It was bound to happen. A search engine toolbar with a twist. Right now, the Internet is awash in toolbars and search engines. The competition must be fierce to get one’s product out. I know that I have looked at about 3-4 new search engine websites the past two weeks.
Well, there’s another one! This is a little different. If you are a search engine junkie, this may interest you. And if you are self-employed, it may interest you a little more.
It’s called AAfter. When you search business or personal questions or how-to questions, Aafter will, like a search engine, generate answers. But Aafter also provides promo coupons and cash back deals on personal benefits for self-employed. For example, I did a search on “canon printer ink mp530″ for my office printer. A search results page (similar in text to Google) gave me a large listing of places about my terms, but it also gave me a link to click “More Coupons~CashBack~Stores…” When I clicked, a new page showed up showing me deals, promotions, discount stores, etc, where I could find Canon printer ink for my MP530 printer. Aafter saves on time and money for busy businesses. You can also search things like details on a domain names, IP address information, tiny urls– very convenient. The toolbar is available from C|Net for downloading.
I’ve been checking out a new search engine, called LeapFish. It’s really neat! There’s a very helpful video to show you how it works.
LeapFish is called a multi-dimensional search engine because it harnesses all kinds of media data for search results. For example, let’s say you do a search on “online games” (my son came up with that, lol), Leapfish delivers not just text results, but shopping results, video results, images results, blogs results, and loads more! It’s pretty amazing. And the folks who put it together did a good job (and have a great sense of humor. I love the “Its OK, you’re not cheating on Google” in the search address window, lol).
LeapFish also doesn’t require you to type in the entire search phrase and hit “Go” or “Enter” like the others. LeapFish is very intuitive. I had just typed “online” before a string of suggestions popped up, and the first suggestion was “online games.” The search is VERY FAST, incredibly fast.
I love LeapFish. I intend on using it more, especially because I do a lot of news and image searches, and LeapFish makes it fast and easy. They draw from the top search engine sites (Google, Yahoo, etc) so there’s a lot of variety and results. Check it out, I highly recommend it!
Here’s another cool search engine that’s rising to the top:LeapFish. It’s a funny name, and we’ll see how it does. If anything, I am THRILLED that Google has some competition!
LeapFish is considered a “multi-dimensional” search engine that gives results not only in text (as you-know-who does), but also shows results for video, images, shopping, and Yahoo answers on the side. LOVE IT! And as always, I did a search for ME (“new york traveler”) to see if the correct results come in. And yes, there I am, Number One for “New York Traveler.” COOL! LeapFish will spit out your search terms something like an auto-complete feature– it’s very fast and intuitive.
Here’s a nice video tutorial that gives you a taste of what to find.
LeapFish combines the efforts of search engine giants Google, Yahoo, and MSN to give a good variety and as accurate a picture as possible. LeapFish will most likely become my search engine of choice. I do love the images/video/shopping features on the side. It really helps to eliminate a ton of clicking for results, and LeapFish seems to be very accurate and extremely speedy. Give it a try. And check out the LeapFish Blog if you are a search engine junkie.
Well, I wasn’t too impressed with Cuil or the other new-fangled kinds of search engines with big image doo-dads and the like. I do tend to prefer the good old-fashioned text links for search results.
With that said, WOW!
I happened across this new search engine– SearchMe. It’s another visual search engine (it shows screenshots of the websites), so it’s a tad graphic heavy. But it’s really nice, and I found it more accurate than anything else I’ve seen out there yet.
Here’s a screenshot of a search I did for “New York traveler.” My travel blogs showed up right away, as they should.
I also found some very cool other New York travel sites, too.
I like SearchMe. It’s fun. Will it replace the regular text link search engine? I’m not sure. Old habits are hard to change. But this idea may catch on, as long as a visual search engine is fast, accurate, and gives good results. This is one to watch.
“No follow” has become the new html tag– a code phrase that tells search engines (the Google search engine, at least) to ignore the link. This is supposedly meant to reduce the passage of PageRank juice and improve the Search Engine Optimization of your website and the Internet in general. I use it from time to time, when I don’t want my blog to be associated with another for some reason. But this html tag is relatively new. It’s being used more as a tweak.
Most blogs are set up to be “no follow” by default. Some blogs change this default setting with a plugin. You may see a blog’s comment area that says “I Follow” or “Comment Luv” or something like it. There’s a popular WordPress plugin called No Follow Free that customizes your links on your blog (mainly your comments) and makes all your comments “follow.” Which means that you pass on PageRank (if you have it) or search engine authority to anyone who leaves their website link in your comments. It’s a nice plugn and I used it for a while, but stopped using it because 1) I got a lot of spam comments, and 2) it was buggy with the theme I’d chosen (this was a year ago). I know a lot of people use it and it works well.
There’s also a new plugin I recently read about. I just may use this one. It’s called NoFollow Links in Posts.
Nofollow Links in Posts plugin enables you to add the “nofollow” attribute into links in a post within a specified category.
This plugin is useful if you are doing sponsored posts. You can set the plugin to add rel=”nofollow” into links in posts older than “X” days.
Currently, the plugin only works with WordPress 2.5+ (works up to WordPress 2.7). There are no plans yet in making this plugin compatible with prior versions of WordPress.
It looks very good, especially if you want to batch-customize archived posts. I have not tried it, but I know people who have with success. Another good plugin to keep in mind!
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