What is tagZar?

tagZar lets YOU, and everyone that uses tagZar, figure out what the best site is for a topic (or what we call a "tag"). You can let us know what tags best describe a site, and then you can vote for sites that others have tagged. Only the very best sites in a given tag end up at the top of the list - so when you search for something in a tag, you'll only get the best sites for that topic. This can greatly reduce the clutter that other search engines will bring back, giving you the highest quality search results.

What's the best way to search on tagZar?

It can take an extra step or two to search on tagZar. Every search page will show a list of tags. When you first start searching it will show a handful of the most popular tags. If you click on one of those tags, tagZar will figure out all the tags related to it, and change the tag list to those tags. Clicking on "Top Sites" will always bring up back to the top list of tags. If you search after you've just selected "Top Sites", you'll get a list of everything on the internet - and have the option of tagging any sites that haven't already been tagged.

To get the best result, pick a tag that most represents what you are searching for. For example, if you wanted to search for iPod related sites, you could select the "gadget" tag or the "MP3 player" tag. You could drill down into that to better refine what you want - for example, if you wanted news about iPods, when you selected "gadget" the "gadget news" tag would likely show up. Click on that, enter your term and click search - and you'll get results back from sites like Gizmodo, Engadget, and BoingBoing.

When you get results back from the tag, take a minute and look at the results - for reach site brought back, if you agree that it is a really good site for that tag, vote for it - that will make sure that when anyone else searches on that tag, only the best results are brought back.

How do I add a site to tagZar?

There's a two ways to do this. If you do a search on the "top sites" tag, any site on the interenet could potentially come back. If you see "Tagd" next to it, then it's already in the system. You can click the next to the info about when it was added to get details about what tags have been used on the site (and you can add your own).  If it's not already tagd, then you can add it by clicking on "Tagit!".

The second way is to click "Add a Site" at the bottom of the tagZar pages. This will let you type in a URL, give it a description, and enter tags for it.

If you add a site either of these ways, you'll notice a "Auto Detect" button next to the Description and Tags. If you click on that, we'll go out to the web page and try to figure out what those two fields should be. PLEASE take a look at the result and edit to what you think is best.

It's really important that when you add a site, or add additional tags, that you enter tags that best represent the site.

I can't find a tag to search on - what should I do?

Any time we show you a list of tags for a search, you’ll see “More Tags” at the end.  Click on it and you’ll see a “Complete” list of tags.  If you click on “Top Sites”, you’ll see EVERY tag in the system.   If you click on any other tags, we’ll show you every tag that we think is related to the tag you clicked on.

You can also click for a tag search - this will let you enter in the start of tag, give you a list of possible matches, and let you select one to search on.

We are still growing – we are trying to build a knowledge base for the best sites on the internet and what topics they cover.  Which can take some time!  If you don’t find a tag that works, or the sites that come back for that tag aren’t helpful, then just go to “Top Sites” and enter a search term.  While the results won’t be as good as if you’d searched under a tag, you should see some sites that have what you are looking for – and you want to help us out, you’ll tag those sites so others can use the tags and sites.

The sites seem to match the tag I used, but do not seem to be current...

Sites entered a year ago still might be perfect for what you want - but we realize that over time, sites will no longer be relavant . So we let you pick the "Freshness" for everything.

Above all tags on the search pages you'll see a link that has "Freshness", followed by the current freshness and then a time range. So if you pick "30 days" you'll only see tags that have been used in the last 30 days, and the sites searched will be limit to those that have been submitted in the last 30 days. Go ahead and try clicking on different Freshness when you get search result - the tags available and the sites brought back will change.