At AgSearch Technologies, we believe in the value of people. Google and most of the other search engines have built their database of links through computer bots or spiders that constantly crawl or creep the web indexing every page it comes across, good or bad. No wonder they use a computer to do that. They do this because it's cheaper and faster to have a computer to do it. They have obviously become the king of indexing the whole world into one big search with virtually no categorization. It works for most of us because that's what we're used to. Fortunately, there's a better way to search. Keep reading.
There is a global movement going on towards the need and use of niche market search engines or directories. Many of these are industry specific and use other methods for acquiring listings, rather than using a spider or bot. Some are very popular like Angie's List, Realtor, Wikipedia, Trivago, etc.
As you can see, there are industry specific Search Engines for several niche markets, but one that is lacking is in the area of Agriculture. There are already some great niche search engines within agriculture as a whole, like University Research articles and Farmer's Markets. We will certainly include them in our Search Results. The time is right for a Search Engine for everything ag.
We also believe that a human being can make a better judgement call on the overall quality of a website than some computer algorithm, which is defined as 'a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer'.
You see, the sacred, secret algorithm Google uses is created by humans anyway, just executed by computer robots or 'bots'. We have our own algorithms developed over the years and they are not secret or sacred. Our algorithm is based on a set of criteria for inclusion on our Search Engine. It is pretty straight forward and can be seen below.
In order for a website to even be qualified for being listed on AgSearch, it must meet the following criteria;
The business or website must be closely tied to Agriculture
The business must be located in the United States. Foreign HQ ok with US Branch
The business must have an active website or active social media business page
The website or social media page must be reasonably up to date and not broken
There must be enough information to reasonably contact the business
For the exact criteria, our Research Assistants may login to their Research Portal to review the Full Training Blocks.
So, as stated before, the search bots are experts at gathering massive data in a short period of time. We would rather spend our time (paying people to do what the bots do) and focus on presentation of the Search Results. Google has not changed the basic look since they began, the one boring white page we have all become accustomed to. We believe all the data in the world is useless if it's not organized and user-friendly to read and navigate.
Google has focused on gathering massive data; we focus on presenting categorized results.
Google is focused on selling ads and data; we focus on building relationships in the ag community.
Google, Twitter, Yahoo, & Facebook have all proven they cannot stay out of politics. We can no longer trust any of them to give us unbiased results.
In the AgSearch Community, we are all Americans, period.