Happy Birthday Google!!

We were so excited about Google's 10th birthday, we wanted to do something big! We wanted to give a gift to Google fans everywhere! A gift to the billions of Google users who have enjoyed/endured a decade of Google's search engine domination. A gift that gives you exactly what Google has always given you, just a LOT more of it!

Here it is, our gift to you, the Googawho? Tabulizer!! (crowd cheers)

Now, before you rush out to try it for yourselves, we want to offer a quick word of warning:

The Tabulizer is not for the faint of heart or the casual searcher looking for a really good Lesco recipe. The Tabulizer is for all of you die hard web search NINJAS, determined to leave no site un-searched in your quest for the best web based information.

When you use the Googawho Tabulizer, something wonderful and terrible happens. With just one click of the Tabulizer, Eight (8) search engines come popping to life on your screen each of them dinging and beeping as they basically beg you to choose them, use them, click them! That's right. Your single Googawho? search is parsed and passed to Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Cuil, AltaVista, Excite and Dogpile!

That's the wonderful part. Now for the terrible part. The behavior of the Googawho? Tabulizer is, well, a bit unpredictable. It really all depends on your browser's version and settings. For example, you might get 8 Tabs in FireFox and Opera or Chrome, but you can expect to get 8 separate WINDOWS in Safari or IE, or maybe even sucked into a dimension you never knew existed.

It's pretty much exactly like the Large Hadron Collider, we're just not sure whats going to happen when you click that button.

So, thanks for using Googawho?, and Happy Birthday to Google!!

Peace.

Little things mean a lot...

A while ago several Googawho? fans recommended that a new feature be added to the search tool. They wanted a way to view the search engine results of their choice, full-screen, without keyboard shortcuts, right-clicking or selecting from alt-menus. It took a while, but that feature is now offered. To use it, just click one of the little blue arrows above either frame and voila! These little blue arrows remember the last engine loaded below them. Click one and your search terms get passed to that search engine, which then loads into the window. All with just a click.



Looking back on the effort these little JavaScripts required leaves me wondering whether it was worth it?... I mean, all that work just so people can browse AWAY from my site. Hmmm.

Another new feature that just seemed to make sense, was adding a form.submit within the onClick event of the radio buttons. This makes gathering your search related content for news, images or web results go a lot faster. You no longer need to re-click the Double Your Search!! button when switching between the search types. DUH!

Enjoy.

Gather them all...

Once, the idea for Googawho had been hashed out and the domain was registered, I decided that it was time to start gathering the names of other like-sounding domains and attempting to get those registered as well. This is pretty common, but not always as simple as it might sound. I found that the name Googahoo.com had already been registered to someone in London. That was a real bummer at first. It meant that this person not only had the domain I need, but they may also have had a very similar idea to the one that I had already put so much work into.

Well I noticed right away that the current owner was only squatting on the name and had been doing so for over a year. With a little more research I was able to find some contact information for the owner of Googahoo.com, a fellow named Romano. So I sent Romano a quick message explaining that I was building out a site called Googawho.com and I had already reserved the .net and .org versions of the Googahoo domain, and how I thought that adding Googahoo.com to the list of domains that point to my site would add to the success of my project, Oh, and uh, by the way, would you take $XXX for the name? But alas I never heard back Romano, that is until I decided to do a search on Facebook, and what do you know, I found him! I contacted him again through FB and the next day he responded that he wasn't using it, and would be willing to sell it.

So we had a deal. Now here is where the whole process got a bit interesting. I guess that I was just a bit surprised that he was willing to sell, and at being presented with the daunting question... "now what?"

Well as it turns out there are third parties who handle almost the entire transaction for you. I chose NetworkSolutions, mostly because they were only company offering the service that I had ever heard of. But the whole transaction was pretty straight forward. I just had to set up an account with NetworkSolutions handing over all of my contact information and credit card number, which they would charge $19 to just to make the offer. And that they did via e-mail that same night. They kept me posted every fews hours with Email alerts letting me know how things were progressing. Romano accepted and got paid, and I got the googahoo.com domain all to myself.

Here is the current list of domains that point to googawho.com

googawho.net,org
googahoo.com,net,org
googafoo.com,net,org
searchawho.com,net,org
phatdocs.com - its a long story...

Goog-a-Who? Search Times Two...

It came to me in a dream.

Ok, that didn't happen. While I usually use Google for all of my search engine needs, I always wondered what I was missing on the other major search engines. But it was a pain to enter search terms on multiple sites for comparison purposes. What I wanted, and often needed was a simple way to enter a search and compare engine results, side by side, in just one window. But I couldn't find anything that quite fit the bill. 'I should create one myself,' I thought. 'That should impress my pals at the pub.'

So, that's what I did.
www.googawho.com