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.

It deserves all the attention it can get as I believe that Kikono is the next step toward rationalizing nonprofit news. BTW, I took a look at the tables for Kikono. The links tables alone are ripe for someone to write an OPML export for a Google CSE like Manseo. I’ve got lots of plans for Kikono – we’ll be doing a theme redesign and eventually inviting more nonprofit bloggers to join in on the fun.

Ok, folks, those of you on my collaborators list — let’s see if we can restart this process and get more sites into the search engine. I’ve added more than 180 sites but with my regular job, programming my startup (yeah, that’s something — I’m programming a nonprofit into being but more on that much later) and this blog, there’s precious little time to do any more. Expect an e-mail from me sometime in the next few days.

Some parting comments: Google engineers, please let us create an RSS feed that allows non-collaborators to see what’s being added to the list and also, let us add RSS feeds into the Google search engine without having to put in refinements for each one. Even better, provide us with an interface to do that.

Things you can do with manseo

If you would like to add your own links in the future, please go to the MANSEO search page. At that page, you can add yourself as a contributor.

Google provides Google Marker so you can add a site just by clicking a link on your toolbar. Check it out. It works just like del.icio.us and all the other social bookmarking widgets.

You can add manseo to your Google homepage by clicking on . It’s pretty slick.

I took the entire Nonprofit Blog Exchange blogroll and my previous non-profit technology websites and rolled them up into one. I then went through and added refinements to the blogs. This means that I had to go through the entire list of sites and categorize them based on the following categories:

• for_fundraisers
• for_marketers
• for_techies
• for_managers
• for_advocates
• personal_blogs
• nonprofit_advocacy_blogs

I think additional refinements can be created by contributors to manseo but I don’t know that for a fact. If you wish suggest refinements, you can always e-mail abenamer['at']nonprofittechblog.org.

I’m not quite done yet but I think I’ve only got 20 blogs left to categorize. I’ve also started playing around with the AJAX Search API that is now able to access custom search engines. I have to say it doesn’t work so well but you can take a look at it by going to the future manseo page.

Update (11/18/2006):
179 links are now in the search engine. There are now six collaborators to the engine. There is also a Google Group for manseo.