You may wish to contact English department at a nearby high school or college, and arrange to have an upper level student perform this task for you. It's that important!

7. Keep your page design clean and free of clutter. A site that visually assaults visitor will be clicked off quickly. White space and clearly defined sections will make for easier navigation.

8. For a large site, break content into sections and create seperate pages accordingly. Many Internet users do not like to scroll down indeterminately on overly long pages. Manage your page length to three screens maximum.

9. Test your pages with multiple browsers to be sure they work as they should. What works in one browser may not work with another. The two most commonly used browsers as of this writing are MS Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

10. Invest wisely in registering your own domain name and acquiring professional quality webhosting. To rely, even at first, on sub-domains or free hosting services will seriously harm your business credibility. In addition, avoid using any free email account as a business contact.

11. Provide a incentive and a method for visitors to join your mailing list, and display it prominently on each page. This is not an option. It's a necessity to your ongoing success.

12. Openly display your full name, your physical address, and at least two contact methods (ie. email and telephone) on your site. This will cultivate visitor trust, and add to your credibility as an honest and above-board business owner.

EmailPinoy [ www.emailpinoy.com ] Sends your query to 15 search engines. Don't use Kanoodle, ah_ha.com and GoClick pay-per-click search engines, because you'll get irrelevant results. For better results enclose phrases in quotation marks. This MSE is from Philippines. 1 SECOND [ 1second.com ] Searches a good selection of 14 major SEs and WDs, throws out duplicates and summarizes results in a neat listings page. Use Advanced Search if you want to customize search, especially timeout of search engines. My Prowler [ myprowler.com ] Searches over a dozen search engines, news, images, audio/MP3, music videos, auctions and various other sites. Compiles results, weeds out irrelevant matches and provides a summarized report. It accepts "natural language" query. Gimenei [ www.gimenei.com ] Use of "Advanced Search" option is strongly recommended. You can customize results page, including my favorite option, "All Results" in one page. This is a comprehensive and fast MSE based in Manhattan, New York. Dug Dugi [ www.dugdugi.com ] Queries major search engines, collates results, eliminates bad information and aggregates results in an ultra-clean layout. For each match you'll get search engine and ranking of page. Search 66 [ search66.com ] Groups together pages from same domain. Beautiful. To avoid SEs timeouts, select "Speed": "Comprehensive". Obviously, you'll get more results from this excellent Australian MSE. Besides very good MSEs listed above, there are also some others that are worth a try: Internav [ internav.com ], NetXplorer [ www.netxplorer.de ] (Germany), Aaise [ www.aaise.com/meta ], Metengine [ www.metengine.com ] (Antigua), One2Seek [ www.one2seek.com ], Ithaki [ www.ithaki.net ], Fossick [ www.fossick.com/Search.htm ] (Australia), Pandia [ www.pandia.com/powersearch/index.html ] (Norway), meta EUREKA [ www.metaeureka.com ] (Netherlands), Widow [ www.widow.com ], VROOSH! [ www.vroosh.com ] (Canada), Meta 360 [ meta360.com ], 7 Meta Search [ 7metasearch.com ], Metor [ www.metor.com ] (Germany) and Ixquick [ www.ixquick.com ]. The following is a list of some unimpressive meta search engines. These MSEs do not provide breadth of coverage offered by sites recommended above. Each of these has its own flawed characteristics, but generally they are old and have not kept up with latest capabilities or they suffer from too many functional problems.

Metacrawler [ www.metacrawler.com ], Dogpile [ www.dogpile.com ], C4 (formerly Cyber 411) [ www.c4.com ], Mamma [ www.mamma.com ] (Canada), Pro Fusion [ www.profusion.com ], moonmist [ www.moonmist.info ] (UK), Bytedog [ www.bytedog.com ] (Canada), il motore [ www.ilmotore.com ] (Italy), METASEEK.NL [ www.metaseek.nl ] (Netherlands) and ApocalX [ search.apocalx.com ] (France). 2. Pseudo MSEs Type I The type I Pseudo MSE sends query to search engines, and then presents results grouped by search engine in one long, easy to read scrollable list. Be careful. Based on how many SEs you select, waiting time can be very long. Some people might find these MSEs useful, however. The best MSEs in this category are: Mall Agent [ www.mallagent.com/web.html ], which provides results from 38 SEs and WDs, qb Search [ www.qbsearch.com/ ] (from 17), Better Brain [ www.betterbrain.com/ ] (12), My Net Crawler [ www.mynetcrawler.com/ ] (12), NBCi [ nbci.msnbc.com ] (11), Planet Search (Sherlock Hound) [ www.planetsearch.com/ ] (10), Rede Search [ www.redesearch.com/ ] (8), 1 BLINK [ www.1blink.com/ ] (7), Search Wiz [ www.searchwiz.com ] (6) and Search Fido [ www.searchfido.com ] from 4 SEs and WDs. 3) Pseudo MSEs Type II There are two types of Type II Pseudo MSEs: a) You type your query one time and then select search engines. One browser window will open for each SE selected. The best are: Multi-Search-Engine.com [www.multi-search-engine.com] which opens 36 windows, GoGettem [ www.gogettem.com ] (30), Search Bridge [ www.searchbridge.com ] (24), The Info [ www.theinfo.com ] (15) and Net Depot [ www.netdepot.org ] (15). b) You choose SE, type query in SE' form and a new window will open. Every search engine has its own query form. Many users will find these window-opening MSEs annoying. The best of this type are: Alpha Seek [ www.alfaseek.com ], Westlaser [ www.westlaser.com/ ], Dan's No Overhead Search Thingy [ www.danielc.com hingy.html ], Express Find [ www.expressfind.com ] and Freeality [ www.freeality.com/meta.htm ] .

4) Search Utilities (also called Desktop Search Applications) These are downloadable meta search tools that search multiple search engines. Results are collated and ranked for relevancy with redundancies removed. They are not free but most of them have a free trial version available. The price? A few dozen dollars. The most popular are: BullsEye [ www.intelliseek.com/ ], Copernic [ www.copernic.com/ ], LexiBot (formerly know as Mata Hari) [ lexibot.com ], WebFerret [ www.zdnet.com/ferret/index.html ] and WolfBot [ www.wolfbot.com/ ].

Conclusions: Now, you might ask yourself: If MSEs are so good, do we still need search engines? Well, it depends. I use a search engine - yup, Google - when I search for general information. I use a meta search engine when I'm looking for a unique or obscure search term or if I want to make an in-depth analysis of what's out there on a specific subject. My suggestion is to find some time and give a test drive to MSEs; you might fall in love with these lesser-known search tools. And next time you use your search engine of choice, remember that there are search tools that can provide you many more relevant results. Good luck with your searches!