Todd Carpenter’s REMBEX.com is the search engine of the RE.net
Todd Carpenter runs REMBEX — Real Estate & Mortgage Blogger’s Exchange. It’s a web ring of RE.net sites, and Todd has run it as a labor of love for much longer than BloodhoundBlog has been howling. Once I realized that weblogging was about linking (Thanks, Dustin!), Todd’s was one of the first places I slinked off to for a link.
Recently, Todd announced the creation of REMBEX.com, a search engine that deploys Google’s search technology on a defined set of real estate weblogs:
Basically I collected 250 active, relevant blogs, plus all of the blogs on activerain.com (a network of real estate bloggers), and input them into the engine. Google Co-op searches only these sites.This engine bridges the gap between searching each blog individually, and using a more global search engine like Technorati or Google Blog Search. Those bigger engines can be useful, but I’ve found that they don’t differentiate between dedicated realty bloggers and anyone with a blog, that happens to mention real estate. The big search engines also tend to bring up results from sploggers or almost any site that uses RSS feeds.
I think this is an insanely great idea, so much so that I’ve deployed it along with our regular sidebar search function on both BloodhoundBlog and RealEstateWeblogging101.com. Suppose you’re reading a post about Dual Agency. Want to hear what other RE.net blogs have to say on the subject? Type “Dual Agency” into the REMBEX search box and see who salutes.
I can’t sing the praises of this tool enough. It’s even easy to deploy in your own weblog. For me, this is the leverage of genius that the internet brings to us all: Todd gave up some sleep to bring forth a tool that will save all of us time every time we use it — and time is our sole capital. We enrich ourselves by tiny little accretions of time — time we can redeploy to more productive purposes. It’s amazing to me, in this economy of vast abundance, how many of these enriching time-savers come to us for free, with the sole cost being our ability to understand and appreciate them. REMBEX.com will save you far more than a minute of your time in no time, so you might take a minute today to thank Todd Carpenter for giving you a tool you hadn’t even known you needed.
