September 24, 2009

Goby.com's Local Search Concept: Good Idea, Not Ready for Primetime

Goby.com launched this week, promising to help people find things to do with their spare time or help them find interesting things to do on vacation. The idea is to type in the type of thing you want to do, where you want to do it and when you want to do it directly on the homepage (which is available on Firefox and IE):

The problem is the results leave a lot to be desired. Simply type in "dog park" and then try a bunch of different cities. The results for Wasington, DC returned listings for dog parks in Washington State and the listing for New York City was for an upstate dog park. There were no results found for a bunch of cities including San Francisco, CA or Chicago, IL.

"Museum" does relatively better, save for Washington, DC whose famous Smithsonian museums are forgotten due to listings, again, for Washington state museums. The rankings for museums in other cities are a bit off. For example, the listings for the American Museum of Natural History and MOMA are too far down on the list of museums for New York City for my taste.

Generally, when you are able to get results, bigger cities fare better than smaller ones. Even still, the results are not as good as you'll get from the top 4 search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask).

Goby boasts being built on search technology developed by MIT. It's a good idea in theory and I hope it gets fleshed out, but the tech needs to be improved for it to be useful for searchers.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

September 2, 2009

WikiAnswers Holds Virtual Amazing Race-Type Competition

If you're a fan of the hit reality show Amazing Race, you'll now have your chance to play a similar competition - in virtual reality. The WikiAnswers 93 Experience has begun and runs until September 9, 2009.

There are three events in the competition: town hall sessions; the AnswerHunt, and a Video Contest.

AnswerHunt is the Amazing Race-type contest where you travel around the world couch potato-style. Travel around the WikiAnswers world to find clues, figure out riddles and complete tasks.

If pure fun isn't incentive enough, then consider that the total prize values for the competition add up to $4,000.

Will you play the 93 Experience? Let us know your plans in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 24, 2009

Wolfram|Alpha Hard at Work Three Months After Launch

It's been three months since Wolfram|Alpha launched as a search engine for structured data. But they haven't just sat back and hoped WA took off. No, they've been hard at work attempting to improve upon their search offering.

Most of the work has centered around two things:

Things that searchers want that Wolfram|Alpha doesn't know yet
Questions that Wolfram|Alpha doesn't understand (aka linguistics)

While this presents challenges, founder Stephen Wolfram sees the glass as half full.

"The good news is that there's been very little that's come through that wasn't already somewhere on our to-do lists. They're long lists. But we can now be confident that they're good lists," Wolfram wrote on the official WA blog.

And they're already checking things off those lists. They're understanding the linquistics problem better and have reduced the "fall-through rate" of misunderstood queries by 10%.

Here's what else the WA team has been up to - all of this since launch:

Codebase has grown by a staggering 52%--adding well over 2 million lines of Mathematica code.
Classified 54,233 of feedbacks as bugs or suggestions. Of these, 31,006 are now in the implementation queue, consolidated to about 5800 to-do items.
3,907 people who have submitted bugs have been told they've been fixed.
To-do list has grown from 250 per week to 600 per week.

What do you think of Wolfram|Alpha's progress? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

August 21, 2009

Rumor: Bing and Wolfram Alpha Strike a Search Deal

If a new blog post at TechCrunch is true (and that's generally about a 50/50 chance), then Bing has struck yet another search deal - this time with Wolfram Alpha. According to the rumor, Bing would make use of Wolfram Alpha to incorporate structured data to its search offering.

Hmm, who else is going after structured data? Oh right, Google with its oh-so-flawed Google Squared.

While I'm sure all the geeks at Microsoft could have coded up a worthy structured data feature, it's smarter, easier and quite possibly faster just to partner up with Wolfram Alpha.

However, Microsoft would not confirm the rumor. So stay tuned!

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 5:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

August 17, 2009

Hunch Quickly Does Away With Spotlight Search in Favor of More Standard Results Page

Hunch has been around for a couple of months and is already doing away with their original search format. Instead of a menu popping up to help you search, now you just type and submit. Then, a list of results pop up. Hey that sounds familiar.

To be fair, the results are still different. They're links to answers, all of which are hosted on Hunch, which after all is the *other* decision engine.

I tested out the new update with "tennis." But why does a result for sports underwear pop up?

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

August 7, 2009

CitySquares Incorporates Facebook Connect

Fast-growing local search engine CitySquares has incorporated Facebook Connect. Now, you can use your Facebook account to sign into the site.

When you do, you can invite Facebook friends to CitySquares and control which information from Facebook you want visible on the local site (name, hometown, birthday, etc.)

The CitySquares teams plans further integration of Facebook Connect in the future. It will include enabling users to update their Facebook accounts when they rate a business.

Ben Saren, CitySquares CEO, says it's all part of recognizing the close relationship between social and local.

"The Local Web and the Social Web are related," wrote Saren on the CitySquares blog. "OK they're not sisters, but they're definitely cousins. The now and the future of local will see much more social features and functionalities."

As such, adding Twitter integration is also in the works.

"There's a whole strategy we're going to evolve that into for community and neighborhood pages, to effectively create a waterfall of real-time locally relevant information that both pulls content in, and distributes content out. I know that sounds a little too conceptual, but hang in there - you'll see what we mean very soon," explained Saren.

What do you think of the relationship between local and social? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 27, 2009

hakia Unveils Commercial Ontology

hakia is unveiling their new approach to the semantic web by introducing Commercial Ontology. Dr. Riza C Berkan, CEO, took to the official hakia blog to explain.

Commercial Ontology is able to recognize phrases and terms as opposed to typical ontologies which Berkan says only look at one word. The word Commercial must be taken broadly - extremely broadly. You could be looking up a phrase like "Ricky Henderson statistics," with no intention to buy anything. But it's still considered commercial because of Henderson's career in Major League Baseball, which is a commercial entity.

Berkan used the word "road kill" to demonstrate the difference between Commercial and traditional ontologies. (Road kill is disturbingly commercial, btw.)

Traditional ontologies search the word road and the word kill separately before making a connection. hakia's Commercial Ontology recognizes the phrase "road kill" from the beginning. Here's a graphic that maps out the differences:

According to Berkan, another major difference is that traditional ontologies use manual work while hakia's Commercial Ontology can be automated.

The Commercial Ontology will be released at some point in the future. No further details were given.

In the meantime, what do you think about Commercial Ontology? Is it the future of Natural Language Processing? Share your opinion below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 16, 2009

Scour Incorporates Real-Time Results into Regular Results

Real-time search is all the rage lately, with Twitter fueling the movement via its search of user feeds. Of course, this all really started with universal search and the addition of news results to timely keywords.

Social search engine Scour is getting into the real-time search game with a rather nice approach. Instead of revamping their site or having a separate little section for news-y results, they're simply notifying users of a real-time result with an icon containing an exclamation mark. Otherwise, the results just hang out with the "regular" results.

Check out this search for Tiger Woods. You get the Wikipedia page, his official site, and his PGA tour profile. Then you see the first "real-time" result, a press release on the PGA site for July 14, 2009.

A few links down you see a result for one of many articles talking about how Woods is favored to win this week's British Open.

Despite the pleasantness of the integration, it would be nice to see Twitter results. Perhaps a widget on the sidebar or something.

What do you think of Scour's real-time results? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

July 15, 2009

Hunch Adds Shortcuts to Help Users Navigate Topics

Hunch, the decision engine that launched just after that *other* decision engine, has already added an update to their site. They've added "shortcut topics," which aid in navigation.

If you haven't visited Hunch yet, then you need to know that the site serves up a decision by asking you a bunch of questions. Say, for example, you're trying to decide what type of coffee you want to buy. You type in "coffee" to the search box. A list of suggested questions and topics comes up:

As you can tell, if you already know you want to buy organic, you can select the question with ">Organic" in order to skip ahead to that narrowed-down category.

Then you can embark on a series of questions to help Hunch find the right answer for you. Here's the first question:

Conducting a number of searches, I came across few shortcuts. However, there may obviously be more in subject areas I personally am not interested in. The other factor is that Hunch is based on community contributions. So, substantive topics depend upon the users submitting content.

What do you think about Hunch's shortcuts? Tell us your thoughts by leaving a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 19, 2009

It's Electric: The Tale of CitySquares' Hairy Beginnings

One morning, Ben Saren was halfway through shaving his head with his electric razor when a schock from the mini appliance left him in need of a barber. Obviously, he wanted the nearest barbershop he could find near his Davis Square home in Somerville, Massachussets, a city just north of Boston. But searching the web at the time turned up fruitless. So, he did what any man in his predicament would dread doing - leaving the house half-hairy, half-bald in search of a barber at 8am.

It wasn't just barbershops that Saren was in search of. It was, well, just about everything. Where's a good local pizza place? Where's a Mom and Pop hardware store? Where was anything in Davis Square and not 10 miles away?

Saren set out to start a bare-bones site of Davis Square businesses. Think Craig's List for local, independent restaurants, shopping, and services.

But he realized he wasn't alone. Residents of nearby Boston-area neighborhoods were in search of the same things (though possibly not always for the same, half-bald reasons).

Thus, CitySquares was born.

Saren felt lucky that the domain name was available. And he should. The name evokes the very concept of Saren's site: Find out what's available in your neighborhood. It's the online version of your local community.

Another stroke of luck has been timing. Just as local search and online communities have begun to take hold, CitySquares started expanded nationally last year. The expansion, which was just completed in early March, came on the heels of being named the fastest growing search site last summer by comScore.

But don't expect to find hockey stick traffic data for CitySquares. Slow and steady is the approach for the hyperlocal site. Their approach to national expansion was to roll out from region to region.

And while Saren got up at 6:30am to get his hands on the latest iPhone released today, he wants to make sure he's got solid data and an innovative concept before launching CitySquares mobile apps.

That doesn't mean CitySquares is in a holding pattern. They have plans to use tools like Facebook connect to enable easier login and sharing of CitySquares content. Saren also envisions opportunities for users to post community information such as school lunches and trash pickup schedules.

While the search industry has oftentimes struggled what to do with the "local search niche," Saren has a clear vision for CitySquares and it seems to be paying off. In May, there were 2 million unique visitors. Not bad for a site, which less than a year ago, was just serving the New England area.

Saren isn't simply following a trend or trying to game market potential. He genuinely seeks to solve local search problems and unify communities online. Companies who keep their eye on their customer instead of the competition seem to be the most likely to thrive. That makes CitySquares one heck of a site to watch.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

June 17, 2009

Searchme Launches Search Advertising Program Out of Beta

In February, visual search engine Searchme began testing a search advertising program in a closed beta. Now, the ad program is officially launching to all interested advertisers.

Searchme's results offer up images of website pages, which provides search marketers with an opportunity to include more design concepts into their campaigns.

"We've basically fused together the best elements of brand and keyword advertising. At the same time, we're helping consumers know exactly what they're getting before they click on an ad," said John Galatea, Searchme vice president of sales and marketing.

As a result, search marketers may find their cost-per-click maximized.

"The Searchme Ad Platform delivers more valuable clicks leading to increased conversions while reducing consumer frustration at clicking through to ads that don't match their needs," continued Galatea. "The future of search advertising is visual."

Galatea is basing his statements on the success of the beta program. Mindshare, part of the Group M unit of WPP, is including Searchme ads in their client strategy.

"We're doing a lot of testing on the Searchme Ad Platform for a number of different brands. We see some very cutting-edge, unique opportunities and we'll continue to introduce this to our clients," said Chris Westmeyer, Senior Search Strategist at Mindshare.

Mindshare isn't alone. Media Contacts, the global interactive media network of Havas Digital, is also experiencing success with Searchme ads.

"What is appealing for Media Contacts' clients is the idea of providing a pre-click site-preview in the SERP to qualify the audience and ultimately improve efficiency," said Rob Griffin, Media Contact's Senior Vice President, U.S. Director of Search, Data & Analytics. "The innovative format and integration of the ads with the organic content itself allows our clients to be part of the page flow which lends to a cleaner, less cluttered environment enabling better brand messaging at the same time."

Will you be checking out Searchme ads? Let us know your interest in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

June 10, 2009

CitySquares Offers All Businesses Couponing Opportunity

Local search site CitySquares is now offering all businesses the opportunity to extend coupons to their customers. To take advantage of the opportunity:

Go to CitySquares.com
Find your business listing
Look for the Edit Listing option in a blue box on the right. (If you're new, you'll need to register)
Edit your business information to offer a coupon.

CitySquares recommends asking customers to bring coupons with them so you're able to track who is visiting your business via their local search.

Last year, online couponing skyrocketed when the economy took a nosedive. This is a free and easy way to reach out to new customers, especially since CitySquares is one of the fastest growing search sites on the web.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 19, 2009

Microsoft, hakia Launch Contextual Ad Networks

Two new contextual ad networks are available for online publishers and advertisers. First up, Microsoft has removed the "beta" label from its Content Ads network. Participating online publishers include WSJ.com, FOX Sports, and RunnersWorld.com.

Meanwhile, semantic search engine hakia has also launched their contextual ad network, dubbed CONTEXA. ReadWriteWeb.com is their first publishing partner.

"We are excited to keep the wheels of innovation turning at hakia as our industry has plenty room for improvement. Today, Web users are overwhelmed with the quantity and suffer from the quality of display ads and quickly learn to ignore a good portion of the Web pages they visit," wrote hakia Chief Architect Kartal Guner. "In the long run, the industry's focus will have shift to increasing ad quality and limiting the supply to increase value. The path to this promise goes through enhancements to both contextual and behavioral ad targeting technologies."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 18, 2009

New Search Engine Wolfram Alpha Launches to Much Buzz

In the 1957 movie Desk Set, Katharine Hepburn plays a researcher at a TV station who feels her job is threatened when Spencer Tracey comes along and installs a computer that could spit out the answers in a fraction of the time. Ultimately, Hepburn was still needed because, of course, humans had to operate the computer.

Long-awaited and much anticipated search engine Wolfram Alpha has gone live with much of the same roller-coaster excitement seen in Desk Set. It's trending on Twitter and causing all sorts of questions to be asked. Will Wolfram Alpha take on Google? Were Google's announcements at last week's Searchology an attempt to stave off Wolfram Alpha?

In the end, of course, there's room for everyone. Wolfram Alpha is designed around good old-fashioned computing. Of course, other search engines have been computing for years. So, let's do a little comparison. Here are various search engines for the term "population of the United States."

Wolfram Alpha gives us the 2007 estimate plus a slew of other facts including population density and life expectancy:

Yahoo!, Google, and Ask.com provide an immediate answer at the top of the results:

Live Search, AOL, and hakia do not:

What do you think of Wolfram Alpha? Share your impressions in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

May 13, 2009

Searchme Releases Mobile App for Android

Visual search engine Searchme has released a mobile application for Android. The Android is a mobile operating system by Google that is currently found on the G1 at T-Mobile.

"Searchme's visual search app is perfectly suited for Android users who are looking for ways to push the boundaries of what their smartphone can do," said Randy Adams, Searchme Founder and CEO. "This solves a real issue for mobile users - a faster, better way to do mobile search. The feedback we're getting from the mobile community is that they like being able to quickly preview web pages before deciding to take the time to load them in the browser."

Searchme released an app for the iPhone last November. The visual search engine launched last year and is experiencing 4 million unique visitors monthly. Searchme has seen growth of 180% since January 2009.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 4, 2009

Scour Attempts to Attract Searchers with $1,000 Giveaway

Social search site Scour is holding a contest where the prize is a $1,000 giveaway each month for the next three months. For every search a person conducts on Scour, they will be entered into the contest, up to 50 entries per day.

Members of Scour will also receive 1 entry per 4 searches conducted by friends who sign up to Scour via referral.

This is reminiscent of Microsoft's recent incentive efforts to attract searchers to Live Search via programs like Cashback and SearchPerks.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 22, 2009

CitySquares Allows Merchants to Opt-Out of Reviews (For a Fee)

CitySquares is allowing merchants to opt-out of being subject to reviews on their site. The catch? You'll need to pony up $5.99 a month to opt-out.

It's a catch-22 scenario. Opt-out of reviews and kill the negative reviews or stick it out and hope for some good ones. If you opt-out, some consumers may wonder if you have something to hide.

Plus, if you're a small business, you better hope this idea doesn't catch on. Can you imagine having to shell out $6 a month to a bunch of different sites? It adds up.

Still, it could be worth it if you find that you're losing hundreds or thousands once a nasty review gets up there. And of course, reviews aren't necessarily honest. They could be fake ones set up by the competition.

CitySquares' plan isn't perfect, but it does show the continued need for innovation in the ratings/reviews space.

Would you pay to opt-out of reviews? Let us know in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 31, 2009

Jimmy Wales Whacks Wikia Search

Jimmy Wales launched Wikia Search a little over a year ago. His idea was to build a user-generated search. It opened to not-so-great fanfare and the dismal economy didn't help things. Wales said that due to a reassessment of priorities, he's nixing Wikia Search.

Not all Wikia products are suffering a dark fate. Wikia Answers is proving to be quite popular, which holds with the current trend in the popularity of Answers sites.

Wales hopes to return to his Wikia Search project during future, more profitable times. He holds strong to his belief in openness and transparency in search.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 27, 2009

Searchme Adds Twitter Button to Aid Tweets of Search Results

Visual search engine Searchme has added a Twitter button that helps users Tweet the search results they've come across. Once you've conducted your search, simply click the button. You'll be taken to the Twitter homepage where a Tweet is already prepared for you. Tweak as needed or go ahead and update. Check it out...

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

March 9, 2009

CitySquares Tweaks Their Search (and Rocks Online Reputation Management in the Process!)

Last week CitySquares announced the expansion of their local search to all 50 states. In my coverage of the announcement, I noticed that typing in my hometown of Raleigh brought up no results.

CitySquares Lead Developer Michael LeBarron noticed the post and commented on the blog that indeed Raleigh was included in the expansion.

I emailed him privately to tell him how I was conducting the search. It turns out that CitySquares recognized "Raleigh, NC," but I was typing in just "Raleigh." For whatever reason, the search didn't recognize the city without the state.

Michael went to work on it, and by Friday I had an email in my inbox saying the fix was complete. I tried it out this morning and wow - what a fix!

Now, when I search for Raleigh, CitySquares smartly asks me which Raleigh I, in fact, am searching for:

Incidentally, this is a fantastic example of a brand listening to the conversation about them online. Not only did CitySquares engage in the conversation, they made a change to their product that benefits everyone.

If you want to know how to be as good as CitySquares at online reputation management, check out these posts:

How to Bury Negative Online Mentions of You - Intermediate Level Tactics Pssst. People are Talking... About Your Business! SEO for Brand Reputation Management Big Brands Wage Reputation Battles on Many Fronts 61% of Reluctant Consumers Can Be Positively Swayed Online Online Reviews Second Only to Word of Mouth in Purchase Decisions Google's Mobile Ratings Increase Need for Online Reputation Management Need To Track Your Brand Online? Try Search Monitor

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

March 2, 2009

CitySquares Expands to 50 States

CitySquares began as a local search site for cities in the Northeast. Last year, they announced their plans for a nationwide expansion as data showed they were the fastest growing search site. They followed through, expanding to a trickle of cities and states along the way.

Now, CitySquares is announcing that they have reached all 50 states in their expansion. There are 16,000,000 businesses now listed on CitySquares.

They still have some growing to do. For example, here in North Carolina, there are listings for Charlotte but not the capital city of Raleigh. Still, congratulations are in order to CitySquares for reaching a major milestone.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 26, 2009

SearchMe Launches Search Advertising Beta

Visual search engine SearchMe has launched a search advertising test and is looking for beta testers. The program is open to 500 participants who will get free advertising for 30 days. To apply, click here.

"We are fusing together two popular advertising formats to drive better tracking of both ROI and branded advertising spend. We want consumers to know exactly what they're getting before they even click on an ad," said John Galatea, vice president of sales and marketing at SearchMe. "The combination of search marketing with the power of branded display ads creates more valuable clicks leading to increased conversions and that's what advertisers want. The added qualification of seeing before clicking makes a huge difference for end users and advertisers and provides an exciting glimpse into the future of visual search advertising."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 24, 2009

Local.com Gets a New CFO

Local search site Local.com has announced the appointment of Brenda Agius as its new Chief Financial Officer. Agius has 15 years of experience in corporate financial management for such companies as Miva, Neighborhood America, and Slingpage, Inc.

"We are pleased to welcome Brenda to Local.com's management team. She brings broad financial knowledge and industry specific experience in the publicly traded global online advertising sector, M&A and corporate financing," said Heath Clarke, Local.com chairman and CEO. "She has a solid reputation among the financial community and a deep understanding of Local's business model. We are confident that Brenda will drive value to the bottom line for our shareholders. I would also like to express my appreciation to Doug for his contribution to the company over the past six years, and wish him the best in his future endeavors."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 20, 2009

Local.com Releases 4th Quarter 2008 Earnings

Local.com has released its fourth quarter 2008 earnings. Their revenue grew 61% year-over-year to $9.6 million. However, they experienced a net loss of $2.2 million, which translates to $0.15 a share.

"We are pleased to report fourth quarter results in line with our prior guidance and forecast a return to strong revenue growth in the first quarter. We are bullish for 2009, projecting approximately $50 million in overall revenue and a return to net income for the entire year," said Heath Clarke, Local.com chairman and CEO. "Despite a challenging economy, we are well positioned and have a balance sheet that will allow us to take advantage of strategic opportunities throughout the year. Our focus is on continued execution in driving sales and organic traffic."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 6, 2009

RushmoreDrive.com Partners with TheLoop21.com for News and Commentary

Last spring, IAC launched RushmoreDrive.com, calling it the first search engine targeted towards African-Americans. Today, they're announcing a partnership with TheLoop21.com, a site for news and political analysis. The goal is to provide commentary from an African-American perspective to their users.

"We are extremely proud to be partnering with TheLoop21.com. Their in-depth analysis of economics and politics will enhance the editorial product for our users. The articles found on TheLoop21.com fit in nicely with our current editorial direction, which is to bring voices from the margins to the center on the web in spaces that are often overlooked as it relates to Black populations. TheLoop21.com will add value to our site because of the insightful, critical and provocative nature of their articles," says RushmoreDrive.com Vice President Products & Content Kevin McFall.

TheLoop21.com's Senior Editor Rachael Leone adds: "The entire staff at The Loop21 is delighted to be working with RushmoreDrive.com. We each believe very strongly in the need to inform in a way that is interesting and compelling. I am most excited for our respective Web communities, which benefit from even greater quality and variety of content."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 5, 2009

hakia Releases Updated Version of ScoopBar

Semantic search engine hakia has released an updated version of its toolbar, called the ScoopBar. The new version will highlight search terms on a web page visited as a result of clicking on a link in a search engine.

For example, let's say you do a search for "What happens to the coins thrown in the Trevi Fountain?" in Google. You get back your results. You click on a result.

Once you're on the result's web page, hakia ScoopBar will highlight the words on the page that are related to your search. This can help you find your answer more quickly.

To use the feature, the word "Highlight" must be selected in the toolbar. I was having trouble simply clicking to select (could just be the computer/version of Firefox I'm using), but you can look for the arrow next to the hakia logo - and use the drop-down menu to select as well.

ScoopBar is available as a plugin (aka add-on) for both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 6, 2009

hakia Updates Search Box

hakia has updated their Search Box, which is a site search feature you can place on your website. The biggest change is the ability to search multiple domains. Here's a mockup, via the hakia blog:

Another update is the highlighting of the semantic relevant words in the results:

Search box is available for free, up to 30,000 searches per day. Related Reading: hakia Launches Personalized Search Feature Meet the New hakia hakia Calls for Librarians to Contribute Credible Web Sources

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 31, 2008

Cuil May Sound Cool But Did Not Kill Google This Year

Touted as a possible Google killer when it launched July this year, Cuil has had a disappointing start.

Traffic numbers reflect the company's lack of stickiness following its launch. TechCrunch sees it as flat lining.

Interesting that Business Week has it amongst its most promising start ups of 2008.

Kevin Ryan gave us a thorough examination of the problems with Cuil and DaniWeb did an interesting analysis of their search results in comparison to Google.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

December 30, 2008

CitySquares Expands to Delaware and Maryland

In August we learned that CitySquares.com was the fastest growing search engine according to Quantcast. They also announced that they would be slowly but surely expanding their reach from just local search in the northeast to the rest of the United States. Earlier this month, that expansion began.

Today, CitySquares officially made the Delaware and Maryland sites live.

How will the rest of the country roll out? Here's what to expect, according to CitySquares co-founder Bob Leland:

To give you an idea of how we're rolling out, we started in the northeast, are currently knocking down the mid-Atlantic states, and making our way down the coast to Florida. We will then move west towards the great Mississippi River and then jump to the Pacific coast. We'll be skipping over a few less populous states as we roll-out and circle back to them. Our overall roll-out plan shows us launching about 40 states in 30 days.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 27, 2008

hakia Launches Personalized Search Feature

hakia is jumping on the personalized search page bandwagon with My hakia. Users can customize several dynamic content features including:

News search
News headlines
PubMed search
Wikipedia
YouTube videos
Cartoons

Here's a screenshot:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 22, 2008

Quintura Unveils Site Search, Receives Patent

Quintura has launched its first site search solution. It's initially only available in the U.S.

"Web publishers who add Quintura's free, hosted solution to their websites will realize significant cost savings and generate a new revenue stream," said Yakov Sadchikov, founder and CEO of Quintura. "Online publishers are given a unique opportunity to engage their users in site search far more than ever before, resulting in additional page-views and click-throughs."

Quintura has also received its first patent, for a search engine graphical interface using maps and images.

"In beta trials, our solution has proven its benefits to web publishers," said Dennis Szerszen, CMO of Quintura. "Our statistics demonstrate much higher click-through rates, search utilization, and overall page-views."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 6, 2008

Meet the New hakia

It must be redesign your search engine day. hakia has a new look and it's reminiscent of Yahoo's recent glue pages test with a hint of the old Ask.com.

Of course, hakia already distinguishes itself from the "big" search engines by saying that sites with a bunch of inbound links are not always credible. hakia attempts, through partnerships with experts, to produce more credible results.

Now, it's adding images and user-generated content to those results.

"We have been working hard for some time now to make the search experience better for users than what they are used to with today's popular search engines," said Riza Berkan, CEO, hakia.com. "hakia's new look bolsters this promise even further, by making credible sources available to all in a more well-focused way - quality over popularity."

Take a look, and then let us know what you think of the changes:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 24, 2008

hakia Calls for Librarians to Contribute Credible Web Sources

Semantic search engine hakia is calling for librarians to contribute credible web sources. They've done this in the past in the health industry. One of the reasons behind the request is that popular websites aren't always credible and vice versa.

It's also clearly a strategic alternative to Google, which bases rankings largely on popularity via links.

"By having information experts suggest sites to hakia, we can guide searchers to relevant and credible information on the Web. As a search engine, we will rely on information professionals' collective knowledge to add a dimension to search: credibility," said Melek Pulatkonak, President and Chief Operating Officer of hakia, at the Web Search University event in Washington DC.

"The campaign that hakia is starting is a great way to leverage the never-ending knowledge and information analysis skills of the information professional in building a Web database full of the web resources that are most useful, and most importantly, have the most credibility," said Gary Price, Editor, ResourceShelf.com. "This is a new chapter for library collection development. I hope this is only the beginning."

Librarians can find out more or contribute here.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 18, 2008

HelloMetro Wins Trademark for 'Hyperlocal'

HelloMetro has also won trademark approval for the term Hyperlocal. HelloMetro now uses the term to describe their search results on HelloLocal.com and hopes to maximize the term in the internet advertising space.

If the industry isn't careful, even more of these widely used terms could also become trademarked. Earlier this year, we learned that Jason Gambert applied to trademark 'SEO.' Many marketers took the opportunity to address the U.S. Patent office in order to derail the effort.

Do you think HelloMetro should have been awarded this trademark? Sound off in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

July 30, 2008

SEW Experts: What's Wrong With Being Cuil?

Cuil may be a good search engine...someday. But launching it as a "Google-killer" was a mistake. In today's Searching for Meaning column, "What's Wrong With Being Cuil?," Kevin Ryan outlines two lessons to learn from this: First, make sure it works before you launch it. Second, make sure you can live up to your claims or you'll suffer the consequences.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 10, 2008

hakia Comments on Leveraging Yahoo's BOSS

Yesterday, Yahoo announced the launch of Build your Own Search Service, aka BOSS. The program allows third parties to utilize Yahoo's index and ranking methodologies to create their own search engines.

Semantic search engine hakia is using Yahoo's BOSS technology to accelerate its advanced QDEX (Query Detection and Extraction) technology. The Yahoo data is being combined with hakia's own crawled data, and then indexed and ranked by hakia.

“Accessing Yahoo!'s resources via Yahoo! Search BOSS geometrically increases our ability to QDEX the entire World Wide Web and usher in the next evolution of search – semantic, or natural language search,” said Dr. Riza Berkan, CEO of hakia. “BOSS is a great testament to Yahoo!'s foresight, strategic thinking and leadership, and illustrates the growing need for new technologies that will improve the user experience and overall search capabilities.”

Recently, hakia launched Syndication Web Services, allowing third parties to leverage their search.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 8, 2008

mInfo Chosen as Official Mobile Search Provider for Beijing Olympics

The Beijing Olympic Committee has chosen mInfo as the official search provider for the mobile version of the 2008 Olympics web site. mInfo currently provides mobile search services to 600 million wireless subscribers in China. Pull-advertising is also a major mobile offering of the Shanghai-based company.

"mInfo is extremely honored to have been chosen by BOCOG to take on the important responsibility of powering search for the official mobile site of the 2008 Olympics," said mInfo CEO Alvin Wang Graylin. "We are proud to be able to contribute to this historic event. The release of this service is particularly satisfying to mInfo, as our Chengdu development team was the core group behind its development, and had to overcome extraordinary challenges to release the service on time, given the devastation caused by the recent earthquakes in the region."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 26, 2008

Searchme Adds Media Search and Visual Bookmarking

Visual search engine Searchme has announced the addition of two new features. The first is Media Search, which allows users to search for videos and images from YouTube and Flickr. The second is "Stacks," a visual bookmarking and sharing features that enables users to share what they find on blogs, social media profiles, email and web sites.

"These visual search applications enhance our core search engine by allowing people to use Searchme in fresh, innovative ways across various media and all over the Web," said Randy Adams, Searchme CEO. "It's another step in our long-term plan to add features and functionality, improve our beta engine's relevance and coverage, and create a world-class search experience."

"Until now, most web users have had to check multiple bookmarks every day, click on dozens of links pasted into an email, and hunt multiple times for sites they saw once but didn't have time to check out," said Adams. "With Stacks, they can now bypass these methods, saving time and creating an organized web experience."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

State of Missouri Releases Collaborative Search Portal

The State of Missouri has launched a collaborative search portal, enabling citizens of the Show-Me state to explore millions of historical documents. The search, dubbed Missouri Digital Heritage, is powered by Deep Web Technologies' Explorit Research Accelerator. Included in the searchable material are nearly 20 "Collections" such as Transportation, Sports, Women, and Agriculture.

"This is a unique project because of the queries this site is designed to handle," said Abe Lederman, CTO of Deep Web Technologies. "A family historian may have only a fragment of a name or a street address that they want to explore. By delivering every hit -- even the most remote -- we significantly increase their opportunity to put another piece of their family tree in place. Missouri Digital Heritage is truly designed to support every local researcher's needs."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 23, 2008

Yandex to Open Labs Office in Bay Area

Russia's most popular search engine has officially announced plans to open a labs office in Silicon Valley. This news began to leak last week with the departure of Yahoo SVP and General Manager of Search, Vishal Makhijani. Makhijani will be President of Yandex Labs in the Bay Area, and will report directly to the CEO of Yandex.

Yandex says it sees about 1 billion searches per month. Last month, Google saw 6.8 billion searches, while Yahoo saw 2.2 billion, according to comScore. Yandex came in third in European search market share data for the month of March.

"We did not hesitate to go the extra mile to find this rare talent,” said Arkady Volozh, CEO of Yandex, the parent company. “We are excited to add a leading technology and business veteran in Silicon Valley to the Yandex team. Vish and his group at Yandex Labs will help to extend and improve Yandex's core technology capabilities including the quality of algorithmic search for the Russian audience."

What do you think of Mr. Makhijani's move to Yandex? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

June 19, 2008

Semantic Search Engine hakia Launches Syndication Web Services

Semantic search engine, hakia, has announced the launch of Syndication Web Services. The new service will allow third parties to use hakia search on websites, mobile applications and document management systems. Site owners can offer hakia's generic search, implement a custom search, or utilize a vertical search on their websites.

I spoke with hakia CEO Dr. Riza Berkan, and he says that the advantage with hakia's web search is the focus on the quality instead of popularity when it comes to delivering search results. hakia targets precision and accuracy in the goal of providing relevant results on a searcher's first attempt at a query.

Today's announcement includes 7 different ways in which third parties can utilize hakia's Syndication Web Services:

Web Search – Brings search results from the World Wide Web
News Search – Brings news articles for a given query
Vertical Search – Brings search results from a vertical (for example, health) or from a particular database (such as PubMed.org)
Summarizer – Provides a summary of a given text block or URL, ideal for content management systems
Categorizer – Identifies categorical terms from a given text (URL or text block
Characterizer –Identifies and expands descriptive phrases, keywords or tags. Ideal for SEM professionals and publishers
TMR (Text Meaning Representation) – Provides text meaning representation of a given text block, suitable for core technology development

Have you checked out hakia? Would you be inclined to use their new Syndication Web Services? Give your thoughts in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 18, 2008

Local.com Launches Ratings and Reviews Engine

Local search engine Local.com has announced the addition of ratings and reviews to their offering. Users can create a free account and give their opinion on businesses listed on the site. Ratings will use a 5 star system and users will be allowed to make comments to accompany their ratings.

“According to Jupiter Research, 77 percent of online shoppers use ratings and reviews when making a purchase,” said Kim LaFleur, Local.com vice president, product management. “We are pleased to launch our own ratings and reviews engine to allow consumers visiting Local.com to both add and access important information on local businesses throughout the U.S., enabling them to make more informed purchasing decisions. In addition, this allows our business customers to more proactively manage their own reputations and understand their customers' opinions (both good and bad) of their own products and services.”

The news comes at a time when data is showing that searchers are looking for answers. Additionally, search engines are beginning to move toward more comprehensive search results.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 12, 2008

Kayak.com Launches Display Ad Platform

Travel search site Kayak.com has announced the launch of a targeted display advertising platform. The platform was developed by SideStep.com, which Kayak acquired in December 2007.

Kayak says display advertisers will be able to target a variety of search criteria, similar to existing text ads offered through the Kayak Publisher Network. Examples of search criteria are:

Destination
Origination
Trip dates
Length of stay
Specific airline/hotel/car brands and car type

Three ad sizes will be available, which are in line with IAB standards:

180x150 pixels
160x600 pixels
300x250 pixels

Kayak and its affiliates generate 200 million ad impressions per month on air, hotel, and car search results pages. Currently there are over 30,000 text placements from more than 2,000 brands on the Kayak Publisher Network.

"Our advertisers have repeatedly told us that display ads can communicate travel services in a way that text ads cannot," said Steve Hafner, Kayak.com co-founder and CEO. "Yet we know that some consumers dislike these ads and find them distracting. I believe we've found the right balance by allowing our registered users to suppress or view them, whichever they prefer."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 3, 2008

Wikia Adds Features to its Open Source Search

If a search engine allows its users to change the results, is it still called hacking? While many news outlets are saying Wikia's new features allow users to hack results, it's really just part of their modus operandi.

Today, Wikia announced a plethora of new features for users to have their say in how search results should really be. And here they are:

The ability to edit any result, title and summary. The edits are then instantly available to everyone
The ability to add new results for any search query instantly
The ability to delete and/or hide any result
Every result item can be rated 1-5 stars, which will slowly influence the ranking position
The ability to add suggested and/or related searches for any query
The ability to add public comments to any result item
The opportunity to see site previews and annotate text, images, links and forms directly into the results
The ability to try any search on Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine with a single click
The ability to customize the background on the header for a more themed result for any search
The opportunity to view the change history showing all the social actions for any page

Looks very social, don't ya think? Let me know by leaving a comment.

Want to learn more about Wikia? Check out these posts... How Will Wikia Grow The Index? Wikia Search: Wikia Dream? Or SEO Wake-Up Call? Wikia Search Requires Your Help Search Wikia Launches Open Source, Distributed Crawler

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Visual Search Engine Viewzi to Launch This Month

Visual search engine Viewzi has been in private beta for quite some time now, but they've just announced they expect to launch to the public this month.

Since it's visual, a wordy blog post just isn't going to do this news justice. So I've created a screenshots for your viewing pleasure. Be sure to leave your reaction in the comments!

Viewzi main search page

Viewzi's search menu offers several options for viewing results

Video search displays results from popular video sites. Some of the videos are played in fast forward right in the results page. In Viewzi, mouseover an individual result to see the title of the video.

Web screenshot results show search results in a cover-flow style. I like this because you can easily see which pages are educational, shopping or parked domains.

Photo view is similar to video view, displaying image search results in several rows.

Simple text view combines results from Yahoo and Google and looks similar to traditional text-based search results.

Four source view displays website screenshot results from Google, Yahoo, Ask, and MSN. To remove one of the sets of results, just click on the search engine name that you do NOT want to see displayed. Mouseover a result for a larger view.

Celebrity Photo View is not just an image search for photos of celebrities. Instead, it's the name for the way the results are displayed, which looks like a photo album or scrap book and features a slick drag and drop feature.

mp3 View shows results of mp3 files related to your search. You can even listen to the files in your browser instead of opening additional applications which can use up valuable memory on your computer.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

May 21, 2008

Image Search Review

Ann Smarty - aka SEOSmarty - has written a great overview of image search. If you look for images online this is well worth a read to hone your searches and find the right engine for you.

The article gives insights into filters, tagging and how best to use these features to really find what you are looking for. Ann's has great expertise in this area and there are other posts about image search worth adding to your must read list.

Posted by Frank Watson at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yandex Going Public, IPO On Nasdaq Later This Year

Yandex the leading search engine in Russia - bigger than Google in that country which is a global rarity - announced it will have an IPO later this year, Reuters reported.

If they were every to link with Baidu - another engine that dominates Google, but in China - they could grab the international traffic online marketers are started to see the great value in.

While Google CEO Eric Schmidt sees Google biggest threat as being internal, as Fortune reported, if they overlook the growth of alternative engines outside of the US they could have a lot more problems.

Add Yahoo Japan's dominance and three of the biggest overseas markets are not Google controlled.

Now if I can get rid of my Yahoo stock without a loss before the IPO I am in!

Posted by Frank Watson at 5:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 12, 2008

Powerset Launches Piggybackipedia: Wikipedia Search Engine

Who won Survivor last night? Powerset doesn't know.

Okay - maybe that's an unfair question for Powerset since the aptly-named Parvati Shallow only won Survivor Micronesia last night. It might be easier to ask "Who is Parvati? The answer: in Sanskrit, "parvati" means "Mountain's daughter" one of the names for Shiva's wife, the Universal Mother.

So what is Powerset? That's a much more intelligent question to ask.

Powerset is the much-hyped beta natural language search engine metaphor-challenged mainstream media call the Google Killer. That means you can type questions in a search box the way you normally ask them. (Think Ask Jeeves 1.5)

That doesn't mean natural language search or Powerset can kill Google, or even commit assault and battery on Google.

Powerset launched with a smart concept: better search results than Wikipedia's own search box. So the play is a "non-Google Custom Search Engine" for Wikipedia. Let's see about what Powerset can can do..

"What is Powerset?" we asked. Powerset separates results by combining the primary keyword (Powerset) with related verbs and nouns from Web pages and Wikipedia. Here's the answer we weren't looking for from Powerset itself.

Factz from Wikipedia: we found the following about Powerset Powerset opened : community and Powerlabs.

Results for Powerset opened community

Powerset (company) In a form of beta testing, Powerset opened an online community called Powerlabs on September 17, 2007.

Results for Powerset opened Powerlabs

Powerset (company) In a form of beta testing, Powerset opened an online community called Powerlabs on September 17, 2007.

Results for Powerset displayed advertise

Powerset (company) (Powerset is not currently selling or displaying any advertising.)

Results for Powerset searched language

Powerlabs Let's roll, is a prerelease of Powerset's general natural language search.

Wikipedia Articles: results 1 - 10 of 78

1. Powerset (company) Powerset is a company based in San Francisco, California that is developing a natural language search engine for the Internet. 2. Power set In mathematics, given a set S, the power set (or powerset) of S, written , P(S), or 2S, is the set of all subsets of S. In axiomatic set theory (as developed e.g. in the ZFC axioms), the existence of the power set of any set is postulated by the axiom of power set.

6. Powerlabs Powerset Applications Currently, Powerset has released two applications: Powermouse and a beta of its search engine.

Only when you click on the expand snippet (powermouse) miniviewer button, do you find the answer you're looking for (sort of):

Powerset (company)

Powerset is a company based in San Francisco, California that is developing a natural language search engine for the Internet.

The company's stated desire is to build a search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo which would act on a user's questions, as opposed to keywords. For instance, a user who wanted to find out which U.S. state has the highest income tax would enter "Which state has the highest income tax?" at Powerset, as opposed to "state income tax" at Google. The advantage to the user, aside from using questions similar to what one person would ask another verbally, is that a natural language search engine would, depending on its underlying programming, return a result that is more relevant to what the user seeks

Powerset is limited by the poorly-written Wikipedia entry. The comparison to Google doesn't work. If someone's searching for the state with the highest state income tax, they'll type in "highest state income tax." No one would type in "state income tax" in Google if they'd type "Which state has the highest income tax?" in Powerset.

At this stage in beta, Powerset can be considered a search engine survivor.

But unless the technology yields better results -- and fast -- people will think of Parvati and Powerset as "shallow" contestants.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 17, 2008

Search Engine Promises to Reduce Carbon Footprint

If you want to “go green” while conducting your searches, then a new search engine is right up your alley. Echocho promises to grow up to 2 trees for every 1000 searches. The search engine allows users to choose whether they wish to conduct searches on Yahoo or Google.

As of this post, Ecocho had planted 2,873 trees which they say offsets 1,436,710 kilos of C2. The trees are purchased using 70 percent of advertising revenue. Echocho also has a toolbar which is available to download for Firefox or IE6 and IE7.

The design of Echocho features a white background, which may prove controversial for some eco-evangelists. Last year, Blackle launched as a Google custom search engine with a black design, which they said would reduce the amount of watts used during searches. As of this post, Blackle claims to have saved the earth 567,579.120 Watt hours.

The “big” search engines are no stranger to green initiatives. Last summer, Yahoo was trying to find the “Greenest City in America” while Google hosted a “Summer of Green” site that listed environmentally-friendly hotels and vacation destinations.

via The Daily Telegraph

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:20 AM | Permalink

April 16, 2008

Search Startup Announces $25 Million in Second Round Funding

Search startup Cuill has announced $25 million in venture capital as part of a second round of funding. Among those behind the new search engine are search experts from Google, IBM, eBay, Alta Vista, Xerox PARC, the Internet Archive and Stanford University.

Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Tom Costello said that Cuill "is using breakthroughs in search architecture and technological advances to create a new paradigm in search, and we now have the resources to reach the next level in pure search."

Previously, Cuill raised $8 million from Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:25 AM | Permalink

April 10, 2008

Video Search Is a False Messiah

"Video search is a false messiah," claimed Steven Chao at this week's Video Search Summit in San Francisco. Video search is not about words, optimization or getting into the traditional web search engines. Instead, he says we must look to video consumers and more collaborative approaches.

It's telling that Chao, who's all about our cultural zeitgeist, is currently running an online portal for How-To videos. Chao is best-known as the originator of America's Most Wanted and Cops, and later served as USA Network's president.

According to Chao, we're just at the beginning of video consumption on the web. Today, average Americans are still attached to their televisions and he believes it's only a matter of time until Americans shift and become “internet viewing zealots.” Improving findability is critical for this transformation.

Video search is more about emotions than words. That's why Chao advises to think differently and transform video search into a push rather than pull experience -- and to find ways to push relevant video results and answers before there is a query.

“There will be a place for good quality,” said Chao. “In that huge amount of video, this room has the secrets.” At the Summit, the room was filled with web video search insiders, including Blinx, CastTV, ClipBlast, Dabble, Everyzing, Pixsy, and Truveo/AOL.

Chao identified Amazon's collaborative filtering for books as a starting point. He encouraged the video searchers to develop approaches which take advantage of community interests. He wants us to incorporate consumption behaviors but not depend on popularity contests. All these insights should support video search and discovery.

Of course, I applaud Chao's statements and also acknowledge we have some work ahead. With all the video search engines, we are relying on words, tagging and textual approaches today. There's no doubt that we will have to harness people's behaviors and interests, in more implicit ways, to really improve video findability.

Posted by at 2:25 PM | Permalink

March 11, 2008

Visual Search Engine Searchme Launches Private Beta

Sequoia Capital, which is known for its investments in both Google and Yahoo, today announced the private beta launch of its latest investment, Searchme, a visual search engine.

Searchme employs Adobe Flash and Flex to create a user interface that displays results as web page screenshots. the effect is similar to the Cover Flow feature in iTunes, where users "flip through" album cover art. Below the image results are text search results that look similar to Google results.

The perk of this technology is the ability to see a page before visiting it. If you're fatigued from clicking on links to parked sites and made-for-AdSense pages, then Searchme's visual results will be a welcome change.

But making sure the results are relevant is Searchme's challenge. In an interview with Kara Swisher at Boomtown, her All Things Digital blog, Adams said, "We are no Google, of course, but we are trying something different to provide a new experience for search users. Most of all, we are trying to innovate in search, which is still largely a text and list experience."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:00 AM | Permalink

January 7, 2008

Wikia Search: Wikia Dream? Or SEO Wake-Up Call?

Debbie Richman posted two social search engine analyses reviews of Wikia Search that didn't bash Wales and his Build-A Bare Engine Workshop.

VentureBeat's Saumil Mehta (product manager, vertical search engine competitor) has the most thorough user review of Wikia Search here that makes others superfluous. Bloggers, If you haven't reviewed the features yet, wait until the next release.

We say "Wikia Search", Saumil says "Search Wikia." Should Wikia Search call the whole thing off?

Jimmy Wales weighed in at TechCrunch where a great debate is brewing. So we'll give Jimmy's comments a wider audience here.

After the jump, Eli Feldblum will explain why SEOs (and corporations using SEOs) could make Wikia Search grow exponentially -- thru better search results -- but may stay on the sidelines, along with hundreds of millions of searchers.

Wikia Search will likely take the advice of Ask exec and former Search Engine Watcher Gary Price: in short, watch out for "manipulation." (by SEOs? by webmasters of the world? We'll look for more from Gary since Wikia Search will be a (4th Place) Ask.com Killer before it ever gives Google the Sweeney Todd treatment.

In TechCrunch, Jimmy Wales said: "(Wikia Search) is a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine ... So the comparison to Google on day one is just mistaken. Google didn't launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea. So they didn't have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it. We aren't even running with a real index yet, just a placeholder index. Yeah, the search sucks today. But that's not the point. The point is that we are building something different."

Eli agrees with Jimmy, kind of:

"So I tried the new Wikia Search today, and it is awesome. Well, it's awesome for SEO people. I think it kinda sucks ..." (more after the jump)

"..or is just unnecessary, for everyone else. What's revolutionary about Wikia Search: it's completely transparent, explaining in complex detail why a certain page was ranked where it was.

The algorithm behind your results is yours to see. If you don't come up number one for a desired search term, you can easily compare on- and off-page elements used for ranking your site against those of the top-ranking sites.

If that sounds exciting, you could've been as excited years ago, when Nutch, which powers Wikia Search, was launched in 2005.

Searches in Nutch return results which can be analyzed to see what on-page elements were factored and weighted to give a specific site it's ranking. Nutch also provides a list of in-bound anchors for each result, which Wikia Search does not, which can give you a further idea of why a specific site is ranked where it is.

Wikia Search does include a few features over Nutch, like “mini-articles,” which quickly summarize the topic you're searching for.

Future iterations include the ability to rate results, and possibly alter the rankings, although the feature isn't ready yet. Still, the best thing I got from Wikia Search, being an SEO guy, was an introduction to Nutch, which is bound to be an invaluable tool in gauging the SEO power of a site.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 2:37 PM | Permalink

January 3, 2008

ChaCha launches text service at Sundance Film Festival

ChaCha, a “human-powered search engine”, today announced a new service that allows users to text questions of any kind to 242242 (which is ChaCha on a phone keypad) and receive text answers on their cell phone. The answers are sent by a live person, called a ChaCha guide.

The service is currently available as a free trial and, as part of the launch, ChaCha will be the “Official Text Answers Service of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.” This will allow festival goers to text in questions about screenings, festival events, local restaurants – anything connected with the Sundance Film Festival – and get dynamic, relevant answers from ChaCha guides. As the “virtual information booth,” ChaCha will provide exclusive real-time information about the audience pulse, length of wait lines and other dynamic and relevant information.

I spoke with Brad Bostic, president and co-founder of ChaCha, who said festival goers can even ask questions like “How long is the wait line?” and get answers from ChaCha guides.

ChaCha's new mobile answers service offers answers that people can't easily find otherwise when they have questions on the go. For example, Bostic's daughters asked him yesterday to find the name of the 2008 American Girl doll.

To get a brief answer from his cell phone, Bostic simply texted their question to 242242 as if messaging a friend. Because the questions are being answered by skilled people who are trained to use ChaCha's powerful internal search tools, users don't have to remember any special formatting or rules and questions can be asked even with typical text shortcuts, misspellings and slang.

Within three minutes, he got the answer from a day-old post on a blogger's site: The 2008 American Girl doll's name is Mia, and she's a 10-year-old hockey player-turned figure skater from upstate New York. Oh, and she has long, silky red hair.

With ChaCha, users can ask questions on a variety of topics, including: • Dynamic information – sports scores, movie times, airline delays, weather, etc. • Local information – cheapest gas, shopping, recycling, pharmacy locations and more • Current events – business news updates, stock updates, world news, etc. • General information – names and phone numbers for local businesses and residences • Trivia -- movie quotes, song lyrics, celebrity gossip and more

With the world's biggest community of real-time guides in place, ChaCha has put its powerful technology platform to use with mobile devices, Bostic added. On the cell phone, users benefit from the assistance of another knowledgeable human who can do research for them – especially when they don't have the resources, such as a computer, to do the research on their own.

So, what do you want to find out about the films, world premieres, panels, discussions, deals, and, of course, parties at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival? ChaCha is there and, thanks to text alerts, you'll be the first to know whatever is worth knowing.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 2:00 PM | Permalink

January 2, 2008

Wikia Search Engine To Launch Test Version Jan. 7

The Jimmy Wales' search engine experiment will launch its test version January 7. The engine - - Wikia - which Wales had stated last year would eventually challenge Google is an open source community driven program.

"Wales says pretending search results come from "some magic algorithm" doesn't help the concept of democracy or transparency, which goes against the characteristics the Web embodies. "All of these things are parts of the puzzle, but it's all going to be released under free license," he says. "The amount of human editorial influence will be much higher than anything we've seen before," CM.com reported.

Posted by Frank Watson at 8:45 PM | Permalink

December 19, 2007

Shopping Search Engine Providing Online Safety Tips

Sortprice - a price comparison search engine - is doing its part this holiday season with a guide to safely purchasing online without falling victim to identity theft. If you are traveling in New York City between Dec. 19 and December 23rd, people will be distributing cards with safety tips for online buyers.

Taking the cause offline and to the busiest city on the planet is an interesting approach and one I want to follow.

Posted by Frank Watson at 11:40 AM | Permalink

October 2, 2007

iHeard.com: Web Radio Search Engine

A specialized search engine for finding internet radio stations has just been launched by Fusa Consumer Search Network, Eric Ward reported today.

The site, iheard.com, organizes a directory of online radio stations by genre, language and country, and allows users to search through their database of thousands of stations, Ward noted. Fusa also has specialized search engines for podcasts, news and videos.

Posted by Frank Watson at 12:04 PM | Permalink

September 5, 2007

People Search Engine, Spock Has Danny Breaking Up Larry and Sergey

Spock, the recently launched beta people info search engine, seems to think that Danny Sullivan as the perfect buffer for Larry and Sergey.

Do a search on Spock for search engineand Sergey gets top billing, followed by Danny with Larry coming in third.

The results for the term search engine gives a list of well known search figures. Technoratti founder David Sifry is fourth in front of Matt Cutts followed by Marissa Mayer. Four of the top six are Googlers and there are no Yahoo or Microsoft people on the front page.

Dave McClure, Brett Tabke, Bruce Clay and Jill Whalen round out the top ten.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:43 PM | Permalink

August 30, 2007

Searching For Sports Info? Try Enth - Just Added NFL Search

With the NFL season about to get underway, Enth.com has added NFL search on its site, SearchNewz announced today.

Enth is a source of sports statistics and even offers a tool bar that runs sports scores and fantasy results.

"Through a partnership with STATS LLC, the worlds leading sports information provider, Enth.com aggregates, filters, and sorts sports statistics based on the question you submit," SearchNewz reported.

Posted by Frank Watson at 12:13 PM | Permalink

August 17, 2007

Search Engine Accoona Looking To Go Public

Accoona has been a round for some time - a small search engine - and is now looking to launch an IPO, according to Adotas.

The company launched Exchange Place last year to try and grab traction from the Cost Per Acquisition model, when others were having click fraud problems with straight PPC.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:23 PM | Permalink

Golf Course Search Engine Helps Find Your Way Out of the Rough

A search engine to help find golf courses is a great concept. I understand the problem finding a course, especially if Tiger Woods ever played there. His popularity pushes him to the top of organics and can leave the local course out of bounds.

Cybergolfsearch.com is a good vertical search engine covering the golf industry. I see a time when many such engines exist, along side a portal or community dedicated to the particular niche.

Posted by Frank Watson at 1:34 PM | Permalink

August 14, 2007

National Science Foundation Funds Music Search Engine

John Batelle's blog tipped me to this one. The National Science Foundation gave just under $100,000 to the University of Charleston for the development of a music search engine that uses aesthetic similarity.

The engine has the ability to 'listen' to the music and find comparative pieces in the same genre and music style.

In and of itself that is impressive, but the cross applications are enormous for sound recognition based search.

Posted by Frank Watson at 12:58 PM | Permalink

August 10, 2007

Marchex Adds About.com Founder To Team, Buys Call-Based Ad Co.

Local search marketing company, Marchex announced the purchase of call-based advertising services company VoiceStar and the appointment of About.com co-founder and CEO Bill Day as its new Chief Media Officer.

"Local search and locally developed and oriented content will be one of the key drivers for the search market over the next five years, and Marchex is in a phenomenal position to be a leader in this category," Day, who will report directly to Marchex Chairman and CEO Russell Horowitz, told MediaPost.

Day helped found About.com - the model for local user-generated content.

Posted by Frank Watson at 3:22 PM | Permalink

July 30, 2007

Wikia Grabs Search Crawler Grub

The open search engine being developed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has bought the search crawler Grub from LookSmart, according to IDG News.

"The Search Wikia project seeks to create a search engine based on open-source search protocols and human collaboration, drawing from the concept of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, which is written and edited by a community of volunteer collaborators." The IDG News reorted.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:58 PM | Permalink

Spock, Inc. Launching People Search Engine Not Going to the Dogs

Do a search for boxer on Google and you get a bunch of dog sites - reasonable unless you are looking for people. Do a search on Spock Inc.'s soon to be released engine and you get info on California Sen. Barbara Boxer and Muhammad Ali.

This search engine works the people niche and plans to launch with 100 million people in their database, the AP reported.

The site relies on public records so some of the information may be inaccurate but it seems like a good start.

Posted by Frank Watson at 1:31 PM | Permalink

July 24, 2007

iRazoo: Human-Powered Search Engine With Prizes

Okay incentivized search is not new, but it usually was a bugus engine asking people to click and share some minor income. The newly launched engine iRazoo seems to be a different model (not unique), though it has some initial detractors over at Digg.

The engine is human-powered. As the site explains:

"A person goes to the iRazoo website and uses it to perform a search query. The search engine produces it's search results. The user then clicks on a search result. The resulting website that comes out of the click is opened up on another web page. That web page has the header of the original iRazoo search engine with the resulting website page beneath it. That header has the following wording “Do you recommend this site, yes or no.” If the user clicks yes, that website url is placed into a database and is cross-indexed to the search term the user entered. After the url and keyword have been recorded by the database, then the next time a user goes to the search engine and types in the same search term, a “user recommended” heading will show in the results page with the indexed url shown below. These “user recommended” results will be shown above the regular search results that are returned by our regular search engine."

Whether this has legs only time will tell. Mahalo - another human powered engine - seems to be struggling. ChaCha has a live chat session where you can ask someone for help. This human touch seems to be a popular notion right now.

Posted by Frank Watson at 3:12 PM | Permalink

July 23, 2007

ClickSurge's New Content Widget To Monetize Traffic Adds Pixsy Image Search

MediaRiver's ClickSurge, a relatively new entry into the content monetization industry, has partnered with Pixsy to help add image search to publishing sites, the two companies announced in a joint press release.

"MediaRiver recently launched ClickSurge as an innovative tool for web publishers to lead Internet users to online content in a discovery-based contextual model. Publishers deploy ClickSurge powered widgets on their web properties, their partner's web properties, or as a part of their viral widget strategy, that feed the end user articles, videos or photos that are relevant to the page they are viewing. For example, a visitor who is reading an article or blog posting around a specific celebrity would be shown links to relevant articles, video clips and photos of that celebrity, prompting them to click through to other monetized web pages," the press release stated.

By incorporating ClickSurge powered widgets into its offerings, Pixsy will enable its publisher customers to display rich multimedia content that is contextually relevant to whatever text is on the page where the widget is deployed. The end result is a significant increase in page views for its customers and an increase in search volume and market share for Pixsy.

"Pixsy provides web publishers with a platform for Internet users to search photo and video archives on their websites, a functionality many of the largest media companies are lacking," said Chase Norlin, CEO of Pixsy Corporation. "With ClickSurge, our publishers can now display dynamic links to relevant images and videos, offering a powerful toolset to increase the profitability of web properties and deliver a very high quality user experience."

Under the terms of the agreement, Pixsy will deploy ClickSurge within its publisher network and leverage the solution to drive content syndication deals and extend the reach and effectiveness of its image and video search platform.

In addition, MediaRiver will leverage Pixsy's award winning multimedia search engine to provide its customers who lack multimedia search capability with the ability to drive traffic to their monetized multimedia assets.

"Incorporating Pixsy's image and video search capability to the ClickSurge offering will enable MediaRiver customers to expose their image and video content to the right audience, at the right time, anywhere on the web," said Al Wasserberger, CEO of MediaRiver.

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:04 PM | Permalink

July 18, 2007

FoodieView Is Recipe Search Engine, Restaurant Review

If you have some chicken breast inthe fridge and want a new way to cook them, then FoodieView.com may be the search engine for you.

This new recipe search engine could prove a popular niche. It also has restaurant reviews.

As the site's FAQ explains: FoodieView is a recipe search engine. You can use our site to search over a million recipes on the most popular cooking sites on the web.

Anyone who has tried researching the best way to make their favorite dish knows that it's a pain to switch from site to site to find the best version. We make things easier by providing a single place to search the web for recipes.

Just use this simple form, and enter a dish name, a type of cuisine, a chef's name, a list of ingredients, or any combination of the above.

Posted by Frank Watson at 12:41 PM | Permalink

July 17, 2007

BidClix Closing Doors July 31

BidClix, recently purchased by aQuantive, will cease to exist on July 31. They have sent out emails letting current advertisers know they will be sending refunds in August for any remaining balances in prepaid accounts.

The interesting thing is they will be moving select advertisers and publishers to another aQuantive property.

"Over the next few months we are going to work hard to transition our best BidClix advertisers and publishers to DRIVE Performance Media, an operating company of aQuantive and one of the world's leading advertising networks," the email stated.

This is an interesting approach by aQuantive. Buy something only to cherry pick the good advertisers and publishers then gut the company. One would think it would have just been easier to approach those advertisers directly.

Guess the talent at BidClix was worth the expense.

The full email is below:

The BidClix Advertising Marketplace, as you know it, is closing. Soon you will no longer be able to access your BidClix account and the existing interface will be shut down.

In December 2006 BidClix became part of the aQuantive family. Over the next few months we are going to work hard to transition our best BidClix advertisers and publishers to DRIVE Performance Media, an operating company of aQuantive and one of the world's leading advertising networks.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR ACCOUNT.

Please note your current account balance: $278.67

If you would like to receive a refund for any positive account balance then you MUST first verify your contact information by logging into your BidClix account and following the steps outlined there. If you do not wish to receive a refund check then you do not need to take any action.

Please Take Note of these Important Dates:

* July 31st: BidClix will stop serving ads and stop accepting bids from advertisers.

* July 31st: The last day you will be able to verify your contact information for payment/refund.

* August 6th: The last day you will be able to log into your BidClix account to call reports etc.

* August 8th - 30th: We will send final checks to all verified accounts.

Posted by Frank Watson at 10:14 AM | Permalink

June 26, 2007

Quigo To Serve Time Inc. Contextual Ads

Quigo has signed a multi-year with Time Inc. to provide contextual ads for the publisher of such sites as CNNMoney.com, Time.com, People.com and SI.com.

Time chose Quigo's AdSonar platform due to its flexibility and the fact that “many of our advertisers are very response-driven,” Time Inc. Business and Finance Network's president of digital publishing, Vivek Shah stated.

"Our partnership with Quigo underscores Time Inc.'s strategic focus on becoming a powerful force in digital media. Quigo was the partner that could enable us to sell a Time-branded solution directly to our own advertisers so we can become a leader in performance-based advertising," said Ann Moore, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Time Inc. "After a rigorous evaluation, we came to the clear conclusion that Quigo's custom platform provided the best solution for us to own our advertiser relationships and generate significant incremental revenue."

"We're excited to welcome Time Inc. to the AdSonar network. This partnership is a milestone for Quigo and a clear trend we see in the online advertising industry where sophisticated media companies are increasingly demanding more tailored and innovative monetization solutions," said Mike Yavonditte, Quigo's Chief Executive Officer. "Time Inc. has some of the crown jewels on the Internet and together with Quigo's technology and unique approach, we will be able to create a new ad marketplace designed to further Time Inc.'s brands in the digital age. In doing so, Time will capture the full value of their brands while also building their own advertiser asset base. We look forward to launching the new program in July and to expanding our partnership in the coming years."

Posted by Frank Watson at 5:09 PM | Permalink

May 24, 2007

Hakia Holds Concert To Launch Music Search

Hakia is throwing two concerts to promote the launch of their new music search. I RSVPed for the New York City event next Tuesday and will add a review next week.

It is an interesting approach and one that seems to reflect a playfulness the company presents.

"In the beginning, there was light. In the digital age, there is the search engine. Man asks questions and expects answers. To search for the meaning of life on the Web is to plunge into the depths of absurdity, a challenge to any creative mind. The “Search Music" reflects this challenge", the website tells us.

Hey they are even looking for musicians to submit music for their next CD!

Posted by Frank Watson at 5:56 PM | Permalink

May 15, 2007

It's Raining Search Engines

Seems like everyone wants to launch a search engine. 2007 will be the year of the niched search engines. The news today has had a lot of stories about these small engines.

ChaCha and blinkx announced a partnership. Autobytel joins Kosmix for a car sales engine. ISEdb launches a search engine, Scoop, for news about search engines. Prodge rolls out music band search engines like SearchWithMaroon5.com Trulia, a real estate search engine goes Web 2.0. Zuula, an engine that uses results from the search engine a person prefers, is launched.

Posted by Frank Watson at 11:25 AM | Permalink

May 7, 2007

Sphere revamps its blog search site

Dan Farber of ZDNet reports that Sphere has revamped its blog search site. It is now focusing more on current activity from the last 24-hours or seven days, and surfacing related content to search queries from Sphere widget partners, such as the New York Times, GigaOM, Access Hollywood and TechCrunch, and other sources.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 8:36 AM | Permalink

May 3, 2007

Quintura For Kids: Another Search Engine For Kids

There have been a number of attempts to create a specialised search engine for kids. Yahoo did it - once Yahooligans now Yahoo Kids beta. Ask nearly changed to a kids site completely - or so the rumors go....

A new entry to the field is Quintura for Kids.

The space is a tough one and I think possibly one that has overreached itself. My 14-year-old uses Google... she would be insulted if she were told to use the kids' search engine.

Kids search engines should be for 3-10 year olds. After that they expect to be treated like young adults and the allure of cartoon drawings and puzzles just doesn't cut it anymore.

Posted by Frank Watson at 3:28 PM | Permalink

April 17, 2007

Pizza Search Engine Slow To Deliver

A new niched search engine announced its launch today: Pizza.net - the pizza search engine.

Artistically it looks decent, but as far as giving you what you need fast and clean, lets just say, in the old days you would be getting the free pizza.

The homepage uses the colors of the ingredients for pizzas. Tomato reds, pepper greens etc - clever and hunger eliciting.

One big problem is the initial search is a little slow and then the results do not give you a phone number or if they deliver until you click on the individual result.

Come on guys I really love the concept but like pizza delivery - we always look for fast and fresh. Fine tune this and I am sure you will be the number one site of college kids across the country who are tired of the obligatory Dominoes.

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:58 PM | Permalink

March 30, 2007

WebFetch, new meta search engine, launches in UK

E-consultancy reports the launch of WebFetch, a new meta search engine in the UK. In addition to web search results from Google, Yahoo Search, MSN Search, and Ask.com, WebFetch also offers image search, audio search, video search, news search, a business finder, and a people finder. The news search results come from only four sources: Fox News, ABC, Yahoo and Topix.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 8:50 AM | Permalink

March 27, 2007

Sports Search Engine Even Has Gambling Info

2007 is definitely looking like the year of the vertical or niched search engine. We have local search, business search, video search, image search, music search and more.... and now there is a sports search engine!

Enth.com has announced a partnership with Stats LLC - a leading sports statistical data source - and is beta testing its search engine.

The engine can tell you who was the pitcher when Roger Maris hit homerun 61 or how many times Ohio State basketball has covered the spread this season.

And the gambling info may be what makes this engine stick. Or even the stats it can provide fantasy sports people will make it stand alone.

This niche has the right demographic - people with money - let's see if that is enough to keep it going.

Right now it could use a good logo and a lot of functionality help. But I love sports enough to watch its progress.

Posted by Frank Watson at 11:30 AM | Permalink

Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Google?

Who's afraid of Google? Not Topix.net's Rich Skrenta, that's for sure. In his Skrentablog yesterday, he outlines 12 tips for up-and-coming search engines who want to take on Google, with a promise for more to come in "How to beat Google, part 1."

Rather than cower under Google's dominance of search and advertising, startups should feel confident that they can stand up and fight, he says. "Grow a spine people! You have a giant growing market with just one dominant competitor, not even any real #2 ... Get a stick and try to knock G's crown off."

Skrenta, co-founder & CEO of news aggregator Topix.net, gives some sage advice to those trying to do so. Among the advice:

If you merely duplicate Google's search engine, you will have nothing.
You need both a great product and a strong new brand. Both are hard problems.
You need to position your product to sub-segment the market and carve out a new niche. Or better, define an entirely new category.
Forget interface innovation. The editorial value of search is in the index, not the interface.
Forget about asking users to do anything besides typing two words into a box.
Your core team will be 2-3 people, not 20. You cannot build something new and different with a big team.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:05 AM | Permalink

March 1, 2007

ReportLinker: Vertical Search Engine For Marketing Research

If you have looked for open access market research reports, then Reportlinker may be the answer.

The newly launched engine attempts to filter the results of regualr engines that are imapct by SEM efforts.

The engine addresses the problem of "how to quickly find and access relevant information using general public tools? General public tools promote merchant content, boosted by search marketing (SM) and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, making relevant open access information more difficult to find," Digital50.com explained.

Unfortunately this is not a free service. Monthly subscriptions are 29.89 euros, according to information at the site. Though marketing reports can run a lot more than that, so this could be a fast and inexpensive way to pull research.

Posted by Frank Watson at 12:53 PM | Permalink

February 25, 2007

Blinkx offers a way to search the contents of Web videos

Jason Pontin of The New York Times has written a feature story about Blinkx today entitled, "Millions of videos, and now a way to search inside them." Among the interesting factoids in the article is this one: "Today, owing to the proliferation of large video files, video accounts for more than 60 percent of the traffic on the Internet, according to CacheLogic, a company in Cambridge, England."

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 1:29 PM | Permalink

January 31, 2007

Over In NYC: Silicon Valley Cavorts

We're at the AlwaysOn Media conference. If we have to see one more company put up a slide that shows Publishers, Advertisers and Consumers in a triangle, then we are going to start throwing tomatoes. Only kidding.

This conference showcases the online media world. Companies give short presentations, and it's a terrific way to learn what's going on lately in those three triangle points and more. Watch it live through Wednesday.

In this energetic venue, there are good companies talking to each other off-stage. There are bloggers sitting in positions of honor during the sessions, in their very own blogger bullpen. Everyone's feeling generally pumped up.

The highlight? Bill Cleary did a “man on the street” interview. It was a nice commentary on the current state of self-made videos and blogs. He showed a video that accosted San Franciscans about whether the blogosphere concerned them. Most people out there didn't have a clue but wanted to make nice – and agreed that it was a dire matter.

The meta-message was not to take ourselves too seriously. For a show with lots of new companies and important things to announce, I'm glad this set the tone. We need to laugh at ourselves sometimes, even while letting the world know what we do.

Posted by at 6:19 AM | Permalink

January 30, 2007

Wikio combines news search, personalization and social media

While I posted a short item about Wikio getting funding a few days ago, Chris Sherman of Search Engine Land has taken a closer look at the "relatively new startup that blends articles from major news web sites and blogs with commentary and tags from Wikio users." According to Chris, "Wikio is one of the most useful news and blog aggregators I've seen come along in a while."

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 9:34 AM | Permalink

January 18, 2007

PPC Back Fill Map or Who Is King Of Garbitrage

While this is not news - it really should be. Most of the small search engines are arbitraging one way or another. And the Big Three (clearly 3 since Ask back fills Google PPC) make their cuts on the front end.

A Bruce Clay map for all the PPC partnerships and the rules that govern them would be handy.

My rant here started when I noticed at Ask that we were not being served Ask ads but rather our Google ads. Spoke to one of the people over at Ask and was told that they back fill with Google when the CTR drops below their acceptable level.

Guess that is the level where Google would pay them more to put their ads in... so some of our $10 plus Google terms pay Ask more (rumors of what percentage vary but let's work with 60%) - they get $6 a click from Google when we advertise for say $3 on Ask.... so the CTR would have to be 200% to make them enough money to change....

They are not the only ones.... I see many of the small engines pushing their results out into even thinner search provider portals.... the search results may stay at the site but the results are feed straight from another engine... yet many of these engines also arbitrage their onsite inventory with one of the Big Three so they force their advertisers to bid up to at least what these other people are willing to pay.

Not making much sense - after a while people are going to realize they are just using variations on Google, Yahoo and MSN and just go there first.

I want to start a Back Fill Map - so everyone post what you know in the forum and I will develop something that we all can use.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:05 PM | Permalink

Social search engine Sproose surpasses 250,000 unique users 30 days out of beta

Sproose, a recently launched social search engine, today announced that it has surpassed 250,000 unique users in just 30 days out of beta. Additionally Sproose has topped one- million voted websites.

Sproose allows users to vote for their favorite websites and rank the index according to the score given. This creates a personal index for each user and a weighted score of sites for all users.

Sproose has developed it's own web index from scratch while the ranking engine was built on a platform using a combination of proprietary algorithms and open source software and crawling technologies.

Sproose provides peer-moderated, ranking, prioritizing and community networking for consumer use. With its proprietary "Knowledge Rank" moderated directory technologies, Sproose users can effectively categorize and index sites, tailored for personal or group use.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 2:36 PM | Permalink

January 1, 2007

Searching for the next Google

Miguel Helft of The New York Times has written a great article entitled, "Looking for the next Google." In it, he mentions Powerset, hakia, ChaCha, Snap, and Wikia as well as Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon.com.

Esther Dyson, a well-known technology commentator and Powerset investor, is quoted in the article saying, “There is way too much obsession with search, as if it were the end of the world.” She adds, “Google equals money equals search equals search advertising; it all gets combined as if this is the last great business model.”

Now, there's a quote you can take to the bank. ;-)

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 8:18 AM | Permalink

December 19, 2006

BlowSearch Adds More Features

While it may be a small member of the search community, BlowSearch has provided some innovative elements to its products. They were leaders in the site exclusion for advertisers not wanting traffic from specific sites that did not convert for them.

Their email announcement today states:

The new reporting features include:

Traffic Source Selection has been directly integrated into the Traffic Source Report page Advanced report generation tools that allow you to select ad type, campaign, listing and date range One-click access from your campaign manager directly to the reporting page for quicker access to campaign data Added ability to export report data to Excel file Combined multiple individual reports into single activity report for improved ease-of-use and easier access to critical data

They have also enhanced their "Traffic Source Selection" tool.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:41 PM | Permalink

December 18, 2006

NHN Corp Has Expansion Plans Starting With Japanese Search

NHN Corp, whose sites include Naver the leading Korean search engine, announced expansion plans starting with the Japanese market, according to an Associated Press report.

Naver uses a community based method for its search results with users helping each other find answers. This method works well within the Asian culture, according to the NHN CEO.

"In the search sector, we can provide users with a meaningful service based on a social and cultural foundation," NHN CEO Chae Hwi-young said. "In this regard, Japan could be a model very similar to South Korea. I believe Japan is where we can excel more than anywhere else."

NHN also plans to enter the English, Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese and other markets.

The Japanese engine will launch late 2007.

Posted by Frank Watson at 12:15 AM | Permalink

December 14, 2006

New social search engine, Decipho, launched today

A new social search engine called Decipho was launched today.

Here are some of the major features of Decipho:

1. Decipho filters the search results by user preferences and breaks them into categories. It is able to do this by allowing users to categorize the results -- shopping, info & categories of their own choosing-- and the storing them for future searches and allowing others to see what websites were ranked and for what category.

2. Another unique feature Decipho offers is the "My Results" section. While logged into your account, when a website you have already ranked appears in another keyword search, the system will pull out that search listing to the top right side (next to general results) even if it is listing number 40.

3. The "Keyword Rankings" link next to all of the search results breaks down user-votes by categories for each keyword search that a site is ranked under, and displays them in percentages.

4. Another feature Decipho has added to narrow your search is the Social Meter. This allows you to select what percentage a websites user ranking for a specific category must be equal to or greater than.

5. Another feature is the Claim a Website option. When you see an image or logo next to a search result and a link below it called Owners Message, this means the website owner has written there own description about their site for you to read. An example of this is if you do a search for decipho. Listing one, which is decipho.com, will show you what the claim a website looks like. This will appear whenever this website appears in a search. 6. Users while signed into their accounts may add their own categories to rank websites. Users may rank a website as many categories as they choose to and these rankings will show whenever this website appears in a search they conduct as well as in the My Results.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 1:48 PM | Permalink

December 12, 2006

Mamma.com Launches New Video Search Engine

Mamma.com has launched a Video Search engine in Beta format.

In conjunction with the Pixsy Media Search Platform, Mamma.com now offers its users video search capabilities that provide visual searching based on relevance, categories, photos and videos. For example, users can enter a query into the Mamma.com search box, hit the Videos tab, and pull relevant results from numerous video content providers.

This enables users of the metasearch engine to find, explore, and view millions of broadband videos from TV shows, movies, music, and news events. The Pixsy Media Search Platform provides Mamma.com with the technology that gives users the ability to search for videos from their favorite providers across the web including YouTube, BusinessWeek, Reuters, USA Today, Revver, StupidVideos.com, AddictingClips.com, Blastro, MetaCafe, Sharkle, Roo Media, and many more.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 9:57 AM | Permalink

November 8, 2006

Collarity Relevance Engine

Collarity is a social search engine that combines a variety of different types of functionality to produce results in a new and interesting way. The basic concept is very straightforward, and is something that we've seen before - searchers begin to type in their search and as they do a little box pops up suggesting appropriate terms for the search - a little like Google Suggest but rather more sophisticated. There is also a slider bar with three settings for Personal, Community and Global.Clicking on each of these options will provide a slightly different set of suggestions, based on previous searches. Searchers can choose to continue typing in their search, or click on one of the suggestions to add that to their search, or can simply click on a likely looking URL that is displayed.

Results are then displayed on the screen and can be clicked on as usual. The search engine is combining the concepts of a suggest function, a social community element (ala the Eurekster swicki) and a slider element, vaguely similar to the Yahoo Mindset approach. Initially I wasn't overly impressed with the results - not least because most of those on the first page were culled from the same site. However, once I got myself a (free) account and started to explore in personal mode things got rather more interesting.

I ran a few searches that tended to focus on reflexology, alternative health therapy and the area that I live in, just to give it something to work with. I started with the tab set at 'Global' and started to type mass (for massage) and was rewarded with suggestions for city and Boston by the time I got to 'ma'. By the time I'd reached 'mass' we'd moved onto density (with narrower terms being volume, unit and body) and when I'd finished typing the entire word 'massage' I was being given suggestions for health, spa, products and so on. All of these made perfect sense given that the search engine could (and did) interpret what I was typing/searching for in a number of different ways, and it was able to reflect that very well, given that the dialogue or suggestion box was very tiny. URLs were also suggested, as mentioned, and hovering the cursor over any of them displayed another small box describing the website with keywords in context.

I then chose to run the same search with the slider set to 'Community'. By the time I had got as far as 'massa' I was getting suggestions that related to my specific subject area of interest, and by the time I had got as far as typing out the whole word the suggestions were related exactly to alternative therapy and in particular reflexology, which was one of the searches that I'd initially run to give Collarity something to work with. Re-running the search again, this time with the slider over at Personal the search engine immediately started to focus on the reflexology/health aspect of my search, and included suggested URLs that I'd previously looked at in my initial searches.

I found the approach that Collarity is taking to be very intuitive, and based on a very small sample of searches extremely accurate. Of course, there were things that I wasn't overly impressed with - mainly the search engine results page, with similar results from the same site. Other information was quite sparse too - just title, brief description, URL and various keywords that further described the page, based on previous searches. There wasn't an advanced search function, and Boolean operators didn't work. I tried a few of the other obvious search functions such as link or title, but they didn't work either. The lack of any help function or documentation really let the engine down. While I appreciate that it's still in development I would have thought that was more reason, not less to have the functionality fully documented; I don't want to have to guess. This is slightly ironic given that one of their tag lines is that the search engine 'saves time and mental energy' - the idea that searchers can use their resource to save themselves fro having to think is a slightly unusual marketing ploy - but I do see what they're saying.

Collarity is a great idea, and provided quick on topic results based on very limited information on my interests, but it's let down (at this stage at least) by emphasising that element of its technology at the expense of other basic search functionality that should be an integral part of any search engine. These interesting functions need to be a bonus, not a replacement for the basics. Having said that it's worth looking at, most especially if you take the few seconds to register and start to personalise your searches.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 7:15 AM | Permalink

November 6, 2006

ChaCha Search: Take Two

When "human-powered" search engine ChaCha launched in September it was a great idea with very flawed execution. The site offers algorithmic search, but also IM-chat based search with actual people in real time. Here's my previous post on ChaCha. Today, the site has gone from "alpha" to "beta" based on lessons learned during the alpha period. And it appears from casual searching there have been some significant improvements.

According to the press release issued today, "Since launching the experimental Alpha version in September 2006, more than 14,000 people have entered the system to serve as ChaCha guides with as many as 1,500 guides being added on any given day. The fast-growing guide community has been instrumental in ChaCha's accelerated Beta development, as they have been working around the clock to help end users find information online."

I spoke to CEO Scott Jones late last week about the discoveries and improvements ChaCha had made during the past few months. He said he was surprised by the number of people using guide-based search. "I would have thought 95% would search without the guide, but it's been more like 40% using the guides."

Jones said that ChaCha's guides are drawn from three primary pools: retirees, college students and stay/work-at-home moms. "I thought our target market for guides was going to be college students, but the thing that took off was work-at-home moms."

Guides are qualified and paid according to an elaborate system. But Jones explained that guides have the capacity to make as much as $20,000 per year at the top end. But he also said that they've instituted strict controls to ensure quality and are working to get better and better guides into the system.

The guide-discovered search results are integrated into the algorithmic results and given priority in subsequent searches. I conducted four searches to test ChaCha in beta:

Best Thai food in Los Angeles: ChaCha, Google, Yahoo
How many smartphones will there be in 2010 in the US: ChaCha, Google, Yahoo
Best non-toxic household cleaning products: ChaCha, Google, Yahoo
Thanksgiving recipes: ChaCha, Google, Yahoo

These were all traditional searches without using the guides and the results were quite competitive I thought. The site was essentially not working in Firefox, but worked fine in IE. In a couple of cases I tried these same searches using guides but they were busy; however algorithmic results were provided. In one case I did have an interaction with a guide.

Here's the transcript in the context of a search for "Best non-toxic household cleaning products":

Status: Looking for a guide ... Status: Connected to guide: melindam melindam: Welcome to ChaCha! You: Best non-toxic household cleaning products melindam: Hi, how are you? You: fine melindam: I'm sorry, it says you're searching for Thanksgiving recipes. Let me change that and I will look for you. You: that was my previous search You: sorry melindam: No problem :-) You: now I'm looking for something different melindam: Ok, one moment please. melindam: I appreciate your patience while I find exactly what you need. melindam: Look at that one while I find more please. (Result found: mrsmeyers.com) You: That's a commercial result You: Mrs. Meyer's is a brand not an "objective" source melindam: Ok. Are you wanting a personal opinion? You: I'd like a reputable source that gives me a range of products and evaluates them, thanks. melindam: You asked for non-toxic cleaning products. Are you looking for reviewes or products? You: The word "best" implies an evaluation melindam: Well the word best is subjective. melindam: All companies say they have the best. You: Now we're having a philosophical argument You: "Best" can be subjective You: but it can also be a judgment resulting from tests You: or expert evaluation melindam: Let me transfer you to someone who may be give you better results. Transfer: You are being transfered to another guide who can help you search even better! Looking for guide ...

I didn't pursue it with the second guide. While I was waiting and interacting with "melindam," there was video running in the upper right of the screen. This offers a brand advertising opportunity and takes some of the pain out of waiting for the human to conduct the search.

The guides represent both a burgeoning social network with its own possibilities and a word-of-mouth marketing force. These are two elements that suggest the site will develop some staying power and find a market.

Jones and I talked for awhile about brands and search and the role that brand plays in search loyalty. He told me that he spend considerable time thinking and working on the ChaCha brand, "Cha means search in Chinese, and it's a dance -- to achieve a search result."

What are the most popular searches on ChaCha?

google.com
amazon.com
digg.com
weather.com
ask.com

Posted by Greg Sterling at 9:19 AM | Permalink

November 3, 2006

See And Find With Quintura

Quintura is the latest in the line of visual search engines such as Kartoo, Mooter and WebBrain. Quintura basically takes your search term, runs a search and then translates the results into a tag cloud effect on the screen. Users can then simply look at the results (powered by Yahoo) listed under the tag cloud and click on the link as per normal, or they can explore words displayed in the semantic map to focus the query more closely.

The results section of the page is not exciting - title, URL, keywords in context and sometimes the size of the page, but that's about it. I'd like to have seen more information, and keywords in context are no more than a word either side, which doesn't provide any guidance at all. This section of the page is also squeezed into the bottom half of the screen, giving it a cramped feeling. This is probably the weakest element of the search engine, and clearly the one that the developers spent least time on because they wanted to get onto the interesting and fun section of the semantic display.

This is where Quintura does become more interesting and quite fun to play with. After the search runs the search terms appear on the screen and are surrounded with other hopefully appropriate terms. My search on 'search engine watch' for example returned keyword suggestions such as 'blog', 'forum', 'search engines' and so on. The closer to the search terms, the larger the keyword suggestions (both in terms of font size and bold), the more relevant they are deemed. Holding the mouse over a term - note that you don't need to click - will display a new set of results in the bottom window and will also show another keyword cloud overlaying the original, which does get a little confusing at times, and it's quite hard to work out exactly what you're searching on.

However, it's an interesting approach to search, and users who enjoy different approaches to the display of search results will enjoy using it.

It does obviously have more flexibility though, as it's a reasonably well rounded search engine. Keywords can be dropped from the semantic display by clicking on the appropriate icon, and any associated keywords are also dropped at the same time. Excluding 'baseball' from the search on my name also excluded 'statistics' for example. Words can be added to a search by simply clicking into a blank area in the screen and typing them into the search box that appears; words can be excluded in a similar manner as well with the usual minus sign in front. It's possible to save searches as a favorite or it can be emailed to a friend or colleague.

There are additional things that I'd like to see with Quintura; a more indepth 'help' guide, RSS feeds, greater search functionality by type - at the moment it's limited to web or images, and news, blogs and so on would be a nice addition. Equally however it's in beta mode, so it would be unfair to be overly critical.

As previously mentioned, people who enjoy visual search results pages will get a kick out of this one, while for everyone else it's a bit of an oddity they'll ignore. While the semantic element is clearly the emphasis I personally found the cramped results section too irritating to want to use this engine for any length of time.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 5:39 AM | Permalink

November 1, 2006

Zotspot Wants To Share The Search Wealth

One could plausibly argue that it's crazy to do anything in the general ("horizontal") search marketplace. But new engines continue to launch. The latest, having been in semi-stealth mode for the past several weeks, is Zotspot. Zotspot is a general-purpose engine that officially launched yesterday. Here's the press release.

Like a number of others before it, the idea here is to "reward" users for searching. It claims to be the first engine to "pay users in cash for their normal search behavior." If you don't want the cash you can donate it to one of numerous partner charities.

You essentially get paid for referrals in a "multi-level" fashion. Here's how Zotspot explains how users get paid. Search engine ChaCha doesn't reward its users, but has a comparable payment structure for its "guides."

The theme here is "share the wealth." The question is will that be incentive enough to get people off their G-Y-M habit? One wants to root for companies that have their eye on the larger social good, but Zotspot's results at a minimum have to be as good as Google's or no one will be swayed.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 10:07 AM | Permalink

August 30, 2006

Accoona Review In Ariadne

Accoonawas recently reviewed in Ariadne magazine by me. (If you're not familiar with Ariadne, it's a quarterly online magazine aimed towards the UK academic market, but with a general wide appeal). I won't go into the entire review since you can read it in the magazine but in brief I'm pleased with the recent developments of Accoona, particularly in the area of news and the easy ways in which searches can quickly be targetted by date, publisher, company, country and more. If Accoona has passed under your radar recently it may be worth another look, and if you're in Europe you can try the .eu version .

Posted by Phil Bradley at 5:49 AM | Permalink

May 11, 2006

NetworkWorld Talks With Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivisimo & Clusty

Gary Price points to a NetworkWorld.com interview with Vivisimo CEO Raul Valdes-Perez, of Clusty Search. Clusty uses clustering technology to provide results. The NetworkWorld author was convinced, during his interview with Mr. Perez, that Google/Yahoo/MSN provide "incomplete results." Is clustering the future of search? Give Clusty a try for yourself. Also, for past articles at Search Engine Watch on Clusty click here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:49 AM | Permalink

May 3, 2006

Google Not Tops In South Korea

Google fails to make inroads in South Korea from the Associated Press is a interesting look at how there's at least one country where Google is not tops or a major player: South Korea. Instead, the human-based Naver service remains far-and-away the most popular.

It's the one exception I know of where a question-answering model has succeeded and thrived, compared to those run by Google and Yahoo. The relatively small slice of the web in Korean, along with apparently poor automated search technology initially, has allowed Naver to succeed.

The story touches on Google's efforts in the country, including the promotional Google Bus that was sent around. You'll find more about Naver from us here: An Internet Search Company Hotter than Google? A Profile of Korea's NHN and Naver.com

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:25 AM | Permalink

April 25, 2006

A Well-Rounded Approach to Searching the Blogosphere

A new blog search startup called Sphere is launching today, with a different approach to finding content in the blogosphere. Sphere's creators are veterans of several internet startups who've applied the lessons they've learned from previous companies (Oddpost, Wordpress and others) to build a powerful, but easy-to-use blog search engine, with a number of interesting twists. I've got a full writeup of the new service in today's SearchDay article, Sphere: A New Approach to Blog Search.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 11:10 AM | Permalink

March 28, 2006

Google Lands Deal With Verizon SuperPages.com

ClickZ reports that Google has landed a dead with Verizon SuperPages.com to provide some backfill sponsored results for SuperPages.com. Google will be using its AdWords PPC engine to help Verizon better monetize their online Yellow Pages engines, SuperPages.com. The deal will allow Verizon to increase their inventory of ads. SuperPages will be managing the accounts and they will buy the Google advertising on their behalf.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:52 AM | Permalink

March 15, 2006

Nutch's Doug Cutting Joins Yahoo Full Time After Serving Four Years Independently

Jeremy Zawodny notes that Doug Cutting, who has been working at Yahoo for four-years as an independent contractor, as now signed on with Yahoo full time, as an employee. Doug will most likely continue working from home on his open source projects; Lucene, Hadoop and Nutch. So while Yahoo loses some employees, they gain some as well.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:24 AM | Permalink

December 15, 2005

UDDI Business Registry Closing

Way back in 2001, I had a reader or two ask me about UDDI and a business registry that IBM, Microsoft and others were building upon it, which is now closing.

UDDI is the Universal Description, Discovery & Integration protocol. I mentioned it briefly in this article for SEW members, Navigational Keyword Space Heats Up; Watch Those Claims!, but never got back to doing more about the system as I didn't really see it going anywhere.

Today, I got an email from Microsoft that it was pulling out of the registry:

You are receiving this mail because you have registered as a publisher on the Microsoft node of the UDDI Business Registry (UBR).

The primary goal of the UBR was to prove the interoperability and robustness of the UDDI specifications through a public implementation. This goal was met and far exceeded, and now the UBR is discontinuing its operations. As part of this process the Microsoft UBR node at uddi.microsoft.com will be permanently unavailable for all operations beginning January 12, 2006. Data stored in the UBR may be retrieved until January 12, 2006 and used in accordance with the UDDI Business Registry terms of use available at http://uddi.microsoft.com/policies/termsofuse.aspx. You may find the UDDI Data Export Wizard useful for retrieving your data, and it is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9D467A69-57FF-4AE7-96EE-B18C4790CFFD.

For more information, please see the frequently asked questions related to the UBR discontinuation at http://uddi.microsoft.com/about/FAQshutdown.htm. You may submit feedback to Microsoft at the following location: http://uddi.microsoft.com/contact/default.aspx.

Thank You, Microsoft UDDI Team

IBM and SAP are also pulling out. More details here on why: UBR Shutdown FAQ. UDDI support from these vendors continues, but the associated UDDI Business Registry is closing down.

Software giants ready Web directory from News.com back in 2001 gives you more background on what the vendors thought the registry might do. Microsoft brings keyword search to UDDI from InfoWorld in the same year covers how Microsoft teamed with RealName to bring UDDI into that system. RealNames itself died the next year. Weak security taints directory from Computerworld covers fake listings and verification issues that hit the system that year.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:01 AM | Permalink

October 19, 2005

Exalead's Home Page Gets a New Look

Exalead, the Paris-based general-purpose web engine we've blogged about several times during the past year, has redesigned their home page.

Although total database size means little, they have also posted an increase to the size of Exaldead database now passing the two billion page mark according (according to the site). In this case, I'll say that a growing total illustrates that Exalead continues to expand their offerings and also shows their desire to play in the leagues of some of the larger general-purpose web engines.

Exalead is now using the slogan "One:Web Search" to differentiate this product from the now publicly available: "One: Desktop Search." That's right, a new desktop search client. Btw, Exalead is also offering enterprise and workgroup tools using the "Exalead One" name.

The new home page is clean, sparse and easy to use. You'll find a single search box with direct links to an advanced interface, language and other preferences, and help.

Exalead continues to offer many advanced search options including stemming, phonetic search, proximity search (hooray!), and others -- many not available elsewhere.

Directly below the search box, you'll find four boxes labelled, "add shortcut." Here' you can add-in hyperlinked static images of favorite pages. This personalization feature has been available since late December. Update: Fellow blogger and librarian Phil Bradley points out in an email that you can have up to 18 shortcuts on your home page.

At this point, search results pages look much the same as they have in the past. I wouldn't doubt that they'll get a makeover soon. Results pages are filled with useful data that can make focusing your results a point and click operation.

The left column consists of: + Related Terms + Related Categories (I belive Exalead uses the ODP) + Web Site Location (Where in the world the page is coming from) + Limit by Document Type (Need to see only PDF files, just click)

Along the top of a results page, in a gray box, look for a button labeled "RSS." If you select it, links to RSS feeds that are available for sites listed in your results become visible.

Also in the gray box are three buttons that allow you to select how the results page is laid out.

Finally, in most cases, the right side of a results page contains static thumbnail images of each result page. Actually, a change in the Exalead's preference section allows you to determine where you want to see the thumbnails (left or right side of page).

Kudos to Exalead on the home page makeover and we're looking forward to seeing more changes and enhancements in the future. Hat Tip: G.N.

Postscript: One other cool feature that Exalead offers is very similar to what Clusty and others have provided for a while. When you're on a web results page, click anywhere on a result snippet. A new window will open at the bottom of the results page with a LIVE version of the page. You can even bookmark it!

Posted by Gary Price at 6:32 PM | Permalink

July 13, 2005

Claria Planning "Behavioral Search Platform"

Claria, the company formerly known as Gator, is getting into the search game with a forthcoming site that will use searcher behavior rather than link analysis as a primary measure of relevance. From the press release:

"The technology incorporates basic metrics such as click rates, as well as critical post-click metrics of consumer behavior - such as time spent viewing a site, number of pages viewed at a site, number of return visits to a destination Web site, historical interests based on Web-wide surfing habits, and conversion behavior. While in the past Claria utilized RelevancyRank technology solely to benchmark and evaluate other search engine results, this alpha release marks the first time this technology has been incorporated into a search engine platform."

The alpha Web site, which will be available in July, will be password protected and limited to a small test group, with a public beta expected in Q4 of this year.

More information is available from the press release. See also Claria Debuts RelevancyRank: Search Ranking By Behavioral Activity for more background from us on the RelevancyRank system.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 11:52 AM | Permalink

July 6, 2005

Searching The Activist Web

Need to search the activist web? Activista indexes content from activist, protest and vegetarian/vegan recipe web sites as part of its mission to expose information about social change. The motto on the bottom of the home page says it better: "Our dreams won't fit in their search engine." You'll find a full list of what you're searching against here. FYI, long-standing site Disinformation has a similar mission of trying to focus attention on information from alternative resources, though it long ago abandoned the search and directory format for a blog approach.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:15 AM | Permalink

May 31, 2005

Shmoogle: Randomizing Google Results To Show Good Stuff Beyond Top 10

Thanks to Philipp over at Google Blogoscoped for pointing out a new site called Shmoogle.

This new service takes Google results and shows them in a random order. Why? The sites creator, Tasila Hassine, is trying to make a point. She writes:

This tool touches upon several crucial issues on the web such as Search Engine Optimization. Shmoogle instantly neutralizes Page rank and the whole SEO industry induced by it. Yet it addresses other fundamental issues such as retrievability vs. visibility. While all pages on the net are equally retrievable, they are certainly not equally visible.

Hassine has a good point and one that I make quite a bit in my presentations and classes to both librarians and the general public.

Just because it's "on the web" and has been crawled by a web engine doesn't mean that it's easily retrievable/visible. As I've said before, the Invisible or Deep Web in 2005 is every result beyond number 6 or 7. (-:

Why is this an issue? Here are just a few reasons that come to mind:

++ Keywords Selected You use the term "pop" but the perfect result uses the word "soda."

++ Number of Keywords Used by the Searcher

++ Effort and Time Searcher takes what they find during the first search and does nothing else to possibly improve their results. They also want it "all" in just a few seconds.

++ Lack of Searching Skills Like I've said many times, people don't use most of the tools engines offer to create more precise results. I'm not just talking about advanced search resources but also the fact that many of the large engines offer specialty tools like image, news, and discussion search. Most of the engines will tell you that the click-through rates on these services are very small as compared to the primary web engine. Udi Manber said a few months ago that search engines are not mind readers. He's right and a little bit of education about search could go a long way.

++ The Searcher Doesn't Look Past the First Results Page Many more results are available but so what?

++ Search Engine Overlap Different results at different engines but does the searcher look in more than one place?

++ Of course, another issue is that the data itself is just not on the open web. It might be available "via the web" but the searcher doesn't know where else to turn to find it. Again, a specialized database might have just what they are looking for. Yes, sometimes these databases cost money but many times people don't have any idea that they have free access to these fee-based services from home or office.

These reasons and many others are why I think we've seen lots of interest in verticals in the past few months. Many times, assuming the searcher knows about the resource (here comes marketing again since people can't use what they don't know about), a searcher can get a good if not better answer in a shorter amount of time by searching a smaller, focused database.

A study published by Outsell last month pointed out that searchers in the workplace are "shifting away from their Internet research methods from just four years ago" and relying more on other sources including librarians and their intranet.

I often wonder if making large web engines larger with more content will make everything easier versus keeping things in small, focused databases and using meta/federated search technologies to (if needed) search disparate databases simultaneously using a single interface. Databases to help with database selection would also be possible.

Dynamic clustering, what Clusty.com provides can help the searcher quickly surface results that they might not see on the first page of results. In a white paper from Clusty's owner, Vivisimo, they argue that their technology can provide "a selective ignorance." Personalization based on a users preferences and their past search behavior can also be of assistance in helping material become more visible.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:40 PM | Permalink

May 24, 2005

An Upstart Challenger to Web Search Giants

You don't see many new general purpose search engines emerge these days—the major players pretty much dominate, and it takes a lot of resources to build and maintain a world-class search engine that can handle millions of users.

But newcomers still spring up. Yesterday we had word of BigClique, a new crawler-based engine. Another new search engine worthy of your attention is Exalead, writes guest writer Mary Ellen Bates in today's SearchDay article, Introducing a New Web Search Contender. In addition to a respectable index, Exalead offers some power tools not found elsewhere, making it really useful for certain types of searches, especially when you're just not getting what you need from one of the big boys.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 9:27 AM | Permalink

May 17, 2005

New FyberSearch Tool Helps Find Tutorials on the Web

Nathan Enns, the developer and proprietor of FyberSearch has released a new interface that allows the searcher to quickly find tutorials on the open web. Cool idea!

Sure, many researchers could get more focused results if they used some of the advanced search tools and techniques that the large web engines offer. However, most don't. Verticals are another option and we're seeing lots of interest in this area. Finally, I like the idea of general web engines creating tools that search specific subjects/types/formats of material. In other words, offer interfaces that search specific "chunks" of the complete database. We recently saw Yahoo release a search tool that limits a search to material with a Creative Commons license. These tools can potentially help the searcher get better results without having to know about or use any type of advanced search option. Of course, letting users know that these tools are available and could potentially offer better results, is another matter altogether.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:46 AM | Permalink

May 10, 2005

Clusty, Snap, and Answers.com Profiled in Fortune

It's always good to see some of the newer names in web search getting the mainstream notice that they deserve. This is the case in three recently published articles in Fortune that profile Clusty, Answers.com and Snap:

I realize that Google is the search service with the greatest mindshare and using the name makes for a very noticeable headline. Nevertheless, I don't think constantly comparing every other search tool to Google is always the best idea. Let Clusty be Clusty. Let Answers.com do what they do best. The same with Snap. They all offer services that Google doesn't. Perhaps their biggest challenge for these companies is getting the word out about what they have to offer during a time when so much of the press only wants to talk about one or two companies. Clusty offers dynamic clustering (they also license their technology it to any company that wants it), Answers.com is a vertical that offers info for certain types of searches and actually works with Google. Snap offers both a unique interface and pay-for-performance ad program.

Thanks to S.C. for the news tip.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:37 PM | Permalink

April 22, 2005

Do You Want to Demo Filangy?

Filangy, the web search history tool that I posted an overview about the other day remains in a closed beta. However, I just noticed that I have a few (about 30) invites to share. If you're interested, send me a note and I'll send one to the first 30 people I hear from. If you don't here back in the next day or so, sorry. Please send your requests to resourceshelf@myway.com.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:03 AM | Permalink

April 20, 2005

Filangy: Another Search History Tool; Search the Full Text of Your Cached Pages

I thought I would toss out another web-based search history resource called Filangy. Unfortunately, it's a limited beta and you'll need (at least for now) to sign-up to get a login. Here's a link to send them an email. Let's hope they open their beta to more users soon. I've only been using the service for a short time but so far I like what I've seen. I'm looking forward to comparing it to what Google has just released.

Filangy is a free service.

It provides web-based: + Automatic (easy to turn on/off) full text caching of every web page viewed in your browser + Web search, results from your cache are integrated onto results pages + Import your bookmarks, what Filangy calls "WebMarks" + Access and search your search history + Search the full text of all of your saved material + Clustering of results + Page preview feature that embeds live pages into the results list (Clusty.com also offers this feature). + Export your "Webmarks" (only) and syndicate via RSS. You can also mark any/all Webmarks "private" and they will not be included in your RSS feed.

Privacy is also taken seriously, read about what they offer here. Btw, https pages are not cached.

With Google's move today, you've got to wonder if Filangy will jump onto the radar screens of other search companies as a possible acquisition.

In addition to developing their service, Filangy faces the same challenge many other web search resources face today, getting the word out and then getting those who know about the service to try it. How do you do this? I'm not a marketing expert but one thing that could help is user education. A very little of it goes a long way. Users might be more likely to use new services if they can understand and experience how a new service might give them more value. Current and well established services can also use education to teach users how to take full advantage of what their technology has to offer. Udi Manber from A9 said a few weeks ago that search engines are not mind readers. I agree and again education could help.

I'll keep using Filangy and will report back soon.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:40 PM | Permalink

March 28, 2005

InfoSpace Plans to Launch New Mobile Search Engine

It's becoming increasingly apparent that along with vertical engine, currently the "next" big thing, that mobile search/info retrieval is very rapidly becoming the next "next" big thing. We've blogged about many new services over the past few months from established names (Google and Yahoo) along with new companies like 4info.net, FeedBeep, and Synfonic.com).

In the current issue of The Puget Sound Business, Jeff Meisner takes a look at what Infospace is planning to offer in the mobile space. His article is titled, Next wave for InfoSpace: cell phone surfing.

Meisner reports that InfoSpace will launch a new mobile search tool in the next 12 months that can be searched either via typing your query or voice recognition. The company also plans to offer new location based services but specifics are not mentioned in the article. Last week I blogged about Nextel and MapQuest now offering location based (via GPS) mapping and local info. Infospace still hasn't decided how the new search tool will be branded.

The company already offers several mobile tools available from many mobile providers and is a major player in the ringtone market.

"The holy grail of InfoSpace Mobile over the next five years is to translate the search and directory services we have on the Web to the 170 million cell phone users in North America," said InfoSpace CEO Jim Voelker. Chris is quoted in the article.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:09 PM | Permalink

New Search Features at Fybersearch

Fybersearch, the small but feature filled general purpose web engine that we've mentioned several times in the past (it's the work of one person, Nathan Enns) has released an update and even more search advanced features.

What's New + A new and improved relevancy algorithm + New advanced search features ++ Search Type Limit or refine your search to "official web sites" or "general information" ++ Page Type Limit/refine your search to "contact us" pages, "faq" pages, and six other types.

Fybersearch now offers 14 advanced search options including many that are unavailable elsewhere.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:00 AM | Permalink

March 24, 2005

Here Comes Location-Based Mobile Info

This isn't really a search news item but it's still worth a mention given the massive amount of interest these days in local search, mobile search, and online mapping tools.

About 10 days ago Nextel and MapQuest announced a service that delivers location-based maps and local info (shops, restaurants, etc.) to any Nextel GPS-enabled phone. The service is called MapQuest Find Me. The service also allows you to share your location with trusted people (via the web) and even send text messages through the service. Cool! According to the Find Me web site the service is powered by technology from uLocate.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:34 PM | Permalink

March 15, 2005

Claria Debuts RelevancyRank: Search Ranking By Behavioral Activity

Claria, the company behind the Gator eWallet software, has released new search relevancy ratings today examining how the top search listings on Google, MSN and Yahoo compare to pages the company says its research shows are actually most relevant. More important, the ratings mark the first use of technology Claria hopes will let it improve the results of major search engines or perhaps offer its own improved search engine.

You'll find the ratings in this company press release, and I examine them more in the Claria Unveils Behaviorial-Based Search Ranking article now posted for Search Engine Watch members. In short, this isn't a battery of tests that you can take to the bank to know who is best.

Instead, it's really meant to showcase the bigger point Claria wants to make. It's now going public with its RelevancyRank system that uses behavioral data to determine what it believes are the best pages on the web for any particular term.

Claria computes this by both monitoring the activities of web surfers and searchers through its own software applications and with partnerships it has with publishers. The company's plan is that the technology will either be licensed to search providers looking to use its data or it may release its own search engine powered by clicktracking and behavioral data itself.

More on this "third generation" of clicktracking in this article for SEW members, Claria Unveils Behaviorial-Based Search Ranking.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:43 PM | Permalink

A Glimpse of the Soul of the Machine

Lucene is a popular, open-source search engine that's freely available for anyone to download and use. Lucene is a basic platform, and because it's written in Java it's highly extensible and can be adapted to many purposes.

If you're a proficient programmer, or simply are curious about what the code looks like for a world-class search engine, check out today's SearchDay article, How to Hack Your Own Search Engine, which is a review of a new book, Lucene in Action. The book offers detailed instructions for downloading and customizing Lucene yourself, and the companion site also makes all of the source code examples available for your perusal.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 9:27 AM | Permalink

March 1, 2005

Searching for Name Brands

You'd think that well-known brands would have an advantage in search engines. After all, if you're searching for a Hilton hotel or the official web site of the actor Jude Law, these sites are not only "obvious" but should have reasonably good link popularity and other factors recognized by search engines.

That's true, but name brands also often hire affiliates to promote their web sites. And sometimes, these affiliates are so good at search engine optimization that they displace the official site of the brand itself. Brands are also magnets for spammers, who use brand names to lure searchers to their own sites.

The solution? A specialized search tool dedicated solely to brands. Today's SearchDay article, A Search Tool for Name Brands, covers VisioBrand, a vertical tool that's focused solely on the official web sites of major brands throughout the world.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 11:35 AM | Permalink

February 13, 2005

Screen Captures of Exalead's Desktop Search Application

We've been tracking Exalead, the feature filled (putting it mildly) web search engine from France since it became available last October. About a month ago, Exlead's web database passed the one billion page mark. Since October, we've also known that Exalead has plans to enter the desktop search space. We still don't know exactly when a beta release will be available but some screen captures are available via the French language web search newsletter, Netchercheur. From what we can see, Exalead Desktop Search will offer many of the same features and sport the similar UI as their robust web engine. Thanks to Christophe for the heads-up.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:21 PM | Permalink

February 11, 2005

Australia's Ansearch Set for March Launch

Ansearch Set For March Launch We've been tracking Ansearch, a new search engine from Australia, since November. The ZDNet article: Fledgling Aussie search engine eyeing growth, says that Ansearch should officially launch in March. The article also offers details on how they say Ansearch works versus Google and other engines.

Speaking with ZDNet Australia yesterday afternoon, [Ansearch chief executive officer Dean] Jones posited that "a lot of people use Google because its the only one [search engine] that they know", but that "theyve never been particularly happy with the results".

Posted by Gary Price at 10:34 AM | Permalink

February 4, 2005

Deepy Aims For Broadband Searchers

Billed as a search engine for broadband users, Deepy provides access to Gigablast-powered search results along with a "View TextShot" feature that lets you preview a page before viewing it. It's somewhat similar to the binoculars feature at Ask Jeeves that lets you see a preview of a web site. Much more similar is the preview feature that Vivisimo offers. Pretty cool is the "Jump to keyword" feature that lets you jump to your keywords in the preview. Tabs at the bottom of the page also let you jump to the next page of results without a reload page delay -- or at least, much of one. To learn more, check out entries on Deepy's blog. Image results, by the way, come from Picsearch.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:26 AM | Permalink

February 3, 2005

Expect Convera's New Public Web Engine by Mid 2005

In early December I blogged about Convera, a popular player in enterprise search, planning to launch a publicly available open web engine. Today, I spotted a news release from Convera with news that they will release the new service in the next two quarters.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:44 PM | Permalink

February 2, 2005

IBM's WebFountain Takes A Blow

IBM's WebFountain search engine has gotten some attention in the past as a potential Google killer, though it was never released to the public in that way. Instead, the company positioned it as a high-level tool for web data mining. That use just took a blow, given that Factiva has dropped its partnership to use WebFountain for reputation monitoring. Indexing refresh was said to be too slow.

More here from Information World Review: Factiva to drop IBM's WebFountain. Also see IBM and Search for some links to more information on WebFountain, Monitoring Super Bowl Ad "Buzz" for mentions of some competing reputation tracking tools and IBM's WebFountain LaunchedThe Next Big Thing? for a past write-up on the IBM-Factiva partnership.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:47 PM | Permalink

January 31, 2005

Don't Waste Time On Web's Biggest

A new search engine "Web's Biggest" has come out claiming they are bigger than the other major search engines. Wow, rush on over! Don't waste your time.

First, I highly doubt the claim. The search engine provides no count numbers with its results, so there's no way to run comparisons. Doing comparisons always is problematic anyway, but counts are a basic starting point.

It does provide a page that purports to show how it is bigger than the others. Enter a number, and it supposedly generates a random list of sites that supposedly have no or few pages listed at Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Oddly, no matter what number I enter, I get the same sites listed. And the links showing results at the other search engines? They don't use the right commands to bring back accurate results. And when I do use the right command? Over at Google, I get signs that the sites may have been banned. For comparison purposes, this "proof" shows nothing.

But let's assume that this site really was bigger than the others. Time to roll out the trusty haystack analogy of why bigger is better. How can you find the needle in the haystack if "small" search engines hunt through only half of it? That's something we used to hear in the early days of the search engine size wars.

I have my own haystack response that I've long used in these situations. If I dump the entire haystack on your head, can you find the needle then?

Going back to this site, we get plenty of proof on why having the entire haystack is no help if you don't have a powerful magnet to pull the good needles to the top. A search for "movies" brings up a list dominated by porn sites (OK, I suppose they ARE movies). "Cars" brings up travel search engines and give away sites. "US patents" fails to find the US Patent Office.

All in all, I find a good use for the nofollow attribute for the first time. For more on size issues, see my recent Search Engine Size Wars V Erupts post.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:56 AM | Permalink

January 30, 2005

A Directory of Over 12,500 Search Tools

I don't think I've mentioned Michael Wong's directory of search tools since I started blogging here. "Search Engines 2" offers direct links to more than 12,500 search tools that are organized into several categories (topic, location, ppc engines, etc.) Worth a look and very possibly a bookmark.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:08 PM | Permalink

January 27, 2005

FyberSearch Now Offers Results in RSS

Nathan Enns, the developer of FyberSearch has let us know about few a new services and advanced features. + Results are now available in RSS format. + Domain Clustering: no more than one result per domain name is displayed unless the user specifies. + The keyword density option has been improved. It allows you to view pages that contain your search terms at least "X" number of times.

January 11, 2005

Exalead's Index Passes 1 Billion Page Mark, Prepares to Launch Desktop Search App

News that Exalead's database of web pages has passed the one billion page mark. The total page count on the home page now reads: 1,031,065,733 pages.

If you've never tried Exalead, I think it's more than worth a look. I blogged an overview post focusing on a few of its numerous advanced search features back in October. A couple of weeks ago I posted about personalizing the Exalead home page.

Exalead's Paris-based CEO, Francois Bourdoncle, tells me that the company plans to have a two billion page web index online in the near future. He also said that his company is about just ready to introduce a desktop search tool.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:33 PM | Permalink

January 10, 2005

FindWhat.com Licenses Fast Search And Transfer Technology

I said last week that Fast Search and Transfer was continuing to add big name info industry clients when I posted about the company adding Factiva and AOL. Today, word of another new client FindWhat.com. They'll use FAST Data Search across "multiple applications."

Posted by Gary Price at 1:15 PM | Permalink

Some of the Stranger Queries from the BBC's Search Engine

The BBC has posted an article letting us know that their search engine received over 227 million queries in 2004. It also includes a list containing several of the "strangest queries." Btw, the news search engine from the BBC offers a "not always easy to find" very useful advanced interface that allows you to limit by date range and section.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:37 AM | Permalink

January 8, 2005

Gigablast Passes the One Billion Page Mark

A congrats and kudos goes out to Matt Wells (and his team) as the Gigablast web index passes the one billion page mark. The official number listed is: 1,014,363,952. Previously, Gigablast was using a total page count of about 640 million pages.

Gigablast has been a very busy place lately. In the past few weeks they've launched several new services.

If you're interested in learning more about Matt Wells and Gigablast, take a look at this interview he did with Infoseek founder and Matt's former boss, Steve Kirsch.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:19 PM | Permalink

January 5, 2005

Gigablast Now Offering XML Search Feeds

The list of new services and tools at Gigablast continues to expand.

In the past few weeks I've posted about: + Using Gigablast to create a custom topic and "site search" tools.

Today, I noticed that it's possible to create customized XML-based "search feeds".

Matt Wells has posted instructions along with a complete list of parameters that any one can use in building a query (cool!) here.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:42 PM | Permalink

December 29, 2004

Personalize the Look of the Exalead Home Page

Here's a personalization option I recently noticed on the Exalead home page that allows you to customize its look with shortcut links and preview images (thumbnails) to just about any web page.

To customize: + Click on any of the shortcut boxes "outlined" directly below the Exalead search box. + Enter a page title and url + Hit the enter key Now, your favorite sites and/or pages that you frequently visit are directly accessible from the home page.

Exalead is a search engine that launched (beta) in October, is loaded with advanced search features, and will soon have an index containing more than one billion pages. It's definitely one to watch in the new year.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:22 PM | Permalink

December 28, 2004

Site Search From Gigablast

We mentioned last week that Gigablast was offering a service that allows users to create topic focused search tools. Pandia has created a "search engine search engine" that queries a bunch of search-related sites including SEW.

Today, another new service from Gigablast. They've just announced a new service allowing you to quickly create a site search tool. You can search for pages from the main Gigablast index or "add your root url via the site search addurl page and it, and the pages it links to either directly or indirectly, will immediately be indexed at the rate of about one page every five seconds."

Posted by Gary Price at 12:24 PM | Permalink

December 21, 2004

A Search Engine that Talks

BBC Online takes a look at Speegle, a search engine that reads (using synthesized speech) Google results to the searcher.

If the look of Speegle reminds you of Google...

Google has no connection with Speegle and the use of bright colours is simply to make the site more visible for those with visual impairments, said [Speegle's Founder] Mr [Gordon] Renton.

"It is not a rip-off. We are doing something that Google does not do and is not planning to do and there is truth in the saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," he said.

Postscript: Google does something like this, or at least did, at Google Voice Search. It was created ages ago but no longer appears to be working.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:21 AM | Permalink

December 20, 2004

Build Your Own Topic Specific Engine With Gigablast

I've wondered when a general-purpose web engine(s) would begin offering a "roll your own search engine" service.

No more wondering, say hello to:

Gigablast's: Build Your Own Topic Search Engine.

It's now possible to create a subset of the complete Gigablast web index that ONLY searches the sites (or subsites) you specify. You can select up to 200 urls.

Simply copy and replace a few lines of code, list the urls of the sites you want your topic engine to search, paste the finished code into a web page, and you're done. You do not need to register and you can create as many topic engines as you like.

Very cool!

Posted by Gary Price at 3:44 PM | Permalink

December 19, 2004

Second-Tier Engines Provide Low-Priced Leads

Brian Morrisey at DM News writes that although second-tier engines don't get the traffic Google and Yahoo offer, they do provide low-priced leads.

"As massive as Google and Overture are ... they have a finite amount of inventory," Peter Hershberg, managing partner at search marketing firm Reprise Media, New York, said during a Search Engine Strategies panel covering alternative search ad programs."

Posted by Gary Price at 4:04 PM | Permalink

Australia's Sensis is Confident

The article: Sensis confident of online advertising success, takes a look at how the company's ownership of content gives Sensis an advantage over Google, Yahoo, and others in Australia.

"The winner in this market will be the organisation that can collect and organise the content most efficiently and be able to publish it in many forms - voice, wireless (for handheld wireless computers and mobile phones), PC internet and print," said Greg Ellis, general manager of Sensis Search

Posted by Gary Price at 3:55 PM | Permalink

December 12, 2004

December 7, 2004

Convera Plans to Enter Web Search Marketplace

The Washington Post article: Agencies Find What They're Looking For, takes a look at Convera, a popular provider of search technology to many government agencies (CIA, FBI, etc.)

The article concludes with the news that Convera plans to enter the commercial web search marketplace next year.

"...Convera plans to make its Internet search engine available to regular computer users for free sometime next year. In that business segment, Convera would seek to profit through the sale of online advertising, which is growing. Convera's search results, based on proprietary technology, would be different from those provided by Google and Yahoo, [CEO Patrick] Condo said. 'We have applied technology we built for the intelligence community to an advanced development project to index the Web,' Condo said."

Posted by Gary Price at 8:19 PM | Permalink

Accoona, Artificial Intelligence and Hype

Gary blogged yesterday's launch of new search engine Accoona, and has followed up with a closer look in today's SearchDay article, Accoona Launches, But Isn't Ready for Prime Time. After testing the search engine with a few softball queries, Gary came away less than impressed but hopeful the search engine will improve over time.

Accoona is seeking to differentiate itself from Yahoo, Google and other leaders by touting its "revolutionary" artificial intelligence technology. "Accoona's artificial intelligence technology will elevate search engine performance to a new unprecedented level, allowing the most relevant search available today," said Accoona CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer at yesterday's launch.

The AI spin is interesting, but the implication that Google, Yahoo and others don't employ artificial intelligence techniques is misleading. They do -- there's a lot of AI in all major search engines. Also worthy of note: Google's director of search quality, Peter Norvig, is the co-author of a book regarded by many as the "Bible of Artificial Intelligence." I'm willing to bet that at least a few engineers at the Googleplex have read Peter's book, and maybe have even woven some of its lessons into the search engine's DNA.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:10 AM | Permalink

Blingo Brings Back Prizes For Search Model

Several years ago, iWon gained an audience quickly by giving away prizes (see my iWon Wins Users article). That didn't help retain the audience in the long-run. Nevertheless, Blingo is trying the same thing, promising prizes for search. The ads on the site come from Google. The search results themselves appear to come from Gigablast. The promotion model and hype is iWon, circa 2000.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:05 AM | Permalink

December 6, 2004

New Search Engine: Accoona Launches

Accoona, a new web engines and business research tool, has just gone live on the web. We'll have an overview article in tomorrow's SearchDay. Here's the news release and a short story from Reuters.

Early impressions after using Accoona this afternoon? It's great to have another web database that offers additional business info. That said, Accoona needs lots of work.

In case you're wondering, the name Accoona is derived from the Swahiki term, "Hakuna Matata", meaning "no worries." Fans of The Lion King should be happy.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:55 PM | Permalink

November 28, 2004

An Interview with Chris Sherman

SearchDay's very own (and our friend), Chris Sherman, is interviewed in the Rocky Moutain News article: Ever-widening search.

Chris offers up a few search tips, mentions why he's happy to see MSN Search, shares thoughts about local search, and of course talks Google. In fact, you'll read about his upcoming book, Google Power.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:03 PM | Permalink

November 26, 2004

New Web Search Engine From Australia Coming Next Week

ITWorld.com is reporting that Australia-based Ansearch will officially launch MySearch.com.au, next week.

The article includes a bit of detail on MySearch.com.au plans in terms of ranking and crawl.

+ Quality of data: focus on a relatively small list of the most popular websites in the world rather than those with the most number of websites linking to them + Ranking: based on usage rather than link farm size. + Focus on a site versus pages: IE's Geocities will feature in its database only once, rather than the extensive network of millions of free pages / Web sites that are found within Google. This will result in a natural tendency to feature more business/commerce sites. + Top sites index: a listing of top Web sites updated and ranked regularly. + Small data footprint: allows for a daily update of the top-ranked Web sites, as opposed to updates every six weeks.

Ansearch will generate revenue via paid listings and offering enterprise search services.

There are three other revenue streams that will be revealed in Quarter Four, 2005. "To the best of our knowledge, no other search engine -- global or Australian -- is addressing these other areas." --Louise Williams, marketing manager, Ansearch

I couldn't find a MySearch blog but did track down this October 2004 newsletter.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:08 PM | Permalink

On Web Directories

ResearchBuzz (aka Tara Calishain) writes about how Yahoo has downplayed their human built directory of web sites in the past few years. Tara is correct, they have. She continues, "But I'm sorry and upset to see the directory take such a back seat. The Web needs, I strongly believe, a good searchable subject index. There is a class of general searching that it's difficult to do well in a full-text search engine, that works very well in a searchable subject index like Yahoo. Searchable subject indexes are also wonderfully browsable and make it easy to find related groups of information. You CAN find those groups on full-text engines, but it's more difficult.

The good news is that several well organized (an understatement) and impeccably maintained, general web directories STILL exist. Quality and authority of the underlying is key. Take a look at the SearchDay article: The Value of Non-Commercial Web Directories, for a list of several of our favorites.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:32 PM | Permalink

November 19, 2004

Findory Begins Personalizing Web Search Results

Since launching in early 2004, Findory has focused on "personalizing" news and blog content.

However, as of this week, Findory is beginning to "personalize" web search results.

Today, Greg Linden, the Founder/CEO at Findory, has posted news on his "Geeking with Greg" blog that his company is now personalizing web search results using the Google database.

Linden's blog post provides a couple of examples. He also notes that today's annoucement is just a "baby step" in what Findory plans to offer.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:55 PM | Permalink

November 18, 2004

Looking For Directories?

There's been a number of posts on our forums and elsewhere where people are listing new and existing directories, all part of the general quest by site owners to find more quality links. Nick W decided to pull everything into one place in a new thread on our forums: Directory Submissions 101. So if you need a starting place on the directory hunt, check it out.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:25 AM | Permalink

November 17, 2004

Let's Talk Mooter

Here's a web search tool we haven't heard from in a long time, Australia's Mooter.

In: Searching your thoughts, from Red Herring, you'll read a Q&A style interview with Mooter's Founder and CEO, Liesl Capper.

Q. What are some recent Mooter developments?

A. We have a very exciting application called the 'Mooter Information Harmonizer' that sorts information (on a news site, or search results, or adverts) by the personality traits of people reading that information, to give more responsive results, and less advert clutter.

This is already well known in other media - if you are reading The Economist you would not expect to see stories about whether or not a pop star was secretly married, or feel positive about invasive adverts offering cool ring tones.

Thanks to Greg L. for the news tip.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:14 PM | Permalink

The Return Of RealNames

Keith Teare, founder of the RealNames navigation system that died back in 2002, tells me via email that he's regained the RealNames domain name and launched a new RealNames search engine based on the company's old data.

Teare provides more details about the relaunch on his blog. So far, it's unclear whether there are plans to bring in new data or a new business model. Teare himself notes on the blog: "To be honest, I'm not yet sure what I will do with it."

For background on the former RealNames system, see my article about the closure, RealNames To Close After Losing Microsoft.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:28 AM | Permalink

November 11, 2004

Handy Invisible Web Chart

David Whelan at Forbes has put together a handy chart that does a nice job expaining the Invisible Web. It's based on the book that Chris and I wrote more three years ago.

After a presentation about shortly after the book was published, an audience member came up to me and said that we didn't include a mention about a specific portion of the Invisible Web.

I thought to myself and wondered what we forgot to mention.

She explained that for many searchers EVEN IF the material has been found and crawled by a general web spider but it's not found in the first few results, its invisible.

I think the comment was right on the money. Placing content in a database is one thing, the ability to FIND it is something else. The fact that: + the average query length is about 2.8, + most searchers don't use any advanced syntax + search skills haven't improved that much in the past few years + there is little to no use of controlled vocabulary (to help bring like things together) + many searchers only look at the first few results on a serp and other issues further complicates the situation.

This is another reason why specialized/focused search tools (verticals) can be very useful.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 10, 2004

Popularity Doesn't Always Equal Usefulness (or Importance) of a Search Tool

Some numbers from Hitwise were released the other day about the traffic smaller web engines tools have been getting some press attention.

The actual numbers aren't a big surprise. Far from it.

Collectively, five alternative search engines -- Vivisimo.com, Clusty.com, a9.com, Alltheweb.com and Snap.com -- claimed only one-tenth of a percent of total visits to search engines and directories during that week, Hitwise found.

AllTheWeb gets little attention these days. Yahoo currently uses it as a testbed for algorithm changes and its own web database and many of its powerful advanced search features went away several months ago.

Clusty and Snap had launched just a few weeks before the sample was taken. Perhaps an issue but it's not worth dwelling on.

I was happy to see the Hitwise VP of Research say:

The market share of these search sites might be small, but it's important to note that Google itself was in such a position not too many years ago...The challenge for smaller players that want to become mainstream search portals is to gain mindshare and ultimately deliver the most relevant search results.

First, he's on target with these points. His comments about Google having a small market share just a few years ago will keep the developers developing. However,gaining mindshare might be just as big of a challenge these days. In this arena, Google is just so damn good.

Second, when it comes to general web engines like Google and Yahoo it's important to have a variety of crawls and relevancy algorithms out there. Danny has referred to this as unique "voices." Jux2 clearly illustrates that search engine overlap isn't as great as many would think. Snap.com is using the Gigablast database. Ask Jeeves/Teoma have their own crawl and MSN is currently previewing their own database. When you add in Google and Yahoo that's five large web indexes. The more the better!

Finally, from the searcher perspective, let's don't focus on the numbers. Because a general web engine or a vertical doesn't receive the traffic (or attention) that Google or Yahoo get, doesn't mean the resources (the ones with less traffic) aren't worthy usage. The search tools mentioned in the survey and MANY others not only offer search capabilities that the two big guys don't offer (clustering and metasearch from Clusty, dynamic search refinement from Snap.com) but can also allow the searcher to access a smaller, more "focused" portion of the web and potentially receive more precise results in a simple and prompt manner. As general web engines grow larger and with typical searcher habits not changing much, searchers will find focused, specialized, and niche tools even more useful.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 9, 2004

China: Rumors About Sina and Zhongsou.com

ChinaTechNews.com informs us of rumors that Sina is interested in acquiring Zhongsou.com.

"...Sina may be eyeing a takeover of search partner Zhongsou.com's specialized search activities. Sina's proprietary search directories and engine have been a weak spot for the company, and Sina has bolstered itself by partnering with various companies over the years...Zhongsou.com is one of the largest search engine technology providers in China. It was colaunched and established by Huicong and China Internet News Center in September 2003 and enjoys a good reputation in China for large webpage coverage, fast data upgrades, and fast Chinese searches."

Posted by Gary Price at 2:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 4, 2004

A Look at Eurekster

The New Zealand Herald article: Hunting what's hot in social networks, takes a look at Eurekster and its founder, Grant Ryan, who hails from Christchurch, New Zealand.

"People on the web have been building communities for 10 years. They think they are valuable, but they have not been able to leverage their communities. We allow them to offer a new service which creates a new view of the web."

Ryan said sites with Eurekster already installed have increased by tenfold their click-through traffic to Google and Yahoo.

Ryan said it is a partnership where everyone wins. "We put more money through their coffers."

"It's an online water cooler ... We see how search terms will start in one place and then spread rapidly, like word of mouth on steroids."

Thanks to S.C. for the news tip.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tier Two Alternatives for Search Marketing Campaigns

Google and Overture dominate the paid search marketplace, but there are hundreds of other PPC networks that offer compelling alternatives to the 900 pound gorillas. These so-called Tier Two networks may not offer the reach or scope of the major players, but they do distribute your ads to niche sites where your marketing message may have a better chance of being acted upon. As an added benefit, Tier Two campaigns tend to be less costly and offer comparable ROI to what you get with the larger networks.

In today's SearchDay article, Search Marketing Beyond Google and Overture, guest writer Dana Todd reports on a recent Search Engine Strategies conference panel that explored these PPC alternatives to Google and Overture, concluding that they're worth a look by most search marketers.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 1, 2004

New Look and Services at Findory

Personalized news tool Findory is online with a new look and several new services. You can learn more from Findory's CEO Greg Linden via a post on his Geeking with Greg weblog.

If you're interested in learning more about Findory, here's a recent interview that I did with Greg.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On 'Kanoodling'

Buffalo's Business First offers up a profile of Kanoodle.

Kanoodle.com has been growing by leaps and bounds, literally and figuratively. The Amherst company moved into new, larger offices a few weeks ago on North Forest Road to accommodate its 75 local employees. Another 25 work from offices in New York City and Santa Monica. Total employment is expected to grow by about 50 percent over the next year, most of it local.

[CEO Kent] Keating says competing with the Googles of the world is a little bit fun. We poke 'em in the eye," he says. "We can't compete with them on everything, but we have a better quality product and it's being produced here in Western New York.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 31, 2004

Searching for Moblog Images

Here's something we haven't seen before. Moblog image searching.

What's a moblog? Take the word "mobile" and "weblog" and you have moblog. They're defined by a moblog hosting service as a place on the web where you, "can post pictures, video & text from your camera phone direct to web instantly."

Search Engine Journal tells us the IceRocket, a new web engine we've blogged about a couple of times, now allows you to search for images posted on these "mobile" weblogs. The service is also available on Blog Search Engine (another site from Loren at SEJ). The images themselves come from people and groups (community moblogs) who use the Textamerica service.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 28, 2004

Campaign Contributions and Search Companies

Lots of stories and posts about Fundrace, a tool to see if your neighbor donated to a politcal candidate in this election cycle. Fundrace uses data from the Federal Election Commission. MANY other search tools provide access to this public data and sometimes you'll find interfaces that offer different access points.

A wonderful set of databases that I've used for several years come from PoliticalMoneyLine. They offer serveral free and other fee-based search services.

On the free side, you can use this interface to search and find donations by employer name or occupation of the person making the contribution.

Btw, the answer is yes, you'll find donations made by employees at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other companies.

Finally, another database (also free) allows you to search PAC (political action committee) data and find out where they've put their money.

For example: Here's the summary page for the Yahoo Inc Political Action Committee.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 25, 2004

Can Social Networking Be Profitable?

A look at the business of social networking in the AP article: Networking site LinkedIn causes buzz -- but can it be profitable?

[Reed] Hoffman [LinkedIn CEO] and LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke say they're confident their 30-employee company will become profitable before 2006. How? By relying on a mixture of advertising and subscriptions sold to some of the site's 1.2 million users.

They believe they can, while leaving the basic service open for free, charge "power users" such as executive recruiters, sales representatives and investment professionals who tap into the network frequently.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New Mobile Search Engine: UpSnap

In today's SearchDay we're introduced to a new SMS-based local directory search service named UpSnap.

Chris mentions that SMS and wireless search is really "heating up" with several new services going live. He's right! We've mentioned several of them on the SEW Blog in just the past few weeks.

+ Google SMS and Synfonic NOTE: Google also offers a search interface for wireless browsers. Yahoo Mobile offers an entire suite of services for mobile users. For example, I have news alerts delivered via SMS. + Smarter.com SMS

Posted by Gary Price at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 21, 2004

More SMS Search In the U.S.

Wireless access to information via cell phones and smartphones continues to gain steam here in the U.S.

As you know, Google SMS launched a couple of weeks ago. At the same time we saw Synfonic go live.

Google's service includes an option to access pricing info from the Froogle database.

A new SMS service from comparison shopping engine Smarter.com that offers access to pricing info for more than 100,000 computer and consumer electronic products became available earlier this week.

Material about how to access and use Smarter.com's SMS service can be found here.

I plan on using both services and will report my findings on the blog.

and while we're on the subject of mobile search... JB points out this new article from Media Post on the topic. He's as excited as I am (I've been posting on the topic since we started the blog) about searching from mobile devices.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 19, 2004

Searching for Digital Books

Here are a three specialized databases that do a good job providing info about and/or access to thousands of digitized books and texts.

+ Digital Book Index This database (free to use) contains information about more than 100,000 digitized books and texts from over 1800 publishers. About one third of the titles are available in full-text format at no charge while other titles are fee-based. Registration, also free, is required to access the database. You will need to give an email address but can make the choice to opt out of any future mailings. The database can be searched by author and title. You can also browse by author, title, subject, and publisher.

+ The Online Books Page I wrote about the OBP for SearchDay last year. The database currently provides searchable access to over 20,000 free full text books. The OBP comes from the University of Pennsylvania.

+ eBooklocator.com Search for commercially available ebooks from more than 400 publishers. Listings come from Overdrive's Content Reserve Digital Content Marketplace. Search by: + Format + Title + Author + Subject + Keyword + ISBN/DOI

Posted by Gary Price at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 17, 2004

New "Answer Engine" Coming: Stochasto

Pandia has published an article about Stochasto, a new "natural language" engine from Norway that is set to launch in early 2005.

This is not keyword search with a layer of natural language on top, says Stochasto CEO Jan Husby. - This is real natural language search based on an extensive database of vocabulary, conjugations, phrases, grammatical rules and semantic contexts.

Two versions of Answer Search will be available. One is a metasearch engine where Stochastic's technology is utilized on results from Google. This will be extended to include Altavista and Yahoo! among others.

The main product, though, is based on indexes generated by Stochasto's technology. It will be available as desktop search, enterprise search and publisher search (for multimedia publications, including CD and DVD disks).

Much more in the Pandia article: The Answer Search natural language search engine.

We've blogged about Kozoru (another natural language answer engine currently in development) and Gurunet here. We also mentioned Ask.com's Smart Search technology and a couple of SMS answer services here.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 13, 2004

Recall Update

I mentioned on Monday that Recall, the datbase offering keyword access to a portion of The Wayback Machine, is no longer online.

Brewster Kahle, CEO of the Internet Archive, told me last night that the move is just a temporary one. The IA intends to make the database available as soon as they can make it more reliable.

"Given its instability we didn't want people to suffer," Kahle said. The Wayback Machine is still available.

Let's hope that Recall, a very valuable research tool, returns to the web very soon. T

Posted by Gary Price at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recall Update

I mentioned on Monday that Recall, the datbase offering keyword access to a portion of The Wayback Machine, is no longer online.

Brewster Kahle, CEO of the Internet Archive, told me last night that the move is just a temporary one. The IA intends to make the database available as soon as they can make it more reliable.

"Given its instability we didn't want people to suffer," Kahle said. The Wayback Machine is still available.

Let's hope that Recall, a very valuable research tool, returns to the web very soon. T

Posted by Gary Price at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 12, 2004

An Introduction to Exalead

Eric B. lets us know about a new web engine called Exalead.

This Paris-based company has been around since 1999 and continues enterprise search technology.

Their "public" search product is a showcase, what they call a demonstrator, of their technology.

You can read more about the company in this Red Herring article. It mentions that AOL France uses the Exalead database and technology. The article also contain a few comments from our own Chris Sherman.

The company plans to enter the desktop search market "soon".

Exalead offers many advanced search features (several unavailable from other major engines) and is worth of a look.

Let's take a look.

What does Exalead offer? Here's an overview of some key features.

* A unique web index containing more than one billion pages. At least this is what their news release says. The total on the home page is much smaller. Hmmm. A page submission form is available.

UPDATE: Francois Bourdoncle from Exalead let us know that the index is currently at 300,000,000 (as noted on the home page) but should reach 400,000,000 by next week. They expect to hit the one billion mark in th next month or so.

* "Basic search" uses a default "and". It also provides automatic stemming if you search with more than one term. Auto stemming is disabled when you place the + sign in front of a term.

* Unlike all other major web engines, Exalead offers a proximity operator (AltaVista used to have one). The NEAR operator finds documents where the query terms are within 16 words of each other. * Several options to "widen your query" including stemming/truncation (using the * symbol), optional terms, and pattern searching (very cool!)

Syntax * Limit to a domain with site: * Limit to words in title with title: * Limit to documents in a specific language with lang:

The advanced interface offers four "search methods" * Phonetic search * Auto Word stemming * Exact Search * Approximate Spelling

Exalead indexes PDF, RTF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Adobe Acrobat files.

Search Result pages offer many features including: * Related terms (other terms you might want to search) * Related categories (drops you into the ODP) * Limit results by format or location * Limit results to multimedia content (pages that include links to audio and video content) * Spelling suggestions * Thumbnail images for all results can be turned on/off. You can also choose to not have a snippet visible. * You're able to open a result link directly inside a frame on the serp. You can also bookmark pages. Bookmarks can be transported to your IE favorites file.

Bottom Line? I've tried several searches and while Exalead is not perfect (this is a beta release) the results I've seen aren't bad at all (I've seen much worse). I'm also very impressed with the amount of functionality Exalead offers the searcher. I'll continue to test I'll report back. Btw, according to this page, you can register to access more advanced search features. I'll let you know what they are.

Posted by Gary Price at 7:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 11, 2004

No More Recall

I just learned that Recall, the search tool that provided full text search access to about 1/3 of The Wayback Machine database (about 11 million pages), is no longer available.

I'm trying to find out if this is just a temporary move and a new version of Recall is on the way or if the project has been scrapped.

The Recall database went live as a beta about 13 months ago. It was designed and developed by Anna Patterson, an IA volunteer. I believe Anna is now working at Google. In April, ACM Queue, published an article by Patterson titled, "Why Writing Your Own Search Engine is Hard."

Posted by Gary Price at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 8, 2004

Search and Cluster the CIA WMD Report with Clusty

The folks over at Clusty (aka Vivisimo) have just released a search/cluster version of the CIA WMD report that was released on Wednesday.

In July, Vivisimo made a search and cluster version of the 9/11 Commission Final Report available.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 6, 2004

More Full Text Books

Well, Google Print for books is here.

Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" has been around for a while.

It's worth mentioning that several other services are out there that offer searchable, full text and full image, access to book material online. In many cases, access is free to the end user.

These services don't place any limits on how much of a book you can read and also allow you to bookmark pages and add notes.

One player in this space is NetLibrary. This Boulder, Colorado company (part of OCLC) has been around since 1998 and offers their service to thousands of libraries around the globe. Currently, NetLibrary offers access to about 76,000 books with about 1300 new titles added each month.

The user accesses NetLibray via their local public or university library. With a library card, you can "virtually" check-out and read books (full image) without having to visit the libary building. That's right, 24x7x365 access. In many cases, content can be printed.

NetLibrary continues to bring new publishers on board. In September they announced a deal with Penguin USA.

Another company is ebrary. This California company has been in business since 1999 and is under the direction of Christopher Warnock. You can read an interview with him here. ebrary provides access to more than 50,000 titles (books, maps, sheet music, etc.). Like NetLibrary, ebrary licenses their service to libraries and educational organizations and users can login and access via any computer with web access.

ebrary also offers a program (if you're library doesn't offer the service for free) where you can register and access more than 20,000 books from more than 180 publishers. Once registered, you can read (make notes, bookmark) all the you want for free. However, there is a per page charge to copy and print material (up to a limit determined by the publisher).

Posted by Gary Price at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 5, 2004

Finding Canadians

Today, Canada411.com added a few new features to their service. They include:

+A new reverse telphone number lookup

+ Reverse address lookup,

+ Partial name search.

These services are also available via a new French language version of the site.

The site is powered by Seattle-based W3 Data.

A few more details in the news release.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Week Clusty, This Week Clush

Last week Chris and I wrote about the release of Clusty, a new consumer search product from Vivisimo.

Today, we learn of a new product with another "interesting" name called Clush in an article from eWeek titled: Search Startups Target Clustering.

Unlike Clusty's meta search capabilities, Clush uses its own index that is very small (about 1 million pages at the moment). Like Clusty, both tools cluster results into categories.

I haven't had much time to use Clush but here are a few things I noticed: + All results have static page images next to them. + Registered users can "Rate" pages. These ratings "will be added to the "overall relevancy score of that particular webpage." + Clush offers a paid-inclusion/rapid recrawl program ($19.95/year) for one url

I ran a few searches with Clush and was not impressed with the quality of the results. In a couple of cases I found pages that didn't contain any of my search terms. Let's give the database some time to grow and see what happens.

Searcher Perspective When I want to cluster web results I'll use Clusty or another site that uses Vivisimo's technology.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 3, 2004

Gigablast Grows

Gigablast, the useful search tool that searches its own database of web content, has grown. An update on the Gigablast home page today informs us that the database now contains more than 640 million pages. Previously, the total page count was at 475,577,392.

In April ACM Queue published an interview with Gigablast's developer and sole proprietor, Matt Wells.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 2, 2004

FyberSearch Launches Blog

Nathan Enns, the developer of FyberSearch, the small but feature-filled engine that I mentioned last Sunday, alerts us to the just launched FyberSearch News Blog.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 30, 2004

GoHook Offers Up a Database of PDF Content

We've just learned that GoHook is building a database of Adobe Acrobat (PDF) content.

GoHook used to provide an archive of completed eBay auctions. However, in March the service ended after the company ran into several problems with EBay.

The new GoHook PDF database includes about 500,000 documents. According to the company more than 10,000 documents are added to the database each week.

GoHook offers several options to view PDF content online. You can click the hyperlinked title and open the document in an Adobe Acrobat Reader or:

+ View the document converted into HTML + View a cached/archived version of the document in PDF. Google, Yahoo, AJ, and other web databases that crawl PDF content DO NOT offer cached versions of these documents. The Wayback Machine does offer a small amount of archive PDF material. + View the document converted into text (txt) format.

GoHook results pages also contain the date the document was crawled along with its size.

You can use quotation marks to search phrases and a minus sign to exclude a term. A default "and" is used between terms.

Snippets do not show your search terms in context. This is a feature that would make GoHook much more useful. However, it's possible to quickly open a text version of a document and then use edit/find to locate your search terms.

The company is also developing a database of .WAV sound files. At the moment GoHook Audio search contains only 5000 files.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dipsie Says Online "Soon"

Along with Microsoft at the MIT conference Danny mentioned was Jason Wiener who continues to say that his Dipsie search engine will be online soon. We've heard this before. Here's one example. I'll believe it when I see it.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 27, 2004

Berners-Lee on The Semantic Web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is interviewed in the new issue of Technology Review.

The interview focuses on the latest developments with the Semantic Web.

Here's a small portion of the interview.

B-L: You can take a database or a calendar or an address book or a bank statement or a weather reading--basically anything with hard data in it--and make the machine write it in the basic Semantic Web language, instead of some proprietary or application-specific format. This solves the "syntactic" problem.

It still doesn't solve the "semantic" one, though. For that, the Semantic Web first gives names to the basic concepts involved in the data, date and time, an event, a check, a transaction, temperature and pressure, and location. These are all defined just to mean whatever they mean in the system which produces the data—for example, "Transaction date as I get on a bank statement," and so on. This set of concepts is called an ontology. Then, where there are connections between ontologies, such as when the date and time on a photograph is the same concept as the time on a weather report, we write rules to take advantage of these connections. This allows one to query the Semantic Web agent for photos taken on sunny days, for example. Bit by bit, link by link, the data becomes connected, interwoven. The exciting thing is serendipitous reuse of data: one person puts data up there for one thing, and another person uses it another way.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 26, 2004

Small General-Purpose Web Engines

The developers of small general-purpose web engines continue to impress with their innovative spirit.

It's a good idea to keep an eye on what these types of companies are up to. Why? We're all aware of the fact that some of today's most popular general-purpose web engines started very small in garages and dorm rooms.

Here are just a few examples:

+ Gigablast (Matt Wells, developer) Every result includes a direct link to The Wayback Machine. A real time saver!

+ FyberSearch (Nathan Enns, developer) FyberSearch offers numerous easy to use search options and limits. I just noticed that every url on a serp contains a hyperlink to Michael Fagan's URLinfo that Chris recently wrote about. FyberSearch also offers several "subject focused" databases that provide business, government, science, and other types of material. + ObjectsSearch ObjectsSearch powered with Nutch technology is now offering clustered results and offering several "specialty" databases including image search. They're also making a Web APIs service (beta) available.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 22, 2004

Kozoru Seeks Answers

The "answer engine" space continues to get press attention. Michael Bazeley sheds some light on what a Kansas City based Kozoru is up to.

Kozuru Chief Executive John Flowers says they're, "specifically focusing on providing answers to specifically tailored questions...We are trying to determine who the most authoritative sources are.''

They plan to launch in July 2005.

The article also points out that an Ask Jeeves co-founder David Warthen is on the Kozoru board.

It's worth noting that Kozoru is building an automated approach to deliver answers versus the OLD Jeeves approach of having humans build question and answer sets.

This blog post contains a couple of links to articles about the answer engine research Microsoft is doing.

You can read more about Kozoru in this article from a Kansas City area paper.

An obstacle Kozoru might face is obtaining access to some of the most authoritative and respected info sources since they're often fee-based and not available on the open web.

A company like GuruNet that also considers itself an answer engine offers some content for free but to access the full service you need to pay about $40/year. Here's a positive review of Gurunet from SearchDay.

As I pointed out in this SearchDay article many people already have FREE access to many fee-based resources by way of their local public or university library. These reference databases often contain the full text from thousands of publications, poweful search interfaces, and are accessible 24x7x365 without having to go to the library. All you need is a library card.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fagoogle: Google For The Gay Community

Fagoogle is a new Google-powered site that promises to share some of the ad revenues it earns with the gay community (exactly how this is done, to what groups, etc. isn't said on the site. A press release suggests it will go to fund awareness programs in schools).

There's a ton of disclaimers, like on the bottom of every page, "Fagoogle.com is not owned, run, operated, viewed, conceived, sandboxed, or banned by Google.com" or in the Fagoogle press release: "Google, Inc. itself, has announced that Fagoogle.com is fully in compliance with Google regulations, and as such is neither endorsed, nor shunned by Google."

I personally haven't seen any such announcements of this from Google, nor do I see anything like this on the Google press page. But I have no doubt Google has a relationship with Fagoogle. Fagoogle simply seems to be one of many Google's many AdSense For Search affiliates.

What's a pity is that Fagoogle didn't make use of Site-Flavored Google Search to customize results for a gay audience. For example, the box below is site-flavored to promote sites that have a gay focus to them.

homeHTML = ""; document.getElementById("hm").innerHTML = homeHTML;

Try a search for marriage and compare it to a regular Google search for marriage. You'll see colored balls showing up next to results that have been given an gay interest boost (for more, see this past article from SearchDay).

What really remains to be seen is whether Google's trademark attorneys will be comfortable with the name sounding so close to Google's own. The porn search engine Booble certainly found that gained Google's displeasure. A parody site also recently became a target: Google: Take Down This Parody Site.

Want to comment or discuss this? Please visit the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nuggets: Search Via SMS For UK, Sort Of

Nuggets is a new meta search engine that lets you get back answers to questions via SMS, if you're in the UK. That's ideal for those taking part in pub quizzes -- though you might find yourself banned by the quiz organizers, if you do so.

More important, however, is the fact that Nuggets "cannot guarantee for the correctness or quality of the answer supplied," as it says on its FAQ page. That's because the system relies on sending your query to an unnamed major search engine, then analyzing the pages listed to extract what it thinks is the correct answer.

Whether the answer is actually correct will depend on if the source material itself has it right and more important, whether the extraction works properly. I tried two questions, at 50p each (about US $0.80):

How old is Sergey Brin?

The answer should have been 32, I believe. It definitely should not have been, "unknown were eves-dropping on 2 old friends as they reminisced about the."

What's that all about? I'm guessing the query went over to Yahoo, which for how old is sergey brin brings back an article about me interviewing him last year at SES San Jose the day before his 30th birthday. A human doing the math could work out his current age. Automatic extraction, however, failed.

When was Yahoo founded?

That was my second question, and I'd have been happy with April 1994. I wasn't happy with "unknown 1968 Intel is founded. unknown 1969 doc log modules mqa-send.sh mynuggest nuggets -deployed.cig nuggets -testing.cig table temp ARPANET is f." Where'd that one come from? I took a quick look but couldn't figure it out.

So much for the pub quiz. As an alternative, you can try Any Question Answered. It's more expensive, but humans are also involved. Short write-up on the service here: U.K. Mobile Users Get Any Question Answered.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 16, 2004

Stolen Credit Card Numbers in Web Engines

Google Search Reveals Credit-Card Numbers Source: NewsFactor Although the headline of this story mentions only Google containing this type of info in their database, the article does mention (in the third section) that these numbers can be found in other web engines. Kudos to the authors. I'm happy to see this because other articles haven't. This News.com article on stolen credit card info in Google is an example.

On a related note, a News.com article from about six weeks ago discusses data from Moveon.org "leaking" by accident into Google. No other engines are mentioned. However, as I pointed out on my ResourceShelf.com site that the data was accessible from other engines. Eric Baillargeon also did some checking and offers his thoughts on the topic. Yes, of course, Google is the leading engine but the media would do a better job by reminding people that just checking for personal info on Google doesn't mean that it's not accessible elsewhere.

Btw, I'm also glad to see that the NewsFactor article correctly points out that Google and any other web engine is not at fault for including this type of info in their database is wrong. Site owners and webmasters need to understand how engines work and that keeping material out of large web databases needs to be their job.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blinkx Continues To Get Attention

David vs. Goliath... vs. Goliath: Blinkx and the Future of Search Source: Media Post

More positive press for Blinkx. Gord Hotchkiss concludes his article by stating that Blinkx is "changing the tune of the entire search industry."

While I agree that Blinkx is doing some interesting work (and the company should be watched closely) I'm not ready to say that they'rea changing the entire industry (at least as of today). I've used Blinkx for a couple of months and have found the web and news results it offers not been very useful.

One problem is that the size of their web index appears to be very small. The article does mention that Blinkx is growing the database.

The SEM community might find the following passage from the article very interesting.

"One of the interesting results that Blinkx found with the original users is a dramatic increase in the number of links chosen in a day. Traditionally, most users may turn to a search engine 5 to 10 times a day. This means most users might see 50 to 100 links. But when Blinkx is always there, suggesting relevant links, the number of links seen by the user rises dramatically. The average Blinkx user generally sees 200 to 250 links a day. As [Suranga] Chandratillake [a co-founder of the company] is quick to point out, this opens up some real potential in the area of search marketing. 'When search is ubiquitous, users will look at it more. They don't have to stop what they're doing, go to the Web and search. We're always there, making suggestions.'"

Note: The article mentions that, "Copernic reportedly has a similar search appliance coming out soon." Perhaps this article was written prior to the release of Copernic's Desktop Search tool on Aug. 30th.

Want to comment? Visit our forum thread: Blinkx Continues To get Attention

Posted by Gary Price at 2:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Feedster and Eurekster Get Together

A news release informs us that Eurekster is now offering rss/blog searching powered by Feedster.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 15, 2004

Comparisons with TiVo

Seems like comparing web search tools to TiVo is getting hot. (-:

Today, Chris reviews a, "search toolbar, an RSS reader, online bookmark manager or web research manager" named Pluck.

On the Pluck homepage you'll notice the line, "it's like TiVo for the web."

In her article about the launch of a9, Stefanie compares some of the sites new features to TiVo. She writes, "To this end, A9 lets people navigate, annotate and store Web pages they've visited, and as the TiVo digital video recorder does with television programs, it will recommend sites based on users' past preferences."

I wonder if comparing web search tools to TiVo will become more popular than search engines (especially new ones) saying they are "Google like" or the "next" Google? (-:

Posted by Gary Price at 3:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

See More Posts From:

This Week | This Month

Legal Notices, Licensing, Reprints & Permissions

Privacy Policy
Affiliates

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-564586-7"); pageTracker._setDomainName(".searchenginewatch.com"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); window.collarity_appid = "incmedia"; //> //>

Top Jobs

more Jobs

Account Manager
Varick Media Management New York, United States

Reporting and Data Analyst
Varick Media Management New York, United States

Director of Marketing Communications
Avery Dennison Brea, United States

Publisher
Confidential Leading Publisher New York, United States

White Papers

more Research