Oh dear readers, I have to tell you that I’m hurtin’. Being my second day without search, the withdrawal I’m feeling is very much like what happened to me when I tried to back off of caffeine. I’m just jittery. I can admit that I have gone to the Google homepage and just looked at it, with dreams of typing in a slew of necessary search queries and just finding things to my heart’s content.

OK, well, on with the show.

Again, I’ve come up against the major roadblock in using social bookmarking and social networks for any kind of search. This is a bitter sweet experiment, because even though my obvious problems with trying to use these kinds of sites for search often end in tragedy, the discovery is fantastic.

So yesterday I’m trying to find a css solution. First stop, a site we all know well, A List Apart. See, I’m a terrible script librarian (meaning I don’t save my favorite scripts until it’s obvious I use them more than once) so I need a good CSS horizontal menu. Of course, the first place I go to is A List Apart, who’ve been the center for good css design practices for longer than I’ve known what good css design practices where. The internal search worked like a charm and I found exactly what I was looking for.

Next, I’m trying to find good advertising partners related to the beauty products vertical, so I decided to got the THE REALLY BIG COMMUNITY. WordPress.com (c’mon like they really need a link from me) I had been holding off until today, and to tell you the truth, the internal search algo was just ok, but here is where I found tagging to be a fantastic discovery tool. WordPress.com has a global tagging feature that really helps for you to find postings based on what the authors Categorized or Tagged there post with.

For the most part, people with blogs tend to label or tag their post with something that is pretty spot on relevant, but from time to time, you get someone who tags their post with “beauty” and you’ll find a post about lemurs in Peru with necro-flesh disease who are probably wwaaayyyy the fuck over on the other side of “beauty”, so you wonder what that particular blogger was thinking of that day.

Blogs are cool because even though the blog you’re reading might not be “the expert in the field” but they might, and often do, link to the expert in the field. Nice.

Ok, so I needed to do a little personal searching during work hours. Don’t tell anybody ok? I might get in trouble. What did I do to? Checked out Massive Links. Fabio has been working this site for YEARS, and all of the dedication shows. Massive Links is part directory, part forum, part multi-user blog, part business listing, and ALL hand jammed. You think you’re a dedicated webmaster? Ha, Fabio laughs in your face. (Just kidding, one of the coolest guys I know) Now, you might be thinking “Oh rumblepup. your just touting for a friend” which I would, but I calls them as I sees them, and friend or no, I gonna tell you what’s right and what’s wrong at ML.

What’s right? I love the clicking. I mean, everything you could want to find is within a few clicks, and the subject of what you’re trying to find is pretty much there at your fingertips. Want a blog post about home decorating? Bingo. Want a forum discussion on rack servers? Bingo. Want a listing of business sites with further links to the most pertinent services? Bingo. I like it.

What wrong? A little (just a little) on the design consistency side. Some areas look different than others. No big deal, really, because navigation is consistent, but I’m sure ML is working on it.

So that was the end of day two. I didn’t do a lot of “Looking” because I’m busy building award winning websites that rake in massive amounts of money and are number 1 on the SERP’s all the time (get the sarcasm) but there are more to try, and tomorrow will be another day, without search.