AfterVote Marries Meta Search to Customization - Customizing What You Can Do
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Incidentally, these are just the defaults. If you change the boxes you’ve clicked in your results display, you get a different selection of icons. All you have to do is click on settings, click on the results display tab, check or uncheck items as you wish, then save the changes. As I mentioned originally, this would be a great place to have tool tips to find out what each widget does before you check it off.
I went through the procedure of changing the icons/widgets while my search results were still displayed. I saved my changes; the box closed to take me back to my search results – and I discovered that AfterVote automatically updated the results. Along with the default icons, it now showed the new icons I’d checked for sending links via AIM and finding blogs linking to the search result on Blogger. How’s that for cool?
I found that some of these widgets work quite well, but others didn’t work the way I expected them to. The one that lets you email particular links to someone else worked perfectly; one click on it brought up a new email in my computer’s email program that contained the link in the body of the message, so all I had to add was the email address of the recipient (and any special message). I don’t know how (or if) it would work with Web-based email though. The AIM widget didn’t work the way I expected it to; it brought up an AIM window, but it did not insert the URL. Oh well, I guess my own laziness strikes again; all I’d really need to do is copy the URL into the AIM window.
Using the Blogger icon/widget was eye-opening. SEO Chat came up as the second search result under SEO on AfterVote (knowing how optimized we are for that term, I expected that). But I had no idea we cast such a “shadow” in the blogosphere, if you want to call it that. Some sites quoted a paragraph from one of our articles and included a link for their readers to the rest of the content, located on our site; others made use of our tools and talked about them, linking to our site; still others simply linked to SEO Chat as an example of an SEO-focused site. This widget shows yet again the potential of AfterVote as a tool for SEO.
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