I thought it would be worth a shot to create a quick search industry tool with Yahoo!'s new site builder. I'd love your feedback on the results (as I'm sure Yahoo! would, too).
Let's see how well this baby works. Remember - it's centered around the search marketing industry, so try to limit searches to somewhat relevant topics. Here's a few searches I tried:
- link building
- 301 redirect
- Canonical URLs
- Good book on SEO
- Google Sitemaps
- SEO Companies
- Site Audits
- Ken Jurina
Not bad... I do wish I could seed it with a few sites and then ask it to also consider any sites that those sites link to.
I don't mean to be a party pooper, but the Internet should ideally serve as an unbiased forum of information. While search engines have to gauge a site's relevancy somehow through content, structure, links, etc., using search engines should hopefully introduce one to information that sometimes might evade their radar screen. I hope that these custom search engines will not encourage and enable people to surf the web in a fashion that merely confirms their worldview, which is narrow for everyone of us.
However, I do see some application for a specialized search engine to focus on topics like say "SEO," but confining a search engine to only search for news on f**news.com or npr.org can pose some danger. The Internet should challenge our understanding of the world.
Steven,
Good point, but at some point its not practical, as I think you allude to. And there has been times when I wish I could find particular topics on say "SEO Duplication issues", narrowed down to my "trusted" sources. If I wanted all sources, I'd head to technorati, yahoo, google etc. They are only a click away.
Anyway, I'm going to go the other way and include Eurekster on my blog, just to support the underdogs. I've been planning that since SES.
And on a sidenote, if you like to challenge your world view, you should hae no problem saying "I check out FoxNews from time to time" - loud and proud. :) Or say the same for NPR or The Nation, depending on your orientation.
Sorry - are we saying that Foxnews.com and NPR.org have an equivalent amount of bias? I guess I just don't pay attention to media bias to know...
I don't know who is more biased, but I would suggest that the F-word Network is. However, even though NPR is my news source of choice, I do check the F-word Network from time to time.
Big problem is - the number of sites you can include is limited, so it cut off everything after stuntdubl - textlinkbrokers, threadwatch, ysearchblog, etc...
They need to allow for a wide range of sites, too.
Dear Rand,
I find your search engine to be very useful for finding link building information....
We have provided a link to your site from our very high pagerank directory, www.veryhighpagerankdirectory.com/kickassSEOcompanies.html
If you could please include us in your link building search engine we would be most greatful...
Chuckle Chuckle :)
Hey yeah... Where's TLB? Let me fix that up.
actually, the wiki is a pretty good resource... :) I think we actually have a link to you in there..
Good stuff. I can't wait to see a lot of these custom searches showing up. Now all we need is an API that allows us to keep the searches local to our site.
Come on Yahoo, wheres the paid XMLfeed service?
Rand, looks like they got the search for "link building" right so yeah I give it my full endorsement ;)