I’ve been meaning to post about IconSurf for some time. It’s a cool site/search engine that lets you search for other sites based on their favicon graphics – you know, the .ico files that reside at the root level of sites, they show up in your browser’s address bar, next to the URI. What’s stopped me is that the site loads very slowly. I thought its author would do something about it, but since nothing’s changed in a few months, I guess that’s about as fast as it’ll get.

Still, as frustrating as it is to use, it’s an interesting concept. You can alphabetize the sites in its directory (over 40,000 at the time of this writing) by TLD (top-level domain), by starting character (a, b, c, d, etc.) or search by a keyword or phrase within the URI. Obviously, this is a basic sort of search functionality, but it does let you narrow your search, and as I said, the site is interesting-enough overall to make you forget about its limitations.

Just think about the possibilities! If a proper image-search engine is put in place, you could organize the sites by color schemes (primary colors, pastels, etc.), by shapes (round, square, oval, etc.), by colors (ex: find a site that uses red in its favicon). This engine has possibilities!

I encourage you to give it a try! Go to it, then step away from the computer for a couple of minutes while it loads. When you come back, you’ll have a nice surprise. Enjoy!