SEO Dance

And no, this isn’t an April Fools Prank. As of March 27, they no longer use Google to conduct searches. Now search results through Blingo are a mash of Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com.

If you haven’t heard about Blingo, it’s from Publisher’s Clearing House. You conduct searches like normal but with each seach, you have a chance to win a prize like a $5 Amazon gift card. The $5 prizes are the most common but some prizes do have a higher value. Get your friends to sign up, and everytime they win, you win, too.

Now those clean, search results are garbled with ads that bleed into the actual search results. Sponsored results are mingled in between actual results and look very much like a normal search hit except it says ‘Sponsored by’ in front of the web address. Many people seemed displeased with the change since Google offers clean results and clearly marked sponsored ads. I conducted a search for ‘casual games’ on Blingo today, and sponsored ads definitely blend in with regular results. I do like that it is marked which search engine the result came from.

Searches now might offer a wider variety of result options now that three search engines findings are displayed. Either people will get used to it or they will might find move on to another win and search engine since apparently there are several of them out there.

Earlier this year, Ask.com underwent an extreme makeover. Ask.com relaunched itself with a sleek and clean user interface loaded with tons of options.

After coming to the conclusion that I use Google way too much for searching only to get lackluster results, I was determined to give some other search engines a try. This weekend I spent playing around with Ask.com and was quite pleased with my search results. Since I needed to write an article about games, I did a search for spooky card games since it soon will be Halloween. The Ask.com results were just what I was looking for. Searching Google with the exact same phrase did not net the same results. In fact, on the first page of the Ask.com results was listed just what I was searching for. I did not have the same luck with Google.

With Ask.com you can sign up for an account where you can essentially bookmark your search results, making it easy to find them later. Add your own tags, so your results will be categorized. It’s an easy interface that makes it simple to find past search results.

For webmasters who want their website crawled by Ask.com, there isn’t a “submit your website” form. Ask suggests that you have a sitemap of your website. This way if they haven’t stumbled upon your site from a link that they can learn about it through your site map. To get more information on Ask.com, visit their about page that is loaded with useful information.

ask.com

A new study concludes that search engines do not give the same top search results. The study spearheaded by Dogpile.com searched Yahoo, Google, Windows Live, and Ask with 19,332 queries. The top search result was the same in only 3.9% of the searches. A similar study conducted two years ago showed that the four search engines agreed 7% of all queries.

It’s just a reminder that when searching the Internet, diversify your searches for a broader results.

Light Iris is a search engine that was designed for new Moms. Sometimes searching for information on Google nets results that are unrelated to what you need. Imagine your newborn has a rash, so you type in “rash” only to get thousands of pages of results and not anything that you’re looking for. New Moms face many daily challenges and Light Iris believes finding answers shouldn’t be one of them.

Typing in the word “rash” into Light Iris will give results from AskDrSears.com and KidsHealth.org. Google results feature a lot of websites, but none on the first page deal directly with rashes in children. Instead of having to waddle through pages of Google results, Mom or Dad can find information a lot faster by using Light Iris.

Kevin Burke is the mastermind behing Light Iris. Burke is a father and has a passion for helping Moms. Burke even donned a pregnancy suit for one month to gain an appreciation of what women go through when pregnant. His thoughts on his experience are documented on the Light Iris blog.

Under the ‘About’ section is a form to add your website to their search results. Light Iris is a nice search engine and does give clean results that are on topic for new Moms or Dads.

Search engines, New moms

Wazap.com is a game search engine that has recently opened up their U.S. section. While currently still in beta, the project is now open to everyone. Through Wazap you can find game information or gaming news. Wazap carefully chooses which websites to include in their searches, therefore increasing the odds of finding what you are looking for when searching.

Niche search engines like Wazap can be a great tool for web surfers looking for specific content on a certain topic. Niche search engines are also good for niche websites, too. A gaming website that is indexed with Wazap is likely to receive traffic as well as returning visitors. People who find a website through a niche search engine are already interested in your topic and might even bookmark your website for future reference.

If you sign up with Wazap you can rate games, comment on the news stories, and more. If you are looking to promote and/or connect with other gamers, then Wazap is a good web resource.

Wazap, game search engine

Mahalo is a recently launched search engine that is edited by humans. Each search result has been compiled by a topic guide who has carefully researched each website to make sure it meets the Mahalo guidelines. Some of the requirements for a website are that it should be a year old(some exceptions might apply), no spam or phishing websites, and ads placed in a way that users must scroll to get to the content of the page. Mahalo is more like a directory than a search engine because results for a searched keyword will be categorized.

Mahalo.com editors research topics and put together the most relevant webpages that are associated with a category. Users can submit websites for inclusion and if the website meets the guidelines, the link will be added. Sites that are close to meeting requirements are placed to the side of the results and are marked as user-submitted websites.

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After that hoaxy search engines post, I finally got to find the real list of top search engines. All 100 of them as discovered from John Battelle’s Searchblog.

Of course, Google, Yahoo!Search, MSN Live Search, Ask.com, Digg and Technorati made it to the top according to their prominence on cloud. But I’m sad that Dogpile.com didn’t make it.

This list of top search engines though does not include what measure was used to come up with this list.

See all of the Top 100 search engines.

Update: Charles Knight compiled this list of search engines and ranked them according to his own experience in using them and features he found interesting.

top search engines, search engine list

It has become my habit to check out my blogs’ Akismet’s Spam section. Although I find it a stressing habit, it still is worth my time because if it weren’t for this compulsive Akismetted comment checking habit, I’d lose some of my clients.

This spam checking extends to my e-mail spam inbox or junk mails. And just today I thought I again discovered a gem from my junk mail box because of this e-mail title:

Search Engine of the Year

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Quintura wants you to add this new search engine made for your kids - Quintura for Kids. It has that visual tag cloud that the main Quintura See and Find ™ visual find engine is very proud of.

The intuitive nature of the cloud allows kids to develop and refine their search by clicking on keywords that appear in the cloud. The interface also allows for relevant searches around a set of rotating icons on the site.

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If you are searching for a kid-safe search engine, my initial reaction is “What an oxymoron!” Seriously, search engines like those do exist, at least that is what they claim.

How do you know if an SE is safe for your kid? Here are some features that you should look for:

1. Fun graphics and flash images

2. Parental filters avoiding results about porn, violence and other non-kid-friendly content

3. Emphasis on educational content or homework help

Most of these search engines are meta search engines. Meta-search engines get results from many other search engines.

Here is a list of kid-friendly search engines:

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UFO research fanatics can soon access an online French database of around 1,600 UFO sightings and other UFO-related info from the more than 30 years effort of National Studies Space Center or CNES.

It sounds promising with its being backed by CNES. Will this be the most legit UFO search engine?

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Jimmy Wales, the founder of the widely-used free online encyclopedia and one of the most successful Web 2.0 creations Wikipedia will be collaborating with Amazon to launch the search engine that promises to change everything - Wikiasari. It currently redirects to Wikia Search. (more…)

Ask.com’s partnership with Yelp, Judysbook, etc. gave birth to a new local search engine available for all US cities - AskCity.

The local information service is meant to provide a more convenient way for Web users to comb through the 10 years of entertainment listings and services stored in the CitySearch service of IAC, along with links to maps, events and ticket services.

More about AskCity:

New York Times
GigaOm

askcity, local search, local search engine, ask.com

I’m growing considerable affinity to visual search engines and meta search engines. Aside from getting tired of the spam sites and other rubbish search engine results, meta search engines esteem (everyday my diction is getting more and more influenced by comment spammers) me more than the other major search engines. Why? I’m seeing better results from their SERPs for this blog than from the other SE’s. Hehe. Or maybe because I still have the coveted-trifecta-to-win-SEO-contest syndrome.

What is a metasearch engine?
Metasearch engines are mashup search engines that usually show the top 10 results from the major search engines, Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live and Ask.com. The most fun metasearch engines I’ve encountered are Dogpile, Kartoo, Quintura, and Zippy.

Here are some of my observations for each of the mentioned metasearch engines:

Dogpile fetches results from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. But it looks like it’s more of Google since after checking out results for SEO Dance, this blog is not on the top of the results, which also holds true with Google.

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Searching is fastly getting revolutionized with the mushrooming of various search engines offering a wide array of features. And just recently, a new visual search engine with a catchy moniker, Snap, has been launched to join the SE war.

Here is what Snap boasts about:

1. Provides a fast visual display of its SERPs previews.

2. Anticipates user’s content through suggesting widely-searched terms. (think Google Suggest.)

3. Allows interaction with the preview site without having to leave the SERPs page.

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