Who's searching for what?

I write about Internet search engines all of the time and that’s because they are worth writing about. They are also very much worth learning about. The closest that you’ll ever get to finding a needle in a haystack, you will get with a search engine. They are that important.

There are times that I have been curious as to what my fellow Web surfers are trying to find on the Internet at any given time. My strange nosiness can now be satisfied at a number of different locations in Cyberspace.

First off, if you are similarly inclined - you might try the “Metaspy” feature of the Metacrawler search engine by going to www.metaspy.com –you’ll have two options at that Web site; “Metaspygreen” which utilizes a filter to keep the subjects searched “family safe”, and then you’ve got “Metaspy red” which comes unfiltered – you are on your own with that one bubba’.

The very popular “Ask” search engine also allows access to its most popular searches, simply click here to visit that part of the site. Speaking of Internet searches, if you haven’t visited the “Dog Pile” in a while, you might checkout www.dogpile.com –although most folks consider the site to be a search engine, it really isn’t. What the site is really designed to do is to take your search keywords, and then to apply those words to a simultaneous search of about a half-dozen major search engines on the Web. Just make sure you wipe your feet off real good when you’re all done searching OK? You'll find a link on the site entitled "SearchSpy", click on it and like the "MetaSpy" site, you'll be able to select between filtered and unfiltered searches that are taking place on the site.