IFRA launches second vertical search engine for media

OK, IFRA, you’ve been pretty kind to me over the years, but I’m going to contradict your claim that your new IFRA Search is the first vertical search engine for the news industry.

IFRA Search, the search engine for the news publishing industry, officially goes online. With www.ifrasearch.com, IFRA is introducing the first professional research tool for specialised searching on to the market: by using IFRA Search, persons working in the media industry will find all information relevant to the news publishing industry drawn from IFRA’s own, partners’ and other high-quality sources.

Its vertical orientation ensures that the hits generated by IFRA Search offer quality instead of quantity – the result of a two-year development period based on more than 40 years of IFRA know-how in the news publishing industry. Thus the IFRA search engine offers the possibility to find important contents quickly and precisely.

Not so fast. I launched MediaGeeks.org Jan. 27. Beatcha by a month. But hey, since IFRA Search uses different technology (MediaGeeks.org is really just a subset of Google results, being built on a Google Custom Search Engine), it’s a good addition to media vertical search. It returns different results for the same terms

Introducing MediaGeeks.org – custom search for media professionals

MediaGeeks.org LogoFor many months, I’ve wanted to play around with setting up a vertical search engine using Google Custom Search.

Today, I finally got around to it.

Here it is: MediaGeeks.org, a vertical search engine for media professionals.

The initial group of 140 URLs I’ve fed into the search engine are mostly from my blog roll along with obvious media sites (such as E&P and OJR).

If you know of a media site I should have included but didn’t, send me an e-mail to howard owens (one word) -at- gmail dot com.

Also, if you view the source of the home page, you can see how to add the MediaGeeks.org search widget to your blog or site.

The search engine is only useful to the media community uses it, so link to it. Tel your friends.