Returning visitors are an important part of a successful web site. And if you give them something special, some boon that your competitors don’t offer, chances are your visitors will come back. Building your blog or web site and researching your topic you have most likely gained knowledge that your users could benefit from. Why not offer them a customized search engine that draws on that knowledge?

Here are introductions to three great tools for making a customized search engine. They are all easy to use and embed. Find the one that meets your needs and get cracking.

Rollyo

If what you need is simply search engine that will search a specific set of web sites, Rollyo is a simple and fun way to do it. It’s this easy:

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Pandia Wishes You a Happy New Year!

(…and gives you a few of the recent search engine headlines from around the web):

• 5 (More) Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

  How would you like to track hot news geographically? Or see where social conversations are happening on a map? (SE Land Dec 29 2008)

• Predictions 08: How Did I Do?

  Search engine expert John Battelle reviews his predictions (Dec 30 2008)

• 50 Most Memorable Moments in Search for 2008

  Search Engine Watch has the list (Dec 31 2008)

• Rumor: Marissa Mayer, Google’s 19th Employee, To Leave

  Marissa Mayer is one of the most public figures that Google has ever had. (SE Land Dec 31 2009)

• Last Toolbar PageRank update of 2008

  In case you didn’t see where I confirmed it on Twitter, Google recently did a toolbar PageRank update. (Matt Cutts of Google Dec 31 2008)

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Those of you who follow the search engine scene regularly know that you need to keep up with what search engine guru Danny Sullivan and his friends are doing over at Search Engine Land.

Now Search Engine Land has a new look. The logo and and the color scheme are the same, but the lay-out is different.

First of all: There is more room set aside for the main news stories. Stories that the editors find less ground breaking are presented in a separate text box called Search News in Brief.

Other text boxes present recent feature articles, how to articles and comments.

Secondly: Search Engine Land introduces a premium membership giving you access to additional content. When Danny Sullivan edited Search Engine Watch, that site also had a subscription service — at least for a while.

Members of Search Engine Land get access to two years worth of stories categorized into topics such as Google: SEO, Google: AdWords, Search Marketing and Search Statistics.

Finally: Search Engine Land now allows readers to make comments directly under the posts. They do not have to submit their comments to Sphinn as before.

Our conclusion: An excellent site has become even better!

Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land’s new look.

It is a well known fact that Google owns YouTube. Few people know, however, that Google is using YouTube to teach users about their services.

Maybe they are not marketing those services in the right way, or maybe people don’t consider the possibility.

We are here to rectify that. Over at the Google YouTube channel there are quite a few videos that should interest searchers and search engine marketers.

Google search

First: There are actually not that many videos telling you how to search the web using Google. It could be Google believes this is so easy that you do not need a video to tell you what to do. Or, it could be that the web search people are not as interested in videos as — let’s say — the Google Maps people.

The best search tips video we have found so far isn’t actually made by Google at all, but by DL.TV. It does feature Google’s Matt Cutts, though, so we will include it here anyway:

(By the way: WebmasterRadio.FM has a very interesting audio interview with Cutts on the future of search.)

In May Google published a looooong video on what Google does in the search arena. It is hosted by Marissa Mayer of Google:

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This week’s search engine scene, as mapped by Pandia:

• ComScore: YouTube Now 25 Percent Of All Google Searches

  Video search on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S. (TechCrunch Dec 18 2008)

• A Look-See at Yahoo’s New Open and Social Launch!

  A lot of the new open and social elements that Yahoo has long said it was injecting into its most popular products. (BoomTown Dec 16 2008)

• Google Webmaster Tools Now In 40 Languages!

  Google Webmaster Tools has announced, the addition of 14 more languages, taking the count to 40 languages! (PageTraffic Dec 17 2008)

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Pandia celebrates its 10 year anniversary. Here is the strange story about how Pandia was born out of an act of the Norwegian parliament.

By Per Koch, co-editor of Pandia

In Web time Pandia is ancient.

It was born in December 1998, a couple of months after Google was incorporated. At that time AltaVista was the best search engine around, and a large number of search engine companies competed for the number 1 spot.

Remember Infoseek, Hotbot, and Excite? They were all listed on the Pandia home page of early 1999.

Although a lot of our visitors believed Pandia was yet another American corporation trying to conquer its part of the growing search engine market, it was in fact a hobby site run by two Norwegians: My wife Susanne and myself.

All-in-one link collection

Pandia started out as an all-in-one link and search form collection, gathering a large number of relevant search tools in one place. It was this home page that later was turned into
Pandia Powersearch, your one stop shop for Internet search fixes.

In 1999 we added the Goalgetter web search tutorial, which ended up on the curricula of several American universities.

Yahoo! continues to be in trouble and sacks some of it’s employees. The Google Chrome browser is out of beta. The Indian government believes terrorists made use of Google Earth satellite imagery. Google Book Search includes scanned magazines. These are just a few of this week’s selected search engine news articles from around the web-

• A lot of Brits don’t understand search engines

  Most Britons either have no idea or an inaccurate view of how online search results are determined, according to the Online Search Matters Survey (Guardian Dec 12 2008)

• Use SearchWiki To Rank Your Web Site Higher in Google

  If thousands of people remove a page using SearchWiki, Google may respond in kind by removing the offending result. (SE Roundtable Dec 10 2008)

• Google Zeitgeist 2008 Live; Lycos Announces Top Searches of 2008

  What people has been searching for in 2008 (SE Land Dec 10 2008)

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More and more people are responsible for information dissemination on the Web, often without any formal — or even informal — training in search engine optimization. Here is a presentation I gave at the Online Information Conference in London On December 2:

The presentation outlines six tounge-in-cheek typologies representing tried and true ways of making content visible online. These techniques do not include tweaking of meta tags. In fact they don’t require HTML skills at all. They focus, not on building web pages that search engines like, but on writing content that real web searchers are looking for.