Marc Ohmann’s Blog

Everyone knows about the most common search engines such as Yahoo, Google, AltaVista and Dogpile.  These are considered generalized search mechanisms.  They gather all kinds of content from the internet and reference said content using keywords.

But – there are literally thousands of search engines available to web users that specialize in topical content.  It would be impossible to list all of these search engines, especially as new ones are added on a daily basis, but let’s review a handful:

• Entertainment Searches.  You can use Media Channel to find Internet Television and Video sites.  Find that YouTube video you’ve always wanted to watch or the latest internet television schedules.

Yesterday I was in a meeting with a partner from a mid-sized insurance firm here locally.  We were discussing all the exciting aspects of Internet marketing, social media and most importantly public relations online.  Jeff Rabkin from Wowza was in the meeting also and was discussing his recent experiences with Mattress Giant.

For anyone who doesn't want to read the article.  The gist is that a Google search for Mattress Giant displays a negative review from epinions.com as the second organic result.

In our meeting the insurance company partner was amazed that negative results could show up and that Mattress Giant was trying to improve their image online. 

Since I will never have time to read all of Lee's 256 Must Read Blogs (which leaves me with 330 in my reader), I figured to put all this knowledge to best use all the sites should go into a custom search engine.

Creating the CSE would have only involved a quick Perl script on the OPML file but thanks to Feedburner, it's not that easy.  So anyhow incase anyone wants it, here is the file listing every site included .

Here is the link to the actual search engine page or you can make use of a search box like the one below.

Stomping on the grave of Google Answers . There seems to be a lot of activity in the answer category by other Internet powerhouses and Web 2.0 shops.  Included in this is the new LinkedIn answers section.

Below is a screenshot from the new section.  As you can see from the first question there are a lot of great answers to be found  

Also jumping on the answer bandwagon is Amazon with Askville . 

Popularity: 11% [?]

Last month I accidentally typed the letter 'i' twice when writing ZoomInfo on the 'About ' section of the blog so it appeared as ZoomIinfo.  Through the analytics I discovered quickly that I was ranking for this misspelling and quickly corrected the spelling on the site.  However, before I could get it changed I had already had 15 visitors from Google due to the misspelling.  It gets better, those 15 visitors ended up with an average of 4 pageviews each!  Oddly enough due to the misspelling it seems those visitors still found something they were looking for on the site.  Long live the long-tail-of-search.

With the simplicity of Javascript style analytics packages such as Google Analytics compared to the traditional log file parsers, comes the concern that some data (page views) may be overlooked.  One legitimate concern is for browsers with Javascript turned off (which could really be less than 0.05% of all users).  But another concern is for the case where a site removes traditional form posts and replaces them with elegant AJAX calls.  By using the urchinTracker a site can accurately track all sorts of non-pageview events.  Over at Google Support there is a great example of how urchinTracker can be used specifically for tracking AJAX calls.

Now my wife will attest that I am not the most observant person so this may have happened a couple of days ago I just didn't notice.  But today I have been seeing a Google map link included in the search results for some businesses — such as the listing below.

Just another reason to make sure your business is included in the Google Maps (Local) database.

Popularity: 10% [?]

I switched over from Outlook + Exchange a couple of weeks ago to GMail for email.  However I still found myself opening Outlook every time I had a schedule an meeting.  Well today that's all changing.  I dumped my whole calendar from Exchange to a csv and imported into Google Calendar - seamless.  I am loading all my past emails right now with Gmail Loader GML - again seamless (except for the date thing).  I have project milestones fed into GoogleCalendar from BaseCamp and by next month I should have salesforce.com contacts and events syncing with Google also.  Man I love integration.

With web searches constantly craving better search results, there is a large trend in search towards vertical searches (searches refined to a specific industry, location, etc).  As with anything in search these days, the Google juggernaut is making aggressive moves in the area.  One particular product Google is offering in the area is Google Base.  From the Google Base info page:

Some of your customers or prospects don’t have time to read the direct mails, emails, etc that you send them.  Some of them don’t know the first thing about how to download your podcasts and listen to your message.  Despite these limitations, how many in your audience do you think carry a cell phone and have possibly 5 minutes at some point during the day to listen to and watch your message?

Enter Google + YouTube + Verizon