Newly minted features...

It has been a while since I've posted any updates here. Which is too bad, because there have been some exciting things happening with Googawho lately. In this post I would just like to run down the list of Googawho's goings on during the last year or so. They include a bunch of new features, Mashup awards, some interesting Tweets and a favorable mention on an Italian blog (I think).

• As of June this year, Googawho has utilized the bit.ly API, which means a shortened URL is provided at the bottom of the page when you search. JavaScripts will gracefully select the text of this URL for you when you move your mouse over it, making it easy to copy and share your searches with others.
  
• Also in June 2009, a link to automatically share your search terms and bit.ly URL on Twitter.com was added to the bottom of the site. This means once you've found a cool search that's worth Tweeting, you can use the TweetIt! feature to post your search terms, bit.ly URL and #googawho reference right to your Twitter profile with just a click.
  
• 2009 saw some huge consolidation in the search engine world as Microsoft's MSN Live Search became the hot new Bing. Just a month later we watched in astonishment as Yahoo! simply  sold off its entire search business to Microsoft. Both sites now use the bing search engine, luckily, the two sites utilize very different search algorithms and each still offers very different search results. Why not see for yourself today at http://www.googawho.com
  
• Googawho no longer offers Cuil.com as a search comparison option. Unfortunately, according to Cuil technical staff, their site implemented some new "server side click-tracking scripts" which cause the Cuil engine to open in a new window, rather than display in the side-by-side comparison format offered on Googawho. However, these things have a way of just working out - because the very next day, InfoSpace re-launched their site with a completely new look, and tons of cool new search features. InfoSpace has become a shiny new facet of Googawho.com.
  
• The Googawho Tabulizer! feature was given greater prominence. Now, after a search is performed, a new button for the Tabulizer! appears to the right of the Double Your Search! button. To ensure that the Tabulizer! behaves as expected, this button is hidden the moment you change the search terms, and will not reappear until the new search has been loaded.
  
• Feedback is now an option. We've added a feedback feature to the About Us page through UserVoice.com. It's a simple way to offer suggestions, or just gripe about what we're doing and how we're doing it.
  
• In August 2009, Googawho was featured as ProgrammableWeb.com's "Mashup Of The Day". Even though this is a daily award we were honored to get it, and our traffic spiked to over 2,300 unique visits and we've enjoyed a sustained bump in our daily hit rate since the award.
  
• A recent twitter search reveled quite a bit of Tweet and re-Tweeting regarding Googawho and it's features. But, in classic Twitter Fail-Whale style, older posts are "temporarily unavailable". If you are a twitter user, please give us a follow here:
  http://www.twitter.com/googawho
  
• October 7th, Googawho was featured (favorably I think) on the Italian blog, Posizionamentoo which even included a 3 minute video demonstration of Googawho.com. Here is a link to the translated blog. Just awesome.
  
• You can now buy Googawho branded merchandise from our CafePress shop!
  

        

Well that's it, thank you for reading!  We'll will try to be better about keeping things current out here, but no promises! If you are interested in more frequent updates, please follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/googawho or, you might also become a Facebook fan at http://www.facebook.com/googawho

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