SirChear for Events
SirChear is dedicated to event search — those times and spaces that happen out there, in the real world, when we’re not sitting at our computers or in meetings.
The types and numbers of events in the world is truly vast — there are many millions of events, large and small, professional and amateur, paid and free, business and consumer. This fragmented, transitory world is nearly impossible to keep track of and to nail down. There are some wonderful events-oriented sites that do a good job of cataloging some small subset of the world’s events, but they’re not really good enough to cover all of the possible variations.
We decided that a simple search engine is a good start on getting to the events that matter to you, and the best of them is Google. Under a theory that less is more, we’ve intentionally narrowed our search to just events. This means that your search for “Billy Joel” or “Drones” or “Dental Implants” will not produce articles, reviews, Wikipedia entries, blog posts, Twitter feeds or anything else that you don’t want. It will produce only Events related to your search.
What is an Event?
It is a thing that happens in public — a conference, a trade show, a convention, a concert, a play, a movie, a game or match, a lecture, an exhibition, a parade, a show, a ceremony … That pretty much squares with what you thought it might be, right?
It’s also whatever a webmaster thinks is an event. We say this because we are especially targeting those web pages that the webmaster has described as an “Event” in a web taxonomy known as “Schema.org.” Here is what Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex think an event is comprised of:
How does SirChear Work?
SirChear uses Google’s Custom Search engine to target especially those sites that have Schema markup or other kinds of structured data. This means that it has a very strong bias toward showing those sites that have been declared events by their own webmasters. They worked hard to do this, so we’re confident that they really are events, and not media, products, companies or other kinds of things that exist on the web.
Notice that your search results include a couple of interesting little doo-dads. First, there is a set of tabs just before the search results. They look like this:
This allows you to focus in on results from specific sites. As we grow the SirChear site, new “refinements” like these will be included. This should hopefully help you zoom in on results that are best suited to your needs.
In addition, we allow for certain sorting options:
Honestly, we’re not sure how useful this is to you, so we will experiment with a variety of different approaches (which will undoubtedly make this short description out-of-date).