The Tampa Bay Local Search Engine Channel has been created. To add the Tampa/St Pete channel to your ButtonALL you can go to the customization screen and drop down on Cities:: Tampa Bay. Remember, in the customization screen, you can re-arrange, add, and delete your search engine preferences.  The inaugural search channels for Tampa are as follows:

• Tampa Tribune
• St Petersburg Times/TampaBay.com
• Creative Loafing Tampa Bay
• Tampa Bay Craigslist
• Tampa ALL**
  

**OK, so what’s Tampa ALL?  This is a new feature we are launching for all local city search channels.  Up until this point, it has been difficult to winnow the search candidates down to just five choices/buttons for each city.  Sometimes as in the case of NYC, we had to create two channels for the city.

All local channels will now incorporate a Google Custom Search Engine (last red button–”City ALL”) that only searches the local media of a particular town (newspapers, magazines, television, and bloggers).  In the case of Tampa, the CSE only searches the following resources:

• The Bradenton Herald
• Creative Loafing Tampa Bay
• Florida Sentinel Bulletin
• The Oracle (University of South Florida)
• Sarasota Herald-Tribune
• St Petersburg Times/TampaBay.com
• Tampa Bay Online
• Tampa Bay Craigslist
• Tampa Bay Newspapers (Seminole Beacon, Beach Beacon, Largo Leader, Belleair Bee, and Clearwater Citizen)
• Tampa Bloggers
• Tampa Tribune
• WFLA 8 NBC
• WFTS 28 ABC
• WTSP 10 CBS

By getting rid of the noise, this strategy allows for more of a refined search of local-only resources.  For example, type the term “best restaurants”, and you will only get results relevant to that city.  Pretty cool.