Its not as lucrative as you would think. When Google Code Search shut down I launched code search http://searchco.de and while it got some attention it was nowhere near as much as you would expect.

That said I do think that going after markets abandoned by the big guys is an excellent way to go. Usually they abandon it because its not a billion dollar business and isn't worth their time.

I believe now that you need to start attacking their market-share before they close the product down and use the closure as a marketing opportunity.

Hmm. I personally have needed to use Google Code Search several times since it shut down, but have never found your site. When I've looked for alternatives by searching Google (say, for "code search"), I've found Koders (now Ohloh code search), but not yours. It seems like you might need to do a bit more SEO.

Yes I certainly do. I have been working on it, but Koders and Ohloh are pretty established so its a long climb. I think the .de domain might be hurting a little bit too. Happy to listen to any actionable items that can address this though.

Check out the periodic table of SEO: http://searchengineland.com/seotable

Kalzmeus on SEO (click around his blog for more, guy's a genius): http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/

Also some quick, simple advice:

1. Blog 2/3 times per week minimum. Target a single, relevant keyword per blog post (relevant to your domain). The post title, H1s, H2s etc, image tags should all contain your primary keyword. Blog posts don't have to be long, but they do have to be useful.

2. Build a G+, FB, Twitter account for your site if you haven't already. Blast out your new posts to these accounts using Hootsuite (free, but you can pay if you like).

3. Build an audience on the social networks - just search around, follow relevant people and share useful, educational material. Don't spam.

4. Personalised mass email from Google Docs and Gmail (kind of hesitant to recommend this in light of Google shuttering services!): http://www.labnol.org/internet/personalized-mail-merge-in-gm... you need to have "newsletter" signs ups (blast out a digest of your blog posts once per month), calls to actions etc on your site for this to work properly (i.e. optimise your site to capture names & emails). Great, low cost/free way to make sure your audience stays engaged and coming back to your site. You can pay for this kind of service too, e.g. Mailchimp (they've a free tier), Constant Contact, or the likes of Hubspot for full suite of marketing automation tools.

5. Best of Startup marketing/SEO here, that I've compiled over the years (absolute gold): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ag_fyIIMSJ6DdGt...

6. Check out Sell More Software by patio11: http://www.hyperink.com/Sell-More-Software-Website-Conversio...

Many engineers don't fully appreciate marketing as patio11 would be quick to point out, but there's a start.

Being successful at SEO is almost the same as starting your own company. Any one of these is a full-time proposition.

I would seek out professional SEO company's and try to find the best deal. No way anybody could do all this stuff by themselves. In the end, it will be a worthwhile investment. From my own experience it's very time consuming to get it right.

Agreed. I do most of the above as an employee in a startup company, and we use Hubspot to have most of our marketing efforts "under one roof".

However if you're a bootstrapped company, you may not have a choice but to put the time in yourself rather than paying for professional SEO services.

If you have a technical and non-technical co-founders, this list is a large chunk of what the non-technical guy should/will be doing.

Building a great product that people want is pointless without letting people know about it.

@patrickk I've been looking for a basics post about SEo without tech speak for ahem years. That doc is brilliant. Thank you! I might be able to start implementing now instead of having SEO on my to-do list yet again.

Glad you found it helpful!

This is excellent, thanks so much!

Not a huge thing, but your HTML isn't valid - for example, there's Google analytics stuff after the closing </html> tag.

That kind of thing is never going to help

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsearchco.de%2...

I didn't know that had any bearing on it but thinking about it seems like it would be a ranking factor. I'll fix that up soon and see if anything changes. Cheers.

That doesn't make any difference at all to SEO (and in some cases can improve performance - or at least having it after the body tag does).

Grepcode also turns up frequently in results.

I think that the base of Google Code Search users that would be willing to pay for a replacement is probably dwarfed by the amount of users willing to pay for a Google Reader replacement.

I never found Google Code Search useful. What I wanted to be able to do was to search for code expressions with Google -- to be able, for instance, to search for the words "C++" or "call-next-method", exactly as I type them, punctuation and casing and all. No synonyms, no "corrections", no singular/plural conversions, no punctuation-stripping. Google never provided a way to search for exactly what I asked it to search for. Still the main thing missing from google search.

Google's Verbatim tool doesn't do the job?

http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

I wrote up a quick reponse to that one (many googlers ask for data when confronted with how their main product is declining) and here it is: techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-is-going-on-with-search-results.html

Not pretty but have some real examples. Please post your own and paste a link here or in the comments.

Copied from comment on blog:

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Anonymous14 March, 2013 19:55

Obviously a comparison of search results is difficult due to the various signals used to alter search results, but as of 3/14/2013 I get what appear to be 'reasonable' results for both of your example searches:

"sublime text 2" "focus group" : http://i.imgur.com/4LpuUYq.png

cisco "anyclient" : http://i.imgur.com/kptK8HO.png

Again, doesn't necessarily detract from your issue, but just giving search terms isn't reproducible!

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I can now verify that Cisco "Anyclient" is not silently rewritten anymore. Will have to wait and see if they weeded out this particular snag, if they adjusted their fuzzing towards sane or if they just gave me a better bubble (I'd like that I think.).

Verbatim doesn't even fully disable word corrections. There is no way at all to search for punctuation characters. Try it yourself, type in ((((())))) or something and look at all zero results.

Their implementation was lacking, but the concept was sound. Someone could get this right, particularly if it was marketed as a learning tool.

Weird. I find they get literal code searches correct very very frequently.

Code search allowed regular expression searches.

I developed http://imnosy.com to notify you when bookmarks/pages you add are updated. Google Reader used to provide this kind of functionality, so I thought I would mention it here myself.

I use page2rss.com for this.

Good find patrikr: http://imnosy.com is a little different then that service. More of a bookmarking engine.

Code search never made sense I think. You could argue stackoverflow / github were the replacements.

I strongly disagree with this. Much of the world's code is not on GitHub or StackOverflow. This is a much underserved market in my opinion.

Well Nuuton will have that feature. Not at the alpha stage, but it will roll out.

" now would be a great time to start building it."

Now is too late. The right time to have started building it was 2-6 months ago. Now is the time to market an existing solution.

Citing the great gretzky quote, the "puck" is already here.

You missed the beginning of the sentence: "the next one" = "it", not Google reader

The way I see it you have until their next spring cleaning to figure out what they'll axe and make/market it. A couple of months is neither here nor there.

I mean-- err, yes, totally too late! Don't worry about it.

We've been working on something at Skim.Me (http://skim.me) for almost two years now as a replacement for Reader and/or iGoogle. We're still figuring it out but would love anyone looking for a replacement to signup for the next release.

Check out Frontpage, its an RSS reader that lets you browse all your feeds right from your lock screen. No inputting passwords or fumbling through multiple apps.

We've been working on it for the past few months.

http://www.frontpageapp.com

Damn it! I was working on a replacement which will concentrate on the "catching up" part. Guess I missed a golden opportunity for publicity. Ah well.

Definitely interesting the trend that Google is following, first with iGoogle and now Reader.

With backstitch (http://backstit.ch) we get questioned a lot why Google is no longer supporting these types of services (and if this means there is no opportunity there since they aren't worried about it anymore). We honestly feel like there is a lot of surface left uncovered when it comes to personalized/streamlined content and it just doesn't seem to be part of Google's refocusing (this has been seen with the shutting down of a lot of their lab projects as well).

Tried it out, not really feeling it. Not loading Instapaper and Google Reader articles. I can't find the option to delete my account, which is pretty annoying. How do I delete my account again? Thanks.

Sorry to hear about that. If you get a chance please shoot an email to [email protected] and we can take a look at fixing the issues you are experiencing or help you with your account further.

Similarly, who are customers that are neglected by the big players?

In my industry merchant accounts are very difficult to come by. We are considered high risk. Even with a year of processing records showing 1 chargeback out of >3k transactions I can't get access to a merchant with decent rates(currently paying 3.7%). All the big players turn us away. There's gold to be mined off the beaten path.

Which industry is this?