Review the Market

Spock.com is a search engine for finding people. Not just people that you know, but also people that anyone has ever known in the history of mankind. You can do these searches by name or by other keywords. These keywords can be anything that describes the person you are looking for, for example ‘president’. Once you have found your result, you can go and look at the main page for that result. Take a look at the page for George Washington, for example, which is arrived at clicking on the first result when you search for George Washington. On the other hand you could search for your friends or people you knew in the past.

One very interesting feature is the ability to embed widgets containing a particular search on Spock on your website. So for example, related to our example here’s a widget for US Presidents:

Spock allows you to tag search results (resulting in the ability to search by keywords rather than by name). Not only can you add tags to your own identity. You can add tags on other people as well, and vote on tags that already exist. And also, although they claim not to be a social network, they do allow you to add trust links between people you know; this allows your search results to be ranked by trust (where you will see your trusted people before you see non-trusted ones for a particular search).

Signing up is fairly quick and easy and as shown below, Spock allows you to pull in contacts from other networks you may be part of:

Step 3 allows you tell Spock a little bit about yourself and you are done. I have added myself to Spock already, and am going to recommend my friends to add themselves as well.

Today I review the Hotel Reservation Service; an online service for finding and booking hotel rooms. I have used this service many times for personal needs and it has never disappointed. It allows you to search and book hotels free of charge on the Internet. HRS also runs special offers and can get you a very good price. At a basic level, it has a very simple interface which allows you to specify your destination, arrival and departure dates, number of rooms, number of people, a price limit, and a minimum number of stars. Then it will generate a list of hotels that satisfy your criteria. In the advanced search mode there are many criteria that you can define to filter your search (e.g. Internet Access, Pets Allowed, etc.)

The results are listed in a way so that it is easy to compare multiple hotels at a glance:

There is visual indication of important parameters such as Breakfast Included, Distance from Airport, Smoking/Non-Smoking, Internet Access, etc.

There is also the capability for comparing specific hotels on detailed parameters. This detailed comparison is useful to decide between 2-3 hotels that you have short-listed. The site provides user reviews and ratings of the hotels in its database.

All in all, a very good resource for searching for hotels online and booking them with confirmation.

Google doesn’t pay you to search does it? What about Yahoo? or Live? None of these pay you to search using their search engines. Yet, we still use them because they give good results and usually they are very fast. However, there are a large number of search engines cropping up all over the WWW, which are different in one way or another. One such engine is called ZotSpot.

ZotSpot pays you to search using their search engine. Nice, I would say. However, when I search, the results are nowhere as good as Google or Yahoo. However, they are somewhat relevant, so you may find what you are looking for on the second page or third. Well, I can put up with that, I think; after all, I am being paid to do this search. How much am I being paid? Well, according to the FAQ, if I just search using their search engine, I will make a decent amount (notice no amount specified). However, we get a hint of this amount further down the FAQ.

There is a referral program, and in that they assume that every person you refer will make an average of $0.25 for you per year. This tells me that if I don’t refer anyone, just by using the site, I am not going to make more than a couple of bucks. That’s too little for me to give up Google. Anyway, I did try out the ZotSpot search for some time, and at the end of that, I have got $0.00 in my earnings.

We think the only way to make money on that search engine is to refer thousands of people to join up, and then hope that they refer others and also use the search engine at the same time.

Thanks to TechTear I have found an interesting tool provided by the guys of Text Link Ads named Blog Juice Calculator. In fact, it is a checking tool similar like DNScoop or the Spanish Checker to get some numbers from your blog site and be able to compare it with other similar blogs in your category. You get a comparison table with the readers in Bloglines, Alexa ranking, Technorati position and incoming links. All this gives you a mark that you can use to publicize your blog much better.

If you thought that looking for videos in Youtube was not enough, now you will see have the opportunity to increase your search to more than 23 millions videos all over the net with this new application. It is called Fooooo ( I have to count the number of "o" to make it right every time :-)), and it is a japanese service that allows you to search videos from YouTube, DailyMotion, MySpace, GoogleVideos, Stickam and some more. Not bad, ein? :-). You have no excuse now to say that you can not find a video to illustrate your posts…

Although they are still in their Beta version, Goshme can be considered the next search engine of search engines.

What is this about? Simply, it helps you find specific information about a very specific topic in an specific search engine of that topic. So let’s say you need to find something very detailed about movies, or music, or ancient art, you create your account in Goshme and go check in the multiple categories and subcategories it has available for you which search engine is specialized in that subject.

Then you can run your normal search in the engine and get better results than doing it in a general search like Yahoo or Google. Useful, don’t you think? You can find search engines about topics you would never though could be such specialized info :-).

We have reviewed, in the short but intense life of Review the Market :-), several companies that helped us to improve the way our website looked or the traffic it was getting, but never so far an entreprise we have seen  got as a slogan the promise to design your page on a way that it would create a buzz on the net :-).

We are talking about ThinkBigsites, a website optimization firm that focus in offering to you more website traffic  and  website optimization services to boost your visibility on the net.

On this last point in which I was particularly interested, they offer blog design optimization, SEO, webdesign and hosting, custom webprogramming, link building and even designing newsletters for you to reach potential customers or readers by email.

There is also a Blog marketing section where they work with us on improving and/or giving a more profesional look, to create a plan and strategy for your blog ( which is something I actually did not know was something it had to be done….mmmm…. :-)) or increasing the presence of your business in the blogosphere.

If all that was not enough, we can also get online support in the form of a webmaster to do the maintenance of our pages, or to fix quickly any problem that may arise. In summary, I guess the whole offer sums up as a good and complete package for bloggers like us, that may be passionated about blogging and writting, but sometimes may need some help in the rest of necessary work to keep the blog live and kicking all the time.