Written on May 9, 2008 – 12:45 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
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Viewzi is a new player in the search engine world. They launched in closed beta at the end of april and have distributed about 50,000 invites so far. Fighting Google just on strength is virtually impossible. So, as most self appointed ‘Google Killers’ Viewzi focuses on displaying their search results more intelligently. First they try to guess what kind of information you are looking for. Is is a term, an image, a person or maybe audio of video content. Then they get a bunch of results from other specialized search engines like Google but also Flickr and Amazon.
Once they have gotten these results they present them in a ‘View’ that is optimized for the kind of content you are looking for. You can easily switch between different ‘Views’ and websites and images are previewed and preloaded so you don’t have to go back and forth between sites trying to find out which result is the right one.
I was skeptical when I looked at their front page. It just looked too black, image rich and bloated. But I decided to check out their video and than made all the difference. The implementation of what they call ‘Views’ is very well done and the idea of browsing through filtered content in their result pages actually sounds cool.
Google, and most other websites, aim to make the search experience as efficient as possible. You search, get results and click away to a destination site somewhere off the Google domain. Viewzi attempts to make the Search experience more than that. If they manage to deliver you will stick around browsing content on their site similar to how you browse through music in iTunes. browsing through beautiful results could be an joyful experience instead of a waste of time.
UPDATE: I have asked for few invitations. If you want one leave a comment and I will send you
Written on May 3, 2008 – 2:09 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
You’ll probably recognize this. My less web-savvy friends are sometimes really surprised when they see me searching for something on the web. They had no idea one could do it so fast. Yet what I’m doing is not that special, e.g. using terms like AND or NOT. For them it’s one of the many mysteries the new digital age brought along.
The people behind the Boolify project stumbled upon a similar problem. Teachers and librarians told them they had a hard time teaching kids to search. Which actually surprises me, as I had figured kids pick up new technologies pretty fast. Anyhow, Boolify has developed an overlay service on Google’s “Safe Search STRICT” technology that illustrates the logic of search, using colored puzzle pieces. These visual cues help children to create a mental model of the search they’re performing. Eventually, it should learn them how to sift information from all the web noise.
So imagine you’re an English kid from Birmingham, looking for a playground. Yet you’re afraid of dogs and totally dig the swing. So you start using Boolify. But after the first keywords, only stores that sell ‘playground equipment’ keep popping up. Apparently they know their SEO. So you exclude them as well. This is how it will look:
Thanks Charles Knight from Altsearchengines for the tip.
Written on April 23, 2008 – 1:16 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Whatever Company is about to launch an Enterprise 2.0 search tool called knowledgeplaza.net. Right now they are showing a teaser site with some interesting content until they launch. What is different about the search engine is that it will index all employee information within a company and use that to deliver everybody within that company useful search results. The goal is to captivate the companies hidden information and knowledge and making it accessible.
There have been many more or less successful attempts to do similar things in the past including solutions from Google and Microsoft that promise similar results. It wasn’t exactly clear to me (by just reading the information on the teaser site) how this will be different from current offerings but this is what they explained to me via email:
“Imagine a large bank customer using Knowledge Plaza; (internal) experts bookmark websites of relevance, tag them according to sector, etc. (so far, it bears some resemblance to del.icio.us or Cogenz.com in the enterprise space) Knowledge Plaza allows to instantaneously build a custom *search engine* on those very sites, a perfect exemple of “less is more”: information is more relevant than a similar Google search, because your search is run through only a few hundred of pages, out of a few dozen sites hand-picked by your (expert) colleagues, not through billions of pages, with a global PageRank.
Knowledge Plaza really puts the ’social’ into “enterprise search”, and it’s something that may allow it to jump past larger players in the enterprise search field.”
The company was founded by Olivier Verbeke and has raised close to a million euros in funding so far. The enterprisesocialsearch.com site is meant as a ‘teasing’ campaign only with the actual service launching soon on knowledgeplaza.net.
The slideshow explaining this new service is currently very popular on SlideShare (‘Slideshow of the Day’) which is understandable because it is fun to watch: (more…)
Written on April 21, 2008 – 5:19 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The first guys I met here are Josh and Sum from the young and enthusiastic team of eeggi. They drove six hours from LA to arrive here 7am sharp. And they had all the reason to do that, since they’ve quite an interesting search engine to present. 
They claim it’s the world’s first mathematically-based Search and Retrieve, Response, and Discovery engine (ReDi engine), capable of focusing on the concept of text and not just the text itself”.
So basically, if you searched for an “exciting dvd”, the results would probably also include “breathtaking movie” or “thrilling film”. It reminds me of the iStockphoto’s search engine, that asks you what the meaning of your ambiguous search terms is. Only eeggi will find that out itself.
After five years of protecting and patenting, the guys from eeggi are now ready to “play”. It only took them three months to develop the prototype, which will launch in open beta in a few months. Josh McMillin, the CFO, told me that they’re going in a total different direction than the other alternative search engines. Sounds promising, let’s see how it turns out.
[reported live from the AltSearchEngines event]
Written on April 21, 2008 – 4:54 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
The first company I met today was Faroo. They are from Germany and Gosia Garbe, the CEO, gave me a quick update on their progress.
Garbe started development on Faroo more than 6 years ago and launched during Techcrunch40 here in San Francisco about a year ago. They are based in Germany. It is a P2P search engine that users install on their PCs, is free to use, as quick as Google and even can earn you some money as revenue is shared with users.
Garbe told me she was slightly disappointed with user adoption (actual downloads) since they launched.
Unfortunately the application only works on PCs and isn’t supported on Mac and Linux and there is no way to test the actual search engine without installing the application first. I can imagine that this requires too big a leap of faith for most users.
The idea of P2P search is interesting though. Google reportedly spends 2 billion a year on their server infrastructure. If a search engine would be able to move all that data to the end user thereby speeding up the service and saving huge amounts of money that would give them a huge edge.
The question is how to entice these users to start contributing to a product that won’t prove its benefit until you start contributing. A chicken and egg problem that Faroo is eager to solve.
[reported live from the AltSearchEngines event]
Written on April 18, 2008 – 8:30 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
If you follow blogs like The Next Web and Altsearchengines, you might notice that social search engines are booming. Stumpedia, Topicle, AndUnite, you name it. They’re popping up everywhere and at least twice a week, one of the founders sends me a line to tell me why his engine is gonna be the top of the bill.
Geoffrey McCaleb from Nsyght is one of them. He and his team have found a new take on social searching: allowing users to use their bookmarks and their social graph to create a customized search experience. “the real eureka moment came when I thought, how can an algorithm tell me whats relevant when my assumptions of relevancy are going to be different from everyone else.”
McCaleb believes that no algorithm can replace the objectivity of a human being. “We all have different concepts and notions of what we find relevant. So, we wanted to create a search engine that didn’t treat every set of keywords the same. What you find relevant for a search may be different from mine.”
The beta version of Nsyght provides integrations into a number of social services such as del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, simpy, digg, last.fm, twitter, and pownce. “We do a couple of things with the social graph, we preserve friendships across different social networks, and we allow for users to syndicate their bookmarks between these services. The key takeaway point here, the more information we know about a person, the more we can customize the search to make it more relevant to them.”
The holy grail
But the most important question remains, Mr. McCaleb. Why would the public choose your search engine, out of all the other alternatives?
“Well there may be a lot of competition in this space, but I feel pretty strongly no one has approached the problem in the same way we have. The holy grail in search is not having the biggest index, but the one that gets you a relevant result in the shortest possible time. While we are small - a given since we are self-funded - we obviously have a ways to go. But as we gain more users, we will gain more of their bookmarks, and then we will have even more highly relevant sites in which to crawl and index.
Another way to look at it is this. PageRank is a brilliant concept, and still does an incredible job determining relevancy. But fundamentally, even with all the data points probably looks at it still is more concerned about the source and not the content. What we can do is let the user define the sites they feel are relevant, leverage their social network, and over time see their results become highly personalized. So in a way, augmenting the algorithm for their own use and gain.”
What do you use?
The only way to end this article, in my opinion, is to ask you guys whether you really use social search engines? Since you’re probably the most web-savvy crowd out there, you would also be the first ones to adopt a new trend. So tell me, still on Google? Or already switching to the brand new social engines?
Written on April 11, 2008 – 11:02 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Most European search markets are dominated by Google and there seem to be no real local competitors. In Russia however, a fierce battle for the search query’s of the consumers is going on. Yakov Sadchikov from Quintura even mailed me that “the Russian search engines are coming.” Well, I don’t think they will cross any borders, since their main advantage is the local knowledge and adaption to the Cyrillic alphabet. But they sure give Google a hard time on Russian soil.
Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh
First there is Russia’s largest search engine Yandex, the first engine that revealed a billion pages outside the .ru domain. According to ComScore, Yandex is the no. nine search engine globally. They’ve launched their first vertical search engine, Yandex.Auto. A search engine for, you guessed it right, car classified ads. The crawler indexes over half a million listings of used cars from 30 Russian car sites. Search query’s can be specified by gearbox type, brand, color and whatnot. Yakov showed me an example of the results for Lamborghini.
Secondly, the search engine that comes right after Yandex is Rambler. They’re not in the world’s top ten yet, but are doing a good job with 300 million monthly searches and more than 37 million unique users in last February. Revenues of 2007 increased with 125% from 2006 to 69 million dollars.
So this upcoming engine has released a new version which is open to the public on beta.rambler.ru. The differences with the current version are mainly visual, also the focus of Rambler has shifted to vertical search. So there’s a thumbnail next to a search result and four categories - Internet, Top 100, News and Wikipedia - are marked with different colors.
It seems like the Russian search engines are doing the opposite of what Google does, since they’re adding fancy add-ons, while Google still keeps it clean and simple. Maybe they’re right, maybe it’s time for specified and vertical search. Most of us are somewhat used to the complexity of the Web now, so we might as well be able to handle a search engine a bit more complicated than just a white page.
Written on April 7, 2008 – 11:15 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.
This time we’re interviewing Luis Pereira, Founder & CEO Stumpedia, a human-powered social search engine that enables registered users to submit sites and matching keywords and phrases. The relevancy of search results are then ranked and rated by the community. The future is search is social, said StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp last week during The Next Web conference, so I figured I should ask Luis to participate in this start-up series. Want to know exactly how it works? Check out this extensive article on SearchRank. Want to know why Luis started this search service and the influence he expect it to has on the future web? Then continue reading:
How did you come up with the idea of Stumpedia?
“The initial idea for Stumpedia.com came as a result of another web site we launched called AskPoodle.com. Both web sites are described as being human-powered, where as Stumpedia.com is a global search engine for key-word driven searches, AskPoodle.com is a local business directory for the US market. We are in the middle of a fundamental shift in the search space. Page Rank will certainly be around for a very long time, but how people search and surf the web is changing. Social bookmarking sites are a great example of new search habits and trends that are emerging. We recognize a need in the market for web pages and web sites to be ranked based on social collaboration methods. Social bookmarking data such as tags are one important element in determining search relevancy.” (more…)
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
