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After doing a half assed search for a pay per click search engine script back in 2004, I settled on one called Smarter Search from a site called SmarterScripts.com. I did not even know how to install and configure scripts at the time so I hired someone to do the install and some basic customizing over at Scriptlance. I actually heard that this freelancer site was run by the same people that owned Smarter Scripts, and it was launched using the freelancer script they sold on that site.

Anyway, the script was a complete bare bones job. It was able to incorporate feeds from other search engines as well as have people submit their own sites, but unfortunately people were required to sign up first. They could still have a free listing by setting their pay per click bid amounts for keywords to zero, but nobody wanted to bother and I can’t blame them. So it was basically a feed engine, and one with a pretty ugly back end too.

The administration area was 99% text, so if people did sign up, it was really dull and unprofessional looking. This was not the right script to buy not knowing much about coding or designing. I was able to learn on the go using that script by sprucing things up with a little color and alignment here and there. If I had to do it all over again, I would not choose this script for my search engine.

Their customer support was pretty bad too. They had a forum that was never posted to by support and if you got an email back after contacting support, it sounded like a fifteen year old wrote it. I heard similar (and worse) support stories from the sister site Scriptlance.

I had gone back to Smarter Scripts recently just to see what was still there and it looked like agriya.com had purchased them. However, as of this posting, the smarterscripts.com website is no longer. It goes nowhere, not even a forward to another site. I guess they changed their mind about their acquisition.

I have since moved on to the Sphider search software and am much happier with it. Although the software is just as stripped down, I’m more knowledgeable today than I was then, and I also knew what I was getting into with Sphider, but not with Smarter Search. If you’re going to download a script that is not very well designed or developed, learn from my mistakes and don’t pay for it. Go open source.

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