Finding Dulcinea Tilts At Internet Content Windmills

Billing itself as the “Librarian of the Internet”, Finding Dulcinea aims to gather only relevant content from the Internet universe. The company launched in October 2007, and has a team of self-described “savvy Internet users” who aggregate content for the site.

Instead of a regular search engine, like Google, which brings you millions of hits for each search, Finding Dulcinea finds what they consider to be the best resources for a given topic, then sorts them and places them in categories on their site. Finding Dulcinea is not the first web site to tackle the issue of relevant search results, nor is it the first Internet information aggregator. It is one of the better examples I've seen of them in a while, though.

Finding Dulcinea has an appealing site design, with just enough Web 2.0 “flavor” to make it current and fresh, with a liberal dash of actual useful information readily available on the front page for balance. Finding Dulcinea evens the playing field in an Internet crowded with information, offering you a better way to find results that are reliable, from verified web sites. It's one way to avoid the pit falls of navigating an Internet full of terrible web sites and bad articles written by self proclaimed experts.

Currently, Finding Dulcinea has several categories to choose from: WebGuides, Behind the Headlines and Netcetera. WebGuides offers information, explanation and how-to guides on a wide variety of topics. Behind the Headlines follows the news, finding you the best resources for breaking and ongoing stories, and Netcetera handles information on entertainment, ideas, places and people.

My only issue with the site so far is that is suffers from dragging page loads. I'm not sure if the site is overloaded with widgets (the site interface is made to look like a series of constantly uploading widgets), or if it is just growing faster than its bandwidth allows. Whatever the reason, if users have to wait for their information it won't matter how great the i is - they will go to a faster site and sort it themselves.

Dulcinea Media, owners of the Finding Dulcinea site, plan to launch Finding Dulcinea in several languages in 2008. They also have plans to launch other sites in keeping with the theme of Finding Dulcinea in 2008 as well. You can read more about their plans on their corporate site.

I'm not sure how much I'll use Finding Dulcinea myself - I like to sort my own data according to what I need at the time, not according to what someone else thinks is relevant. That said I can think of many people who would find Finding Dulcinea useful, either because they are new to the Internet and don't know how to determine a data source's accuracy, trustworthiness or relevancy, or because they don't have time. If Finding Dulcinea can solve their page load issues, I can see them having staying power.