Back in high school, whenever we wanted to know what the cool kids were smoking, all we'd have to do is go out behind the hockey bleachers and take a whiff. We did that today and here's what we found: Addict-o-matic, a new multi-search site that invites you to "Inhale the Web."
The concept is simple – it's a bunch of little boxes, and each one searches a specific site for the term you enter into the search box at the top of the page. It pings all of the most popular news, video, photo and bookmarking sites, plus blog search engines and the like. From Google News and Flickr down to Summize and Tweetscan. Try your favorite band or TV show. Topic searches can be passed around with simple, human-readable URLs.
Like all the other cool kid sites, it's ripe with Ajaxy goodness: you can drag the boxes around to create custom views and delete the boxes that just aren't doing it for you. Once you've created a custom view, you get a custom URL you can bookmark. Custom RSS feeds are coming soon.
Go into the NewsFix section for pre-rolled layouts like Mac News, Baseball, Green or Thought 2.0.
It's like a mashup of a Pageflakes/Netvibes custom start page and a service like Buzzfeed. But Addict-o-matic is much simpler and more whimsical. The site was created by Dave Pell, a man who obviously spends a lot of time thinking about search – he created the "roll your own" search engine Rollyo.
