WHY DON’T YOU SUPPORT FIREFOX

Firefox doesn’t support the OpenSearch standard. The method Firefox uses is difficult for end users to configure searches.

HOW DO YOU CONFIGURE A SPECIALIZED SEARCH?

Suppose you often search for lyrics using Google. Typically, you put the word lyrics and then quote the phrase you are looking for. When you search you will see the following:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=lyrics+%22while+my+guitar+gently+weeps%22

Do the same thing but search for the phrase brrreeeport and that gives you the URL for your customized search.

HOW DO YOU SETUP A SEARCH FOR A SINGLE WEBSITE?

The major search engines have the ability to restrict a search to a single site. You might want to do this because often the search engines provided by a site are not as powerful as the generalized search engines. For example, if you search for TMX on Motorola’s site, it returns about 25 hits. Google returns over 400 hits. In Google’s case, you add site:Motorola.com to search to restrict the search just to Motorola’s site.

WHY DID YOU USE THE WORD “BRRREEEPORT” FOR YOUR TEST WORD?

Robert Scoble created this word as a test of the speed of search engines to review blogs, so it’s an inside joke.

WHAT IS A VERTICAL SEARCH ENGINE AND WHY WOULD I WANT TO USE ONE?

An example of a vertical search engine is Indeed.com. This search engine looks for jobs.

WHY DID YOU MAKE THIS SITE?

It’s a technology demonstration.

WHAT IS A URL?

Uniform Resource Locator. For our purposes, these appear in the browser’s address field and typically look like

http://blogs.icerocket.com/search?q=brrreeeport

WHAT’S THE RSS FEED FOR ON THE HOME PAGE? 

The Really Simple Syndication feed is a standard that allows RSS readers to monitor the site and see when new searches are published.