Sometime very soon I am going to eviscerate another Cheez Whiz Prize winner, but here is a function I would much rather undertake: Delivering praise without limits to an amazingly, outrageously great idea in real estate weblogging.
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.
Yesterday, Todd announced the creation of REMBEX.com, a Google Co-Op-based 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. Suppose you’re reading BloodhoundBlog on (ahem!) 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…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Todd Carpenter says:
Greg,
I’m honored you decided to post my search engine here. But I’m also embarrassed because I gave you the wrong code! I emailed you the proper code just now.
February 16, 2007 — 9:46 am
Greg Swann says:
New code installed just like that. No harm, no foul — and a great accomplishment. Bless you for this!
February 16, 2007 — 9:55 am
mike simonsen says:
We did a similar widget with Rojo a few months ago. We were neither as thoughtful nor as thorough as Todd and only dropped a few sites in to see what would happen.
A quick vanity search confirms that I can drop the Rojo widget and go for REMBEX. thanks!
February 16, 2007 — 1:03 pm
mike simonsen says:
ermm… I had used Rollyo not Rojo. Anyway, it Rembex.com now!
February 16, 2007 — 1:10 pm
Greg Swann says:
Inlookers: If you want to add the REMBEX.com search tool to your weblog, go here:
http://rembex.mariah.com/getse.html
February 16, 2007 — 2:37 pm
Lisa Dunn says:
Greg, Thank YOU for letting us know about this neat tool. I’m going to postpone my blogline surfing to go check it out now!
February 16, 2007 — 2:38 pm
Steve Kane says:
“Insanely great…Google Co-Op-based search engine…specific to real estate blogs”
Reminds me of that Jessica Simpson ad for Direct TV where she says, “I totally don’t know what that means, but I want one.”
So I took my remedial self immediately over to Todd Carpenter’s Rembex site http://rembex.mariah.com/ and did a quick search on “referral”. It brought back only real estate related links. No “lawyer”, “dentist”, or “car dealer” referrals.
Cool. A blog search engine for real estate insiders that only returns germane results. Now I get it!
Question: there’ve been a lot of referral posts on http://www.LittlePinkHouses.com that do not show up in a Rembex search. But you can find them using the generic Google blog search engine. It makes me wonder how filtered and up to date the site is.
To reach the status of “insanely great”, real estate insiders will want to know that they’re getting ALL the real estate results…timely and un-filtered. Todd?
Anyway, enjoyed your post.
February 16, 2007 — 11:13 pm
Kevin Boer says:
Great, now when people search for content on my blog, they find it…right next to ads for all my competitors! I guess Google has to monetize this tool somehow… 🙂
February 17, 2007 — 1:16 am
Todd Carpenter says:
Steve Kane,
The results are filter by me, sort of. I have to add your blog before any results show up in the search engine. I just did. I did a quick search for pink houses and you are now in. Manually reveiwing and adding blogs assures that they are real blogs, written by professionals like us. Thanks to initial interest, the number of blogs has grown from 250, to nearly 300 in the past couple days. I’ll add any blog that’s rellevent.
As far as finding your posts, whatever Google usually crawls on your site, and how well it ranks against the other bloggers here will determine how well you show up. I don’t take any control over the ranking process.
February 17, 2007 — 8:31 am
Todd Carpenter says:
Steve,
One more thing. Google Co-op uses the traditional Google Search Engine. Google Blog Search is a different beast. Currently, the blog seaech engine is not available for Google Co-op. I’m not sure if it would be better anyway, but as soon as it is available, I will evaluate it.
Also, Kevin,
I never envisioned that other bloggers would put the search box on their blog. I admit that a blogger wouldn’t want to promote this over a search that just covers their own blog. I think the teired fashion that Greg set up here would be ideal if you were to offer it. It’s basically saying, “Can’t find what your looking for? Try here.” Not much different than offering a blogroll of other bloggers.
February 17, 2007 — 9:58 am
Greg Swann says:
> Not much different than offering a blogroll of other bloggers.
Moreover, the search by then is so tightly focused that it doesn’t seem likely that you would lose a prospect unless you never had that person in the first place. The people most like to use this search are professionals or real esate junkies who want to know more, more, more. I doubt many of them are vendor-shopping.
February 17, 2007 — 10:05 am
apella says:
Thank you for this information, not only did you give great info, I want to thank you for the prompt reply and to let you know that I have added your blog to my links and signed up for the directory. I will visit offten Please keep up the Great Work
February 17, 2007 — 3:31 pm
Jay Thompson says:
Stellar! Up and running on TPREG.
Thanks for the tip!
February 17, 2007 — 5:47 pm
Marty Van Diest says:
Great tip. I went over and added my blog. Thank you.
February 17, 2007 — 7:01 pm
Steve Kane says:
Re: Todd Carpenter’s response to my comment
Wanted to acknowledge your quick response to my comment about Rembex http://rembex.com. Robert Frost taught us in Mending Wall” that “something there is that doesn’t love a wall”. And since a blog co-op is a way of electronically walling conversations, I took Frost’s advice and asked myself what we were “walling in or walling out.” It’s a good question – and you answered it well, not only in your response but on your How it Works page: http://rembex.mariah.com/how.html.
Three reasons why I think Rembex works:
IT SAVES TIME: As Greg Swann said in his post, “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.”
IT’S INCLUSIVE: It seems to me your wall works because the wall builder is being careful to include all voices so long as those voices: 1. are that of a blogger (not recycled news or splog), 2. the focus is real estate, mortgages, or personal finance, 3. and the voice is established and current (no one trick ponies or outdated news).
IT’S TRUSTWORTHY: The question Frost doesn’t ask is “Who’s building the Wall?.” We have to trust the wall builder and trust takes time. More for some than others. I like that Todd checked out my experience with the blog LittlePinkHouses and took quick action to add it to Rembex. Today, when I did a quick Rembex search for “Referral Fees”, Little Pink Houses appears on the first page of results and points to six recent articles on referrals http://littlepinkhouses.com/?cat=2. Trust still takes time, but Todd earned some of mine today.
Related posts:
Mending Wall: http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html
February 18, 2007 — 2:54 pm