How to find your local search engine.

[Adrian]

For a list of search engines that service your city and the surrounding area - just enter your city here: http://www.geobytes.com/listLocalSearchEngines.htm

This service is still in beta - so please let us know what you think.

BTW It is good for finding local services quickly - try searching on things like - TV, Radio, News, Weather, Movies, Coupons, Fuel, or for more interesting results try searching on your name - or your friend's name.

[mandville]

i tested the search engine with the word 'design' and navigated through to the town brighton, england, uk and all it did was search google with the word 'brighton'... is this right?

[mandville]

http://www.google.com/cse?cref=http%3A% ... &loading=1

[Adrian]

i tested the search engine with the word 'design' and navigated through to the town brighton, england, uk and all it did was search google with the word 'brighton'... is this right?

If you are referring to the "List Local Search Engines" tool at http://www.geobytes.com/listLocalSearchEngines.htm then it does set the default search term to the city name - just for want of a default search term. Perhaps I should drop that out, it is just that otherwise it performs that first default search without a search term and would present no results. Of course, once you have loaded the search engine then you can change the search query to whatever key words that you want - there is no need to include the city name in your search. In fact if would eliminate many of the results if you were to leave the city name there, so I think that I will definitely stop making if the default query - I might go with something like 'pizza' instead.

BTW The local search engines do a lot more than just add the city name to your searches, you can see this by adding the city name yourself and seeing how it restricts the search results. The local search engines effectively include all of the significant suburbs and city names within about 60km (35 miles) within your search, giving the geographically closer sites a higher priority in the search results.

However, it does a lot more then this too.. and will often return pages in the results that do not contain either the city name, or that of any of the surrounding suburbs or cities. What it does, is it looks at a all of the pages within the domain, or sub-directory, and "sort of averages out" the geographic areas that they service across the entire domain, or directory. It also looks at things like top level domain name, and for geographical names in the URL. The technology is not perfect yet, but it certainly give much better results then just including your city name in with your search terms. In any case it is early days for this service and we have a few more ideas to implement yet, that will make it even better over the next few months.

Thanks for your feedback I appreciate it and please let me know if I can assist further.

Kind Regards