Whether you would like to admit or not, many of us airsofters spend a lot of time combing websites, forums, online stores, and other online sources for airsoft guns and gear. The beauty of going online is that you can widen your search of airsoft products from your location to basically worldwide, all at the click of the mouse or a tap on the screen.
Still even with if we use Google and other search engines, we still spend a lot of time going from one page of search results to another. It is worse for using some sites' search functions, many are not that precise that it's still best to rely on the usual search engines.
But how about having a search engine dedicated to airsoft stuff? Just imagine one website to visit and find out if the product(s) that you have been searching for is in stock at various retailers and displayed to you rather then mixed up with other but unrelated search results. It’s cleaner and more convenient, isn't it?
Our good friends from Airsoft.nu just created probably one of the most handy online tools. I have personally seen their efforts coding to make sure that they were able to have a limited beta during the IWA & Outdoor Classics 2015 in Germany and now they can finally say that they have a full Beta of the AirsoftDB search engine for everyone to use.
Here is what Daniel has to say about their service:
The new website Airsoftdb (Airsoftdb.com) is a search engine to find airsoft products from your local shop and stores worldwide.
The system automatically detects your location and tailors its search results to show products from shops which are most local to you, by country (or by state if in the U.S.). If they are no shop (or not yet indexed) in your area you will see products from a wider area.
The website is in early beta preview version and new shops and functions (and improvements) are added continuously.
We think it’s better to let airsofters try the services the website provides during development than release it later with more functionality since we think it will help a lot of airsofters to find airsoft related products with the current functionality.
The website is a hobby project by people mainly from the Swedish airsoft website Airsoft.nu. We are working on this during our spare time.
We hope that the global airsoft community and the airsoft industry like this website and its services.
I have tested and indeed the site is responsive with search results displayed quickly. What I know is that they have spiders/web crawlers that index airsoft retail sites to come up with more search results. The search results will still need to be refined since it will put out results based on all the keywords that you have submitted to the search form. An example is "MadBull Inner Barrels" where search results turn up not just inner barrels, but anything that contains "MadBull", "Inner", and "Barrels" thus, you cannot immediately zero-in to the item that you have been looking.
They seemed to have left-out pricing in the search results and it would be great to have a glance at pricing and be able to compare pricing amongst retailers.
AirsoftDB is now indexing retail shops in the U.S. , Europe and some parts of Asia such as Hong Kong and Japan. If you are an airsoft retailer and want your products to show up on the search results, you better contact them so they can inform you on how to make your site indexed by their spiders.
This project has good potential and it would be fantastic to see airsoft retailers around the world supporting this project. There are still a lot of things for the AirsoftDB crew to work on the improve on our search experiences, but for now, we can have ourselves content with their fast search results, even if they're not yet precise (we're spoiled by Google).
The AirsoftDB crew would love to hear any problems and bugs that you would find whilst using the search engine. You can give your comments and suggestions by following them on Facebook or at the AirsoftDB Contact Page.
If you like the project, why not make it a habit to make it your search engine for airsoft shopping? So far, it's the only thing we have for airsoft, we might as well use it for product and bargain hunting.