All Things Argentina
By Asado Argentina on Oct 4, 2007 in Site News
In case you didn’t know, Google has a nifty custom search engine beta going on that anyone can use. Basically you can create your own little search engine that focuses on topics or specific sites that you like. It’s very cool. Anyway, every day I perform various searches related to Argentina and after a while I get tired of using the site: command to seek out information of the same topic on different sites. Today I thought why not just create a Google CSE? So I did. I took part of the list of blogs over at Bloggers in Argentina to test things out at first.
Let’s say I want to search for Palermo restaurants. Just for example purposes, the top results are a bunch of blogs or travel guides basically stating that Palermo has great restaurants. But that’s not what I want. I want to view some blogs or travel guides that actually review restaurants. Luckily enough, I can add a tag to each site in the search engine that covers this topic. For example, Buenostours.com, Argentinastravel.com, and Saltshaker.net get tagged with dining. So if I search for Palermo restaurants, all I have to do is click on the dining link at the top of the results to receive refined results that give priority to–or only list–these sites that offer dining reviews. Not 100% perfect but still good.
Still needs a lot of work, but there is enough to play around with at the moment for building ideas. This started out as something for me to use personally but I figured why not let others use it as well. The stats only show popular queries and how many queries performed by time/date in case you are worried about privacy.
This isn’t an attempt to steal BIA’s show, btw, that was just a good list to start from. Plus, I won’t be listing what sites I have included and I’ll be adding non-blogs as well.
If you want to try it out you can go here search.argentinax.com
That redirects to the actual URL of http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=007078810743690362250%3Aatijtfg02fg , which is a tad bit hard to remember. I just created this yesterday, so it’ll take a bit of time to fix up. Let me know if you like it or have any ideas.
Great idea and thanks.
Any chance you open this up to contributors? What’s the criteria and process for new site additions?
Rob Evans | Oct 4, 2007 | Reply
Hi Rob,
I added your site btw.
I think adding contributors is a great thing and something I’m seriously thinking about. I know there are probably a lot of things I’ll miss. The recent upgrade I did on this site was a clear example haha. When I get a good part of what I want on there, I’ll figure something out.
For the criteria, the main thing will be relevant or somewhat unique content. For example, those who travel to Argentina for short term or a travel site that has one page on Argentina might not make the cut unless they offer something different than what is already listed. That being said, there is an option to select specific pages from a site, so that is another route. Overall, this is not just for travel type stuff, anything goes.
Asado Arg | Oct 4, 2007 | Reply
Asado,
Great idea! I love it. Thanks for putting it together.
Frank Almeida | Oct 5, 2007 | Reply
Thanks Frank and let me know if you have any ideas.
Asado Arg | Oct 5, 2007 | Reply
Hehehe, I use Google CSE a lot at my ‘day-job’. Great idea Marc, I do these kinds of searches all the time too and this will be great. And thanks for including us!
Cesar from ArgentinasTravel.com | Oct 5, 2007 | Reply
Hey Cesar,
Thanks for stopping by and no prob. You guys cover a lot of stuff that others don’t so it has to be there.
Asado Arg | Oct 6, 2007 | Reply