College planning can be confusing, complex and stressful, especially if you have no previous knowledge or experience with the process. With so much to learn and handle at this vital time in a student’s life, it is important to properly educate yourself so that you can make the most informed decisions for your particular situation. Thousands of helpful resources are available on the Web, and it can be difficult to determine which are credible and worthy of your time. I know this only too well – I am a parent of a high school senior, who’s applying for college this year!

Zakta’s newest Web Guide collection, College Planning Made Easy, is a collection of the best Web sites, articles, videos and more on a variety of topics related to the college planning process. This has been put together by me and other members of the growing Zakta community.

College-ready students and parents will benefit from Zakta Guides in four main categories: Choosing a College, Applying for College, Paying for College and College Living.  It features resources and advice ranging from choosing the right college and what to study in school, to preparing for standardized testing. The collection also offers a variety of financial aid resources, including basic information on how to apply, how much money is available and how the programs work.

If users don’t see the information they’re looking for, they can submit a topic idea to Zakta, who will then evaluate whether it’s a college planning topic others would be interested in learning more about as well. The Zakta team, with the help of other Zakta members, will research the topic and create additional Zakta Guides as necessary, organizing the best, most relevant information available on the Web.

Most importantly, the beauty of Zakta is that it enables people to share their knowledge or expertise with others in an organized, effective manner.  Users who have already been through the college planning process or have specific expertise can share their knowledge with others by creating and sharing a Zakta Guide of their own.

As always, we are eager to get your feedback.

Zakta made its official debut in Monday’s Cincinnati Enquirer, “New Search Engine Holds Promise” and the Business Courier of Cincinnati, “Kadayam Debuting Zakta.com.”

Special thanks to Laura Baverman from the Enquirer.

Monday, we also published a press release about our launch. You can find it here: “Start-up Goes Beyond Google, Yahoo and Bing For Deeper Searches on the Web.”

Since we made our debut in the local press circuit, the Internet machine has been a buzz with all-things Zakta!

Here are just a few blog posts that we have come across so far…

• Steve Phillips, Pimp My Keywords: “Start-up Goes Beyond Google, Yahoo & Bing For Deeper Searches On The Web”
• Matthew Hurst, Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media: “Zakta – A New Way to Organize Web Knowledge”
• Doug Ross, Director Blue: “Is Zakta the Facebook of Search?”
• Yogesh Malik, Subtleties and Shades of Web, Net and Apps:  “Search Deeper, Go Serious with Zakta”
• Charles Knight, AltSearchEngines: “Zakta is No Ordinary Search Engine”
• Franz Dill, Eponymous Pickle: “Zakta Search Engine”
• Constance Ard, Answermaven: “Zakta.com: Collaborative, Expert Search Tool Goes Beyond Search Engines As We Know Them”
• Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer: “Search Innovation From Someone Other Than Google”
  

Various media outlets have also picked up our launch story:

• AOL Money: “Start-up Goes beyond Google, Yahoo and Bing for Deeper Searches on the Web”
• MSN Money: “Kadayam debuting Zakta.com”

Last but not least, we love the feedback we’ve been receiving directly from our users. Please keep it coming – it helps us make Zakta better for everyone! So drop your thoughts, questions, concerns or comments on our feedback page anytime!

Photo source: Cincinnati.com

The founders of Zakta are, from left, Mahendra Vora, Mark Reed and CEO Sundar Kadayam. Zakta offices are located in Blue Ash.

Third of 7 ways to improve informational searches …

3. Own and control the search process and results completely

Often, the search results have a mix of personally relevant and irrelevant results. Can you edit, delete, or reorder your search results so they reflect what you personally find as relevant to you?

On Zakta, the search results are completely editable, and under your control. You can delete results you don’t like. You can drag-and-drop results to rearrange them. You can add tags and annotations to any result. Just hover over any result, and use the toolbar that is visible on the result and edit it the way you want it.

Frequently, you have to do multiple queries to find information on the same topic, so the information you need is actually spread across the search results for multiple queries. Can you keep the interesting results from these multiple queries in one place for easy consumption?

Zakta has the perfect tool for this scenario, called the ClipPad that you can use to save information that you want, in one place, from your various queries on the same topic.

The Web is so big that, sometimes, no single Web search engine can help you find all the information you need from one place. Can you easily search alternative sources to find what you are looking for?

Zakta has the ideal solution for this in the form of Zakta SearchPacks, which bring together the best Web search engines of a given type / category and lets you search them all from a single interface.

Finally, sometimes you find the information you need while you are browsing, not while you are searching, even if you started off with a search result page from some search engine. Can you keep these important finds together with other things you might have found earlier?

Zakta has an elegant solution for this problem, in the form of a Plugin for Firefox, that enables you to search anywhere, and clip and save anything you want from anywhere directly into your ClipPad (or your Guides, a feature we’ll cover in a follow on post).