Briefly, as a child, I rode horses. The knowledge that I was falling off horses more than I was actually RIDING them curtailed that activity. But I couldn’t suppress a bit of nostalgia when I got a notification for Equilink, a search engine for all things horsey, available at http://www.equilink.com/ . At this full-text search engine you can do a keyword search or you can browse by category (racing, dressage, western, vacation, etc.)

The first search I do on targeted search engines is intended to break them — the search is “Strawberry Shortcake” . If I get search results about a certain little annoying 80s cartoon character, the search engine has flunked the Strawberry Shortcake test. (There are at least a dozen vertical search engines I have not covered because they flunked the Strawberry Shortcake test.) Equilink passed with flying colors, giving me no results.

Turning to more horse-related searches, I did a search for withers acupressure. I got at least 100 results (I didn’t get a result count) of searches that covered e-commerce, information sites, and at least one result from Amazon. Results contained page title, URL, and snippet. A snapshot of the site would have been nice, especially a sometimes the whole URL is not included (too long?)

Once you have the search results, you have the additional option to filter them by state and city. Not sure how the state is being determined, though — several attempts to filter by state brought no results. California? 0. New York? 0. TEXAS? 0. The only state filter that worked was Alabama, and that brought one result. Use this feature cautiously.

All the searches I did, and all the browsing for that matter, brought very targeted, focussed results. I would like more descriptions and full URLs in the search results (because it’s always good to see where you’re going) and RSS feeds would be nice, of course. Worth a look to the equestrian-minded.