Hey all – been taking a vacation from the blog for a while, sorting out some personal issues. Wanted to bring up a cool meta search engine that I’ve been getting back into. It’s not new, but it’s a cool way to search when your old standby’s aren’t doing the job.
A meta-search engine is a search engine that sends user requests to several other search engines and/or databases and aggregates the results into …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_search_engine
note: image was altered to fit the width of my blog
“Customized for the metro Philly area”, eh? Interesting, except my actual location this time was outside of Philadelphia, in Reading, Pennsylvania – Berks County, not Philadelphia. I’m not exactly sure how the geo-tracking works in this case (I’ll have to look into that), but when I checked my IP path, I’m not running through Philly. Why not choose Harrisburg then? I’m equally close.
SEO and IP aside, I just started to wonder about whether this was a good idea at all.
I wasn’t logged in. I wasn’t asking for personalized search. What if I didn’t want an art program in the Philadelphia area, but rather an art program like Photoshop? Why would I want a customized “local” search? Or, what if I was open to any location? Granted, these results really didn’t seem that customized to Philly this time around, but how far can Google take this?
I’d prefer some parametric buttons that would let me choose customized results to my location, instead of just having it be “on”.
I’ve been spending my last year working in an agency in Philadelphia. I don’t get out nearly as much as I used to, and as a result, was totally oblivious to this great group of local interactive marketers. I hope to meet them soon. My new friend Chris Phillips invited me to the Internet Marketers of Delaware Valley. Affiliated with that is Search Camp Philly, a great sounding weekend for $21.00. Wow. I might have to leave Disney World early for that. Wife would kill me though…
I don’t feel so alone anymore! I know I have a couple local readers to my new blog. Definitely check this out.
Bill Sebald - Ex-big agency guy, now focused on helping small and medium sized business. I've been practicing SEO since 1998. I started the SEO practice at a major digital agency owned by eBay and helped develop SEO products for one of the largest ecommerce platforms. I'm a proud member of the Philadelphia SEO scene. I'm passionate about search, writing, UX, CRO, and psychology in marketing.
Hang out with me at the SEO Grail