Archive for the ‘Other Search Services’ Category
Qassia Heavyhanded
August 21st, 2008 | 
Author: Qassia is one of those social marketing sites that is becoming too heavy handed in their attempts to purge their data. Thinking they are Google, they are requiring all users to place tags on their web sites so they can confirm that they want them listed in their engine. Now who in their right mind would go to this trouble unless it was for a listing in Google? Quite honestly, why would I stop work just to put a tag on my site’s pages for a little site that’s still stuck in a closed beta? If I didn’t manage my own sites, why would I pay someone to put the tag on the site. If they had a better system in the first place, maybe they wouldn’t attract the riff raff they are seeking to weed out. The method won’t work and only people who have serious business to attend to will be put off by it.
When I commented about this change in policy to them, I got a very rude reply that I was wasting their time with such comments. As a business, I want customer feedback. I don’t want to stifle it. There was more to their message and all of it was quite hateful. Now that’s the way every customer wants to be treated. Strange policies and rude customer server. Hey, sign me up for this treatment. No one expects a Spanish inquisition.
Bottom line, avoid using Qassia.
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Where Do You Want To Go Today?
Talk about verticle market, how about a search engine for public restrooms? Diaroogle searches for “quality public toilets from your mobile phone”. Currently it covers NYC, but they have plans on indexing additional locations. If you are on the go and need to go, then go to this site.
Is cuil Really Cool?
A new search engine in town is being compared to Google. cuil (pronounced cool) has an impressive number of web pages indexed and a nice interface to the web, but Google it isn’t….at least not yet. Still, it’s worth checking out and popping in once in a while to see if they continue to improve. One very noticable thing is that the images they display can’t always be found on the resulting web site. Some of our listings showed images I’ve never seen before so I know it’s not old images. Some links were old and led to different (new) sites or 404 errors. Good luck to them. It ain’t easy taking on the big boys of search.
Cuil
Quintura Blog Search Widget
Quintura presents search results in a Web2.0 site cloud to help you narrow down your search by presenting related words. You select the words you want to add or remove from a search. It’s been an interesting search alternative for some time and now you can add this search to your blog. It’s not always working perfectly, but for you bleeding edge bloggers, have at it. Just click on the green Search Widget icon to sign up.
Diagnose Your Links Competition
A terrific new tool is available to obtain some interesting link data from the Yahoo! API. While there are still bugs in this new tool, it does provide a new look at data and even allows you to download the information in CSV format.
FaceBook Social Ads
Have a brand that has fans, or could have fans. Create a FaceBook ad page and make “friends” with people loyal to your brand. Yup, it costs money, but it is a great way to market to people who forgot how to have face to face conversations and now give word of mouth advertising through the social networks. MySpace is offering a similar ad program of course.
www.facebook.com/ads
SearchReviews on StumbleUpon
Ok, I’ve been bad. I’ve been using this and never blogged about it here. StumbleUpon has made a brilliant addition to their community bookmarking, tagging service. You can now see on search results what others have bookmarked and commented upon. Information from your StumbleUpon friends can be viewed and you can discuss web pages with those friends. The terrific thing about this is it most likely works with the search engine you currently use. I use an addon for Firefox. Now of course privacy discussions pop up all over the place, but it is an online community. What do you expect… What you share is available to all…keep that in mind.
Taptu Launches Mobile Search
Taptu has launched what they are touting to be a new kind of search. Called Socal Assisted Search, their service for mobile phones includes playable audio and video.
Free Times
The New York Times premium content is now free. The Times used to charge for access to what it determined to be free content. People searching for news would hit the password roadblock and leave, moving on to another source. With all the content and traffic that the Times has, they can most likely make more money by taking advantage of all that traffic and sell advertising instead. The Times seems to have a good system for targeting ads to users making it attractive to advertisers.
Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site – New York Times
Your Content is Not Your Own
Uploading your original content to Facebook makes it theirs. Ah yes, many a social network does this including your favorites, Google and Yahoo. Use free online services and your work is no longer your own. Yet another reason not to use these services for special content. Get your own server for original content that you want to retain rights to. This includes written content, photos, audio, artwork, …. yup…all of it.