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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of Missouri has launched a collaborative search portal, enabling citizens of the Show-Me state to explore millions of historical documents.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 (5)

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 Deborah Richman 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 Deborah Richman 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 thi