Name that search engine – anything but Bing!

June 5th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Majors | 1 Comment »

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After a week of semantic scuffling, our staff has come up with the medalists in the race to make a better search engine name than “Bing.”

By the Betanews Staff | Published June 5, 2009 here

It’s not as easy as it looks, is it? The key here was to come up with not only a better name for a search engine than “Bing” (among those who believe there is one), but a tagline that would help frame a marketing campaign for the product. We didn’t care whether the .com name for the URL was already taken. That’s never stopped Microsoft before, including with Live.com — if the name’s good enough, it would have the resources to put down serious money for it.

Six Betanews staff members cast votes for first, second, and third place, with first place getting three points, second place two, and third place one. After a week of intense competition (I have to exhaust my bucket of superlatives somewhere), here are the final results:

1st place: ConceptJunkie with NARO. “Why wade through a million search results? NARO it down to what you want.” (12 points)

2nd place: PC_Tool with RESULT. “It’s not the search. It’s the answer.” (8 points)

3rd place: Straspey with MUSE (Microsoft Universal Search Engine). “Search the universe through our window.” (5 points)

There was a very, very tight race for third place, with Coolbuster’s QUERY tying for points. How would the tie be broken? Both QUERY and MUSE had three staff members voting on their behalf. And both had one first-place vote: Scott Fulton liked QUERY because it’s direct, dry, and dowdy like himself; Tim Conneally liked MUSE because it’s clever and “decidedly dorky.” (Right, and “Bing” isn’t dorky?)

So it came down to the slimmest of hairs for the tie-breaking vote, which ended up being cast by one of the slimmest of editors. Editor-in-Chief Nate Mook cast a third-place vote for MUSE, which put it on the podium. Congratulations to our winners, and yes you actually do win stuff. Make certain the e-mail addresses in your Betanews profiles are up-to-date, and we’ll be in touch.

The Phorm Webwise Discover in under 3 minutes

June 5th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Innovations, Newcomers | 1 Comment »


You can look into the Webwise Discover here.


Phorm announces the launch of our patent pending Webwise Discover, the ultimate recommendation engine. Webwise Discover will allow visitors to any website to automatically find content within that site based on their interests from across the web.

Neither users nor websites will have to do anything other than participate, with no need
to manually set preferences or categories.

For example, a user arriving on a news site will automatically be presented with articles on their favourite sports team or celebrity. Users following the Middle East peace process will be shown the latest headlines from within that site. Those on a shopping site who have been browsing the web for a particular camera will be automatically presented on arrival with relevant reviews or auctions likely to be of interest to them.

In this way, the Webwise Discover widget acts as a personalised content index on any page of any participating web publisher. It automatically guides users to relevant information within the site, whether it be news, music, product reviews or any type of content.

Webwise Discover will be offered free to our ISP partners’ customers who choose to enable the service. It will also be freely available to all websites, large or small, without the need for an advertising relationship. It is an integral part of the trial in Korea which Phorm announced on 21 May.

Websites can greatly benefit from Webwise Discover. Consumers want the net to reflect their interests, and websites are evolving to try and meet this desire for greater personalisation. Webwise Discover can help a website engage with its audience by unearthing valuable and relevant content which too often simply goes unexplored.

Phorm looks forward to announcing a range of applications based upon this platform which will bring producers and consumers of content ever closer, to the benefit of the internet as a whole.

Source: Phorm

Search The Planet With Your Mobile Phone

June 5th, 2009 by Peggy Salz
Posted in Guest Authors, Mobile, Verticals | 2 Comments »

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Continuing with Part 2 of my audio interview with Dan Harple, CEO of GeoSentric, the company behind GyPSii, a digital mobile lifestyle application. But look beneath the hood (and listen in to Part 1 of the series) and GyPSii isn’t just another company jockeying for position in the location-aware mobile social networking space. It’s got its eye on the prize: Using our location, our social graph (because we are members of the GyPSii community), and our judgment to index the world around us. Google may be about organizing the world’s information; GyPSii is about organizing the real world.

What to do with a people-powered, user-generated index of the world out there? Follow in Google’s footsteps and sell advertising on top of it.

As I wrote in my last post, GyPSii has cleverly harnessed PlaceMe, a primary function of GyPSii that allows you to create a point of interest (POI), add your content (image, video, audio, text), add your current or last geo-location, categorize/tag/describe the POI, and submit to the server in real time to a personal or publicly designated folder in your MyPlaces (your record of points of interest).

To get this to Google scale, GyPSii needs a lot of people out there indexing the world with their mobile phones. It’s an ambitious strategy, but not far-fetched. Dan’s forecast models tell him that a company with 7 million users, each doing 2 PlaceMes a month would produce an index in the first year that would be “significantly larger than the Google file system in its first year.” (Dan expects GyPSii to be on “between 80 and 100 million devices in the coming 12 months.”)

There are no stats on active users as a percentage of that total. But GyPSii members tend to be hyperactive when it comes to PlaceMe, creating and tagging “15-20 PlaceMes per month.” Every time GyPSii members do that, they are adding a new indexed item to what the company calls the Osmotic File System (OFS).

Where does mobile advertising come in? It’s already work in progress in China. In fact, GyPSii has a lot of progress to report in China – period. As Dan sees it: “To have an ad-based model, you have to have an audience.” To reach more members (and encourage them to index the world around them) GyPSii’s has this week launched the Java version of its application, with both Chinese and English language support.

gypsii-jave-exploreThe expectation, according to the press release, is that the new app will “appeal to the 70 percent of the 650 million phone owners in China who own Java-based phones.” By way of background, GyPSii is already locally available in China for the major operators China Mobile and China Unicom, for download on compatible Java phones. GyPSii is also available globally across a wide range of devices, including Samsung, Nokia, LG, Apple iPhone, and BlackBerry smartphones.

How does GyPSii plan to make the jump from critical mass to relevant advertising? What is the rev share model for partners (handset makers and carriers) who get on board? And what is the experience for members that use the ExploreMe function to search the world around them (and so trigger the delivery of an ad on their mobile device)? These are just a few of the questions I explored with Dan in this final segment of our podcast interview. (It’s a little longer than my usual interviews, but I felt detail was necessary to fully understand the interplay between search and advertising GyPSii-style.

Excerpts from the interview:

People-powered search: Dan is a great believer (as I am) in social search on mobile. As he pus it: “This is the ultimate user generated content business model ever.” With patented technology in place (as part of the PlaceMe function), the next step is scale. “It’s got to be at scale because if our goal is to build that index, we’ve got to get lots of people to use the app.” Downloading is only part of it. Bundling is the business model that drives results.

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Read the rest of this fine article Here.

Contest – Pick one word to describe Google’s lead.

June 5th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Majors, News | 19 Comments »

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share

14 Responses (so far) to “Contest – Pick one word to describe Google’s lead.”

  1. DaMan Says:
    Googeliantic
  2. Phil Butler Says:
    homeric
  3. Frank Schulte-Ladbeck Says:
    hindering
  4. Peggy Anne Salz Says:
    Hi Charles,
    I’m flying the flag over at my site and encouraging readers there to provide their input. My description is “alarming” – but let’s remember that mobile search is a very different animal. As I have told companies at your networking event last year: Mobile is wide open. innovation is welcome and the winners (yes, plural!) have yet to be decided.
  5. Hope Leman Says:
    Daunting
  6. Sol Lederman Says:
    Huge
  7. Nerdizen Says:
    Googlelicious

    Google’s lead is attributed to its “stickiness” with its audience. As more and more people have a pleasant search experience with Google, they tend to tell their friends and so forth. The real genius of Google, is that they appeal to so many people on so many levels. As for me, I like their “Open Source” attitude about the Internet Community and I think many people like that sense of transparency, which makes Google very appetizing to so many.

  8. Keren Dagan Says:
    empire (or wempire)

    @kerendg

  9. Michael Says:
    Brin-tastic
  10. Christian Rodriguez Says:
    Temporary.
  11. CaronteWeb Says:
    Dangerous
  12. Termeh Says:
    monopoly
  13. mark Says:
    Rediculoogle
  14. NitinK Says:
    Googlewhelming!

TheFind Announces New “Every Store” Initiative

June 5th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in News, Shopping, Updates, Verticals | No Comments »

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TheFind, the leading vertical search engine for shopping, today announced its “Every Store” Initiative to work directly with leading eCommerce platforms such as ProStores, Infopia, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, and others to automatically include every platform’s roster of online stores within TheFind’s search index.

TheFind crawls the entire web to find online stores, and its search index currently includes over 350 million products – more than 10 times the size of even the largest online marketplaces. Last month alone, over 12 million shoppers searching on TheFind visited more than 90,000 different online stores.

“TheFind wants no store left behind,” said Siva Kumar, co-founder and CEO of TheFind. “All retailers – large, small, new or established – belong in TheFind’s comprehensive search results. Every month more and more people visit TheFind to shop the full spectrum of retail categories primarily because they want to find the complete range of stores and options available to them.”

Retailers jumping into the world of e-Commerce will now get automatically included in TheFind’s search index at no cost to them – simply by being on one of the several leading e-Commerce Platforms partnering with TheFind.

P. S. TheFind will be exhibiting at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition from June 15-18 in Boston. Visit them at Booth #422.