I wanted to use a friend adder site like Friendstorm but even though MySpace allows you to find friends by their genre or hobby the third party friend adder sites do not have this feature. MySpace can be a great place for any type of marketer to get an audience of people of a specific interest but it would take somebody forever using the actual MySpace site because of the limitations they impose. This is where my research started. I looked at all the apps and scripts that exist today but none of them provided what I was looking for.



Search Engines that we have today are too general. They allow you to search a specific URL or on a general term but what we now need are specialized search engines that allow us to maybe only seek out things like gardening information, or information regarding construction, bowling, football, and other interests we may have. I did find one very good example of this at Webmasterengine dot com. The only obstacle I foresee with the application that allowed this engine to be created is that there is a substantial cost involved. This application isn't one of those apps that can be obtained for under a hundred dollars but instead you are looking at a cost of almost $500 per url This wouldn't be so bad if they allowed people to obtain a 30 day trial first before making a purchase.

Now lets jump ahead a little hear and think about this. If in your own site you had a special search engine that could only be accessed from your site and this engine serves a niche where there are a lot of people involved could you imagine the traffic you would now get on your site? This would make your site completely unique and it would offer something that people want but could not find on any other site. I would think that you would be then getting a lot of targeted visitors to your site.

So the first thing I did in my research was to try to find an article regarding this. I first did a search for "Search Engine design" but most of the results were for companies that did this type of work. Next I searched for "search engine programming" but again most of the results were for companies that offered this service. In both results though there were a few articles regarding what I was looking for but none of them gave me any sort of direction to further my research. "search engine construction" was my third search and by this time I was getting pretty frustrated at the lack of results.

My last search gave me a lot more relevant results. I performed a search for "create your own search engine" and in these results I found a lot of sites that allowed you to create a search engine which would piggy back on another larger search engine like those of Google or Yahoo. With these site you are able to provide a list of URL's for a search to be conducted on first. You are able to customize the look and feel of the finished search engine which is very important when you are trying to create a brand or do any other type of branding.

The remaining part of my research will be to test every application I have found and in the followup article I will give a review of all my results. I will also be looking at Microsoft Visual Studio to see whether Microsoft SQL will provide every thing I need. If this does work then I will save a substantial amount of money by using the Express edition of VisualStudio. Google and Yahoo also let you create your own search engines with their app builders. Every application out there will have its pros and its cons and in my next article I'd like to be able to recommend the ones that performed the best.

Hopefully I will have this second article completed in the next 1o days but I also want to let you know that I found some great reference to my search at SearchEngineWatch authored by Phil Bradley.