Start-up Tagfetch lets you search tags

TagFetch, a new start-up in San Francisco, offers a simple search of popular sites that use tags.

We’re not sure whether we’ll ever need to use it, given the plethora of other search sites out there, but companies might use it to search and track their brands.

Its home page (partial screen shot below) is spartan, like Google’s. You can choose whether to search news, blogs, bookmarks or media. The results it pulls up are those pages of blogs or other public sources where your search term has been tagged.

It looks pretty thin right now, but it is early days for the company, which says it hasn’t launched an official version. There other players out there that do “meta” searches for things people have tagged or selected to share via “favorites.” There’s Wink, and Gada.be, for example.

Sang Noh, a founder, said the company will launch an official testing (beta) version in about two or three weeks.

As for competitors, Gada.be seems to focus on the quantity of the sources searched (200 sources), and seeks to help categorize the sources you search (you can search “Amazon”, or a more vaguely, a “geeky” category, for example). Wink relies gives you search results that users have bookmarked, and if it can’t find anything bookmarked, it backfills with Google results.

TagFetch is focused on fetching user generated content from popular/quality sources, Noh said. He’s working on a bunch of new features, including improving the ability to” track” searches. The start-up has received a modest amount of angel funding, he said.

Steve Rubel mentions Tagfetch here, saying it is good for companies to track their brands, though criticizes it for not being an open platform, where people can develop their own uses for it. More also from Lifehacker.

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