I Search, Therefore I Am

Today I’m using search engines to find more search engines…

I have a new client that is a Toronto church; they’ve hired me to rewrite and redesign their website using Search Engine Optimization best practices.

(SEO for ministries? Yup, there should be nothing old-school about any line of work anymore!)

So, naturally, one of those practices is link building - a pillar of SEO. And one way to generate quality inbound links is to list your blog/site on all appropriate search engines…

And that should not stop at Google, Yahoo!, MSN and other horizontal search engines.

For every search, there’s an engine to drive it

Vertical search engines are on the rise - both in the business-to-consumer and business-to-business markets. For every market, there’s likely a search engine of some size out there.

In the case of my church client, I went looking for B2C (C2C? Christ-to-consumer?) search engines, and found more than 50! (Cutest name: Fish the Net: The Evangelistic Tackle Box. Some of the targeted marketing: “family-friendly” and “safe search.”)

And speaking of highly specialized B2C search engines, I read about the recent launch of Rushmoredrive.com: Discover More - the first search engine for black Americans looking for products, services and events aimed at them.

Also in beta is the “world’s first search engine for hostels.” Frankly, I don’t see how different this tool is from travel directories, like Expedia, that have been around for quite some time.

Anyway, no matter how you slice it, we’ve come a long way, baby, from the days (not that many years ago) when we had to wade through reams of unrelated, often spammy results to find what we wanted.

And that’s a good thing.