Orchid Nurseries Search Engine

[epiphyte]

When I'm shopping around for a specific orchid I click on each orchid nursery link that I have saved in my bookmarks/favorites folder. Then I search each website to see if they carry the orchid I'm looking for in order to compare prices.

It's not the most efficient process so I decided to create a custom google search engine that only searches my bookmarked nursery websites. It works just like the regular google search except it only returns results from orchid nurseries. The biggest drawback is that while google indexing is good... it's not perfect...so there's always the possibility that one of the nurseries might carry the orchid but google hasn't indexed the page it's on... so the nursery wouldn't show up in the results. Although, when a page isn't indexed by google it's usually through a fault of the website owner and not google.

Here's the link to the search engine.... Orchid Nurseries Search Engine. At first it just searched the 21 sites that were in my bookmarks folder but now it searches all 310 nurseries that are on the Orchid Mall US nurseries page.

Let me know if there are any additional orchid nursery websites that you would like added to the list and I'll be happy to do so.

[exasperatus2002]

Sweat!! sure helps. I usually search by name of the orchid using yahoos search and then check out the nurseries that have it.

[zero742]

Excellent idea epiphyte. Now I can go broke much more efficiently.

[tom499]

This is superb!

I dont suppose you could do one for us Europeans, or point us in the direction of creating such a great site

Big thumbs up for this idea

Tom499

[brookn]

Wow! Thanks for this, it will be very helpful for all of us and our addictions. I have already done a search, it works great.

[epiphyte]

Thanks for the feedback everybody!

Here you go Tom.... European Orchid Nurseries

[tom499]

This is superb!!

We need to get Fred to make this a proper sticky, these are soo cool

[fred]

did you say you would like this thread made Sticky Tom

done my friend

[rmt135]

Sigh I am jealous. Can make one for South East Asia region please pretty please.

[Sharyn]

This is great! Thanks epiphyte for putting this together for us.

[joan gero]

Thanks Epiphyte... this is so thoughtful!

[epiphyte]

Here you go rmt135... Orchid Nurseries of Extended Asia... also includes Australian and New Zealand orchid nurseries (and 1 Indian orchid nursery).

[articuno75]

This is just way too cool. Now can you add more to the list as needed?

[epiphyte]

Originally Posted by articuno75

Now can you add more to the list as needed?

Yes indeed. I'm surprised Google doesn't display all the websites included in the search engine so that people can see if there are any sites that should be added.

Maybe I'll make a webpage that displays the nurseries included in each search engine.

[rmt135]

Originally Posted by epiphyte

Here you go rmt135... Orchid Nurseries of Extended Asia... also includes Australian and New Zealand orchid nurseries (and 1 Indian orchid nursery).

Three cheers to Epiphyte. Great effort. I do not think a mere THANK YOU is enough to cover what you have done.

[Bird Song Farm]

Thanks so much for this, my bookmarks/favorites list is WAY out of control and this will be a tremendous help. Great idea carried out in an efficient way. Wish I had had you working with me when I was actively involved with computers!
AL

[Ellen]

All I know is that my website shows up in Google searches, but not in this search engine. Not sure what the issue is.

[epiphyte]

Hi Ellen,

A custom google search engine only searches websites selected by the person who created the custom search engine. When you first requested that I include your website in the search engine the website you sent me was... http://www.olympicorchids.com

So I checked to see if it would be of any benefit to you if I added your website to the list. This is really easy to do because Google has developed a simple way of doing this by doing a search for "site:olympicorchids.com" to see if Google has indexed any pages from that website. So I gave it a simple test by searching for keywords that I know are on your website...

Cattleya: 0 pages indexed
Encyclia: 0 pages indexed
Phalaenopsis: 0 pages indexed

So I replied to your request and let you know that Google hasn't indexed any of the pages from the website you sent me. Today I received your message to try to include this page... https://ssl.perfora.net/olympicorchids.com/ shopdata product_overview.shopscript

I did the same simple test to see if Google has indexed any of the pages...

Cattleya: 1 page indexed
Encyclia: 1 page indexed
Phalaenopsis: 1 page indexed

So to summarize... technically speaking, and from the perspective of Google, your website/domain does not show up in Google searches for relevant keywords while the website that hosts your website does.

In any case, I added the perfora.net page to the custom search engine as soon as I verified that Google does (now) have that page indexed.

Hope that helps clear up some of the confusion.

[Ellen]

In the process of trying to get the website to show up in the new search engine, I have cleared up some other problems with the website, too. These were more basic problems that had to be solved before I could even see what page Google was indexing! Anyway, it's working, so thanks!!!