Search Engines on the Grapevine
by: Jeffrey Solochek
It used to be whenever you needed to find something on the web you just opened IE to Yahoo and just enter in what you were looking for. Then you would scroll through the millions of matches and hope to find exactly what you wanted or needed. There were some smaller engines besides Yahoo but the majority of searches were either done on Yahoo or maybe AOL depending on who your supplier of the internet was.
Along came Google and with all the money that Google spent on marketing they were now the most used search engine. Their index was by far not the largest but they definitely spent the most money on the marketing because everybody knew who Google was. AllTheWeb had an index at least twice as large but they spent virtually no money on marketing and not many people even knew that they were out there.
Now with social networking and social bookmarking plus the technology of Web 2.0 there are a lot of new kids on the block. It used to be that no matter what somebody was looking for they would use just one search engine for all of their searches. Not anymore, there are now search engines for every niche and every genre. If you have something that you need and you can't find a search engine just close your eyes because it will probably be there tomorrow.
If I wanted a pizza delivered to my house I used to just go to Yahoo and in quotes enter "pizza delivery" and then add +31520 as my area code and then on the results page I would see a list of pizza delivery businesses and how far each one was from that zip code. I could even enter in my exact address and get the exact distance from my house plus driving directions. Now, you just go to local.com and you can find businesses, entertainment, and activities =for any city worldwide. This site will be great for anybody that has to do a lot of travel.
For marketing in order for me to analyze the page rank and traffic for a site I would need to have the Google toolbar installed and then go to the site Alexa.com. After Alexa I would then check incoming and outgoing links for the site plus look at who visits the site and where these visitors go before and after this site. I could do a lot of this just with Alexa but this gave me a biased look at the site. Now I have found a great search engine that will return so much detail that I no longer have to have all these toolbars installed and I only have to visit just this one site. Visit Golexa.com and let me know what you think of this great site.
To assist me with this one site I could even look at PRSearch.biz. This site would be a great compliment or even a replacement for Golexa and it beats having to download and install toolbars which are known to be Spyware or Adware. I have grown so tired of having to remove Spyware and Adware from my computer 2 or 3 times a week. If I don't remove these things then I will get a lot of annoying popups plus my system will get severely bogged down and eventually I will have to shut down and restart my system just to free up memory. This can be a pain in the ass if you are like me and have all these different app's open at the same time.
Do you have children? would you like to allow them to perform searches on the web without having to constantly look over their should at what will come up as results? Now you can let them to go to this site and not have to worry
http://kids.quintura.com/ . Keep them off of sites like MySpace because of the ads you see on the site lately. I am a big believer in the sites like MySpace but you ought to see some of the ads and comments you can get with a profile on MySpace. I've seen hookers, escorts and strippers placing comments on peoples profiles.
Social networking and social bookmarking are a growing trend these days though. They need to come up with a one word acronym to reference these sites like the grapevine or something like it. There are now search engines that specialize in these social searches. Check out Omgili, Sproose, or Url dot com. After you have visited these sites make sure you look at Diigg, Del.icio.us, Shadows, or even Yahoo's MyWeb .Web 2.0 is definitely making a difference with shared bookmarks, Collaborative directories and Taggregators. Do a search on one of these terms and check them out yourself, I think you will be pleasantly surprised.
If all you want to do is find the best deals and bargains then you need to look at the following engines; gnod.net, like.com, slifter.com, and thefind.com. For music and video go to blabline.com, blinks.com, findsounds.com, and Gruuve.com. There are even engines in other languages like Gennio for Hispanic people. This social Spanish engine will even allow you to search for a business in Madrid and once you find the business you are looking for it will let you call that place for free through the internet. Answerbus.com allows you to ask your question in English, French, Spanish, German or even Italian.
I found one site that even lets you create your own search bot which is called searchbots.net and another one called Mojeek.com. You can search using Web 2.0 with web20searchengine.com and their are sites for science related searches, and pretty much almost anything you can think of. I am a webmaster myself in addition to everything else I do so I will be using Zippy.co.uk. My wife will be using Zabasearch because she does a lot of work for a nonprofit and with this site she can look up people and public information.
If you are like me and want to do research and try to discover the latest trends in search engines then do a search for "search engines",+directory or "social search engine",+directory and you will find some great new sites. My son, Jake, is real big with these web communities so I will be telling him to look at Zenome.com.
About The Author
Jeffrey Solochek has over 2 decades experience in the business world. When he writes he blends his unique wit and humour into every article which if you rread his blog you can see all of his many works.
http://www.nosugarcoating.info/newz/
