Written on May 3, 2008 – 2:09 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our '
About' page and subscribe to our
RSS feed.
If you came here from Digg it would be great if you could actually Digg us too! Do you have a start-up that we should write about?
Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
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 March 24, 2008 – 7:03 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
We wrote about the YouTube warp before on The Next Web. It is a visual way of browsing videos on Youtube. Cute but not very useful and well hidden from most users. But now there is a way to link to the Warp browser in your blog or website. A simple how to, link to this URL:
http://youtube.com/warp.swf?v=
If you put the alpha numeric part of the video behind the ‘=’ sign, your hyperlink will be enriched with some warp magic. An example: http://youtube.com/warp.swf?v=2v4p4CpPRwI, makes one beautiful warp about warps.
It can be useful if you want to guide your readers or visitors through a video tour on a specific subject. Wanna tell people where it went wrong with Britney Spears? Or do you prefer to tell them what Easter is all about? No problem! The warp creates an easy and attractive way to show related videos. Although there’s always the risk of some totally inappropriate computer-generated link…
Written on March 8, 2008 – 12:16 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Quintura, a visual-based search engine for browsing and discovery-type search launched its search engine for search on individual web-sites and blogs. When entering a search term, Quintura shows a cloud with related tags. Search blog AltSearchEngines already installed the engine their sidebar. After trying it for a while, I definitely see the use of this visual search option. Time for an interview with the co-founder, President and CEO of Quintura Yakov Sadchikov.
Of course, I asked him why visual search is the future. “The visual-based search is more intuitive and easy to use. Making a parallel here, iPhone is an example of a visual-based user interface that is taking smart phone market by storm. Look at Quintura as an iPhone for the search market.” That’s quite statement, as there are more visual search engines appearing, like ManagedQ.
The search experience it totally different though. ManagedQ loads full screen and shows screenshots combined with tags in a sidebar. Quintura however keeps it simple and just shows tags. Smart move, since the clouds of Quintura can be easily installed on blogs and sites. That has two major advantages: the chance that Quintera will get viral is bigger and it makes a pretty good business model. Right?
Sadchikov: “We can educate the market about new search experience that Quintura brings and start creating a web index and monetizing it straight away. We now have 1,000 web-sites and blogs that joined our site search program. It includes portals with a monthly traffic of several million users. All those sites and blogs that embed Quintura site search widget are actually Quintura advertising network since we plan to start selling graphical ads in the widget’s search cloud. We expect a number of affiliates to grow to 10,000 by the end of 2008.”
That sure sounds good, yet I doubt whether Quintura will be successful in non English-speaking countries. The problem with the visual search engine is it doesn’t handle other languages than English*. When I search in either French of German, tags like ‘through’ or ‘the’ are popping up. So, just like the iPhone, we’ll have to wait a while before Quintura gets really useful in Europe.
(By the way, today is women’s day. So the guys from Quintura created a women-specific search engine. Ladies, please let us know what you think)
*Update: Charles Knight from AltSearchEngines mailed me that Quintura also handles Russian.
Email
Twitter
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
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. (
