About Ossity

Ossity is a web research hub. It provides two main functions: a method of splitting your search terms into two parts, a research subject and a query; and easy access to over 25 search engines. Using these two features together gives you power and control over your web research.

Tutorial

Let's say we're looking for information about the rivalry between Disraeli and Gladstone. The first thing we might do is run a straightforward search for 'disraeli vs gladstone' on Google. To do this, we type 'disraeli vs gladstone' into the subject box, choose Google from the search engine drop-down and click 'Search'. After looking through the results, we return to the Ossity home page to find that the subject 'disraeli vs gladstone' has been recorded. This means that further searches on this subject can be carried out without retyping. Note that this list is limited to the last 10 search subjects.

Our next search might be for 'disraeli vs gladstone' on Google Books. This is easy to accomplish. If the subject box is now empty, we simply click on the subject in the list of recent subjects, choose Google Books as our search engine and click search. This time we see that the search yields new information about a 2012 book called 'The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli' by Richard Aldous.

So now we want to know more about this book, right? Why 'The Lion and the Unicorn'? Let's use ResearchGate to search for a subject of 'disraeli vs gladstone' with a query of 'lion and the unicorn'. This throws up a really interesting article by Richard Scully that "reassesses the likelihood that Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914) included deliberate caricatures [of Disraeli and Gladstone] in his 'Lion and the Unicorn' illustrations for Lewis Carroll's 'Through the Looking-Glass; and What Alice Found There' (1872)." Interesting, right?

This is just one example of how the use of repeated searches on the same subject, using different search engines and/or modified by a variable query, can take us deeper into our research.

Other features of Ossity are:

• A list of up to 20 previous searches, divided into subject and query (available on the Search History page).
• A full list of search engines on the Search Engines page . The descriptions help you to decide which engine to use for different purposes.
• Access to the search engine descriptions directly from the search (home) page (by clicking on 'Get info about this search engine' under the drop-down).

Cookies This site uses cookies to remember your search queries, search history and last used search engine. Cookies are not saved across different devices, so you'll find that the saved information will be different if you, for example, use Ossity on a laptop computer as well as your phone. If there's demand for it, we could use a database to store your information, which would make your saved information available across different devices. This would, however, require us to also institute a sign up and log in approach, making the tool less easy to use. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. You can contact us via the Subjunctive Software site.