Ah yes, Charlottesville. The mighty big small town. Always on some kind of Top 10 Livable Cities list. Home of The University (our chief engineer/founder is a proud graduate). Cultural/Media per-capita capital of the world (How does a town of 45,000 sustain two high quality alt-weeklies?). Home of some amazing blogs, too (though the iconic Cvillain–think small town Gawker–sadly closed its doors recently due to legal headaches). Yes, I’m gushing as I <3 Cville.

For the Charlottesville search engines, we chose the following:

• Charlottesville.org Official website of the city.
• C-VILLE One of the aforementioned alt-weeklies.
• The Hook The other one.
• Charlottesville Craigslist
• Cville ALL (See below)

The daily paper serving Charlottesville is the Daily Progress. We could not use its search string but have incorporated it into the Cville ALL search engine. This search engine searches within the following locally-relevant resources (again, marvel at the concentration of quality local media for a town this size):

• Blue Ridge Outdoors Serving outdoor enthusiasts throughout the Mid-Atlantic. Its headquarters is in Charlotteville.
• Cavalier Daily Student newspaper of UVA.
• Charlottesville Newsplex Combined news operations website of WCAV CBS19, WVAW ABC16, and WAHU FOX27.
• Charlottesville Blogs Local Blog Aggregator
• cvillenews Independent blog focusing on community issues
• Charlottesville Tomorrow Nonprofit that studies land use, transportation, and community design issues.
• Daily Progress The Media-General owned local daily.
• The Declaration Alternative student newspaper at UVA.
• NBC29 The big NBC affiliate.
• Pursue Charlottesville Official tourism website.
• University of Virginia The U that Jefferson built.

To add the Charlotteville Search Engine Channel to your ButtonALL, enter the customization screen and drop down on Cities :: Charlotteville.

East of Richmond (ButtonALL’s hometown), there lies a tunnel and some traffic. Before and beyond that tunnel is the “757.” The birthplace of our country began in the Hampton Roads section of Virginia. For the Hampton Roads search channel, we chose the two main newspapers servicing that region. Here are the five buttons:

• Virginia Pilot | Twitter Primary paper serving South Hampton Roads (Virginia Beach/Norfolk/Chesapeake).
• Daily Press | Twitter Tribune owned paper serving the Peninsula region (Newport News, Hampton, Williamsburg).
• WAVY 10 | Twitter NBC affiliate of the region.
• Hampton Roads Craigslist
• Hampton Roads ALL see below

The Hampton Roads ALL Search Engine only indexes local websites, hence, when you enter a key word, your search results will be locally relevant.

In addition to the websites listed above, here are the rest of the websites we index:

• Hampton Roads Magazine
• InsideBiz.com
• Military News
• New Journal and Guide
• Norfolk State’s Spartan Echo
• Old Dominion’s Mace and Crown
• Port Folio Weekly
• SevenCities
• TReehouse
• Virginia Gazette
• William and Mary’s Flat Hat
• WTKR-TV 3 (CBS)
• WVEC TV 13 (ABC)

To add the Hampton Roads Search Engine Channels to your ButtonALL, enter the customization screen and drop down on Cities :: Hampton Roads.

The latest city search engine comes to us from Western Pennsylvannia.  The five search engines chosen were as follows:

• Tribune-Review
• WPXI
• KDKA
• Pittsburgh Craigslist
• Pittsburgh ALL*

*Unfortunately, we could not work with the strings for the Post-Gazette or City Paper to create individual buttons; however, the “PITT ALL” search engine indexes both of these periodicals as well as:

• Channel 2 (KDKA CBS)
• Channel 4 (WTAE ABC)
• Channel 11 (WPXI NBC)
• IheartPGH.com
• KQC 1410
• Pitt News
• Pittsburgh Bloggers
• Pittsburgh Courier
• Pittsburgh Catholic
• Pittsburgh City Paper
• Pittsburgh Grapevine
• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
• Pittsburgh Steelers
• Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

The “City ALL” search engines have been very popular with local residents who are looking for just local resources.  Give it a test drive. Type “best sandwich” in the search field, for example, and you’re bound to get some results talking about Primanti’s…MMMM, I could go for one of those right now.

To add the Pittsburgh Search Engine Channels to your ButtonALL, enter the customization screen and drop down on Cities :: Pittsburgh

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.

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while (patiently waiting for a fifth search engine to emerge).  Enter Tweetag (thanks TechCrunch!).

Here are the inaugural five (subject to change…any others out there?):

• Twitter (official)  There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service. (author’s note: We love the fact that Summize came out of Virginia!)
• Twitter Troll A search engine strictly for indexing and searching Twitter posts.
• Tweetag Tweetag gives you a unique way to browse through all the public tweets published on Twitter.com  By selecting certain tags, you can also define the scope of your search and discover new topics related to them
• Twellow Twellow.com is able to assist you in finding real people who really matter. We’re doing the hard work of sifting out people who can help bring your vision to reality, whatever that vision might be.
• Twitter Scan In the innovative world of Microblogging, one site aims to organize it all. Tweet Scan searches Twitter, identi.ca and other Laconica-based sites with more being added all the time.

To add the Twitter Search channel to your ButtonALL you can go to the customization screen and scroll down on Blogs :: Twitter Search. OR just click here (click once, or it’ll continue to add this search row. Remember, you can always delete and re-arrange in the customization section)

Here is a list of our inaugural customizable channels (yeah, you can add/drop/re-arrange* these to your ButtonALL search engine console):

• Blogs
• Cities
  • Atlanta
  • Austin
  • Boston
  • Buffalo
  • Chicago
  • Dallas
  • Denver
  • Detroit
  • Houston
  • Las Vegas
  • Los Angeles
  • Miami
  • Minneapolis
  • New York
  • Philadelphia
  • Phoenix
  • Portland
  • Raleigh
  • Richmond…Hometown, baby!
  • Sacramento
  • San Diego
  • San Francisco
  • Seattle
  • Washington D.C.
• Countries
  • China
  • Italy
  • Spain
  • United Kingdom
• Entertainment
• Health
• Images
• Otaku
  • Anime and Manga Merchandise
  • Figures and Models
• People (default)
• Reference (default)
• Search (default)
• Shopping (default)
• Sports
• Technology
• Travel
• Video This has become the most popular channel that users are adding…

Here are a couple more that I’m currently working on (scratchouts means they’re done).  Only God knows what channels Eric is working on:

• Cities
  • Binghamton, NY: Press & Sun-Bulletin, Binghamton University, City of Binghamton, Binghamton Craigslist, Fox 40
  • Charlotte, NC
  • Charlottesville, VA
  • Cincinatti, OH
  • Cleveland, OH
  • Indianapolis, IN
  • Jacksonville, FL
  • Kansas City, MO
  • Green Bay, WI
  • Nashville, TN
  • New Orleans
  • Second New York City Channel (they got a lot of media in the Big Apple): Star-Ledger, Newsday, NY Magazine, Gothamist, Time Out NY
  • Pittsburgh, PA
  • St Louis, MO
  • Tampa, FL
  • London, England
  • Paris, France
  • Madrid, Spain
  • Rome, Italy
• Finance
  • News
  • Stock lookup Google, Yahoo, MSN, CNNMoney, Wall Street Journal
• “How To” Websites
• More Search Engine Subsets:
  • Charity Search Engines: GoodSearch, GoodTree, Search&Give, Clicks4Cancer, EveryClick
  • Google Channel:  news, blogs, images, maps, shopping
  • Human Search Engines: About, Mahalo, Knol, DMOZ, Squidoo
• MEME/Slang/Urban Legend dictionaries (Urban Dictionary, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Uncylopedia, Snopes, Unslang, etc)
• Music Lyrics
• Otaku:
  • Merchandise (ShopAnimeDvd, Anime Castle, Amazon.us, This is Anime, Amazon.co.jp)
  • Figures (Anime Export, Hobby Search, AAA Anime, Hobby Fan, Kid Nemo)
  • Blogs (Danny Choo, Akiabanana, Akihabara Channel, Japanator, AkibaBlog.en)
  • Culture (That Anime Blog, RIUVA, The-O Network, Dark Mirage.com, Danny Choo)
• Productivity Channel (Lifehacker, 43 Folders, Lifehack.org, Web Worker Daily, Zen Habits)
• Social Bookmarking (general and news)
• Technology Channel 2 If BBC can do it, why not us? (ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM, O’Reilly Radar, Techmeme, AllThingsD)
• Video Games:
  • News: IGN, GameSpot, Kotaku, Joystiq, 1UP.com
  • FAQs/Walkthroughs: GameFAQs,  Strategy Informer, GameWinners, GamerHelp, GameSpy

Sidebar: Yeah, we’re totally aware of the drop-down menu getting too unwieldy…We’ve been internally debating a bunch of design usability issues.  Thanks to those who have given us some initial feedback. Update: Toolbar has been updated with a double hierarchical drop-down setup! (ie, category then channel)

IF YOU ARE A CURRENT BUTTONALL USER AND WOULD LIKE TO SEE A NEW CHANNEL (no pr0n), EMAIL US.  For example, if you live in a town not represented above, we’ll make your channel (giving us some suggestion websites helps us).  As long as your request is within reason, we’ll put you first in line and create it for you.

* Remember, you can drag search channels with your mouse to your desired position.  NEAT AJAX!

Like clockwork, the good folks at PRWeb published our first press release this morning…

Richmond, VA (PRWEB) June 25, 2008 — 4What, LLC today launched ButtonALL (http://buttonall.com), the Internet’s universal remote search engine. ButtonALL gives users a single screen search page bundling the most popular websites on the Internet.

“We think the term ‘universal remote control’ is the perfect metaphor for the functionality of ButtonALL,” said Wray Mills, co-founder of 4What and chief engineer of the ButtonALL project. “Like the single universal remote which replaces multiple controllers, ButtonALL simplifies things by consolidating all the most popular search engines and ‘Web 2.0′ applications into ONE single search page. It saves you time by not having to open new windows and re-starting searches.”

 The ButtonALL search buttons are organized topically by rows or channels: the search channel, reference channel, people channel, and shopping channel. Each channel also features one button highlighted by its red color. Rotated bi-weekly, Red Buttons represent the hottest and newest websites. The companion ButtonALL blog (http://blog.buttonall.com) will introduce each new Red Button release with additional commentary and background information.

“There are so many Internet search engines and new ways of presenting search results in the market place,” stated Mills. “ButtonALL will be a great place to catchup on what’s out there for the average user. You can keep up with the latest breakthroughs in search engines and the Internet industry by reading our blog.”

ButtonALL will soon be launching complete user-customization of buttons and home page layout. Users will be able to pick and choose those buttons that are most relevant to their search preferences. In addition, social networking functionality will allow friends and colleagues to share each other’s personalized search engines.

About 4What:
4What is an Internet startup focusing on innovative online products, applications, and systems solutions. 4What is the creator of ButtonALL, a search engine aggregator. 4What is headquartered in the farmlands of Goochland County, Virginia, with offices in Richmond, Virginia, and Baltimore, Maryland. Our corporate workforce currently consists of more horses, dogs and cats than software engineers. For more information visit http://www.ButtonALL.com.