Search Advice,

 The internet is an enormous community made up of billions and billions of websites. Search has proven to be on the most popular methods for making at least some sense of this multitude of content. Search is available in a large number of languages, but getting to grips with the offers in just any one single country can be a challenge. This is where search advice comes in. Search advice works by giving users at least some chance of finding what they are looking for. We have been looking at one such search advice site in Holland. It is typical of the kind of search website competing to attract both users and business clients.

We are not sure how the world of search will pan out, but one thing seems to be certain: Search looks here to stay.

We decided to look into a number of online search resources in Holland, starting with the Dutch Directory called Internetstarter. At first we didn’t know what to make of this directory and at first glance it appeared that things were not working correctly. After digging a little bit deeper, however, we found some links to prominent and well know business such as the Marriot hotel group. We wanted to know more about this kind of business model, so we decided to press on and search for more online web-directory type sites in Holland. Because we did not know anything about the Dutch market, this was all very new to us. Next up was another online search directory called PageSpotter. While the design was different, this site seemed to work in a similar way to the previous directory that we had looked at. It did, however, appear to be far more popular than the previous directory. We then wanted to know what it would cost to advertise in this resource. We could no information about this on the site itself – but there was a contact page where we were able to e-mail the operators of this site. We sent an e-mail and will report back on what the prices are when we get a response from the owners of the site.

As we started to expand our search, we became increasingly aware that a large number of directories seemed to be very similar with regards to how they had been created. A business search site called xselector.net appeared to fit like a jigsaw puzzle into the pattern that we had already been seeing with the previous two directories. Here, too, we noticed a large number of prominent Dutch companies and brands such as T-Online had advertised in these directories. Did this mean, then, that advertising in a directory such as this represented good value for the advertising companies. We thought that the answer must be yes, seen as so many prominent companies had decided to part with their money and give it a go. We decided to take a look at one more online business guide called mata-hari.net. Here we found a large number of categories including restaurants, technology, computers and a number of other resources. Once again, the site seemed to have been built in a very similar way to the others and we were beginning to wonder whether this system might be very good from both an advertisers and user perspective. After all, these resources did seem to offer links to other prominent companies with value services and products. We will update this post when we get some firm answers. In the meantime we will consider placing an article in the above directories to get an insight into the service and the return on investment offered by this kind of service.