Coverage of SES San Jose

We found a number of directory services on the tradeshow floor at SES. GoGuides.org offers an interesting alternative to the standard paid listing services, promising to be “the spam free web search”. GoGuides human editorial process prevents keyword stuffing and other tricks to manipulate the rankings in GoGuides search. What isn’t mentioned in the interview, but appears to be true from looking at the GoGuides site, is a requirement of payment to get listed at all. So while there may be no spam in the listing, there’s no guarantee of quality results. I did individual searches for three popular tech sites: O’Reilly, Digg and Lockergnome. All searches came up empty, despite two of the three sites being more than five years old.

Become.com appears to be a more interesting approach to improving search, particularly if you are shopping for something. Search results for standard queries are comparable to MSN and Google, but what interested me was a feature to track purchase interests. Become lets you keep track of items you might want to buy sometime in the future in a sort of shopping basket, providing quick access to price comparisons of things like digital cameras. All searches have dynamically updating results changing as you type your query.

A third company focused on search solutions is Findology. The company has a search engine combined with a partner revenue program designed to help sites turn search traffic into revenue. In my own experience, search revenue programs aren’t widely successful. Findology offers a different take on search revenue, allowing you to link directly to search queries as part of their search program. The final segment of this episode includes coverage of Findology’s program.

Coverage of SES San Jose is brought to you by MSN Search.