Search Engine Land: Now With More Lands!

Search Engine Land has gained new individual "Lands" today, guides to particular aspects of search and search marketing. You can reach these via the new "Land" buttons or tabs now at the top of each page in the site. In addition, you can now subscribe to any of our search columns via email plus search the site more easily. Here’s an update on all the changes!

• Google Land, Yahoo Land & Microsoft Land all provide overviews of the web’s most popular search engines. Within each area, you can then drill-down by subject into all the coverage we’ve done of them. We’ve also listed the most popular subject areas in addition to alphabetical subject listings.
   
• Search Marketing Land: Trying to get up to speed on search marketing? Search Marketing Land groups all our coverage into major areas, such as SEO and Search Ads.
   
• Searching Land: Want to learn more about searching? Searching Land lists coverage we’ve done about search engines and search features. Within it, the Search Engines area has coverage of search engines by name and type of service.
   
• More Lands: There are only so many buttons you can put at the top of the page! More Lands guides you to other key topics, such as Ask.com, AOL, Business Issues coverage and Stats about search.
   
• Columns Land: We now have nearly 15 columns that appear throughout the week! Columns Land lets you easily review all we offer and subscribe to receive the ones you want via email. (See, Pat, I promised you that page was getting better!)
   
• Newsletters & Feeds: We offer two major email newsletters, our Search Month and daily SearchCap summary of search news (Feed & Information Overload? Read SearchCap! explains why I think many people should take this). Our newsletter page has now been updated to let you more easily subscribe to them (or just use that box at the top left of each page). We also love feeds! Both newsletters also come in a full-text feed format. There’s also our main Search Engine Land Feed that keeps you (and over 11,000 other people) updated with everything we post to the site. More about all of these, plus our new Search Engine Land Columns Feed, along with subscribe buttons and options are all on this page.

What else have we got? Search! Look over there to the right, at the top of our sidebar. That’s our upgraded site search functionality, powered by the good folks over at SLI Systems. Give it a try. Beyond keyword searching, you can sort stories from new-to-old, old-to-new, refine by category, author, date and more. You still can also browse stories by day, month and week, if you prefer.

We still have some dust settling! Among the things we’ll be adjusting over the next few days:

• More popular categories will come to more of our Land areas, plus we’re working on making the bullet-points in the most popular boxes (like you see here) blend better.
   
• Many of our top-level Land pages (such as for Ask.com) have "General" categories that will move to the top of the list, rather than being in the middle alphabetically. We’re also working out how to make iGoogle and adCenter not appear at the bottom of the lists on the Google Land and Microsoft Land pages.
   
• You’ll see a Pretend You Don’t See This! post we use on some pages as a workaround to Movable Type not wanting to print category pages if they have no entries. So pretend you don’t see it, and it will go away shortly. Promise.
   
• That "Get Search News Recaps" box at the top of each page will get a bit smaller, and the Feeds & More Info line at the bottom of it will be cleaner.
   
• Yes, I know you all hate using TypeKey for commenting. I promise, not too much longer. Hang in there!

OK, see something bothering you not on that list? Go right ahead and let us know in the comments below!

Huge thanks go out to Michelle Robbins, our technology director, who worked so hard to get all this in place. In addition, special thanks to Movable Type consultant Chad Everett, who made time at the last second to help us solve a mystery category build problem we were having!

Postscript: A few people are reporting problems in Firefox with tops of pages being cut-off. We’re checking on this.