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Did you know that there was a new search engine on the block? Well to tell you the truth it's not really new, it has been around for a while but it's just undergone a face lift and it's now very different.

It's nothing like what you see when you open up Google and it's nothing like Yahoo, MSN/Live or Ask either. In fact it's a radical departure from anything that you have seen in a search engine before. It's A9 - Amazon's search engine - and you can find it at a9.com. Wander over and take a look ... and have a little play with it too.

It's supposed to be powered by Microsoft's Live Search although you might find that if you test a few search terms you'll get something different in A9 returns compared with what Live returns. When I had a little play with it I found that A9 returned much more relevant search results than Live did.

I tested a few local terms that are of interest to us and found that the A9 search results were very focused ... and they even returned one of our sites at the top of the search engine results page for a term that's mildly competitive and then put two of our sites at the top for one of the most competitive of local terms. When I tried the same terms in Live the results were quite different and for one of the terms the results that Live returned were basically irrelevant.

Local Search
Last week Yahoo launched what's basically a version of local search for mobile phone users in Europe and Google has been putting more and more into local search too. Quite often, if Google has started local search in a country you will find that when you're looking for something local you will also get a Google map pinpointing the physical address of various places that relate to your query.

While it might be hard to get involved with local search in big cities, if you live in a smaller town - or even somewhere that local search has yet to be introduced - then there are some great opportunities for you. There are a lot of small businesses out there that need to get noticed in local search and you may well be the person who can help them achieve that. Of course, when you do that you can make money.

Here in Australia local search is still in the future but it's something that we're preparing for when we build websites for mainstream clients. Sadly for other small businesses their web designers seem to be totally oblivious to what is required to get their clients noticed when local search starts.

You may well find that situation where you live so don't ignore it. It could easily become a very lucrative little sideline for you. If you haven't been watching the local search scene then do a little research and see what you need to offer your prospective clients.

And if you do take the time to get involved in local search there is always the possibility that you'll see an angle you can use for your adult sites too.

The Long Tail of Search
Something interesting in the adult industry caught my eye the other day at the same time as I was looking at a site that was offering a tool that helped webmasters to identify those terms on their websites that only receive a few hits. Individual terms that only get one or two hits a day may not seem all that important but the cumulative effect of all those terms can be very important.

However, that wasn't the long tail that I was thinking of when I saw an announcement that Sunny Leone had re-signed with Vivid and this time she was going to do male/female hardcore. Now that is newsworthy and a babe like that obviously has a lot of fans out there. That means that people were going to be hunting around after they saw that announcement on the search engines looking for more information.

Unless you already have a site or a web page out there that deals with Sunny you've probably missed the rush ... this time. But there is going to be another rush in a few months time. You see, the original announcement said that Sunny had re-signed and would be doing male/female hardcore but her first hardcore movie would not be released until late this year or early next year.

Can you see the other long tail that's out there? There's a long tail of people who want information and that long tail is going to surge again when Sunny's first hardcore video is released. Now is the time to start taking advantage of that long tail and the surge in searches that will come too.

Does Sunny Leone even have a site that you can send traffic too? I leave you to find that out for yourself but that's an example of the sort of thing you need to look for and anticipate.