Category: Of Note in Search Biz

Crawler Available, Will Work for Free

From Boing Boing I learn that the Internet Archive is releasing its crawler for free under a LGPL license. Why is this news? As I've argued in the past, it's not cheap or easy to innovate in the search space, but the search space desperately needs innovation. If key components…

From Boing Boing I learn that the Internet Archive is releasing its crawler for free under a LGPL license. Why is this news? As I’ve argued in the past, it’s not cheap or easy to innovate in the search space, but the search space desperately needs innovation. If key components like crawlers can be snapped in place relatively easily, new ideas heretofore unthinkable become possible. I also like the philosophy behind the crawler, which is named Heritrix: “Heritrix (sometimes spelled heretrix , or misspelled or missaid as heratrix / heritix / heretix / heratix ) is an archaic word for inheritess. Since our crawler seeks to collect the digital artifacts of our culture (my emphasis/link) for the benefit of future researchers and generations, this name seemed apt.”

Way to go, Brewster!

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MetaCarta Gets MetaFunding

Ever wondered how local search is going to work, really? Or how the government might associate particular documents or databases with specific geographic locations? MetaCarta makes a business of wondering just that, and just got $6.5 million in a series B round, led by Sevin Rosen. This company has clearly…

Ever wondered how local search is going to work, really? Or how the government might associate particular documents or databases with specific geographic locations? MetaCarta makes a business of wondering just that, and just got $6.5 million in a series B round, led by Sevin Rosen. This company has clearly stepped into a significant role in “geographic search.” It’s customers include intelligence agencies, the military, and energy companies (Chevron is an investor.) What do they do? From the site: “With MetaCarta Geographic Text Search™ (GTS), analysts accelerate their efforts by searching text documents in a geographic context. MetaCarta GTS turns text documents into geographic data layers.  This accelerates decision support and analytic workflow.”

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Yahoo Gets Set

Two Yahoo items this morning: First, the Journal (sub req'd) reports that Yahoo is set to drop Google (this is not a surprise, but rather the other shoe of the Overture/Inktomi purchases dropping). Second, CEO Semel promises many more innovations (and profits) from Yahoo search in the next year at…

Two Yahoo items this morning: First, the Journal (sub req’d) reports that Yahoo is set to drop Google (this is not a surprise, but rather the other shoe of the Overture/Inktomi purchases dropping). Second, CEO Semel promises many more innovations (and profits) from Yahoo search in the next year at a conference in NYC (link via CNet/Search Engine Lowdown.) The plan is to create personalized search products and beef up paid inclusion, a controversial practice, certainly, but one that is quite profitable. Google refuses on principle to do paid inclusion.

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Declaring the Relationship (RSS related)

Neat: Winer has created a feature that allows folks to see who subscribes to their blogs via RSS. I've always wanted to know who cares enough about Searchblog to check it regularly via RSS. In fact, I think such a connection is one of the cooler things about blogs and…

Neat: Winer has created a feature that allows folks to see who subscribes to their blogs via RSS. I’ve always wanted to know who cares enough about Searchblog to check it regularly via RSS. In fact, I think such a connection is one of the cooler things about blogs and the web – the two-way conversation is declared and nurtured, the community is known. It’s like an email subscription, but more intimate. But some folks prefer anonymity with their RSS habits, and I respect that as well. How do you all feel about it?

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Bloomberg: Google Chooses Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs to Lead IPO

This is not confirmed by any parties, but Bloomberg claims to have an inside source. If this means the bakeoff is final, then the IPO is 90-120 days away, maybe sooner depending on the SEC. Exciting times for all concerned, and possibly and end to all this speculation. WR Hambrecht…

This is not confirmed by any parties, but Bloomberg claims to have an inside source. If this means the bakeoff is final, then the IPO is 90-120 days away, maybe sooner depending on the SEC. Exciting times for all concerned, and possibly and end to all this speculation. WR Hambrecht (the Dutch auction folks) is named as a banker on the deal, but not as a lead, and there is no immediate news on whether an auction or online distribution scheme will play a part in the deal. Slashdot has hundreds of comments on the deal already, for those of you with a lot of time on your hands…(Thanks to Ross for the tip!)

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Tipping Point For Shoppng Engines?

Shopping.com doubled its holiday traffic this past season, DM News reports today. Execs from the site are quick to claim that online shopping (or, as I like to call it, the shopping search vertical) has hit critical mass. It's hard to argue. From the piece: The San Francisco company doubled…

Shopping.com doubled its holiday traffic this past season, DM News reports today. Execs from the site are quick to claim that online shopping (or, as I like to call it, the shopping search vertical) has hit critical mass. It’s hard to argue. From the piece:

The San Francisco company doubled the number of unique visitors in the 2003 holiday season to 58 million and the number of shopping sessions to 69 million. Leads referred to merchants listed on the site grew 123 percent in holiday 2003 to 29 million, and sales for them rose 132 percent to $181 million. …

…Shopping.com … stood fourth among U.S. multi-category e-commerce sites for November in terms of unique monthly visitors, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, trailing only eBay, Amazon and Yahoo Shopping. Walmart.com, target.com and BizRate.com followed. …

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Wired News: Narrowing the Search

Not much you haven't seen before, but a fair roundup of a few more focused search tools, including TouchGraph, which I had not previously grokked….

Not much you haven’t seen before, but a fair roundup of a few more focused search tools, including TouchGraph, which I had not previously grokked.

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The People Search Meme Grows: Plink

Via Jeff Jarvis today I came across Plink, an experimental "people link" search engine built on the "Friends Typelist" and/or blogrolls of Moveable Type users. It is explained by Anil Dash in the Six Apart blog here. This is a neat implementation of search based on FOAF ideas. Basically, Plink…

<a href="http://battellemedia.com/images/plink2.gif" onclick="window.open('http://battellemedia.com/plinkVia Jeff Jarvis today I came across Plink, an experimental “people link” search engine built on the “Friends Typelist” and/or blogrolls of Moveable Type users. It is explained by Anil Dash in the Six Apart blog here. This is a neat implementation of search based on FOAF ideas. Basically, Plink (cool name) lets you search for people you know, and then see who they know, and who knows them. To be included, you have to create a FOAF file, which I have not done, and honestly, am not sure I want to deal with. Those that have, however, are pointing the way for applications that eventually will do it automatically. Might this auger the future of Friendster or LinkedIn, where the intelligence and relationships built into those closed networks become part of the open platform of the Net?

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“Ungoogle”

I suppose it had to happen. "Ungoogle" is a meta-search engine is that uses the "major search engines besides Google." I can't find anything else on the site to tell me who is behind this, save a reference to the "Hound Internet Family of Search Engines" which a quick Google…

ungoogleI suppose it had to happen. “Ungoogle” is a meta-search engine is that uses the “major search engines besides Google.” I can’t find anything else on the site to tell me who is behind this, save a reference to the “Hound Internet Family of Search Engines” which a quick Google search shows will return you to the same page with a few different URLs. (Found via the Google Blogoscoped site.)

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Grokking WebFountain

If you're like me and you want to understand what IBM is up to with WebFountain, this overview from IEEE Spectrum is as good a piece on it as I've seen anywhere. WebFountain is clearly one to watch in 2004, I'll be talking with them early this year and will…

IBM logoIf you’re like me and you want to understand what IBM is up to with WebFountain, this overview from IEEE Spectrum is as good a piece on it as I’ve seen anywhere. WebFountain is clearly one to watch in 2004, I’ll be talking with them early this year and will have reports back shortly….also, I’ll be watching this joint venture with Factiva, which will be one of the first commercial executions of the technology.

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