Ambiently reviews

Ambiently is a VERY new tool. Like, it just came out this year. So there really aren't a whole lot of reviews and such out there.  And I have not been able to find anything that indicates how many people are using the site.  But I did find a lot of articles and blogs on Google that at least mention the tool, which is impressive for such a new tool.  So that at least shows that people are aware of it and are talking about it, which probably means a considerable number of people are currently using it already.

On web worker daily, Samuel Dean posts his thoughts on ambiently, which he recently started using.  As a web worker, he explores search engines besides Google to get different kinds of results. He has found ambiently to be useful, especially for topics intended for a small or specific audience:

I find it most useful for quickly showing me alternatives to pages on fairly esoteric topics, and particularly useful for quickly looking at how anything I’ve written on the web is being picked up by others.

He gives, as an example, a link to an article that he had written about a Firefox extension called Pencil that he thought was useful.  When he goes to that page and clicks on the Ambiently tab, he finds web pages that mention his article and other sites that discuss Pencil.

He prefers Ambiently to Google for these kinds of searches because

Ambiently appears to look at a whole lot of keywords on any web page you’re on and then seeks to find matches for groups of them.

He concludes by saying

I’ll give Ambiently a nod for indeed being different from a search engine — definitely more of a “discovery engine” — but it’s primarily best at finding non-obvious relationships related to offbeat topics.

Killer Startups, which reviews internet startups, has this to say about Ambiently: 

The main advantage that this site has over search engines is that it is much simpler – you don’t have to dream up a query to fire up the search, you simply click on the Ambiently button to come across related links. As it is correctly pointed out online, each and every page becomes something akin to a search engine in itself, and a specializes search engine at that.

The review predicts that this new kind of search engine may be a predictor of services to come, and leaves the reader wondering how Ambiently will continue to evolve.

Read Write Web claims that Ambiently works best for specific topics and is not as useful if you are looking for suggestions for similar things to the site you are viewing.  For example, clicking on ambiently from that specific blog post doesn't lead to other blogs on the same topic, but it does lead to other blogs and sites that referred to it.  The article says that Ambiently could be useful, especially if you are

researching unique topics which you're having trouble locating through traditional search engine queries. But before we can say that this search tool will actually become a part of our daily routine, we'll have to live with it for a bit longer.

Actually, I used Ambiently to search for reviews on amiently.  And I did find that many sites that popped up weren't really original sites on the same topics, but were blogs and articles writing about the specific article I had started out on.  Nevertheless, it was still useful for finding unique sites about the topic.