March 31st, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Music, News, Verticals | 1 Comment »
SeeqPod is a music search engine that spun out of a project at the University of California Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. However the search engine has had a stroke of bad luck as they have had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy yesterday.
SeeqPod had raised $7 million in funding from undisclosed investors and is doing this out of fear over some multibillion dollar lawsuits. Some of the music labels suing SeeqPod include Warner Music and Capitol Records. Some music companies even went after developers simply using the SeeqPod API.
SeeqPod is similar to Napster in the sense that it never actually hosted files on their actual servers, but it still crawls illegally copied music from servers and across the web. SeeqPod encourages the adherence of the DMCA according to their copyright document.
Source: Pulse2.com
March 31st, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Newcomers | No Comments »
March 31st, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Updates, Verticals, Visual | 1 Comment »
Searchme is the first major search engine to integrate “Tweets” into search results and make it easier for searchers to share results with the Twitter community by adding a ‘one-click’ post to Twitter button on every search page.
Searchme is a next generation search engine, designed from the ground up to provide a superior search experience over traditional text-based engines designed more than ten years ago. Instead of a list of blue links, Searchme delivers large images of the web pages, videos, music and products that play right on the search result page making it easy to find and consume things on the web.
Now Searchme has included Twitter search results and also made it easy for searchers to share their discoveries with the Twitter followers by clicking the large Twitter button on every search result page. The new Twitter integration adds to the array of social sharing tools in Searchme for sharing stacks with friends and family via email, their blog or the most popular social networking and community sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Stumble Upon! and Delicious.
Source: Searchme
March 31st, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, News | 1 Comment »

Wikia has announced that it is closing Wikia Search. The service was intended to be a user-generated search engine, through which users could influence the rankings of results for all other users.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia and driving force behind Wikia Search, fully expected the development of Wikia Search to be a “long-term project.” The current economy, however, has forced him to “reassess everything,” and “do what we need to do to get to profitability.”
Source: cnet
March 31st, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in News, Unique Interfaces, Updates | 8 Comments »
Ms. Dewey was a viral marketing campaign started by Microsoft in October 2006. The Ms. Dewey website was an Adobe Flash-based experimental interface for Live Search. The interface features a modern-looking cityscape as a backdrop with the character on the left side, while the search results appear on the right. The cityscape backdrop changed depending on the time of day.
Developed by advertising agency, McCann-Erickson and digital content marketing firm, “EVB San Francisco”, Ms. Dewey appeared to be an interactive search assistant who audibly commented on searched keywords in her own style and made random actions when idle. The responses actually consisted of about 600 video clips recorded over a period of three days. Janina Gavankar played the role of the Ms. Dewey character.
In January 2009 the website became inactive. Source: Wikipedia