KellySearch.com – Pay and be Found

Most engineers in the US are familiar with Thom Cats -- the big green set of books that listed every industrial company and its products by Thomas Publishing. The UK equivalent was KellySearch. But did you know KellySearch.com lists more products on its that does ThomasNet.com? 190,000 vs only 80,000, says a KellySearch.com employee at NMW. However, ThomasNet still gets more hits on its website according to www.trafficestimate.com.

But before you go rushing over to KellySearch, here is a basic problem with the way they do things. The site is very advertising driven. If you advertise, your company’s products are listed ahead of the others. Good for revenue in he short run, perhaps, but not good if your goal is to fairly show all products. You could be a market leader and still be listed after products by companies that chose to advertise. This was the case with Bimba, a leading cylinder manufacturer.

I’ve never been a big fan of directories in which rankings are influenced by advertising. In fact, I started TenLinks based on objectively ranking websites based on their value—not on how much they advertised.

Comments

[tonny]

you have two choice for using it:

a) for checking information of suppleirs.
enter the keywords in the blank, enter. and then chose those you focused

b) being a paid member listing, you will get more chance than those free listing. this way, you as the supplier for being find by other purchaser

[Lisa]

We would like to know how to use it.

[tonny--toolee group inc.]

i begain to use kellysearch 3 years ago, that time i only thinking to find some clients on it, and i got some, of course dealing business with them. i do not know if i pay little money on it i can get i better postition for all of my items listed.

I just make one decision, that is i will advertised my company TOOLEE GROUP INC. on kellysearch.com, and I am one of dealer for kellysearch.com in China since Jan. 2007.

[Rich B]

When you looked at Traffic Estimate.com did you also add in the Kellysearch.co.uk, Kellysearch.de, Kellysearch.nl, Kellysearch.jp or Kellysearch Asia? If you would have bothered you would have seen that added together Kellysearch is much busier.
Of course advertisers go first. What website doesn't put advertisers first? Thomas certainly does, Google does, Yahoo hides some of their paid advertisers so they loof like frees.

[Roopinder Tara]

TenLinks ranks websites into TopTen lists based upon how useful or interesting they would be for our CAD, CAM and CAE audience. The basic idea is that having websites ranked by an expert or peer is more valuable than search engines, which can overwhelm with a large number of often irrelevant links.

For example, if you type "CAD" into Google, you will get every meaning of CAD available, not just computer aided design. In fact, let me post all the things we have found CAD to mean...

[Jaspreet Hothi]

Roopinder that is a ideal way to go about, i.e ranking the websites based on their value, but value is a relative term for each customer. I wonder how u go about deciding the value of the websites.