Category: Of Note in Search Biz

Via Search Engine Guide I came across this: SearchLimo. You know how Google employee #1 and supergeek Craig Silverstein used to always say he wanted a search engine to “be like the computer on Star Trek“? Well, this is a step in that direction, though I am in no way qualified to judge if this company has the goods to deliver. So what is it? Simply put, voice-driven search.

Now, I *hate* the metaphor used here – a limo – and they’ve made it worse by beating an already dead horse with the tagline “The Web’s Luxury SE.” Gawd. And it’s damn near impossible to find out who is behind this. All the links and About pages are about…how to advertise. The only reference to who is responsible is this: “(SearchLimo) …was developed and built on a freeware VRU platform designed by a prominent institution of higher education…” OK…so…which one? By whom? Can’t find anything. Anyway, it launches officially on Feb 15.

I wrote about this a month or so ago, but it’s ready for media prime time – Eurekster launched today. There’s got to be a better name for socia-networking-driven search (er..Searchster?). What’s news: Eurekster has a deal for search results from Overture, but as MediaPost notes, So far, only the “natural” search results a user clicks on are added to the list of sites recently visited by the user’s community of friends. “The current version of the product offers no re-ranking of sponsored search results,” notes Steven Marder, Chairman, Eurekster Inc.

I’m going to quote liberally from the Eurekster “about” page for you, then ask a question:

See how eurekster personalizes search results
Type in a search term e.g. your name
Click on a search result that you think is best (this can be on any page of the search results). Stay at that website for at least 1 minutes (or we will assume that it wasn’t useful for you). Repeat this as often as you like.
In 3 minutes do the same search again and you will notice that the results you preferred will be at the top of the list of search results (excluding sponsored search results).
We remember the result you liked so you never have to repeat trawling through a long list of search results again!

How this helps other eurekster users
* After you sign up to eurekster and get your friends using it, when one of them does the same search as you then your preferred result will appear higher up their list of results. So everyone can learn from the search activity of people they know and trust.
* eurekster takes care of sharing the quality results around social networks to allow groups of people to learn from each other, while protecting identity and allowing the option for complete privacy.
* If users try to boost poor or inappropriate results they will not be spread to other users. The only people affected by this will be their direct contacts that they have invited to join their personal network. This social network filtering of search results works just like word of mouth that we count on in everyday life.

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On some level, you have to love this: A porn search engine. If only it worked. I crashed it on a search for “sex,” tried again, and got 291 results – 291! Don’t even try more sophisticated fare, there are few results to speak of. It’s a great idea, poorly executed, and with a terrible name – Booble – that’s derivative *and* sophomoric. The lawyers over at Google must be sharpening their knives, because the trade dress ripoffs alone warrant a bigfoot letter, if not more. Booble’s put out a press release, lightheartedly claiming they are parodying Google, but they also claim the engine actually works. It’s a directory of sorts – the release claims they’ve added 6000 sites that are vetted by human editors, but …really. Note to Fleshbot: This is a good idea poorly executed – get on this asap!

(Thanks to the folks at Boing Boing for the pointer).

What with Yahoo pointing to Nutch as one of the centerpiece projects in its new Labs, perhaps the stars are aligning for open source search. I recently got wind of another project in the works. It’s called Sprawler, and it’s in “pre-alpha” over at SourceForge. The man behind Sprawler is Eric Anderson, who is a systems analyst at a large unix installation in Austin, and came to search via an interest in physics. It’s early – Anderson does not expect to start indexing until later this Spring – but its good to see more and more interest in the space.

It was bound to happen – Yahoo announced today its own research labs. The labs live here. Seems this is the old Overture research warmed once over, their too-short list of research projects include Nutch, which was supported by Overture (I wrote an early piece on Nutch here). I’ve been on Yahoo for a while, even back before the Overture days, to take a leading role in search and internet technology innovation. I’m not entirely wowed by this unveiling. The second project, Cluster Graphing, linked to a 404 error. The “Concept Discovery” research is important, however. Let’s hope this is more than just a press release…though at first glance, it kind of looks that way.

Google Labs, for comparison….

Check out Topix, another new news aggregator (in Beta), this one from a handful of DMOZ and Netscape refugees. What makes Topix special? From an email sent to me by Rich Skrenta, one of the founders:

Our project is a news aggregator that reads all the news, everywhere, and sorts it into thousands of categories depending on what the stories are about. One kind of sorting we do is geographical, so we produce an online news rollup for each of 30,000 towns and cities across the US. We also track every mention of a celebrity, sports team, health condition, country, music group, public companies, and some other stuff…

The geographic sort makes Topix a local news player, which is potentially a major source of revenue once local search gains full traction. Take note, media investors.

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David Weinberger today reports on Findory, a personalized news site that requires no registration and no personal information, it simply watches what you read and builds a profile via your information habits and those of others who also have viewed the same articles as you. Very cool idea. No idea if it works, but worth a pointer….

Relatively deep in John Markoff’s piece “Plaintiffs Say Microsoft Still Behaves Badly” these charges are related: In a separate report, filed with the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, which is the lone holdout from the antitrust settlement, stated that its investigations “portend badly for the efficacy of the Nov. 1, 2002, judgment.”

“We have continued to receive and review indications that Microsoft is engaged in troubling business behavior,” wrote Assistant Attorney General Glenn S. Kaplan.

The Massachusetts report said that the state was reviewing allegations that Microsoft is “engaged in a campaign against various Internet search engines similar to the campaign it previously waged against Netscape’s Navigator browser.”

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Dex, the newly named Yellow Pages unit (formerly of Qwest/US West), announced Friday they have made all 240,000 of their listings – covering a major swath of the midwestern and western US – searchable online. Said Dex President and Chief Executive Officer George Burnett, rather defensively, “We think our product is better than any portal.”

MediaPost has a story on it here.

This piece (via Forbes.com) explores the idea, which Google does not deny or confirm. Says Google may do its own branded email service.

From the piece: Google last year purchased an e-mail management software maker and in 2001 registered the domain name googlemail.com.
Some in Silicon Valley also believe Google could be preparing to launch free e-mail to compete with offerings from Yahoo and MSN’s Hotmail.
“If they were to go the e-mail route they’d have to provide an offering that competes with free (e-mail). Anti-spam is one form of strong differentiation,” said Jim Pitkow, chief executive of Moreover Technologies, whose personalized search company Outride was acquired by Google in 2001.