Start pages and portals have become all the rage these days, with everyone from Netvibes, AOL (our parent company) and Facebook getting in on the action. Word on the street is that search is a pretty hot market as well, and we can understand if Google and Yahoo!'s tried and true approach doesn't quite cut it for those who demand more out of search. Offering an unassuming, slick and simple UI, smplr is just such an alternative search tool.

Upon your first visit, don't dismiss the single search box and cool background for all walk and no talk (though it is a nice touch that you can change your background via the menu in the upper right). By default, smplr sends all your searches to Google; certainly nothing special. But be sure to check out the legend at the bottom, which lists smplr's bread and butter in the form of triggers you can add to your queries that can direct your search at everything from films, stocks, eBay, PriceGrabber and much more. By adding the proper 1-5 letter trigger before your searches at smplr, you can begin to save quite a bit of time if you're a frequent users of even a couple of the sites to which smplr can direct searches. Heck, there's even a Mac OS X Dashboard widget available under the Helpdesk menu that provides full access to smplr's services.

As a project from Nik Iliadis, smplr has a nice approach and a good implementation so far. If smplr expands its support for more services, it could become a great resource for those interested in a simple (har har) way to use a few keystrokes to direct their search across a wide variety of important services and engines. It will certainly be interesting to see smplr evolve over time.