Last week on VirtualMarketingOfficer.com I wrote about How To Promote Your Law Blog and it turned out to be a pretty popular post, so I figured there are enough readers who are looking for ideas in this regard—thanks to all who re-tweeted the post; Twitter was driving a lot of the traffic according to my WordPress Stats. Over the weekend, I thought, hey, I wonder how many blogger/readers are using Alexa? (I have no business interest or other connection to Alexa, except being a registered user.) Then I thought, why not ask? Are you using Alexa to monitor the health of your blog, understand your audience, and build a more strategic approach?

If the purpose of your blog or website is to gain exposure and influence readers to pick up the phone and hire you, you should know about Alexa and add it to your blog or website tool kit. What is Alexa?

Alexa is “The Web Information Company.” It provides (free) information about all websites including data about; Top Sites, Internet Traffic Stats and Metrics, Related Links, Site Reviews, Site Ownership contact information, and a few other really valuable paid services. They’ve been pursuing their vision of intelligent Web navigation since 1996. Alexa is one of the largest Web crawls with an infrastructure that can process and serve massive amounts of data.

Okay, so what does this mean for you? Read on…

Web Intelligence

To promote your blog or law firm website (Going forward in this post I use these two types of sites interchangeably.) and to develop the right audience (the one most likely to engage your services), knowing how these sites are performing in search results across the web will be an important component of your strategy. With Alexa tools you can do that.  Further, you can see how you compare with your competitors’ websites. This type of competitive intelligence should allow you to make some informed choices that will make your site a better tool for revenue generation and not just a millstone around your neck.  

Install the Alexa Toolbar

There are two choices. You can install the toolbar up top in your browser menu or install it as a status bar at the bottom. Either works. I use the status bar.  Open your site (or any site) in a browser window and then right click the little icon in the status bar and you’ll get an expanded menu of options.

Select Traffic Stats. A window will open and give you all the traffic stats about the open site in your browser. Other choices include:  Search Analytics, Audience, Reviews, Related Links, Clickstream, or Wayback Machine to see earlier versions of the website or blog.

Traffic Statistics

Before I started using Alexa I relied solely on my WordPress Stats and Google Analytics (all good). I’d learn which posts were most popular, how many visitors a day, where they were coming from and what search queries they used, but with Alexa I can uncover a whole lot more to help me gain clearer focus.

The Traffic Rank shows me what percent of total visits to the site are referred by search engines. Approximately 12% of all visits to my blog site are referred by search engines.

Alexa tells me that: 32% of visits to my blog site are bounces (one page view only), but two thirds stay approximately seven minutes, spending 60 seconds on each page view.

In plain English, this data allows me to make some assumptions:  My search optimization is working but I’d like that 12% to become 20% as readers who reach my blog via search are likely brand new prospects. A third of my visitors hit the home page, read the current post and leave. But, at least two thirds read more than one post! Keeping an audience for seven minutes tells me that readers are getting a deeper picture of my knowledge base and expertise.

It also tells me that because visitors are spending a minute on each page view a lot of my content can be skimmed or read in a minute—this has always been one of my goals—making content easy to skim—I write to reach busy professionals. I want them to be able to quickly assess my value, how that might help their law firm, then pick up the phone and hire me to fill in any “specialty marketing” gaps.

Alexa tells me that 73% of visits come from the US where it has attained a traffic rank of 274,702 (not bad considering my niche focus but certainly can be improved) and my audience, based on Internet averages, is comprised more frequently of females who are in the age range 45-54, have no children and are graduate school educated. (Perfect! Leaders and decision makers!)

Search Analytics

The most recent top search queries sending visitors to my blog are “virtual marketing,” “proskauer rose” (I did a post about their iPad purchases), “jayne Navarre,” “alternative fee agreement,” “marketing officer,” “law firm business card,” “where do CMO’s get their ideas from,” “marketing partner forum,” and “social media secrets.”

Alexa also told me that this month the search query “corporate counsel social media” is driving traffic to the site at an increased rate of 1.30%, while “law firm business card” has declined by 1.22%.  With this information, a strategic choice would be to write a new blog post about “corporate counsel and social media,” “social media secrets” or “iPads in AmLaw firms.”

If you’re working a Search Engine Marketing campaign, Alexa will give you a run down on the most apparent opportunities for you based on Query Popularity scores and Query Competition Index (QCI). A topic for another day….

Reputation Score 

The Alexa Reputation Score is based on how many “incoming links” a site has. Links coming into a website are important because they indicate to search engines a measure of authority and popularity of site content.

Click on the Reputation Score for your site (or any site) you’ll get a list of the top sites that have added an inbound link to the content.

Then, make a few assumptions.  Based upon “who” is linking in to your site and “what” content on your site has been attracting inbound links you could create more content like that to attract more links.  Or, use the information to uncover the types of bloggers or sites interested in your content and then search for and reach out to similar bloggers (use the Alexa Top Site Category Search) or site owners by email with an excerpt of a relevant post and a link to it; just in case they are so inclined to one day use it for an outbound link. Though this takes more work than writing a check to a Link Building agency, the links will be authentic, valuable, meaningful, and ethical (and make you a richer blogger as you drive new revenue through the threshold of your blog).

Don’t neglect to link your blog or website from your profile on directory sites. While not of the same quality as being linked to from a top blog or news site, these do count as inbound links and grows your Reputation Score. ** see note below

As your reputation grows, it can open up doors that didn’t exist before. For example, I’ve been contacted by a publicist to review several very high profile business books, which I assume was in part based upon my ability to drive inbound links—it’s a web! (The more links you attract, the more authoritative you become.)  Although I primarily review books to alert my readers to great resources, as an added bonus the inbound links they create builds my web credibility!

If the purpose of your blog or website is to market your law practice, and your site doesn’t have any incoming links, there’s a problem. Either your content isn’t getting found or isn’t being read by other bloggers, news sites, or those who could link in to your content. In this case, you’ll need to work a little harder at creating some connections and build strategic content that will attract inbound links. Go to other similar sites such as yours that have high reputation scores and study their Alexa data to see what they are doing and what you might replicate.

Claim your site

Don’t forget to claim your site with Alexa. With a free registration, you can “Claim Your Site” and update site title, description and contact information which is all effective for making sure the search engines know what your blog or site is about.

Paid Services

For a small fee, via Alexa paid services, you can optimize your site, grow your traffic, and improve user experience without a long-term contract. The Alexa Site Audit performs a deep analysis of your site to reveal potential problems and provides recommendations to help you improve your site. You can get the one time audit or sign up for the monthly plan. Learn more…

Alexa Search

I’m going to leave this for another post because there is so much you can do with an Alexa Search,  but meanwhile, when you’re on the site, try it out, play around in there. You can learn a lot by looking at Top Sites in specific categories to see how you measure up and what you could do to improve.

Conclusion

If you or your law firm use Alexa, tell us about your experience in the comments; love it, like it, lukewarm? If you’re not using Alexa, check it out and remember to come back and tell us about your experience. Thanks!

**Note on Inbound Links from profiles on social networking sites like LinkedIn. Alexa only counts the first inbound link from any site. Therefore, if all the attorneys in your firm have the law firm website link in their LinkedIn profile, it only counts as one inbound link. No big deal, but just wanted to clarify that. Still, any lawyer in your firm with a blog site should definitely include that link in their profile to generate a separate inbound link to their blog site.

Now that your blog is “LIVE,” you need to do some basic things to help others find you. Or give your established blog a little shove and see if traffic doesn’t improve.

Submit to Giant Search Engines

Even though you’ve optimized the general metadata on your blog, as well as each post, you may still want to hand submit your blog to some key search engines.

1. Google. Google will eventually pick up your page but it doesn’t hurt to submit it via Google Webmaster Tools. You can also check there to see how it is performing. Make sure your metadata accurately describes what your blog is about. Submit to Google here.
2. Yahoo! Blog Directory
3. DMOZ.  This is a human-reviewed directory of the web. The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as Dmoz (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links. Netscape owns it, but it is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. When you submit to DMOZ, make sure to follow their instructions for categorizing your blog VERY CAREFULLY.
4. Bing.  Learn more here.
5. Aol.  In partnership with DMOZ.
6. ASK.com. Add your URL to Ask.com

Submit to legal content centric directories

Some legal blog directories have grown quite large and may not be of immediate help to your blog, but try submitting to the narrowest category possible and see if it doesn’t help.

1. Blawgsearch.com
2. Justia,com
3. Blogged.com
4. Blawg.com
5. USLaw.com
6. BlawgRepublic,com
7. ABAJournal.com Blawg Directory
8. AllTop.com/law

Submit to General Blog Directories and Aggregators

1. Alltop.com. Try submitting your (non-legal) industry focused blog to a more general category here.
2. BlogCatalog.  www.blogcatalog.com/
3. BlogPulse.  submit link here: http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html
4. Best of the Web Blogs.  http://blogs.botw.org/
5. FeedAgg.  Aggregates your blog feed by category http://www.feedagg.com/
6. Technorati
7. Bloglines.  Now being run by Merchant’s Circle, this site reaches out to retail consumers rather than corporate types, but great for personal services practices.
8. Zemanta. Valuable blog tool that feeds bloggers link suggestions to use within their content—submit your blog as a content provider.  http://www.zemanta.com/
9. Newsgator.  More of an enterprise social networking tool, but you can build a Newsgator widget to distribute your content via mobile. (MS Sharepoint partner)
10. Techmeme.  The web’s technology news site of record, Techmeme spotlights the hottest tech stories from all around the web on a single page. Meeting very specific criteria will get your post featured on Techmeme. Not easy but check out this out. http://news.techmeme.com/
11. StumbleUpon. Paid Discovery on StumbleUpon can be effective if you have a specific target audience you are trying to reach. https://www.stumbleupon.com/pd/  OR, simply submit your site for free here: http://www.stumbleupon.com/help/how-to-submit-a-site/
12. FeedShark. Free online tool that easily promotes your blog or website – with the simple push of a button! http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/

 Social promotion

1. Twitter.  Use FeedBurner or FeedBlitz to auto post new content to your Twitter account. Then, for extra measure, write a Tweet that highlights content, asks a question or encourages discussion and send another link.
2. LinkedIn.  Include your blog website URL on your profile using the “custom” box and type in the name of the blog.  Using the (easy) widget on LI, set up the feed of your blog content to appear on your profile page and news stream. Add Twitter to your LinkedIN profile and your Tweets about your blog will show up in your status update.
3. Facebook.  Add your blog posts to your firm’s Facebook page and your individual page. You can link your FB account to automatically grab your new posts.
4. Reciprocal links.  In addition to links within your content to others’ blog content, which can create a pingback or a reciprocal mention, make sure to include a well thought-out, strategic Blog Roll to your blog.  Give your readers similar or complimentary content in your blog roll and ask those bloggers to include your blog in their roll. Build a valuable “blogger community” and incoming links as a result.
5. FeedBlitz.  http://www.feedblitz.com/  Alternative to Google’s Feedburner. Sends email notification to visitors who sign up to receive your latest posts.
6. Scoop.it.com.  Curate your favorite posts, news articles, web pages, as well as your own new posts or favorite evergreen posts, and send your scoop to social networks.
7. Paper.Li  (http://paper.li/) Similar to Scoop.it, publish and share your own-online newspaper on Twitter and other networks—include your most recent post.
8. Repurpose. Set up your blog on Martindale Connected, social networking site for the legal profession, or other industry focused social networking sites. Some will even let you set up a feed so you’re not doing double duty.
9. LinkedIn Groups. This can be fertile territory for specific posts, relevant to specific Groups. Excerpt some of your post to create a discussion and link to your full post. This may take a little more work, but I’ve heard from more than one attorney that this is a very effective tactic.

Miscellaneous

1. Guest blog
2. Add your blog address to your business card and email signature.
3. Include a post teaser and blog URL on the firm’s eNewsletter when content is relevant.
4. Include your blog URL in every media by-line when possible. (Rather than, or in addition to,  your law firm website!)
5. Send a personal email note with a link to a relevant post to a special client or others in your contact list.

Hope this is a helpful resource for you. This list isn’t comprehensive, nor do I personally endorse any of these sites or services and I am in no way connected to any. It is simply a random list of ideas that have worked for my clients and me in the past. If you have some favs to add, please drop us your suggestions in the comments! Would love to hear from you. Thanks!

Do you use Google Alerts? They’re great, aren’t they? (If you don’t, go get a Google Account and start right now. There is a help tab that will walk you through how to get started.)

I’ve been using basic Google Alerts to follow my name, my company name, and select clients’ names for as many years as they’ve been available. However, Google Alerts are much more. For example, a few months ago I set up an alert for [ LinkedIn +Tips ].  This search string produces a surprising bounty of web content, blog posts and news stories that inspire new ways (tips) for using and improving my participation on the LinkedIn social network. You could add +Tips to any search term and get all the content being published as a Tip, i.e. [ tennis +Tips ], [ human resource +Tips ], or [ law-firm-marketing +Tips ].

Alert Search Tips

Here’s a few tips for getting the best results from Google Alerts, all of which can also be found in Google’s Help articles.

• It’s important to keep the topic keywords precise unless you don’t mind getting a lot of peripheral hits. The more precise your search terms are, the more relevant your alerts will be.
• You can also use quotes around words if you are looking for them together.
  • “white house”
  • “Mike Smith”
• You can use a minus sign (-) in front of words that you want to exclude.
  • paris -texas
  • apple -fruit
• Or, put a plus sign (+) immediately before a word to match that word precisely as you typed it, which will exclude synonyms and spelling variations.
  • +foard (to stop Google including results for Ford)
  • Michael +Jacson (to stop Google including results for Michael Jackson)
• Use the site: operator to limit your search to specific sites.
  • physics site:.edu
  • congress site:nytimes.com
• Use the site: operator with a dash to exclude specific sites.
  • “joe bloggs” -site:twitter.com
• Always use square brackets [ ] to denote queries, i.e. [ to be or not to be ] is an example of a query; [ to be ] or [ not to be ] are two examples of queries.
• Check out Google Guide Quick Reference Cheat Sheet for Advanced Search Operators

More Alert Search Details

Here’s a little more detail from Google’s Help article about what these advanced search features deliver.

• Phrase search (“”)
  By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change. Google already uses the order and the fact that the words are together as a very strong signal and will stray from it only for a good reason, so quotes are usually unnecessary. By insisting on phrase search you might be missing good results accidentally. For example, a search for [ "Alexander Bell" ] (with quotes) will miss the pages that refer to Alexander G. Bell.
• Search within a specific website (site:)
  Google allows you to specify that your search results must come from a given website. For example, the query [ iraq site:nytimes.com ] will return pages about Iraq but only from nytimes.com. The simpler queries [ iraq nytimes.com ] or [ iraq New York Times ] will usually be just as good, though they might return results from other sites that mention the New York Times. You can also specify a whole class of sites, for example [ iraq site:.gov ] will return results only from a .gov domain and [ iraq site:.iq ] will return results only from Iraqi sites.
• Terms you want to exclude (-)
  Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. For example, in the query [ anti-virus software ], the minus sign is used as a hyphen and will not be interpreted as an exclusion symbol; whereas the query [ anti-virus -software ] will search for the words ‘anti-virus’ but exclude references to software. You can exclude as many words as you want by using the - sign in front of all of them, for example [ jaguar -cars -football -os ]. The - sign can be used to exclude more than just words. For example, place a hyphen before the ‘site:’ operator (without a space) to exclude a specific site from your search results.
• Fill in the blanks (*)
  The *, or wildcard, is a little-known feature that can be very powerful. If you include * within a query, it tells Google to try to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches. For example, the search [ Google * ] will give you results about many of Google’s products (go to next page and next page — we have many products). The query [ Obama voted * on the * bill ] will give you stories about different votes on different bills. Note that the * operator works only on whole words, not parts of words.
• Search exactly as is (+)
  Google employs synonyms automatically, so that it finds pages that mention, for example, childcare for the query [ child care ] (with a space), or California history for the query [ ca history ]. But sometimes Google helps out a little too much and gives you a synonym when you don’t really want it. By attaching a + immediately before a word (remember, don’t add a space after the +), you are telling Google to match that word precisely as you typed it. Putting double quotes around a single word will do the same thing.
• The OR operator
  Google’s default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator (note that you have to type ‘OR’ in ALL CAPS). For example, [ San Francisco Giants 2004 OR 2005 ] will give you results about either one of these years, whereas [ San Francisco Giants 2004 2005 ] (without the OR) will show pages that include both years on the same page. The symbol | can be substituted for OR. (The AND operator, by the way, is the default, so it is not needed.)

Exceptions

Search is rarely absolute. Search engines use a variety of techniques to imitate how people think and to approximate their behavior. As a result, most rules have exceptions. For example, the query [ for better or for worse ] will not be interpreted by Google as an OR query, but as a phrase that matches a (very popular) comic strip. Google will show calculator results for the query [ 34 * 87 ] rather than use the ‘Fill in the blanks’ operator. Both cases follow the obvious intent of the query. Here is a list of exceptions to some of the rules and guidelines that were mentioned in both the Advanced and the Basic Search Help articles:

Exceptions to ‘Every word matters’

• Words that are commonly used, like ‘the,’ ‘a,’ and ‘for,’ are usually ignored (these are called stop words). But there are even exceptions to this exception. The search [ the who ] likely refers to the band; the query [ who ] probably refers to the World Health Organization — Google will not ignore the word ‘the’ in the first query.
• Synonyms might replace some words in your original query. (Adding + before a word disables synonyms.)
• A particular word might not appear on a page in your results if there is sufficient other evidence that the page is relevant. The evidence might come from language analysis that Google has done or many other sources. For example, the query [ overhead view of the bellagio pool ] will give you nice overhead pictures from pages that do not include the word ‘overhead.’

Punctuation that is not ignored

• Punctuation in popular terms that have particular meanings, like [ C++ ] or [ C# ] (both are names of programming languages), are not ignored.
• The dollar sign ($) is used to indicate prices. [ nikon 400 ] and [ nikon $400 ] will give different results.
• The hyphen - is sometimes used as a signal that the two words around it are very strongly connected. (Unless there is no space after the – and a space before it, in which case it is a negative sign.)
• The underscore symbol _ is not ignored when it connects two words, e.g. [ quick_sort ].

Other ideas for keeping track of web content.

If you only wanted to see social media activity for a person, you could use a social search engine like socialmention.com. If you want topical blog content, try searching alltop.com, a site that aggregates top blog content. Individual social media sites have in-site search that will flush out content. And, if you’re looking for deep web data, photos, and archival information you can subscribe to services like 123people.com or spokeo.com. Finally, if you want to see what a website looked like in the past, use waybackmachine.org which is a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.

What are your favorite search tools and how do you use them?

Just when you thought it was safe to play in the online sandbox – bam! Facebook dumps a load of broken glass into it.

This week Facebook announced that they made “changes to give you more control.” Truth is they actually made changes that give you less control over the content you share with your trusted network, unless you carefully moderate your settings now and be aware that everything you post defaults to EVERYONE!

If you didn’t already know this, now you will. When you publish content or information using the “everyone” setting on Facebook, it means that everyone, including people off of Facebook, have access to that information. That content is open to everyone and will indexed by search engines and appear in the public results.  You do not have control over what anyone who finds it does with it.

But you’re smart, so you care about managing your reputation on the Web. Stay alert.

What’s Up, Facebook?

Anyone who logged in to their account this week got a pop up message informing them to their new terms. PLEASE PAY CLOSE ATTENTION! When you click through the new terms, by default, you agree to share everything with everyone. Yes, EVERYONE.  After you agree to the new terms, Facebook gives you a screen (that suggests) that allows you to retain your current settings or accept the new settings by clicking the radial dials. Although I selected to keep old settings until I could review the new terms, a couple things happened that REALLY surprised me.

Each new posting to your wall requires that you select who you want to share the information with.

It’s in a box on the right hand bottom side of the text box. It defaults to EVERYONE! No matter what your privacy settings are in your master settings, you now need to CHOOSE, for every status update, who you want to share it with. So, don’t forget the extra step.

Why would Facebook do this? Because they want the site content to be searchable by major engines like Google and Yahoo!. Who does that benefit in this case? Well, primarily Facebook. It builds traffic and lures advertisers.

Your Online Footprint. Guard it!

I totally understand the value of building an online footprint via posting content and returning early in search results. It is effective exposure. In fact it is often the strategy that trumps any online participation. Content associated with your name that returns high in results essentially gives you greater exposure and it becomes your resume. And, that’s fine, but I don’t want my Facebook content indexed! If I were using Facebook only for business then maybe, but right now I use it as a private network of close friends and business colleagues that I know and trust. I do not want my vacation pictures showing up in the public time line on Google. Of course that may not be your choice, but if it is, be aware that the new Facebook settings have made ALL YOUR FORMERLY POSTED PHOTOS available to EVERYONE by default now.

Yesterday when I posted a group of vacation photos, weirdly it defaulted to Everyone. I’ve never shared my photos with everyone. No, indeed. Then I noticed that all my photos were defaulted to EVERYONE!  I had to go back in and manually change every album I had previously set to “Friends of Friends, Only Friends or Custom.

Furthermore, I was really freaked out when I went to Custom on a few, and it showed the override default as EVERYONE Even though my old default of Friends of Friends still showed. I was steamed!

I suggest that you go into Facebook right now and review ALL your settings and even your older content. Make sure if you go into custom settings on your photo albums you un-click the Everyone if you don’t want them visible to search engines. It doesn’t unclick just because you set it to friends of friends~!

Just to be safe, I went back into all my settings.  I made sure to untoggle the Allow Indexing for the Public Search Results settings.

I’m still digging into all of this. I will add more tips as I uncover them, but wanted to get this up right now. It’s that big of a deal to me.

There’s more chatter on the Web about the new settings. Let us know here at the VMO what you find and what you think.

Personally, I think this is a big mistake for Facebook – one of many they’ve made over the years. Positioning these changes as giving us more control over our content is dubious. These changes were made, in my opinion, to give Facebook more search results and increase the appeal to the advertisers they are courting.

At any rate, if you don’t want the world to know what you were doing Sunday afternoon, make sure you make the appropriate selection with the share button for every post update you make.

There may be a few USER benefits to the new settings, but over all, they make it harder to use – in my opinion. What’s yours?

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You probably rely heavily on the Internet to do business related research.  Did you know that all searches are not created equal? You can search the Internet to maximize results and minimize noise by using targeted search engines and with little effort you can get results that are on point for specific goals.  I promise, this will not be complicated. I love simplicity.

5 Easy Steps:

1. Open up your browser. I use Firefox browser but Internet Explorer 8 now gives you the same customizable search functionality.

(Firefox browser is FREE! Get it at Mozilla.com.  It is the old Netscape and works for PC and Mac.  You can still run your Internet Explorer browser on your PC and make it your default, but I bet after you try FireFox you won’t want to! FireFox is very stable and secure.)

2. Go to the search box on the upper right hand corner. Next to the icon of your default search engine there is a little arrow.

Expand that arrow and select Manage Search Engines

From the manage search engines page you’ll find dozens of add-on engines that will simplify your searches for creative commons images, commodities, stocks, blogs, wikis, online retail stores, decision engines, travel, [even recipes, a visual dictionary and coupons for the home front], and all the usual suspects; Google, Yahoo!, Bing and more.

FireFox Addons Page

IE Add-ons Page

3. Select search engines to add to your tool bar. Here are a few I keep in my search kit.

4. Select the engine you want to use. Type your search term.

5.  Hit the magnifying glass and GO GET IT!

Easy!!!

Use Case #1:

Let’s say you’re a blogger, publish a newsletter, or frequently prepare presentations. You probably add images, content, and other media to your work.  To insure that what you pull off the Web is not violating any copyright you can use the Creative Commons Search (CC).  {easier than typing in the address of CC and doing your search from the website}.

Let’s say I’m writing a post on collaboration. A quick search using the CC search offers convenient access to search services provided by independent organizations for content, images, news media, video and music that have common use rights.  Within CC search you can view content from the Web, CC images from Google, Yahoo, Flickr; video from blip.tv, music from jamendo, media from spinexpress, Wikimedia, and more, all in one place. No need to type in the URL for Flickr images; they’re all there…fast, easy, right?

Select Creative Commons search, type “collaboration” into the search bar and hit go.

Search music

Search media

Google Images (or Flickr)

Use Case #2:

Want to check stock prices of companies that aren’t already set up in a widget on your iGoogle page? You don’t need to find a site that gives live updates and then search for your stocks.  Add the BSE stock watch engine (pulling info from Google finance) to your search menu. It’s a really fast way to get what you’re looking for.

Here are some more examples of search results for my collaboration post returned to me without going to the web page or having to sort through a lot of unfocused returns from a generic engine like Google or Yahoo!:

Search Delicious

(Great bookmarking site where you’ll find recommended Web pages, for your search term, that have been bookmarked by the public or by a user group you create)

Search Amazon ….

Seach Google/WolframAlpha Hybrid

Search Bing

How are you searching now? If you start using custom search and it simplifies your online life, let us know.  If you’re already using custom search and you have an add on that you love, please share it in the comments. Thanks!

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