Hello Antya! Find and Discover Websites

December 8th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Global, Innovations, Reviews | No Comments »

From India, Antya’s mission is to make all brands & businesses discoverable to the end user, so as you use Antya, you should be thinking more in terms of logos than text or even images.

Search engines today make it increasingly difficult to discover new brands or businesses. If you’re able to remember a brand name or an element of the brand name, well n good. If not, you’re left scratching your head trying to figure out what word you should key in to get the desired result. Many quality websites are not able to find their way through to the top 10 results because of cutthroat competition for the same space.

Antya aims to solve this problem. If you’re looking for a low cost airline that has just launched, but don’t quite remember its name, key in a related airline on Antya, and you will find your result.  That’s not all; all websites are ranked according to users’ preference. For a given context, this will give you a better idea of which websites are more popular among the users. Try “social networking” and you will see what they mean.  Antya also aims to get to the long tail – niche websites out there – and bring them to the fore, introducing them to users for their day-to-day needs.

Marketing Strategy
Antya is committed to provide the best user experience. Towards achieving this goal, Antya’s marketing strategy will focus on educating business owners on the advantages of updating their websites regularly. For those that don’t have a website, Antya will soon be providing a simple but effective way to build a website, nearly free of charge. Checkout their Labs section for the rest of their upcoming features.

Can You Help?
Antya says “Yes, of course!  We will be only too glad. Apart from rating and reviewing your favorite or not–so–favorite sites, you can help us by providing:

Missing Info: Upload any business info that other users have missed. It could be one of those sites that you accidentally discovered.
Feedback: Inform us of results or websites that have incorrect info. We will immediately inform the business owner of your feedback.
Updating Your Website: If you’re a business owner, you may help by updating your website info, especially dynamic content like jobs, once your requirement has been fulfilled.”

Sproose Launches German Language Edition

December 8th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, Global, Updates | No Comments »

Sproose has launched a German language edition of its user powered search model. Sproose provides the methodology  “search meets the wisdom of crowds” approach, allowing users to vote up in the search index their favorite sites improving upon machine calculated algorithmic results. Human interaction in search leverages the community to improve upon the search experience.

Since algorithmic results are over-whelmed and “gamed “ with spam and search engine optimization, the Sproose method of human interaction eliminates “in- bound link counting” as the core way to rank, thus improving the results. Combining user votes with social networking, Sproose effectively provides the community with the means to connect, comment and share results with others who have like interests.

“Now we are bringing the Sproose search platform to Germany. It’s our first international expansion since launching the U.S. version in August 2007,” states Bob Pack, CEO. “Sproose is already gaining great traction in the US, so we thought it was a natural fit to launch our site in Germany at this time, of course it certainly helps that our CTO Stefan Groschupf is actually from Halle, Germany, just outside of Berlin.”

Key Sproose features include, user voting for web and video search results, a tool bar for remote voting, a voting icon for webmasters to place on their site and a personal profile page to connect users with similar interests.

Are you a bilingual Russian or Ukrainian?

December 8th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Global | No Comments »

According to recent Alexa data, the bulk of AltSearchEngines’ readers are from the US – no surprise there.  But where is our second-largest audience?  When you combine Russia and the Ukraine, Eastern Europe is.  But what we lack here at ASE is a bilingual (English/Russian) search engine lover to join our global group of volunteers.  Interested? Just email me (in English) at: Charles@ReadWriteWeb.com and I’ll get back to you right away.