(1888PressRelease)
June 03, 2007 - My Favorites list is an eclectic clutter of countless bygone sites and addresses not worth committing to memory. My home page, however, is sacred. Like 90% of the population, the honor of my home page is bestowed on a humble search engine, though probably not the same one you choose. Mine is Poodwaddle.com. I know, I know. Poo what?
Poodwaddle. I have yet to find it in the dictionary, but what do those geeks at Webster know anyway? Poodwaddle is a cleaver concept in home page design. It allows users to customize the content of the page with many resources, tools and games.
On my first visit, Poodwaddle gave me its default content; a search bar, mp3 player, clock, notepad, calculator, and an advanced search page. After a few minutes of tweaking I had my dream home page with every bell and whistle I could want. I chose a search bar featuring Google search for sites, images, and video as well as a dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, and other resources, a handy notepad for writing reminders to myself, and a clock and calendar. I customized the background with an image of my family and added James Bond music as a background loop. Every time I start my browser I am greeted with this site.
The technology behind Poodwaddle.com, Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash, has been around several years and has been used in games, animations, and interactive sites. This is the first time I have seen it used as a search engine home page. Poodwaddle says the data of each users custom site is stored on their individual computers in a harmless format similar to cookies. Therefore, users never need to sign up, log in, or give personal info. Two thumbs up! I hate sites that require membership and I don’t like logging in every time I access a site.
I also discovered that after the first visit the content loads promptly, even over dialup. Apparently, the content is stored in the computers temporary Internet files where it can be recalled quickly when needed. On my home computer I found the site reloads in one to two seconds. First visit, however, took 8 seconds to load, during which time I was bored and tempted to leave. I recommend Poodwaddle address this issue if they don’t want to lose impatient visitors.
Poodwaddle allows the addition of content from many sources. Any jpg image can be added from virtually any website. Flash games and even YouTube videos can be added. I have not yet tested this feature. I did find the provided calculators useful but chose not to include any on my home page. I'm sure school and college students will find more use for them.
It is also interesting to note that Poodwaddle is not really a search engine. I suppose it is more similar to a directory as it includes links to many resource sites. It uses Google for web searches, Wikipedia for dictionary and encyclopedia, music from Yahoo, video from Google and YouTube, and a compact directory of hundreds of other resources. The directory is cleverly hidden in a popup menu under the search box. Although it is not a complete directory like at Yahoo or Google, it seams more selective and contains most of the resources one could want. I found several valuable sites there that I previously had not known, such as Kayak for travel tickets.
Poodwaddle.com has earned my home page and demoted Google and Yahoo to my Favorites list, sorry. But the question remains, What the _ does "poodwaddle" mean?
