RealtyTechBytes.com

10 August 2008

SearchBoth.com ~ a very cool way to search two engines at once!

Posted by Jerry Kidd under: Cool Freebies; Product Reviews .

Last week’s post was pretty heavy, so this week I thought I should swing in the other direction and talk about something a little lighter. This came to my attention from two sources.  Lillian Ng, an agent in our Opera Plaza Office suggested it to me, and two days later I received an email from a press release source talking about the same website.

Here is the story on this one.  Since Google and Yahoo seem to be the Number 1 and Number 2 search engines in terms of usage here in the US, it makes sense to search both of them if you are looking for something hard to find.  According to SearchBoth, about 70% of the time search engines will have different first page search results for any given search string.

This web site allows you to put your search string in once and get both results pages on your screen at once.  Here is an example of the results I found when I searched on “Real Estate SF Bay Area”:

As you can see, after you get past the paid ads, the first position on both Google and Yahoo is occupied by Pacific Union GMAC (Disclosure…I work for Pacific Union GMAC).  After that, the results differ greatly.  Clearly, having both sets of results is a benefit.

The operators of the site take the concept a little bit further and allow you to pit several travel sites against each other which is great if you are planning a trip.  They also allow you to search for a new job by searching both Monster and hotjobs.

Here is what the home page looks like:

Although all of this is great, breaking old search habits is hard to do, so SearchBoth.com sweetens the pot by telling us that they donate their profits to charity, currently Cancer and HIV research.

Sounds good to me, how about you?

PS Scroll to the very bottom of this page to discover a cool tool that you can add to your web page or blog!

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