28 « August « 2008 « AltSearchEngines

Chose Re@dle, Re@dle, or Re@dle

August 28th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, News | No Comments »

Readle Meme’s mission is to filter the web for you.

Built with automatically updated “News Pages”, Readle Meme listing up to 100 headlines and excerpts (depending on how “hot” the topic are) from the latest and most popular News and Blog posts on every page. You can read the latest about Tech, Gadgets, News, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, Social Networks, Web 2.0, Yahoo, and much more that’s hot right now in the Blogosphere. The pages are updated automatically with around 20-30 minutes intervall. Just reload the pages. Some headlines climbs, and some fall off. Use search for older headlines.

You will never again miss what’s hot on the web, because of you don’t have time to read through all the RSS Feeds you subscribe to. Readle Meme is in Beta for now, not all categories are finished yet. I will continue to add new interesting News Pages all the time, so look for the “Related Pages” links on the pages itself, or in the Site Index, or subscribe to the RSS Feed.

With Readle gadgets you can search for Gadgets and Hardware from thousands of gadget sites. You can refine your search with labels such as English for English posts only, or specify your search to search only in my own Svartling Network of blogs. The search engine will continue to grow with new gadget sites.

Readle social indexes Social Networks sites. User generated content is sometimes better than the usual web content. Therefore are Readle social trying to collect and index all the popular social bookmarks, news, microblogs and communities on the net.

Mobile Search Performance Revealed

August 28th, 2008 by Peggy Salz
Posted in News, Verticals | No Comments »

Author: Peggy Anne Salz

Peggy Albright and I are road testing mobile search with the help of our sponsors and conducting briefings with mobile search companies and mobile operators – all in preparation for our upcoming quarterly series of reports, which document the end-user experience and provide insight into the key performance metrics.

In the course of our conference calls with leading search executives including Lee Ott, Director, Product Management, Mobile at Yahoo and Chris Spanos, General Manager, AOL Search Verticals, we were briefed on many topics and imminent product announcements that we cannot reveal here at this time. However, we were also treated to a few insightful stats and scoops that we now have permission to share.

With the funding announcement yesterday the timing is perfect to kick of this series of posts with some excerpts from our briefing with Adam Soroca, JumpTap Chief Product Officer.

CHANGES IN CONSUMER BEHAVIOR (January 2007 to May 2008):

· General increase in the use of mobile search:

o JumpTap divulged that one average carrier customer they have, which they declined to name, has seen a 370 percent increase in the number of unique search terms that are typed in by users on that carrier’s search box. As Adam put it: “That tells us that users are finding what they’re looking for. They’re trusting the search engine more and they’re broadening their usage of the search box.”

· Growth in number of searches per user:

o In January 2007, this operator’s customers were conducting an average of 7.3 searches per user per month. As of May 2008, “they’re doing about 11.”

· Performance:

o The percentage of times the system has an answer to the user’s query has grown from 77.4 percent in Jan. 2007 to 91.8 percent in May 2008. JumpTap attributes the improvement to a couple of things. One is that during this time period JumpTap doubled the number of unique domains that it covers in its mobile search index. Helping carriers better merchandise their content is another reason.

· General trends:

o JumpTap notices a shift away from entertainment-centric searches, such as ring tones and downloads. It reports more navigational searches: Users looking for websites (such as specific social networking sites) and utilities (such as email) on their devices.

o Local search-Interestingly, JumpTap does not see an increase in the use of search for local services. “We’re not seeing it yet in terms of a real growth in the number of searches users are doing through the main search box.” However, Adam did say when the system gives the user a prompt with a link to a local search form, the use of local search will increase by about 20 percent.

Read the rest of this post on Peggy’s blog HERE:

We interupt this program for this message…

August 28th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Apparently all of my emails for the past week have been lost. (No, I don’t use gmail – yet.) If you have emailed me or AltSearchEngines for any reason in the past week, please resend it to: Charles@ReadWriteWeb.com. Thanks.

Protect the Rainforest Wrestle Loggers! Forestle

August 28th, 2008 by Rafi Farber
Posted in Reviews, Verticals | 2 Comments »

Yesterday, we took a long, hard, carbon-neutral look at Click4Carbon, an alt that donates part of its proceeds to forestation projects. Today, we’ll take another carbon-neutral look at Forestle, which actually buys up forest with your click. (We ask our readers not to confuse carbon-neutral with Switzerland, which is only neutral when countries decide to blow each other up. Call their hotline to find out if they are also carbon-neutral.)

Now that we’re all clear on the Switzerland issue, Forestle, instead of funding forestation projects, protects existing rainforests by purchasing them. How does this work, you ask? You ask a good question.

It costs around $200(US) to buy one acre (4,047 m² or 4,840 yd²) of rain forest. On average Forestle earns around 0.5 US cents per search. Thus you can save about 0.1 square meter (0.11 yd²) of rainforest with every search at Forestle. This area roughly equals the surface of your computer screen. Since an average Internet user does about 1,000 searches annually. This means you can save more than 100 square meters (109 yd²) of rainforest every year by using Forestle. Here’s a table to demonstrate statistical goodness.

Worried about having to go to Forestle.org to type in a search every time? Worry not. Forestle has search plugin that you can use along with indicators to access numerous search functions. For example, you can type “wikipedia::Donald Duck” to do a Wikipedia search instead of a web search. To download the plugin (which goes right on your toolbar) and see the other cool stuff you can do with it besides searching for Donald Duck on Wikipedia which can only get you so far in life (maybe 5 feet), go to their website and click on the search plugin link.

Forestle is an independent nonprofit website that donates all of its income (minus administrative costs) to their partner organization, The Nature Conservancy, which uses this money in their “adopt an acre” program for sustainable protection of the rainforests.