Before I give you my opinion, remember that I work for a competing product, IBM’s OmniFind search engine. So take my views with a pillar of salt. But here goes, anyway.

For small sites with limited technical skills, it seems worthwhile. You can set up the colors of the interface to match your Web site with no programming experience, and you just need to know enough to drop a snippet of code in the right place on your Web page. There’s no server to set up, so even sites with shared hosting can play. There are also free choices, such as Rollyo, that do a good job, but with less control over the appearance.

If you have some technical skills, however, there may be better choices. Even those folks saddled with shared servers can use a free Yahoo! API to give themselves a hosted site search. It’s worth remembering the drawbacks of a hosted search service, however. You can’t ensure that all of your pages will be spidered and you can’t ensure they will be spidered quickly as they change.

If you follow the tips in our book and in the Skinflint’s Guide to Search Marketing, you can ensure that most, if not all of your pages are spidered into that search index. And you can use Sitemaps to give yourself some control over how frequently the spider visits. It’s not the same as having your own search engine, though. If you want more control, you probably need to go a step further.

If you have dedicated hosting or own your own server, you can consider IBM’s OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, a free search engine (plug, plug). You must be savvy enough to be able to administer a server, but if you can, you get a free search engine that you have total control over. And it tops out at 500,000 pages, not 5,000 (or $500 a year for up to 50,000 pages from Google).

Google’s new offering seems valuable for those with small sites and no technical skills. Site search keeps getting easier and cheaper for site owners—what’s your site search like?

Comments

In the “Business” section, a site called Squidoo took top honors.  If you’ve never heard of Squidoo – and, to be honest, more than a few of the winners had gone unnoticed by me – it will allow you to make a “‘lens’ to market yourself, your products or just something that you’re passionate about.  View and rate other people’s lenses and hope your content is rated well by others!”

As for the “Search” categories, Rollyo came in first, Eurekster Swicki placed second, and Pipl got third, so the omnipresent Google was, surprisingly, not visible among the top three.  Simply Google did receive an honorable mention, however.

In my relatively random recap of the Web 2.0 Awards, the section on social networking comes up next.  Here we see at least one name that should be familiar to most: Facebook.  I know Facebook has claimed more than a few minutes of my life, and it managed to claim first place in these rankings, as well.  Mingle2 followed behind, with Imbee (a site aimed solely at kids) bringing up the rear.

And I believe that’ll just about do it for this summary of the SEOmoz monster list.  Here, however, are a few more sites that caught my eye:

Biblio (number two in “Books”)
Pandora (number one in “Music”)
LinkedIn (number one in “Professional Networking”)
Zillow (number one in “Real Estate”)
FeedBurner (number one in “Feed Management”)

Credit for assembling the original beast goes to Jane Copland, and my hat is also off to a number of judges and contributors who also played important roles.

The three Ps of LAMP – Perl, PHP, and Python, have support in the Yahoo Search SDK, along with C/C++ and Java languages, and others. Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny announced the updated SDK on Yahoo’s Search blog.

He noted how the Yahoo Developer Network has come a long way in the year and a half since its inception. After starting life as a BSD-licensed kit with a few search-related web services, their Developer Network has grown substantially.

Search service developers can join up with Yahoo’s Developer Network by reviewing the project’s documentation, requesting an Application ID, and obtaining the SDK.

Yahoo allows developers to use data from the following sources:

•  Audio Search

•  Content Analysis

•  Image Search

•  Local Search

•  MyWeb

•  News Search

•  Site Explorer

•  Video Search

•  Web Search

Developers can look through the Gallery for ideas on building search applications for examples like Rollyo, a personal search engine creation website, and other ideas.

Discuss this article with your fellow WebPros at WebProWorld.
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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

I’m not the only one who thinks we are in definite need of Search 2.0. Just ask the founders of Wink, Delicious, Eurekster, or Rollyo. Or Google and Yahoo! for that matter.

There generally seems to be two different approaches to Search 2.0. The first is the approach of Wink / Delicious, which is largely community driven.

Wink is people powered search. Users rank and tag Google search results, thus using collective wisdom to improve the results for queries. Delicious does something different but with the same goal of better search results – a search query for a word like blogs returns results for the most tagged item by the community.

On the other hand, we have Rollyo a concept based on individuals creating their own search engines. With Rollyo, for example, you can create a vertical search engine on a niche subject or one consisting solely of the sites you visit on a regular basis.

Eurekster is somewhat of a mix of these two ideas. Like Rollyo, Eurekster lets you create your own search engine, calling your creation a “swicki”. In this approach though, you train the swicki to help point it to more relevant sites or search queries. It then uses that information to weight search results – results do not include solely hits from the specified sites. Eurekster also learns from users and has a buzz cloud below its search box, showing the most popular queries by users. You can check out my swicki or see it in action on the right sidebar of Jeff Clavier’s site.

Yahoo! and Google jumped in on Search 2.0 by doing things like social bookmarking and search history. They seem to be betting on personalization over the community approach.

A pure technology solution is not going to solve the search problem. As I wrote in the past, there is no perfect search algorithm. The analysis above proves that. Now, it’s a matter of seeing which type of human intervention – at the individual or community level – brings us closer to Search 2.0.

Ken Yarmosh is a consultant who helps organizations get the most out of their technology investments. He works with technology users and creators across various industries, focusing on technology education and strategy. With over 7 years IT experience, Ken has worked with small businesses, non-profits, federal agencies, and multi-million dollar companies.

His online efforts include acting as the Editor for the Corante Technology Hub and authoring the TECHNOSIGHT blog.

The great thing about search engines like Yahoo and Google is how they index so much information and return results from that index based on a query. The great thing can also be a bad thing, as irrelevant results can crowd out the ones someone needs from a query.

For users who have a group of sites they frequently visit and trust, Rollyo provides a way of searching just through that group. The site uses Yahoo Search technology to enable the creation of “searchrolls,” or personal search engines.

Once a user registers for an account, she can designate a number of sites for the searchroll. Queries submitted to that searchroll return results from those sites. These searchrolls, once created, can be shared with other people. Users can save those other search rolls in their profile as well as ones they create.

After getting results from a search query, users who want to see more results from Yahoo Search can expand the search to the broader index. Searchrolls can contain up to 25 sites, but Rollyo notes the best results seem to come from searchrolls with 5-15 sites.

Rollyo has gone for a bit of celebrity buzz by setting up a list of popular searchrolls that they call High Rollers. Political gadfly Arianna Huffington and search experts Gary Price and John Batelle number among Rollyo’s High Rollers.

The site offers tools like a Firefox plugin, and a bookmarklet will be developed.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.