Search engines make everyone’s lives easier. For instance, they can help you self-diagnose that the rash on your arm means you have cancer. They can help you find the best place to buy an antique chair you’ll never sit in, and of course, they will readily tell you the last person Taylor Swift wrote a song about. In fact, there is very little Google cannot help you find.
But search engines, like Google, do have a few major flaws. The results you are given are not customizable and are not directly optimized to your needs. Of course you can always change your search query, but I’m talking about a deeper level of customization.
What are Google’s major limitations?
- Google delivers every piece of content it finds. That’s part of the charm - Google is powerful and comprehensive. If it exists, you will eventually find what you are looking for, it just might take a while.
- Google has only 2 filters available. Results are automatically filtered by relevancy – but you can change this to date, or a combination of the two.
- Google will not save your search query unless you are using Google Alerts.
- You can only do one search within a topic at a time.
Why are these limitations?
- Google is a great search engine, and in most cases, it’s exactly what you need. But if you are a content marketer, social media manager, or a knowledge seeker, Google can fall short: If you are looking for content to curate, source, or read for industry knowledge, you don’t want every relevant webpage returned in your results. With company websites, wiki pages and the like making it into the mix, the content you are interested in gets pushed to the bottom or onto another page.
- If you’re fulfilling one of these three roles, you want shareable content. Google will get you relevant content, but that doesn’t mean it will be especially shareable or from influential sources in your industry.
- Do you remember finding that fantastic article last week? Do you also remember what terms you used to find it? Google doesn’t either. This means if you didn’t save your search query elsewhere, it’s time for trial-and-error searching until you find it again.
- When you’re looking for great content, it helps to play around with filter options to see what gives you the best results – thus saving you time. But with Google, you will need to toggle between filters and assess their results without having all the information in front of you, or you’ll need to have multiple tabs open to flip through. It works, but it sure can be a pain, especially when you’re in a hurry.
UpContent is your Content Search Engine – Filling in the Gaps
UpContent is designed to be a content discovery tool. It is specially created to save you – content marketers, social media managers and knowledge seekers – a lot of time and frustration. It fills in where everyday search engines fall short:
- UpContent only pulls the type of content you are interested in sourcing or reading: news articles, blog posts, Youtube videos and social media posts. It removes all the websites that you are not interested in, such as company pages and wiki pages.
- UpContent offers 4 different ways to filter your results, two* of which are unique among search engines:
- Relevance – Find content that is most related to your search query
- Recency – Find content that was created most recently
- *Shareability – Find content that has the best propensity to be shared among your audience (content chosen is based on psychological indicators)
- *Influence – Find content that is written by influential authors or published on influential sites
- UpContent always saves your search topic so you can use it again and again. You can also save articles, so they are always easy to access when needed.
- UpContent’s allows you to conduct multiple, related searches simultaneously within the same topic. You can think of it as a way to develop a well-rounded conversation and always have the information of interest displayed together. There’s no need to conduct multiple searches across several tabs to find what you want.
In the end, UpContent can shave hours off of the time it takes you to find the perfect pieces of content.
Did you know…
In 2012, it was discovered that 813,894 pieces of content are generated online each minute. Each minute! And that was 3 years ago. Trying to find the right piece of content just from what was posted one minute ago is harder than finding a needle in a haystack. UpContent was developed to make this reality a little more manageable.