Comments on: A Canadian Search Engine

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:50:00 +0000

Hello,

I am doing a lot of SEO these days for clients but find that WORDTRACKER.com uses results from USA..not CANADA. Anyone know of the best keyword analyzable tool for Google.ca/yahoo.ca based search engine results?

By: James Cogan

James Cogan — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 14:59:32 +0000

SearchEngine.ca was created to basically be a ‘all in one’ type search engine where the aim is to provide you with numerous search options across a fairly broad spectrum of search types. Is it an alternative to Google? That really depends on what kind of alternative you’re looking for. If you want to search YouTube videos, Amazon.ca shopping, .ca-only web search etc. etc. then SearchEngine.ca is a pretty good spot to do all of those things in one place. What we found was that there was no perfect Canadian search engine, or perfect ‘true’ Canadian search. The reality is, the only search that will return 100% Canadian results is to do a ‘.ca only’ search which SearchEngine offers with an easy one-click, or to run your own database/crawl for Canada. Of course, the problem with ‘.ca only’ is that while you’ll get 100% Canadian results, you’ll be missing some of the .com/.net etc. that are Canadian. The problem with running your own DB/crawl is that unless you have a lot of resources to devote to this, chances are your database is going to be out of date pretty quickly. For example, we launched Gadget.ca in April and but a search for ‘gadget.ca’ on Acrosscan.ca turns up no links to the site, which would indicate the database is a little stale. That’s not a knock on Acrosscan because there is value in a human-vetted index, it just underscores how there really is no perfect ‘Canadian’ search. Above all else, SearchEngine.ca is about giving the user options.

By: Rehan Zaidi

Rehan Zaidi — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 17:35:22 +0000

SearchEngine.ca doesn't seem like a Google alternative per se...its default search engine is Google, so you're just getting the same results as you would using Google.ca. And the other options are just an interface to get search results from other search engines (and the ".ca results only" option doesn't work on any of those other ones). Someone I know online has put together Acrosscan.ca, which is a Canadian search engine that maintains its own database. There, if you search for "web 2.0" the results will include some Canadian .com (like michaelmcderment.com and sitepronews.com) that Google.ca wouldn't recognize as Canadian sites just because they're hosted south of the border.