Steve Rubel points to the launch of Inquisitor, a web based version of the Safari and Camino plug-in for Spotlighting the web. It’s basically a quick meta-search engine that allows visitors to quickly search through various other search engines and services. It currently only works with Firefox and Opera (although I’ve failed to make it work in that latter, anyone else have any luck?).

The interface takes a simple two paned approach: search options on the left, and the search engine (or web service that is being searched) on the right. As with spotlight, Inquisitor will suggest search options as you type. Another suprising element is that Inquisitor will actually search Google as you type. So, for every keystroke, Google is getting pinged for a search request. I’m not sure if this is how the Safari plug-in works, and I wonder if Google will put a stop to this if it’s causing a high hit density.

For the other services, the search is more rudimentary. Even though it’s pinging the same services, I still feel as though the searches are snappier, even with services that I usually find quite slow to search (ahem, like Technorati).

I probably won’t use Inquisitor much, except when I’m doing some heavy-duty research that requires a lot of searching. It would be nice if they could include more flavors of Google search. Overall though, the service is clean, snappy, and simple.