Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with searchengine

Ideas for a challenging google-based rescue mission

vizsla — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:21:20 -0800

You're on an island in the middle of nowhere. You need to locate a used motorbike in a faraway country (Netherlands) where you don't speak the language for a next to nothing price. All you have is the internet. How do you proceed? A friend of mine was awoken in the middle of the night to find her 17 year old son crying in the bathroom. He had set his sights on a used motorbike he found advertised for 100 Euros. He took too long getting the necessary paperwork together and the owner had sold it before he could pick it up. He was devastated. In his mind, this was like the start of a new future for him. I offered to help set his mind on the right path again. Recently lost his father.

Tracking number of Real Time Searches of different subjects

tusharj — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 06:23:21 -0800

I need real-time data of the number of people searching different sets of keywords on the internet in a particular location. Some examples: The number of people searching for jobs and jobs related information at that given time(preferably also a particular place as in country or city) The number of people searching for marriage and dating related information. What is the best and cheapest way to get this data? The more real time, the better. Searches on Google would probably be the best given their dominance in the search market, but even other sources would be alright, like Twitter.

What sites should I submit my startup to?

schindyguy — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:40:40 -0800

I have almost finished development on an online classified site dedicated to bartering. It will launch at the end of April and I want to know what general submission / initial promotion sites I should use to get my name out there. I think there are 4 general areas of submission (please correct me if I'm wrong)

1. Sites that are dedicated to startups/projects: MetaFilter Projects (duh), KillerStartups,, StartupNation,

2. Search engines (the link below has most of them listed)

3. Article Directories (also in the link below)

4. Newswires like PRNewswire and PRweb...although I have never used these companies they seem like the larger companies on my google searches. Once the site launches I was going to create a press release and submit it to these sites. I am looking for your guys suggestions in this press release area...

I have found this site that goes over the general pages for submission to search engines and article directories:

http://www.addme.com/newsletters/issue217.htm

Is this a complete good list to start with? Is there a better, automatic way of doing it? And what would be your suggestions for press releases?

I should mention I am obviously on a tight budget and only have nominal amounts of money to spend for submission/ initial promotion (under $1K). I can do the work myself

Synonym Finder?

jmevius — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:08:22 -0800

Is there an automated way to generate potential search terms for a given expression? I'm trying out an idea I had about search engine queries and keep getting stuck. Ideally, I'd like to generate a file (CSV, XML, etc.) with a large listing of potential search terms, send the file to ___, and receive back a file that lists, for each given search term:

1. Synonyms
2. Related Terms
3. Common Misspellings

For example, if I entered the word 'Carpenter', I'd like to see:

1. Woodworker, Builder, Craftsman
2. Wood, Hammer, Nail, Repair, Fix
3. Caprenter

Does anyone have any ideas? I've had decent luck doing this manually, but I'd like to feed a large list (3-5K) of unique terms.

How to Get Rid of Other Search Engine Links on Google Pages

decathecting — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:16:55 -0800

How do I get Google to stop putting the "Try your search on *other search engine links*" bar at the top of all of my search result pages? I use Google as my main search engine. However, they appear to want me to try their competitors. Every time I search, a line of text appears at the top of the page that invites me to:

Try your search on Yahoo, Ask, AllTheWeb, Live, Lycos, Technorati, Wikipedia, Bloglines, Altavista, A9, GoodSearch

The problem is that the bar appears a few seconds after the actual results, pushing them further down the page. If I click too quickly on the first result of the page, I often find that Google has loaded that bar while I was clicking, and it takes me to one of those search engines instead. This annoys me mightily.

There's nothing in my Google preferences about getting rid of this. I've also looked at userscripts.org, and I can't find a fix. Is there any way to solve this problem.

How to search for anything when all else has failed?

schindyguy — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:08:31 -0800

How to search for anything (or find the answer to anything) on the internet when all else has failed? When Google's advanced search (and operators) isn't enough and I have gone through the major search engines, where do I turn? I know there have been discussions of several types of semantic search engines like powerset.com. And then there has been discussion of cuil.com among many others. They dont seem to work well.

But when I need to find something that I give up searching for, I am forced into asking the question to a comment board related community. And even then its sometimes hard to find the comment board specifically for the industry/topic I am interested in. General answer sites like yahoo answers work well, but sometimes I get frustrated at how long it takes to get a valid answer and by that time I am over it.

I would be curious to know what you guys have in your tool set to tackle the hardest questions and find the best results.

Holistic Resource Finder?

eric1halfb — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:47:01 -0800

Are there any online resources for finding local organic/holistic resources? I'm trying to find a resource that will help me to locate organic grocery stores, health food stores, yoga studios, co-ops, holistic health care providers, etc. It would be ideal if I could search by state and then city, but any suggestions would be appreciated.

I have already used yogafinder. This is essentially what I'm looking for, but a little too limited in scope.

Thanks!

How to make simple metasearch engine?

shivohum — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:20:11 -0800

I want to create a simple page that will query search engines of my choice (i.e. in the form www.z.com/?q=blah) and just concatenate the first page of results into one page. Is there any super-easy way to do this? It would be great if it looked pretty and/or was mobile-phone-friendly, too, but this is not necessary. Thanks.

How can I get automate my daily news searches?

abkadefgee — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:28:39 -0800

How can I automate the news searches that I'm performing on the same subjects day after day after day? I'm working for an employer who needs current information on what the press is saying each day. It would be great if it were an issue of what the big national papers were saying and I could simply use Google News, but I need information from our state and local papers, including those that have only a weekly distribution cycle.

Right now, I'm forced to spend time searching through ten websites a day, often to find no new information. It seems like there should be a way to automate this process so that new information pops up in my email box or RSS reader and I can see what's new right away.

So far, I've been considering applications like Dapper, Yahoo Pipes, Google Alerts, or Feed43. I can't simply subscribe to RSS feeds from the sites directly, since most of them are written in 1998-style code and don't have RSS feeds or tagging of articles.

Google Alerts seems to be out of the running since it often pops up with articles that are months old and misses the local papers.

Dapper seems like it could be great, except that I'm having some trouble tweaking it so that it doesn't send me an update just because a banner ad changes. I think I could get it to work, but I could use a tutorial.

Yahoo Pipes seems like it could be very powerful, but it's a bit intimidating.

Feed43 I've heard good things about, but it doesn't seem to do much more than turn pages into RSS feeds and this doesn't help me with the search.

If you have any tips for using the above services or could point me in the direction of a better solution, I'd really appreciate it. I'd bet someone else out there has had to work through a similar situation at some point. Thanks in advance!

How does Google work?

andihazelwood — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:10:03 -0800

Does anyone understand the black art of being listed in a Google search? One day, I posted a conversation topic on our community group forum. Candidates and subscribers started participating in the discussion, and people tell me they started watching the discussion. Later that same day, a search for "Bundaberg Regional Council" listed the thread as the 4th link on Google. I sent a press release to the local media, the candidates and other "stakeholders" about the forum, and mentioned it being listed 4th on Google. The next day it went up to second place. Then I redated the original post, so that it would stay on our group homepage instead of dropping off. The next day, the thread disappeared from Google. It's still gone today. Anyone have any idea why this happened? Not that its critical, but now my press release certainly looks silly.

Is this SEO technique dodgy?

i_am_joe's_spleen — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 01:13:32 -0800

How dodgy is this third-party supplier's SEO practice? And if it is dodgy, how do we tell our customer? At work we have developed a lovely, extensive, and very useful site for a client. Let's just say it's a particular specialty retailer.

The client has engaged an SEO firm. They had an existing relationship that predates us so we were not able to step in.

The SEO firm has made basically two suggestions. One is about effective use of META tags (which we already were doing). The other really concerns me. What they want to do is have a link in the footer of every page to a "related pages" page. That "related pages" page, they say, will have links to relevant related sites on it. They have requested the ability to upload new links on a regular basis.

I have had a look at their suggested links for our client's site, and for other sites these guys have worked on, and while one or two seem relevant, the vast majority are to directory sites I have never heard of - and not to a page relating to our client's specialty, but just to the directory site home page.

How can this work? It feels... shady. And if it is shady, how can I best explain this to our mutual client?

Is there a way to force Google to reindex a webpage right away?

ssmith — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 11:26:43 -0800

Is there a way to force Google to reindex a webpage right away? I've got a client with a really embarrasing error that they had in the title tag of their homepage. We fixed the error pretty quickly, but not before Google had gone ahead and indexed the page while the error was still up there. Now, in the Google results the error shows up as the "byline" beneath the search result.

I used the Google webmaster tools to request that they reindex the site and I added a sitemap. I tried to set the indexing speed to "faster" but it's grayed out and it's not an option.

Is there anything else I can do to try and get Google to reindex the page faster? It was last indexed on June 26th, 2007. All of the changes I mentioned happened about 6 weeks ago and my client is getting understandably frustrated.

Increasing googlability

serazin — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 19:18:35 -0800

Increasing google visitors to blog? I've been using google analytics to track visitors to my blog, and now I'm a little confused.

Each of my posts is about a different subject. It seems that immediately after I post, I get a number of visits from people who googled that subject. But then a few days pass, or I post something else, and my blog must stop popping up on google in relation to that subject because I stop getting new hits with those same search terms. For example, I posted about Chinese American history. For a few days, I got a bunch of visits from people googling "Anti-Chinese Violence" or "Chinese in the Gold Rush". But now that time has passed and I've posted other stuff, I don't get those visits any more. I don't understand why the google results appear higher when I first post than they do a week or two later. Any suggestions?

In a related question, I can't decide how many posts to display on the front page of my blog. Now, I have all my posts on the front page. My thought is that that will encourage folks to read further. But if someone comes to my page through google, they don't immediately see what they're looking for (like, Chinese Americans during the Gold Rush for example) becuase google will tend to link to my blog's main page - not that specific entry - and what they want is buried towards the bottom of the page. Any ideas about what's best for helping people find what they're looking for?

Thanks folks.

Whole Paycheck mystery

hodyoaten — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 13:00:16 -0800

Why does a Google search for "whole paycheck" turn up Whole Foods Market as the first hit, but the word "paycheck" is nowhere to be found on those page sources? I know Whole Foods has been the butt of that joke, but I don't understand why they're indexed if the phrase isn't on the website.

Fastest way to create search engine for discussion web site?

shivohum — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 07:41:33 -0800

What's the simplest, easiest, fastest way to create a search engine for a discussion website (in particular, this one) which is NOT RUN by that website, but on another computer, and which recognizes as searchable/sortable fields: 1) the "board" the post is in, 2) the titles as well as the bodies of posts, and 3) the dates the posts were made? Oh, and it should update with new posts every few hours, say.

I want to start a search engine...now what?

undercoverhuwaaah — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:41:49 -0800

So I'd like to start a website. More specifically, a search engine. Turns out, I'm pretty clueless when it comes to, well, everything about starting it up... I understand the basic framework of crawler, index, database query, search interface. What I'd like to be able to do is get a better idea of the overall architecture, what sort of hardware is needed, and how long it'd take to make this happen. This in turn would help me understand the kinds of costs I'm looking at, which in turn helps me develop the beginnings of a business model. I'm not opposed to checking out a consultant, but not sure what type of consultant to contact. Any and all help is much appreciated.

Help me find a book finder...

vincentm — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 02:30:14 -0800

Book search with price comparison. I already know BookFinder.com. A similar website including permanent link to a specific book would be wonderful.

It should be as "neutral" as possible (that's why bookfinder was almost the perfect match for my needs).

Google, was verfolgst du mich?

mendel — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 12:45:52 -0800

My website/blog has all but disappeared from Google. What happened, and what can I do to fix it? For years my personal website (linked in my profile) has been the first hit for "Rich Lafferty", without the quotes, in Google. But suddenly it's not showing up at all. I still have PageRank (5), and it's still in there if I search for the right terms, but it doesn't appear for the obvious search.

There's a whole bunch of things that could be contributing factors: I recently redid the entire site, from a static site to a blog. I started using a sitemap. I was recently linked to by some major blogs. I've been copying my content to my LiveJournal (username "mendel") -- and since I wondered if I was hitting Google's duplicate content trap, I've just today put a robots.txt file on the LiveJournal.

Aside from disappearing from the listings, the other weird things I've noticed are that my main page is no longer cached on Google, and searches for phrases from individual posts of mine turn up multiple duplicate results: my site, my LiveJournal, my Feedburner feed, Technorati, and some of my LiveJournal friends' friend lists.

Am I just in the process of getting re-added after I changed everything around? Did I get burned by the duplicate content trap, which considered my LiveJournal to be the main copy? Are there any other red flags you see?

It's not such a big deal that I'm not #1 anymore, but since I work in high tech I'd like to figure out how to at least show up again.

Search engine for cultural events

egk — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 18:39:58 -0800

I've lost a link to a search engine for cultural events (museum exhibitions, etc) that was handy when planning short weekend trips, say to New York or Philadelphia. I can sometimes find copies of Time Out New York, but not always. Prefer the web anyway. Anyone have a method for checking out what's going on in the next 2-3 months in museums and galleries? Thanks

Find me some SEO Tracking Software

ajbattrick — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 03:41:04 -0800

I need some software that will track search engine rankings Ideally a PHP / MySQL open source affair that I can install on a server. Win XP compatible software would also be ok I suppose. I want it to poll various search engines at regular intervals (daily probably) and for a list of phrases, get the position that the specified site ranks at.

Perhaps some pretty graphs of position over time would be nice

I'd rather use software than a web service to do this but if you know a (free) web service then please let me know it too.

Search Engine Ranking

Gankmore — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 10:33:01 -0800

How does a website get to be ranked on the first page for searching on google, yahoo, etc? What is organic searching based on? How can one manipulate their website to rank higher on search engines? Is it about traffic? Or links? What exactly is it?

I don't understand why some websites are on the first page and others you can't ever find.

Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Have I been penalized by Google?

quibx — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 12:22:12 -0800

Have I been penalized by Google? I used to be #2 for my main keyword in google. However, since mid Jan my site has dropped off of the face of google for all my keywords. I initially thought they dropped me from their index. Looking at google webmaster tools I get crawled almost every day, I have a PR of 5, over 800 backlinks pointing in, and google has over 47,000 pages of my site indexed. I have been given no notice of any penalty. There are a lot of sites reporting the same results in google’s webmaster forum. Website is in my profile. Can anyone shed some light on this? I previously asked about getting the #1 site removed (it’s a dead link, has been for months) but THAT site comes up number 1 still. I am so frustrated!

How can I overtake my rival on google, considering his site doesn't exist anymore?

quibx — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 06:50:17 -0800

How can I overtake my rival on google, considering his site doesn't exist anymore? For my #1 keyword on google, I have the #2 spot. The #1 spot, a former competitor, has been offline for MONTHS.

Is there any way to get google to remove the dead link from its index? How do I beat a dead site?

I think the reason he is above me is because his domain name has my actual keywords in it, mine does not.

Great Online Media Search Interfaces

pessoa — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 09:32:31 -0800

What are some examples of newspaper, magazine, or content archive sites that you think have really good search interfaces? I'm interested in your criteria--what's 'good' to me would include: ability to modify query from the results page by date, section, and subject filters; clear distinction of ads from organic results; at least five organic results above the fold; sort by date and relevance; ability to view results by media type. To my mind, The New York Times comes closest, but I'm hoping there's a great search interface out there that I haven't found yet.

Technorati alternatives

commander_cool — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 14:14:35 -0800

Technorati seems to be less and less accurate and comprehensive. Are there better alternatives for searching blog content?