BooRah Wins Yahoo SearchMonkey Contest!

July 11th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, News | No Comments »





Yahoo! has announced the winners of it’s SearchMonkey contest.

And, Alt Search Engine BooRah has won the first prize in the InfoBar category!

(See blog post for complete post.) Here’s the gist of it:

SearchMonkey is the first of many initiatives for Yahoo’s Open Strategy (See ReadWriteWeb story). Earlier this week, Yahoo also announced a program to open up their existing API’s for unlimited use with no restrictions on branding/linking. We’re excited to make use of Yahoo’s open platform, with our semantic technology, to enhance the user experience and relevance for our customers. Kudos to Yahoo for taking such a bold step in the tumultuous world of Search.

Now for the details of our InfoBar implementation:

InfoBar is an application within SearchMonkey that allows additional information to be shown along with the search result. Below is a search result for “best restaurants in san jose” that has been enhanced by InfoBar (NOTE: You’ll need to be logged in to Yahoo and add the BooRah application in your profile to see these results. See post for instructions).

By expanding the search result, you can see the enhanced result within the same page.

You’ll see the top 3 restaurants and their overall ratings along with a link to start exploring the site, providing a preview of what to expect when a user lands on the site. For this result example, “Falafel drive Inn” received a 93% positive rating based on 353 reviews, “Maggiano’s” scored 89% out of 324 reviews and “Original Joe’s” scored 82% based on 290 reviews. This information was all derived from the sentiment in the written text of the reviews using BooRah’s patent-pending NLP engine.

Apple Apps Store Offers 150+ Search Tools

July 11th, 2008 by Peggy Salz
Posted in Guest Authors, Verticals | No Comments »



With Peggy Salz

From Music Search To Local Search On Steroids: Apple Apps Store Offers 150+ Search Tools; Does It Play In Favor of Yahoo BOSS?

Apple’s new App store that launched today on iTunes is the hot topic.

A browse through the 554 reveals a whopping 154 mobile search tools and counting! They range from AskPeter.Info Mobile Search (an Answers-like service from Germany’s P & T Software Development) to  zabihah (a search tool from Halalfire Media LLC that allows users to find and map restaurants in their area that conform to Halal Muslim dietary code standards).

Tools are on offer that can help you find a lawyer in the U.S., pick a perfect property in the Czech Republic and even browse for books and ebooks in University Library Graz, Austria. And the list goes on… (You can check them out here.)

Indeed, the Long Tail of vertical search engines that I have tracked and profiled from the start on MSG and now on AltSearchEngines (ASE) has arrived. In fact, Charles Knight, my colleague and friend at ASE, reckons I’ll have a full-time job just profiling the made-for-mobile (or should I say iPhone?) search services on offer for our sites. And that’s not including the scores of online Alts (alternative search engines) – such as Powerset, Summize, Earthcomber and  Sputtr – that have developed a mobile service.

To start off, let’s take a closer look at midomi mobile from search and sound recognition company Melodis Corporation.

In a nutshell, the search app lets users to find songs and artists by singing, humming, speaking, typing or playing original music sources into their iPhones. Once a user discovers a piece of music, midomi mobile leverages the iPhone’s interface and to provide one-click access to iTunes and YouTube, where users can purchase the music or watch related videos. In addition, midomi mobile gives users one-stop access to a wide range of music-related content, including photographs, biographies and complete discographies of their favorite artists or bands.

The music search is sits at the core of a music sharing social network, but more about this after I have had a briefing tomorrow (yes, Saturday) with Melodis CEO Keyvan Mohajer. Thanks again to Donna Candelori at Candelori Communications for setting this up on such short notice!

Another search service that caught my attention (partly because it’s already one of the most popular in the App store) is Wayfinder Power Search from Wayfinder. The technology – which I’ll call local search on steroids –  lets users search across a multitude of databases (White Pages, Yellow Pages, etc…) through a single unified search box.

How it works

Read the entire post on Peggy’s blog MSearchGroove HERE.