Resources

Websites - These websites are places that particularly have a lot of important information and are updated relatively frequently. Most of the new information around the SaaS industry and the SaaS 4 needs to be searched for, however.

Web/Blog Search Tools - Web Search resources are your standard search tools - Google, Yahoo, etc. Blog Search engines can you find new blog posts and blog feeds.

Web Directories - Web Directories are directories of links to websites about a specific topic. Instead of using a search engine to find pages, you browse a web directory until you find a category or sub-category that interests you. The categorization is based on the website as a whole and not a specific page.

RSS Readers - RSS Readers, also known as aggregators, store information about RSS feeds in one central location for easy management and access.

News Search Tools - These tools can help you more efficiently find the latest news and customize news to fit your needs. Although you may typically get all your news from one source or one search tool, use News Search Tools to broaden your sources.

Page Monitors - Page Monitors alert you when a page or a specific part of a page changes. This can be helpful for tracking "static" web pages that do not have RSS feeds and change pretty rarely. Another use of Page Monitors is to track multiple content sources, filter new content based on your preferences, and provide the results. For keeping track of SaaS, page monitors were only used for that second purpose as there weren't too many pages that needed to be track and didn't have RSS feeds.

E-Mail Alerts - EMail Alerts can be viewed as a primitive version / pre-cursor to RSS feeds. The services that provide e-mail alerts send e-mails to alert you about new changes in search results or news updates. E-Mail alerts were unnecessary for this topic because of the abundance of RSS-enabled pages. However, please check out the evaluation of Yahoo Alerts to understand how they work.

Tag-Based Sites - Tag Based Sites consist of social news and social bookmarking websites that use tags / tag-clouds to organize the content. Very great sources of what the latest, most popular places to visit are.

Image Search - Image Search tools are more advanced versions of the simple image functions that exist with traditional search engines. However, because this topic is software, and software that does not exist at retail stores, images are pretty irrelevant. Thus, no image search tools were evaluated.

Video Search - Video Search tools help you find videos…very straightforward. There are more video search tools out there besides YouTube so check these out.

Other Search Tools - There are some search tools out there that don't really fall into a category or combine a few different functions. The search tools evaluated in this section are interesting and could be helpful in keeping up with Software-as-a-Service. Also contains information/evaluation of Google's Custom Search Engine tool.

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