Nature Worldwide Creates Nature Oriented Search Engines Powered by Google

How often has it happened to you that you entered your search words in Google and got all those generic websites that gave you endlessly useless information, while you just knew something better must be out there somewhere? Recently, Google came up with a new facility, a customized search engine to your specifications. So, at WICE, we thought, that this would be a great facility, in the first place for our own research purposes, but then we thought, we should make this a facility to be shared with the entire conservation community. With the latter idea in mind, we came to the conclusion that we needed several specialized search engines, each with different focuses. Obviously, a general one was needed, which we dubbed "Nature Search" in which all nature related topic could be searched. But nature related topics are very broad and for certain fairly broad topics, a specialized search engine would be needed. Birds is one of those, so we created "Bird Search". Other animals, like mammals and insects appear to be much less requested, so we lumped all animals together in "Animal Search", which does not include specific bird websites. Then there are all the wild plants. We felt that those should be combined with vegetation, so we created "Flora and Vegetation Search". Maybe in the future we will need to add more thematic search engines, but we will start out with these non-commercial ones.

Of course, we often need products and service, and some of the most commonly needed products and services are "Ecotourims", "Natural Products", and "Field Equipment".

We currently have one of the WICE sponsored students, Jael Marquez, in Bolivia go through thousands of nature related website links to populate our search engines with the appropriate websites per category. We expect her to be ready by mid December 2006. The commercial websites will be finished a bit later.

We invite all our visitors to spend 10 minutes to add some of their favourate websites to the search engines, thus helping yourself and others to make these search engines very powerful web research tools.