About Featured Sites

At the top of each page containing business listings Switchboard may also display up to three relevant pay-for-placement advertisements from our paid sponsors. Paid sponsors who provide ads to the Featured Sites section include Google, Yahoo! Search, Switchboard Advertisers, and Ingenio.

About Ratings and Reviews

Reviews do not reflect the views of Idearc Media Corp., its subsidiaries or affiliated companies or their respective employees, officers, directors, or shareholders. Idearc Media Corp. does not assume responsibility or liability for any displayed user review or for any claims, damages, or losses resulting from any use of the Site or the materials contained therein.

About Web Search Results

The Switchboard search's metasearch technology automatically returns the top results from the Web's leading search engines. As a result, Switchboard web search will return a richer and broader spectrum of results than those available by using any other single search engine.

Each of the search engines accessed by Switchboard search-Google, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, and others-work in different ways, and therefore, provide different results.

The Internet is an enormous and constantly changing medium, making it impossible for any single engine to reach the entire Web. Switchboard's metasearch technology provides an easy way to search more of the Web by harnessing the collective power of the most popular engines.

Here is a quick summary of the different types of search technologies and where they search for information.

Search Engines deploy special programs that go out and read large numbers of Web pages. From this effort, they compile a long list of content also known as an index. When the engine receives a search request, it compares the search words to the index and returns the results to you.

• Engines searched by Switchboard search include Google, Yahoo! Search and Ask Jeeves.

Web Directories are normally compiled manually, by user submission, and often involve an editorial selection and/or categorization process.

• Web directories searched by Switchboard search include About and Looksmart.

Pay-For-Placement search engines return relevant listings from paid sponsors.

• Paid search engines searched by Switchboard search include Yahoo! Search Marketing and Miva.

Additional Search Content: Switchboard search also utilizes other resources that provide content for images, audio/MP3, video, and news. The following list provides a summary of these resources.

• Image Search provided by Yahoo! Search and Ditto.

• Audio Search provided by Yahoo! Search and Singingfish.

• Video Search provided by Yahoo! Search and Singingfish.

• News Search provided by Yahoo! News, Topix, Fox News and ABCNews.

Switchboard search custom blends and ranks the results derived from each of the separate engines based on the specific terms you type. If, for example, you type the words "digital camera prices", the resulting search will include many commercial Web pages containing information on businesses offering cameras for sale. If, on the other hand, you type "digital camera technology", your results will be weighted toward articles, information and other research.

As you can see, this ability of Switchboard search to access multiple search engines and intelligently retrieve the top results based on the specific terms you type, makes it easier to search more of the Web and get better results.