Non-Profit Tech Blog

For those of you who weren’t reading the blog way back when, I started a Google Custom Search Engine called manseo (Mother of All Nonprofit Search Engines Optimized) that searched every nonprofit blog site that I could think of as well as many other sites that were related to nonprofit technology. It’s now available again on the right-hand side of this web page. But it’s now all new and improved!
I really suggest trying it out — it’s actually kind of fun playing in a nonprofit sandbox on Google. It saves me a few steps on typing and the search results are just that much tighter. Google has added a pretty amazing upgrade to its Google Custom Search. It can now extract links from any URL and add those links to a custom search engine. Used correctly, we can now easily aggregate the combined linking power of all the bloggers involved in the nonprofit blogosphere, thus creating a more focused and automatically crowdsourced version of Google for ourselves. To that end, I’ve updated the way manseo searches and set it to automatically search through pages linked by this blog, Beth’s Blog, Deborah Elizabeth Finn’s blog, GiftHub and news.gilbert.org (Nonprofit Online News). Also, sites found on the Non-Profit Blog Exchange will also be completely indexed.

Do yourself a favor and try searching on your favorite nonprofit-y terms. I do searches on “Raiser’s Edge” a lot to see if it’s more helpful. I think if you’re a nonprofit tech newbie trying to get into the game, it’s probably not so helpful to get a lot of links from consultant web sites which is what you tend to get on Google. Instead, on manseo, you get a link to Idealware on the front page of the search results for “Raiser’s Edge”. That’s exactly the kind of feel I want for manseo. It should be a good starting point for folks who are new to the nonprofit field.

Feel free to volunteer your particular URLs to the site. To become a volunteer for this search engine, visit its homepage and sign up. You might need to nudge me at abenamer@nonprofittechblog.org so I can make sure your application goes through as well.

I’m curious to see how people use this new tool. I know I plan to use it and make further adjustments as well so definitely feel free to leave comments below. I’m very open to suggestion and your help on making a really good shared resource for our sector.