by Dario Borghino

Created on: February 24, 2008   Last Updated: April 01, 2008

If webcams are your passion, WebcamSearch.com is definitely a site you wanna add to your bookmarks. Behind a sober layout hides a whole world for you to explore.

Just like the name suggests, through this site you are able to perform searches on a comprehensive archive of cams all around the world. Just like you would expect (and similarly to other famous cam sites such as Earthcam.com), all video streams are grouped into categories, which are very easy to access and navigate (a vast collection of directory links is on the main page of the site): from astronomy to the oldest known working light bulb, from Guinness World Records to chat, this site is definitely an interesting resource to explore.

Unlike EarthCam.com, which is more directed at webcams that are observing events or landscapes, through this site you are able to explore your webcam capabilities from a 360 degrees perspective: not only landscapes and animals, but also real people, live video chat, news, video sharing, and so on.

In a way that is fairly uncommon for a search site, WebcamSearch.com also includes a free registration process for its users, which quite obviously contributes to the formation of a community around the site. If you register, you will receive e-mails on site updates, new additions, featured channels, site news and so on.

Just like any other directory sites, WebcamSearch.com lets you add your own webcam related site for it to get reviewed, but the voting system is a little different than usual: instead of the common 'star rating' through which users assign ratings directly from the site, you are able to vote only if you are an user of the site that has to be reviewed. This is accomplished by asking the 'candidates' to add a code snippet to their site, which will display a rating dialog. Subsequent votes are directly sent to WebcamSearch and updated almost in real time.

As you can easily imagine, this process is one of the main factors that contributed to the rapid popularity and authority growth of the site, as the snippet includes a link to the site and greatly helps increasing traffic.

Does this site have any drawbacks? The first, noticeable thing is that there are probably too many Adsense banners around. But, as you explore the site even further, you will notice at least two major drawbacks: the first is that links to adult sites are displayed without even a screening process or any kind of warning to the reader, so you might want to avoid have your children surf on the site unsupervised. The second drawback that is easily noticeable are popups, which are quite annoying - but not a problem if you're using browsers like Firefox or IE while activating the popup blocker. However, even if active it, you might still be exposed to the so-called 'pop unders', which appear at the bottom part of the page, and are usually about adult chat as well.

In conclusion: WebcamSearch.com is definitely an interesting site, with a lot of interesting resources that you can seamlessly and easily browse: however, don't expose your children to it, as the adult content is not quite screened properly from the rest of the content.

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