About two weeks ago, a startup based in Alexandria, Minnesota by the name of Striquent quietly launched a new website that combines results from major search engines. "The idea for qrobe.it was born out of a discussion on if the search experience can be improved upon or as the saying goes 'one can't improve what is already perfect,'" Nisha Boban, QA Analyst at Striquent, told Ars. "So what we did is focus on the user experience and meshed together the best of the Web, search results from Google, Bing and Ask, with ability to instantly share a URL with the leading social sites, save it, shorten it, verify it, etc."

Boban believes Google came very close to perfecting the search experience many years ago, but since then the Web has moved on and the search giant has not changed its service much. Microsoft, on the other hand, rebranded its search engine by launching Bing "with a host of very good features," but could have done a better job with branding (making the homepage pretty doesn't cut it), she says.

Qrobe takes the results from both (by default it doesn't include Ask results for the sake of performance, but you can choose to include them). Striquent wanted to include the top three search engines, but skipped out on Yahoo due to the 10-year Microhoo deal which may have Bing powering Yahoo and would result in "redundant results" for Qrobe. It also implements features exclusive to Bing, like instant answers for recipes and infinite scrolling (Bing only does this for the Images section, but Qrobe does it for Web as well). It's worth noting that an earlier Live Search beta had infinite scrolling, but Microsoft ultimately dropped it. Striquent had a lot of technical problems implementing the feature, especially with the use of the browser's back button, but it really was "nothing Microsoft couldn't have solved."

When we took it out for a spin, we barely noticed the speed difference between using Qrobe and using just Google or just Bing. For search queries like MSFT, Qrobe's cleaner interface stood out: it gave all the information we wanted in the search results, but it didn't include all the extra sidebars, links, or ads that Google and Bing do.

We did a search for Ars Technica and compared it side-by-side; Google gave 4,760,000 results, Bing pushed out 8,170,000 results, but Qrobe spat out 6,648,800 results, showing that it's not just simply mashing the two together, but is actually removing duplicates. In fact, we noticed that Qrobe showed the Twitter Ars Technica result from Google, which Bing didn't have on the first page, and the Horizon.K12 Ars Technica page from Bing, which Google didn't have on the first page. Those results were actually on the "second" page, but we didn't realize this until we saw that we were no longer looking at "Results 1 - 12" but at "Results 1 - 26."

The infinite scrolling feature worked surprising well; it was comparably fast to Bing's infinite scrolling in Images. Speaking of the Qrobe.it image search, we noticed a rather useless Peek feature under Web, which opens up a preview window of the source page. We couldn't quite figure out the point of it until we tried searching for Images. Under each image there's a neat "Peek (Image/Site)" line and while the Site link is just as pointless as it is under Web (why not just click on the actual link and use the back button if you don't like the site?), the Image link bring up this great preview pane that lets you quickly go through each of the images in their original size. This implementation of Peek we found to be much more useful.

We're not too fond of the way Qrobe shows this information on each image: you have to mouse over the image to see it, which is just the way Bing does it by default, but at least Bing lets you change this. Qrobe also pulls instant answers straight from Microsoft's decision engine—such as sports teams like the Canucks, and even searches for recipes like macaroni—which Bing only added last week.

In fact, Qrobe seems to be taking more from Bing than from Google. For example, a search for define: love only gives you the instant answer from Bing, and not Google. But it doesn't pull information from Bing very well all the time: when you search for weather or temperature, it doesn't show you that information in your current city, like Bing does at the top, but it links you to Freebase to learn more about the terms, which Bing does further down in its results.

Qrobe currently only has two sections, Web and Images (though Ask results are only offered under Web), but Striquent is working on adding a news aggregator and video search after that. The search results are currently ad-free, but ads might be added to news and other sections later on. Striquent isn't making any money from Qrobe at the moment; it's simply hoping the search mashup will help promote the company's main product, a CMS for ASP .Net.

If you are someone that goes to both Google and Bing regularly because you aren't satisfied with the results of just one of them, Qrobe is definitely worth a try. If you are a power user though, or you're an international user ("Qrobe will remain English-only for the foreseeable future," Boban told us), Qrobe just doesn't cut it yet (too many features like filters are missing). Still, Striquent has made sure that you can add Qrobe to the search bar in your browser (we checked and it works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome) so you can easily take it out for a spin for a week or two.