Like: Indieweb.xyz: Difficult or Silo?

I want to respond to this but I’ll wait for morning.  There is a lot here to think about.

I just installed the new Aperture Wordpress plugin.  I’m not real clear on what it does but it gives me access to Aperture and Microsub and, maybe, Monocle so it’s going in the direction towards an Internet home, which is good.

I’ve been kinda waiting for this, but also stalling a little to see how thing go.  This brings me closer and makes the process easier which is great.

See also: Indieweb.org

This is the infamous vacuum cleaner post I have been promising to write.

I just bought a refurbished vacuum cleaner.  A Tristar MG-2 canister, if you must know.  It’s a compact model which is handy to pull out quickly when you track something in and for carrying out to the garage for cleaning out the cars.  New Tristars are very expensive.  Refurbished they still are not cheap but they will outlast most of the plastic junk built today.

A family I knew well, bought a Tristar back in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s.  Back then the styling had not changed since the 1940’s.  The family nicknamed it The Pig, because it looked like a little piggy rolling behind them.  It was ugly in a cute sort of way, built like a tank and powerful.  I know they used it for over 20 years and they loved it.

Vacuum Cleaner Buying Guide

Here are the numbers I am seeing: You can buy a new “high end” plastic vacuum cleaner for starting at $650 or more.  It might be made in Germany or the USA.  Or you can spend $250 - 500 for a quality refurbished vacuum cleaner, made in USA, made of metal, that will still be running in 10 - 15 years.  Heck, $250 - 550 buys a heck of a lot in the refurbished department.

Most of the high quality vacuums are made in the USA. I like that.

High quality vacuums can be repaired, Usually it’s just a new belt.  They can be refurbished and have a second life and will probably still outlast the modern plastic ones.  I’ve learned this the hard way.

It is okay to have more than one vacuum cleaner.  I have one for each floor of my house because I’m done lugging a vac up and down flights of stairs.  Also a vac model that is perfect for your ground floor may not work as well upstairs where the bedrooms are.

Bag vs. Bagless

Upright vs. canister

If you have small rooms with lots of tight spaces I think a canister is better.

Why Buy Refurbished Vacuums?

Lower Carbon Footprint: When you buy a refurbished, quality machine like I list here, you are buying a machine that has already served 10 - 30 years since it was first manufactured. Professionally refurbished it will probably serve another 10 - 15 even 20 years. It lowers the carbon footprint. When you buy a cheap $150 vacuum it’s disposable - when it breaks in 5 years, you toss it in a landfill. That’s not very carbon efficient or good for the environment.

Get to the Vacuum Cleaner Models Man!

Canisters:

Pro Tip: If you buy a Rainbow, invest in a non-electrified wet hose, plastic tubes and squeegee attachment if your unit didn’t come with it.  These can be aftermarket but made for your model Rainbow. Cheap insurance!

Even if you already have a working vacuum cleaner, a rebuilt Rainbow with it’s wet pickup can be a good investment and a compliment to your primary vac.  Add the optional carpet shampooing attachment and it has even more uses.

Plus, of course, it vacuums up dry dust and sand like crazy.  It works really well for dusting and not putting allergens back in the air.

There is a downside to the Rainbow, because you have to fill the tank with water before each use, it is not the best for a quick cleanup when the kids track in dirt and the in-laws are due any second, or for lugging out to the driveway to vacuum the interior of the car. The Rainbow is for weekly cleaning day.

Others in no particular order. You really can’t go wrong with any of these.

Electrolux/Aerus:  These are well built machines which are sort of torpedo shaped.  They have a great disposable filter bag system so bag changes are clean and neat.  Also a full bag sensor. The retractable cord is a great feature.  They last a long time.  

Tristar: Made in USA. compact, powerful, they are built to last.  If you need something smaller and lighter for lugging around or in a cramped home or apartment this is perfect.  The Tristar is a handy size for carrying out to the garage to clean the carpet in your car yet it is big enough to clean your whole house.

Update: Up above, when I first wrote this, I had a Tristar on order.  Now I’ve had a chance to really use it and it’s a fantastic machine, very powerful and well built.  I would not hesitate to buy one again.

Filter Queen:  Made in USA. my experience is only second hand but they have a reputation for lasting forever and being very good at cleaning and air quality without losing suction.  These can be good if you have a long haired pets.  They even make a dog grooming attachment.  Refurbished Filter Queens seem to be in high demand, but they are priced right. 

Filter Queen Update: I’m seeing the refurbished older model Filter Queen (red, green and blue color models) often priced at $200 - 250ish range.  That makes these rebuilt Filter Queens one of the best bargains of everything listed in this buying guide.  If money is tight but you still want quality seriously look at the Filter Queens.

Best Vacuum for solving your problems

• Lots of carpet, lots of big shedding pets. Get a newer Kirby model (Diamond, Sentria).  These really work on getting pet hair out of carpets.  You will probably still want to have a good bagged canister for dusting and getting under beds, sofas and other furniture.
• Lots of hard floors, lots of pets. Any of the bagged canisters listed above.
• Sever allergies - Rainbow E or E2 models or newer. Not only do they filter with water but they have a HEPA after filter.  Clean floors and dust furniture with the Rainbow.
• Mildly dust sensitive (temporary sneezing, mild irritation) - Any Rainbow model. The water filtration really works. Again clean floors and dust furniture with it.
• Most portable for carrying up/down stairs.  Tristar.
• Best for cramped rooms with too much furniture. Tristar or any canister.
• Best for bedrooms and getting under beds.  Any canister.

Where else to buy?

I’ve found two potential refurbishers for vintage Electrolux USA/Aerus vacuums: Vacuum Man and TheElectroluxMan.com. The first seems to be a thriving concern. The second site looks dated, I would email them first to see if they are still in business. I’ve never dealt with either.

eBay:  You need to do your homework buying a refurbished vacuum cleaner on eBay.  You want to find a seller that really refurbishes the machine and doesn’t just polish up the exterior with Armor All and pass it off as refurbishment.  Find out: 1. what the seller does for refurbishment, 2. what their return and refund policy is (if they don’t have one pass), 3. what is their sales history and buyer satisfaction rating, 4. how much is shipping and what is the final price with shipping, 5. what exactly you are getting: hoses, attachments etc.  You want to separate the garage sale finds from a truly refurbished model done by someone that knows what they are doing.

Local Vacuum Retail and Repair Shop: Of course they will want to sell you a new vacuum, but many of these shops take in trade-ins, refurbish them and resell. But find out what they do for refurbishment.

Amazon: See above under Great Vacs and Ebay.

What if I Want a New Vacuum Cleaner?

Miele - Made in Germany. Makes high quality canisters.

Riccar - Made in USA. Authorized dealers only so check your local vac store. Good machines, especially their uprights.

Sebo - Made in Germany. Good canisters.

Aerus - Aerus is the successor to the old Electrolux USA. They have both a bricks and mortar dealer network and door to door salespeople (I think). New Aerus vacuums are expensive but you can look.

With all four brands: these are not cheap when new. Expect to spend at least $600 - 700 for a good model but they go higher. Check each brands corporate website for dealer locator.

In my opinion, you will not find a really good quality new vac for $100 - 200 range.  You get what you pay for and at those prices, even the plastic seems 3rd rate and they just won’t last.

What do you have?

I have a Rainbow “D” model bought refurbished as my main machine on my main floor.  I dust with it and sweep the floors with it. I bought this a few years ago online from Great Vacs (see above.)  It’s also my “just in case” vac should I ever have a wet cleanup requiring more than just a quick mop (ie. dishwasher leaks, clothes washer leaks, plumbing leaks, water in the basement, etc.)

Pro Tip:  I dump my Rainbow dirty water on the back lawn in good weather.  The lawn loves it.  In winter I empty the water into the toilet.

When I bought the Rainbow, I already had a subcompact 1990’s Royal canister with shoulder strap for quick spot cleaning, doing the stairs and cleaning car interiors. It was too small in capacity for general cleaning but it was good for those jobs.  The Royal also had a tendency to flop over off it’s wheels when trailing behind.  The Royal finally broke down and repairs were more than the little plastic vac was worth.  The refurbished Tristar, mentioned above is replacing the Royal.

My upstairs is all carpet.  I have a refurbished Electrolux, that I bought on eBay.  It is close to the model we had when I was a kid, so I guess nostalgia.

Update February 2020: I bought a refurbished Kirby and a refurb Filter Queen. I’ll figure out a rationalization later.

Unfinished basement:  I have a Dyson canister.  I originally bought this as a general purpose vac.  I hated it from the start.  I replaced it with the Rainbow.  The Dyson sits next to my workbench, plugged in and ready to suck up sawdust and anything else on the concrete floor in that area and off the workbench.  It works well for that task.

(Electrolux is now called Aerus.)  2018.

I tried to cover everything pretty extensively.  If you have questions feel free to ask in the comments below and I will try to get you an answer.

This was also posted to /en/vacuum-cleaners.

Download Ringlink for free. Ringlink is a CGI Perl program that provides the tools necessary to build and run rings of websites, i.e. systems of links between websites of similar contents.

Eureka!  Now this is a genuine FIND.  I looked for this weeks ago, but the script website is dead and I thought I had reached a dead end.  Today I tried my search differently on a different engine and found the actual Ringlink script.  Better, it was last updated in only 2017 so it’s current!

Ringlink is a perl script for hosting webrings. Note the plural.  You can set this up as a webring hosting platform. Yes strangers can sign up and start their own webring or webmasters can sign up for a pre-existing ring.

There are still some small highly niche ring hosts running this script today.

I once ran a small niche webring hosting service using an earlier version of the Ringlink script back in 2003ish.  It worked like a charm.  I think I had about a dozen rings running on it, not all of them were mine.  I don’t know what the top end is for this script, that is, how many rings it can run and how large.  I know my version had a proper index of rings and I think each ring also had an index of sites.  Ringmasters had their own admin panel and the RingLink host had an admin panel.  On my version ring codes were all HTML.

To get this running you need a CGI host.  Some knowledge of perl and HTML.

Now this is a tool for a webring revival.

This was also posted to /en/linking.

A self-contained PHP/MySQL script for creating and managing a full-featured webring

This is a full featured script.  If you want to create and host one webring.  This is not a server for hosting multiple webrings.  Still very handy since you have control on your own server.

This is Part II of my series on the Death of Webrings.  Part I is here.

For this article I am going to use two examples.  I want to make it clear that I am not picking on the example rings, their creators or their intended uses.  I do want to point out what I see as flaws in their model that unless corrected will inhibit use, uptake and general adoption by the public.

Modern 2018 webrings overview.  There are not a heck of a lot of examples which is why I am discussing the only two I know about.  Both of these webrings are one offs, meaning they are custom coded to form one webring.  They are not a centralized service designed to host many webrings.  Nor are they designed so that anybody can create and run a webring.  In this sense they are less democratic than the old 1990’s style ring hosts like Webring.org, Ringsurf.com and Webringo.com.  On the other hand, they do avoid being dependent on a third-party silo.  The creator has full control.

Indiewebring

It works well and at least at the front end, it is simple.

The idea is neat.

This ring, as built, is really more of a club or association.  It is not organized around topical content, but rather if you have the right code on your site.  As such it’s almost like a merit badge.  There is nothing wrong with that, I’m just pointing out the limitation.

It is a black box.  There is no public index of ring member sites or how many sites are in the ring.  The only transparency is to follow the ring.

I presume rings like these can be replicated - if you know code or understand how things work at Glitch.  If replicated how does one make such a ring topical?  How would that auto signup feature check to make sure all the applicants are about one topic? (ie. blue widgets, Star Trek, catching lobsters. etc.)  Just having the right code in place to join is not enough for most visitors.  They want to surf a ring that matches their interests.  Code is not content. Code is not entertainment.

Administering such a ring is also a black box.  How are member sites curated?  Are all ring codes intact?

My point is not to bash this individual ring, but to say this is not the model to build a “webring revival” on.  It needs to be:

1. DIscoverable.  Hubs, interconnection.  Does the ring code give any clues as to what the ring is about?
2. Easily replicated by average person.  If every ring has to be custom made there will be no ring revival.
3. Topical.  Does it match the ring topic?
4. Curated.  Are the topic and the quality of the sites right for membership in the ring?
5. Managed.  Are all ring codes in place?  Can they be found? In short, is it navigable?
6. Transparent. What are the signup rules? How many members? Who is a member?

Microcast.club

Here is how it works: you put your microcast feed URL in the form. You get a webring code to put on your microcast website.  You also appear in the flat directory you see on the ring page.

This has some legs for the future.  It’s more topical and open.  The ring and the directory reinforce each other providing traffic for everyone.  I’m assuming the ring code is checked periodically and that having it on your site keeps you in the directory. Remove the ring code and lose your listing.  This helps keep thing easier to administer.

It’s still not subject oriented but there may be ways to overcome that.  If that can be overcome either by human review (might be wise) or machine detection you could expand this idea into a semi automated categorized directory with multiple subjects.  Just speculating.

It still has many of the same problems as the Indiewebring above.  It’s custom made so it is hard for the common webmaster to duplicate.  That limits mass adoption.

I wish them both well.

Back to old school.

Update

What does this mean?

• Two of the three remaining web ring hosts appear broken (read slowly dying.)
• Webringo.com is at least in working order but appears to only have a few thriving rings and many abandoned ones.  (This is sad because it has some good features.)
• Indiewebring is a one off. Neatly done but problems with replication and wider adoption.
• Microcast.club has some good features but the same questions about wider adoption still exist.
• Orca Ringmaker is a bit harder to start up (you have to install a script) but at least it’s off the shelf and ready to roll once you overcome that.

None of this gives me hope for a resurgence of widespread webring adoption.  I’d like to be wrong.  Unless somebody like Taylor Swift suddenly makes a webring and promotes the heck out of them, I just don’t think people will notice in enough numbers to matter.

I hope somebody proves me wrong.

This was also posted to /en/linking.

Lucky Tackle Box is the most popular monthly fishing subscription box that introduces fisherman to new baits and fishing tackle every month for every species! Get the best new baits from the top brands, SAVE MONEY and CATCH MORE FISH! No mystery in the tackle box you’ll get… perfect for yourself or as a gift!

I just gave a subscription as a birthday gift and it was a hit.  Good gift for an angler.

Economists find a striking correlation between the density of ancient Roman roads and levels of modern economic activity in Europe.

Introduction The “best” feed reader is largely a matter of individual preference. There are many good ones. Most of them, including the best, are free like browsers. The one that matches the way you want to work is best for you. :-) No matter which reader you choose, it should give you some way to back up your feeds, preferably as an OPML file. You may also be able to use your OPML file to move to another reader, although the formats may not be compatible.

Wow what a great article.  It’s much more comprehensive than most of it’s kind.  One thing I’ve learned you really really need a feed reader in the Indieweb space and eventually on Micro.blog.

In the Indieweb you are going to really want to follow all those neat blogs you discover.  On Micro.blog the timeline is purposely fleeting.  There will be people you follow who you don’t want to miss any of their posts or you just find that you are following too many interesting people and the timeline moves past too quickly: the solution is to subscribe to their Micro.blog blogs in the feed reader.  That way you capture it all.

It’s just an essential tool.  I use Inoreader, which is listed in the article.

I purged about 40 people or blogs I was following on Twitter. I want to reduce the echo effect and I don’t need to see 8 celebs opining about the same thing. I’m sticking with friends, people who follow me or insightful sources.

Some things, like many articles for example, are better handled via RSS in my feed reader, so I may still be following just not on Twitter.

Google started out ridiculously smart, but it’s been stagnant for too long. They clearly need competition.

If I were building a search engine…

1. You need to start building your own index of the web.  That means you need a crawler (robot) and it needs to be good.  It takes time to build an index and it is not cheap.
2. I would gather in info from other providers: Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha whatever I could cobble together.
3. Until your own index is ready, you need to have a search results from a big search engine.  There are only two left: Google and Bing in English.
4. What happens if Google or Bing refuse to sell you a search feed or if they refuse to renew because you are getting too big?  You could probably hammer together a good blended backfill feed by combining Mojeek, Gigablast and Yandex using your own algorithm.  You either lead with your own results and use the other three as backfill or you blend your own results in with the three others in a sort of seamless metasearch.  (You do need to plan for “what if” scenarios.
5. All the above is to buy you time while you learn and refine how to crawl the web on your own.
6. Eventually you roll out your own search index as the backbone of the search results with the others maybe on standby for queries you are weak on.

Qwant seems to be the other player.  Their strategy is more open:  they are actively building an index by crawling the web.  Bing is providing backfill.  It is not obvious where Qwant’s index ends and Bing’s begins.  The results are good and seamless.  With a little luck, marketing and money Qwant will eventually need to use Bing less and less.  This too is a good plan.

Fortunately, Bing is willing to sell it’s search feed to just about anyone that can pay the fee.  For now.  I do not think Microsoft really knows what to do with Bing, except to somehow milk it for all the dollars they can get until they decide what to do with it and how it fits in with the company strategy.

Search engines are important but they are not as important as they were before the social media silos of Facebook and Twitter.  You don’t need Google to find a company’s Facebook page.

If I were trying to build a search engine today those are some of the things I would try. All this could change in a year.

Just follow these simple instructions to create the perfect shakespearean insult: [Via]

The finding of the Coroner’s Court is that 1990’s style webrings are officially dead.

Evidence of Demise

• Two of the three remaining Ring Hosts are broken.  Both Webring.org and Ringsurf.com are broken in such a way that nobody can sign up as new members and it has been that way for a time.
• The third remaining ring host, Webringo.com, is functioning.  It just appears that they have no traffic.  But points to them for keeping things in working order.
• New 1990’s style rings created have had zero take up.  This is too small a sample to really tell but it is a small indicator.
• A newer Indie-tech style webring has little useful traffic despite a user base.

What Killed the Webring?

1. Generation shift.  Web 1.0 users “surfed the Web” so they liked the idea of a curated grouping of websites they could surf to.  Modern web users are used to helicoptering into a single web page via a search engine.  They only care about that page and it’s information, not websites or surfing.
2. Rings are passive.  They sit there and wait to be discovered.  They are passive in recruiting members and they are passive in finding users.  Passive cannot break through the noise of the modern web.
3. Search engines used to suck.  That was one reason for webrings you couldn’t find anything.
4. Geocities, Tripod and Homestead.  Webmasters on these free hosts wanted to be found, joining a webring got you traffic.  Those free host webmasters were also familiar with HTML so they were not intimidated by having to put a ring code on their sites.  Modern webmasters use CMS’s and are more intimidated by messing with HTML code.
5. Young webmasters may have heard of webrings in passing but have never seen one in the wild.  They don’t know what they are. Ditto the public visitor, they don’t know what they are.
6. Commerce.  The web in the 1990’s was little used for commerce.  It was a place to explore, have fun, find neat things, exchange information and ideas.  Rings were good for explorers but not daily commuters.  Today commerce has taken over the web, efficiency rules so we can maximize sales, revenue and consumption. Webrings were never good for that.
7. Lack of traffic.  Webring hosts had hubs.  These were a directory of webrings organized by subject. Example.  Many tens of thousands of visitors went to these ring hosts to find rings to surf, because search engines sucked.  So a webring gained traffic from both the ring host and the ring codes on individual sites.  The biggest reason you joined a ring or started your own ring, was to tap into the hundreds of thousands of eyeballs at those hubs, the code on other websites was icing on the cake.

There may still be some life in old style webrings: it seems to me neocities.org is a perfect match for webrings.  But it would take some promotion.  A ring host would need to get listed in Neocities webmaster resources pages and it might catch on. They would be a good match just as they were for Geocities et al.  But it would take effort.

The demise of the webring does not make me sad.  It’s time has passed and there are better ways to find websites.  It would have been nice to have it as a tool in the fight against the Google search monopoly silo but it’s a bit like fighting Delta Force with a sword.

This is part of a series: See Part II Here.

This was also posted to /en/linking.

To Do’s

Internal ads:  I need to look into ad or banner system plugins for Wordpress.  I don’t need it right now but will need.  I am not talking about Adsense or outside ads, but I need to drive some traffic to my own content.  The big example would be the Blog Directory.  I need to let people know it is there.

Graphical banner ads are a pain.  Mainly because I’m terrible at making graphics.  The other thing is they can screw up the view on mobile.  The good thing is you set up the campaigns and forget it.

Text ads? Maybe.  Worth trying.

Placement?  I hate ads between paragraphs in articles but it is effective.

I need to think this through and see what free plugins are available.

More directory listings:  I need to add more.  I could easily add the famous blogs, but that really isn’t the focus of the blog directory, which is hopefully for good new or unfound blogs - the underappreciated.  Will work on this.

UK based Mojeek.com is the next privacy search engine I am going to make my default and use for a few weeks.  (There is a UK specialized version at Mojeek.co.uk, plus German and French versions.)

I did a quick look over before, but this test will be daily use as my default browser.  I will try my best to use it exclusively, without resorting to a backup search engine.

I really don’t know what to expect.  Mojeek has it’s own unique database that it is building by crawling the web with a robot.  But, unlike Duckduckgo or Qwant, it has no backfill from a massively larger search engine to back up the Mojeek search index.  They out there with no training wheels.  That takes guts.

So we will just have to see how I get on.

I don’t have to do this alone.  You can join me!  Just make Mojeek your default search engine for a few weeks and use it as your daily driver.  I would love to hear how you do and what you think.

My experiment with Qwant search engine is ending early.  On July 20th, 2018 I started using it as my default search engine for a month long test.  Today, August 7th, I am terminating further testing.

The test terminated when I got yet another captcha because they detected unusual activity from me and thought I was a robot. That never happens to me.  I just don’t type that fast.  When I’m trying to find something I do keep refining my search query.  I guess that is too much for Qwant.  They apparently only want dilettantes doing an occasional search. This is not a robust search engine for somebody who seriously works and searches.

The truth is, I was already getting irritated with Qwant.  Not for the quality of it’s search results, but because the search results page was taking too long to load.  The page is pretty but slow.  I’d want lean and fast results.  The actual search results were pretty darn good.

But I can’t use a search engine that craps out on me right in the middle of a project.

Pros:

Trying to build their own unique index.

Decent search results.

Privacy

Cons:

Slow

Not robust. Can’t handle multiple searches typed by a slow human typist.

Like: Best Browsers of 2018 | Expert Reviews.

For my own amusement and because the Wordpress plugin was free, I made a little bookshelf of free public domain ebooks available for the Kindle.  It’s a bit like having a Little Free Library on this blog.  I enjoyed them so I thought I would point them out.  They remind me of a gentler era.  Folks from the UK should be able to find the same free titles on Amazon.co.uk.

Bookshelf here.

Disclaimer: All the books are free and in the public domain.  I am not an Amazon Affiliate so I derive no benefit from this.  The button “Purchase from Amazon” just takes you to the Amazon page where it is free.  Just encouraging reading.

Enjoy.

I just installed OStatus plugin for Wordpress.  It’s a bit short on details as to how it all works.  Scant few controls too, one check box on the plugin panel about activating feed summary or some such and nothing on the Post screen.

For me the biggest reason to try it is better two way communication with Mastodon.

I always have thought web directories should have backfill from a search engine when you search them.  Especially, general directories.

Yahoo (dubbed “Mighty Yahoo”) was the first directory to add a backfill provider on it’s search results. First Alta Vista, then Inktomi, then Google, then Inktomi again provided backfill results for Y!.  Snap/NBCi directory had backfill and so did Looksmart.

How backfill worked was somebody would search the directory, when the directory ran out of listings that matched the query, you would see search results from the backfill provider.  (Being Mighty Yahoo’s backfill provider cemented Google’s reputation and proved to be one of the biggest mistakes Yahoo ever made.)  What was important is the search portal needed to provide something in a search that would satisfy the person searching, otherwise they would start going elsewhere. And they could go elsewhere because there was genuine competition in web search back then.

It gets harder for niche directories.  For example: if you go to a Star Trek niche directory and search for “uniforms” it is assumed you are only going to get uniform sites that are related to Star Trek.  In this instance you don’t want a general backfill giving results for police uniforms or nurses uniforms.

For backfill to work on a niche subject directory you almost need a place to put in an extra search “slug” to bring it into context.  So in our example, you need to have a place in your admin panel to add “star trek” as a term to the backfill.  So that somebody searching for uniforms on your Star Trek directory are automatically searching for “star trek uniforms” on the backfill.  The “star trek” is always added to the backfill.

It gets even harder for a local or geographic directory.  Frankly I think backfill should not be used with a local directory.

I did some looking around, Google and Bing are way too expensive to get a search feed from.  Smaller engines like Mojeek.com (or Mojeek.co.uk) or Gigablast.com provide search results API’s.  Both are affordable, but Gigablast’s is really really affordable.

Of course, I don’t know how to actually code this.  That’s what coders are for.  😀

But the trick here is this:

• The more listings you get in your directory the more users will use the search function.
• You have to have a search function.
• No matter how sophisticated your directory search is, you have a finite amount of listings.
• Mobile devices make the search function even more important.
• This is why most will need backfill.

Yesterday I noticed that there is an Add URL form at Gigablast search engine.  So I took a few seconds and added both of my current domains.  Why? Because it’s free, it’s there and it puts my domiains, both newish, on Gigablast’s eventual crawl list.  At least they know about them.

Back in the day, all the engines and directories had an add url form.  When a new directory or search engine launched all the webmasters would race over to add their sites.  Especially on the directories, it was easier to get listed in a new directory for free when they were new and needed to build an index.  The longer you waited the harder it became to get listed.

The whole idea behind having a website on the Web is to be found.  To do that you want to be listed in as many legit places as possible.  You never know where a faithful reader is going to come from.  We’re living in a unique time, where social networks like Facebook and Twitter have loosened Google’s throttling, monopoly, grip on web discovery.  We could go back to that overnight, so get yourself listed in as many search engines large and small as you can.

Gigablast has been around for years.  It used to supply almost all the meta-search engines.  That brought traffic. I think most meta’s have died because there are so few general search engines to get search feeds from that it is not worth running a meta-search.  But Gigablast still has it’s own index, it still crawls the web and if adding my URL’s aids them and me then it’s worth doing.

This is so simple, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.  You can make a decent blog search engine, for free, in minutes with Duckduckgo.

1. Go to the Duckduckgo Search Box page.
2. Do whatever customization you like.
3. In the field “Site Search” type in: blogspot.com,wordpress.com,medium.com

Medium.com is optional.  Copy the searchbox code and Paste it on an HTML page and you are done.

Pros:

• Because it’s DDG all searches are private.
• Blogspot and Wordpress are the two largest blog hosts on the web, at least in the Western World.
• Fast results with very few ads.
• DDG does not insist on having their branding all over the searchbox.
• You can do multi word, complex search queries.

Cons:

You are not searching for all blogs. Only blogs hosted on a subdomain “blogname.blogspot.com” are going to be searched.  Blogs on these same hosts that pay to use their own domain will be overlooked.  Also, blogs that are self hosted on their own servers will be overlooked.

Have fun. Adapt this to your own needs.  If you find this useful on your own site, come back and let me know how you use it.  Thanks.

Blogspot search allows to to look for blogspot blogs in this Blogspot blogs search engine . To help you search blogs on blogspot

This is actually a good find.  Very current, it searches all the blogs hosted on Blogger.com (aka Blogspot)  Very good tool for discovery.