Stumble on great sites? Create a personalised search engine, or two

Search Engines: The Threat

Good information on the internet is useful, only if not sandwitched between hoards of commercial websites who "spam" the engines by using keywords that have NOTHING to do with their content. Believe me, I've been an search engine optimization expert of sorts for hobby projects and I've seen all the dirty tricks. Search engines try and create algorithms to filter out spamming websites. These search engine spammers use false keywords, redirects, white-text and all sorts of dirty tricks.

Search Engines: The First Principles
The basic principle of operation of a majority of search engines is all-inclusiveness. Unless a website is found guilty of hard-spamming, it is not banned from a search engine.

Quickest Solution: Personalized Search Engines
If you are an avid reader, even of print media, you will come across genuinely resourceful websites, which might contain 80% of the answers you seek. These include websites with trusted content, blogs of reknowned authorities in a field etc. The best idea in this case is to create your own personalized search engine.

What I've tried:

Google Co-op: Seems impressive. Just started using it. I have created a general-knowlege lookup engine and now working on specialised knowledge search engines, the first one being a TabletPC knowledge search engine.


Apart from fine controls it offers a novice meta-search engine designer like me, I like the ability to custom skin it. It is also possible to collaborate and create a search engine with your colleagues or team-mates. One of the best uses I see is faculy & researchers rolling out their custom search engines, which would be help-ful for students to form basic solutions. However, if it is not used exclusively, only then the envelope of knowledge will expand for the person in question, but atleast, there will be no junk search results from an innacurate source ("a psycho blogger behind a fancy template situation").

But the best feature I like about Google Coop is Google Marker, a brower toolbar tool to quickly add a website you are browsing to any of your search engine. Very much like the delicious toolbar tools. I love it already.

Other Similar Service:
Rollyo - Somehow, I stopped using it. It did not index my chosen sites properly.

Conclusive Remarks:
I see personalized search engines as a step up from social bookmarking. The effort is pretty much the same: discover a resource, tag it. However the resulting output is much sweeter: not a bunch of links to go back to, but ability to search what they lead up to. I will accept CSEs over Social Bookmars. (Google's code calls the Personalized Search Engine a CSE - Custom Search Engine).

Give my search engines a spin: continue to read the extended entry:

My General Knowledge Search Engine

My Tablet PC & Digital Ink Tech Search Engine