Yesterday, Search Engine Roundtable and InfoDocket both pointed out that Google's U.S. government specialty search tools, Google-Uncle Sam and USGov.Google.com had been offline for several days. Additionally, Google's long time specialty search tools Linux Search, Microsoft Search, Apple Search, and BSD Search were also unavailable. Google has now confirmed both to us via email and on a Google Web Search Help Forum thread that all of these specialty search tools are no longer available. Uncle Sam and the computer specialty search search sites had been available for a at least a decade. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: Web Search | Search Engines: Custom Search Engines | Search Engines: Government Search Engines

At the beginning of Google's "Searchology" event in early 2007 original Google employee Craig Silverstein opined, "If Google had started a year or two earlier, it wouldn't have worked." That's because prior to that time (1998) the internet wasn't yet large enough to require Google or enable people to see the value of its approach. As sites and pages multiplied exponentially Google became an increasingly necessary tool. We're all familiar with the story. Now Google controls a majority of search traffic in most countries around the world. It has become a seemingly unstoppable force. The in [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: Web Search | Search Engines: Cuil | Search Engines: Custom Search Engines | Search Engines: Open Directory Project | Search Engines: Powerset | Search Engines: Social Search Engines | Search Features: General | Top News

There have been many search "preview" tools, plug-ins and add-ons that try and give users a peek at what's behind a link on a SERP. Their objective is to circumvent the click and enable people to more quickly get to desired information. Almost all of these tools have failed to deliver on the promise of that idea. Generally, also, consumers don't use them. One of the most obnoxious in recent memory is the blog plug-in tool "snap shots." Many blogs installed it because it looked "cool" but did very little in the way of adding value. Bing does a version of this currently, which is relativel [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Search Engines: Custom Search Engines | Search Engines: Experimental | Search Features: Enhanced Listings

The startup 80legs launched in September of last year to make web crawling affordable and accessible to anyone that wanted to subscribe to the service. The company makes crawling the web or customized slices of it available to even small companies. More flexible than something like the Google Custom Search Engine, pricing ranges from free to $300 per month for users or companies with "heavy crawling needs." After watching how its customers were using the service the company has now come out what it calls "Crawl Packages," pre-configured crawls of various sorts. Think of them as "vertical" o [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Custom Search Engines

Facing unfavorable content on page one in the search engine result pages (SERPs) for your brand terms can be a challenge. Today's article discusses a strategy that allows you to mobilize all of your company websites to jump to the top of the SERPs so that your company dominates page one for your brand phrases... leaving unfavorable content nowhere to be seen. Which sites to mobilize To start dominating page one in the SERPs with your company-owned websites, consider any company-owned website that is either on a separate domain or a subdomain. Here are a few examples of company micro sites [...]

Related Topics: Brand Aid | Channel: Strategy | Search Engines: Custom Search Engines | Search Marketing: Branding

I've written previously about Google Custom Search Engines.  These vertical Googlettes let anyone create a search engine with results based on Google's index, with an added layer of human editorial selection. Put more simply, you create a Google CSE; you select the sites you want in it, and then you let anyone search your CSE from your site. New Google CSEs appear almost daily. You can see examples at Google here, and there's even a directory of them being maintained here. Google CSEs offer a couple link building opportunities, one of which might be described as affinity link [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Custom Search Engine | Link Building: General | Link Week | Search Engines: Custom Search Engines

Pandia is offering a free custom search called the Search Engine Detective, a meta search engine which lets you do specialized searches for anything search engine related. Search Engine Detective give you two options: "All the best sites about search engines" searches a wide variety of sites and blogs on search engine optimization and the search engine industry. If you want to search just the very best sources — the search engines’ own blogs and those of the top industry experts and old timers, select "Top 25 sites about search engines". What's included in the top 25? We're flattered tha [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Search Engines: Custom Search Engines | SEM Industry: Blogs & Forums | SEM Industry: General

The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they have added a box to the home page in order to promote user generated search sites. Yahoo will feature selected sites that use the Yahoo Search Builder tool. If you want to ask Yahoo to feature your site, you can use this form to submit your site. In addition, Yahoo has given us the option of a smaller search box, specifically 192 pixels wide - to fit into smaller areas. The Yahoo Featured Search Builder box looks like this: As an FYI, Google also features their Google Custom Search Engine engines in their Google Picks. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Custom Search Engines | Yahoo: Search Builder

Boxxet is a new service which combines aspects of computer automation with community and social commentary and ranking systems to create "box sets" of web based content for specific topics. It's an interesting idea—sort of a multimedia directory of links to web, news and blog content, photos, forums, online bookmarks and "stuff," products available for online purchase that relate to a particular subject. The idea is to filter the mass of information available online, presenting only the best or freshest content. While the resulting "box sets" are generally on topic, ironically, I found [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search Engines: Custom Search Engines | Search Engines: Social Search Engines

Eurekster have quietly rolled out some interesting improvements on their swicki system. Swickis are search engines created by individuals and used by groups which learn from their users and deliver more focused and targeted results. There are currently over 40,000 swickis in operation on websites and weblogs, with over 13,000 unique publishers, delivering 21,000,000 searches in November, according to Steven Marder (Eurekster CEO), who I spoke to earlier this week. The improvements to the service allow much greater input from each swicki user community, to let publishers leverage the knowledge [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search Engines: Custom Search Engines | Search Engines: Eurekster | Search Engines: Social Search Engines