I’m sure all three of my loyal readers are eager to find out how my day went yesterday. Well, I’m eager to tell you that it went…mezzo, mezzo.

I didn’t have to do a lot of search, up until I had to check SERP’s. You see, that’s my job, getting SERP’s. I started to feel a bit like a tard, thinking that my one week experiment in not using search in any way was a bit….ill conceived.

Aha, but wait! I have bookmarked some services that gave me a kinda, sorta view on where my serps where yesterday. Three of my favorites are:

Shoemoney’s SERP tool – It’s pretty straightforward. Shoemoney has got this great little tool that will check for your position in the major search engines all at one shot. After checking out a bunch of these tools, I have to admit that Shoe’s is one of my favorites. Direct, to the point, and pretty accurate.

Rank Checker by Seobook – Aaron Wall is just a really great mind folks, and the Rank Checker is another of his neat tools that give you a basic look-see of what’s actually happening out there.

seodigger – When it’s working, which sometimes it goes a little hooey, it’s a neat reverse lookup of where your site is listed for a given keyword. The service is goodly, in that all you have to do is pop in your url, and voila, you get a listing that is “somewhat” up to date of the keywords your site ranks for and where.

Of course, there is always Webmaster Tools, which gives you a weekly rundown of how your site is ranking for given terms, but it’s limited in that it only shows Google SERP’s. Good, but I need the info from the other SE’s as well.

So, the day progressed as so.

I really only had to do one search, for an asp.net control (yes, I’m a Microsux dude) I needed for some developing (no, I’m not a good coder in any way, shape, or form – I just play one on the internets) So I drop on by asp.net (go figure) and I start poking around. A search on their site, which is actually kind of a cool tabbed thinger, yields some results, but the problem is that the app I’m working on is still in asp.net v 1.1, and in the internet world, REALLY OLD. .Net developers LOVE new shiny toys, and everybody is working on .Net 3.0 beta, zeta, some such thing. Took me a while to find a reference to a blog post that when clicked on, lead to a 404 page.

Nuts.

Ok, off to something else. Before hitting the directories I’ve mentioned, I went to Ma.gnolia. I like the concept behind Ma.gnolia, and it has a soft spot in my heart, cause I did an interview with Larry Halff, but I have to admit, I got really flustered really quickly. (I found Ma.gnolia on a Matt Cutts post) I mean, the concept is cool. You bookmark your favorites, with your own tags, they come up under your profile, and you can join your bookmarks to groups, and each group has discussion forums (for lack of a better term) I mean, I really liked how the vibe (when I first joined) was “oooh, look what I found, what did you find, wow that cool” kind of thing.

But the performance! After just a few seconds I started sounding line Yosemite Sam after his foot has been blown off.

“YAH fricken fracken frookin, ricken racken FRACK!”

I tried from three different computers, just in case it was my problem, to try to just get to the tags. The first time I clicked on Everyone’s Tags, the website huuuuuunnnnngggggg theeeerrrreee for almost a full minute. Just when I thought that the page would pop up, blammo, 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable. DAMN! I checked again, and again. Nada. Ma.gnolia has had this problem with performance since it’s inception, and I was really hoping that some day they’d get it under control. But it was just too difficult to actually use it for discovery. I’m hoping I can try again today.

So, off to del.ico.us. We all know it, some of us use it, and I’ve always liked exploring it. But I think I came upon one of the problems with Social Bookmarking. Using the search function is del.ico.us worked pretty quickly, but if their algo uses tags as meta, then that explains why I couldn’t find what I was looking for. People tag bookmarks with a word or phrase that is:

1. Meaningful to them
2. Is a tag that corresponds with a high PR page.

So my search with terms that I found important where smacked up against the mob rule. Oh, I found some really killer stuff when I started clicking on tags, and I have to admit that the quality of the tags and what they represent are on the whole very, very good, but nobody on del.ico.us had tagged what I was specifically looking for.

By the way, I found a really good blog post on How To Integrate Google Checkout and Paypal In 3 Steps. Boy I need that.

Well, I tried both BOTW and DMOZ. Nothin. These are directories of sites, not of content. A phrase search doesn’t really work.

So I head over to HotSripts. OMFG (Nuff Said)

I bite the bullet and went on over to Mahalo, and just using the directory links I found their Programming Languages category page.  Uhmmm, Mr. Calcanis, asp.net might not be LAMP, but it does exist, for some time now as well.

So right them I threw in the towel.  No, not on my experiment, but on this particular thing I wanted.  IM’d a friend who had in his script librabry an asp.net 1.1 table data view control.  Before you even go ballistic and say that I could have rolled my own, which is true, go to hell, ’cause this was for science, and I’m a lazy shit.  So he sent it over to me, and that was the day.

So, my first day without search kinda sucked.  Social bookmarking and “discovery” sites are still the bomb in my book, but today’s experience has led me to believe that it’s solely for discovery, and not search.  Well, I’ll try again today, cause I have some interesting stuff to try to find.

Will someone please tell me what I missed if I had used search?