where search meets research

middlespot.com is a patented search interface for teachers, librarians, researchers and anyone who wants to interpret information faster from their search results, collect and annotate relevent results into groups, and share those collections with people relying on their expertise.

you can... see your results as screenshots that you can pan and zoom like a map save and annotate relevant individual results to collections in workpads share workpads with others who are looking to you for your expertise best of all, you don't need to sign up or login to use middlespot.com interpret results faster middlespot.com's interface is broken into two areas, the traditional, linear text based search results on the left, and a new map like interface made up of a gallery of screenshots of those same results on the right. The screenshots allow you to visually scan up to 50 of your results, panning around and zooming into sites that draw your interest. When placing your mouse cursor over any screenshot, the associated text result will automatically appear in the orange highlight box.

the same is true when using the text based results. As you scroll up and down through the text results, the associated screenshot is magnified and highlighted in the right hand gallery.

to learn more about using the inteface, please try our tutorial.

collect results relevant to you

middlespot.com workpads allow you to gather together only results that you find relevant to your research. You can collect search results together that are from multiple searches, over any amount of time. We've even built a number of tools that allow you to add to your workpads even when not using the middlespot interface.

workpads are feature rich. You can rename them to better reflect what they contain, leave a comment describing the contents of the workpad, open the entire workpad in the middlespot.com interface, and add any url you want. Your collected result is stored as a screenshot that you can uniquely annotate with your own comments. You can also have as many workpads as you want.

to make accessing your workpads easier over multiple sessions, we've placed your workpad tabs on the start page of middlespot.com.

to learn more about using the inteface, please try our tutorial.

share your research

Different than a lot of social bookmarking sites is the fact that we don't make your collections public. What you put in your workpad is just for you. It's up to you to share them with who you want. And we've made sharing quick and easy, both for you and the person you are sharing with.

You can email or even just copy the unique URL of your workpad and send that to a friend or colleague. Shared workpads are read only and whenever you update your shared workpad, your friend automatically see's your changes but can't make changes. Shared workpads become a part of their series of workpad tabs (just a different color) making it easy to access your workpad on their computer (just tell them to go to middlespot.com).

If you do want to share your workpads publicly on a blog or website, we've made it possible to do that as well. It's completely flexible so you can decide how big both the embed frame is and the size of the screenshots. Any comments you made about each screenshot are presented as mouse over tips.

best of all, you know when people have looked at your workpad. a view counter keeps track of how many times your shared community have opened your workpad.

We hope you find middlespot.com a useful tool in your efforts to research information on the web. We always appreciate feedback, so please send us your comments and feature recommendations.

As well, please check back often as we plan to release a number of new features in the near future.

Thanks, the middlespot.com team