Welcome to Lute Lumber’s Building Supply Search
What is Lute Lumber?
Lute was my Grandfather’s nickname so we decided to keep a family name for the web site. The idea came from having to do a lot of web searches for material, information, etc. in my day to day job. What I found was a mess. There is no great place to find information about the entire building industry. Over the past 6-8 months I have been using a program (Google Custom Search Engine) which let me develop my own search engine. And now, a project that started out for personal use has evolved into a new business plan.
How Should I Use LuteLumber.com?
When looking for something in the Building Supply Industry use it as a replacement for your normal Google search. Though it works on the Google Custom Search Engine platform it will give you a much more targeted search result. AND… in case you can’t find what you are looking for in one of our tabs (see next section) we have added in a Google tab which is a plain vanilla Google search.
What is in the Building Supply Search?
I currently have around 6000 web pages in about seven different search engines covering the US, Canada and the UK/Ireland (plus many other places around the world). Each search engine represents a different tab on the results page. The different tabs are:
1. Industry: These are the manufactures, retailers, wholesalers, mills, etc. of the building industry. Basically, if you are a company that lives in or services the building supply industry, you would be located here.
2. Google: This is a just a plain old Google search… in case I missed something.
3. Maps: This is a simple Google Maps search but will show local results for your search. It will work off the users IP address to show results in their local area.
4. Associations: This contains about 300 of the different association that service the building industry (NRLA, NAWLA, etc.).
5. Knowledge: This contains all your tutorials, videos, stats and how-to’s of the building supply world.
6. News: This will be broken down into two parts… General News sites (NY Times, Washington Post, etc.) and Building Industry news sites (Prosales Magazine, Retailing Magazine, etc.).
7. Government: This has links to all the national, state, Canadian and UK government web sites.
8. More: This will contain off beat searches that I think are relevant and can provide even better targeted info (ex. we are currently working on a Pressure Treated only search).
***So… If you do a search for “beetle kill timber,” on a single page you will get a tab with companies that sell beetle kill timber, google results for BKT, any associations that acknowledge BKT, any general information about BKT, what the news is saying about BKT and how the government is reacting to BKT.
Note: This search engine is not only for lumber information… though there is a lot of it in there. Try out such search terms as; lumber, plywood, concrete forms, span charts, nails, sip panel, how to install a window, etc.
Links to Sample Searches:
Industry Tab: European Spruce
Industry Tab: Bamboo Floors
Associations Tab: Insulation
Associations Tab: Lumber
Knowledge Tab: How to Install a Window
Knowledge Tab: SIP Panel
Industry News Tab: Beetle Kill Timber
News Tab: Green Building
Government Tab: Oregon Building Codes
Government Tab: Stimulus Plan
I hope you enjoy this new search engine and please feel free to fill out the “Contact” form to let us know what you think or add to the site a new web address… in case we missed something.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Building Supply Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.