I spend hours during my day to seek for business opportunities online, about triple the time I actually work on my business.

The time I have invested allows me to learn about new business opportunities and take a couple of great business opportunities.

I usually seek business opportunities online in:

• Web forums: SitePoint, DigitalPoint and the likes – many hidden opportunities here, but beware of scams!
• Online marketplace: SitePoint Marketplace and the likes – I somewhat prefer marketplace with paid listing that naturally screen-out ‘unwanted’ listings.
• Search engines: Google, Yahoo! and the likes – The most common, but powerful source of information.
• Business online publications: Entrepreneur.com and the likes – This includes blogs, I mainly look for benefits, recommendations and reviews of the business opportunities offered.

The new search tool I found

I recently came across a different search engine that help me in searching for opportunities, namely RankNoodle.com.

It looks just like the other search engines I have used to search for business opportunities, but this one has caught my eyes – it is the human involvement in search results.

To explain better, let us use the term I searched yesterday – ‘business opportunity‘ and ‘franchising‘.

The search results – named as ‘article’ – are quite comprehensive and informative – you can get the common web results, images, and videos, as well as other interesting results such as definition of your searched terms, related conversation and related articles (search results).

I particularly enjoy the thumbs up/thumbs down part – What is this significant for me? I will get better search result the each time I use the search engine in the future.

What I really need (hopefully the site developer read this!) is the voting capability for images and videos, as well. This way, visitors will get the search results that is 100 per cent human powered.

One example why I need the voting capability for images and videos is due to the some irrelevant results – i.e. in my ‘franchising’ search results, I get a video that leads to an episode of a serial in Playhouse Disney! Let me thumb down on that :)

One more thing – Allowing user to register is also a nice feature to add. This will allow me to save my searched terms for future reference.

I recommend you to give RankNoodle.com a try to see whether it will benefit you in your entrepreneur journey.

Ivan Widjaya
Searching for business opportunities