With a name like Scoofers, it’s got to be, um…

June 22nd, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Innovations, Verticals | No Comments »

scoofers_mainScoofers is a new social search engine. This means that it provides search results based on the knowledge of experts at social networking websites.

The combination of automatic results with social bookmarks leads to more relevant search results.     
     
Social networking websites are websites where people can collect their favourite links and share them with others. Those websites are becoming more and more popular, and have millions of users. Scoofers orders its search results based on the popularity of social bookmarks. Only the best bookmarks appear in Scoofers’ search results.

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sc2Scoofers’ intention is to provide you great search results. We noticed that searching today provides you all the results, but picking the right result is sometimes hard. That’s why we labelled a large part of the internet. We labelled sites with refinement/labels like ” For Senior Citizens ” or ” For Families ” . When you click on those labels or refinements, you will get the appropriate results. We didn’t do the labelling completely by ourselves; we use Del.icio.us, Digg, Yahoo directories, DMOZ and other social bookmarking sites and directories.

We have also made four (until now) vertical Scoofers. They will provide better results for specific subjects, like travelling, electronics, party or fashion shopping. Notice the differences when your for instance type “New York”. When you use the general Scoofers you will get results like the history of New York. When you use Travel Scoofers you will get instantly results with some travel like sauce on it. Also check the other vertical Scoofers out.

Happy Scoofering!

Source: Scoofers

New search engine for do-gooders: All for Good

June 22nd, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Newcomers, News | No Comments »

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All for Good
Are you looking for ways to give back to your community? All for Good makes it simple to find and share volunteer activities with friends and family.

Inspired by the call of President Obama to engage more Americans in service, a group of individuals from the technology, marketing and public sectors came together to build an open source application that allows you to find and share volunteer activities. All for Good lets you browse activities and find events based on your location or interests. The site is governed by Our Good Works a nonprofit organization that was formed by some of the people who initiated the project and who support the product’s growth.

Volunteering activities matching ‘animals:’

A) Graphic Design Consultant
Cambridge, MA – Present – March 10, 2011
Outreach Alliance for Kids and Animals (OAKA) hopes to strengthen the capacity of local organizations that are devoted to child and animal protection. We are looking for graphic design professionals who are willing to donate their time and expertise to worthy nonprofits affiliated …
www.idealist.org – Like – Share

B) Work Party Volunteer
Cambridge, MA – Present – March 9, 2011
Outreach Alliance for Kids and Animals (OAKA) invites you to attend a monthly work party at our office to work on a variety of volunteer projects, socialize with like-minded people, and enjoy delicious food.
www.idealist.org – Like – Share

C) Foster Care Homes – Animals
Wakefield, MA – Present – June 22, 2010
Caring homes needed to join our network of foster homes. You are the caretaker of the animal or animals, in your home, providing food, water, clean litter pans, etc., daily. PAWS pays all veterinary costs, and the foster homes are responsible for taking the animal to/from our vets. If …
www.idealist.org – Like – Share

Even better – sign in with your primary social network to connect with friends, and discover and share interesting activities. Doing good is more fun together!

How did All for Good get started?
When President Obama called on Americans to get out and serve even before he took office, people who led the online and on the ground effort looked to Silicon Valley (where lots of tech companies start and settle) for new tools to engage in service. All this chatter ultimately turned into a groundswell of individuals from varied backgrounds — technology, marketing, academia, non-profit— coming together to volunteer their time and talents to create All for Good.

From that initial spark, our ad hoc crew worked to bring the idea to life. Companies and organizations joined in and donated resources to help turn a shared idea into a reality. Now that we’ve gotten it started, we’re looking to you, the community at large, to help us innovate and grow All for Good.

Lots of individuals and companies came together to get All for Good off the ground. The activities you find on the site come from nonprofits, companies, self-organized groups, and individuals. Founding activity providers include 1-800-volunteer.org, 1 Sky, AARP, American Solutions for Winning the Future, American Red Cross, City of New York, The Corporation for National and Community Service, craigslist, Girl Scouts of the USA, Habitat for Humanity, HandsOn Network and Points of Light Institute, Idealist, MeetUp, Mentor, Network for Good, Organizing for America, ServeNet.org, Sierra Club, TechMission, The Extraordinaries, Truist, United Jewish Communities, United Way, Volunteer2, VolunteerMatch and Youth Service America.

Source: AllforGood.org

Setooz – A New Language Search Engine

June 22nd, 2009 by Steffen Schilke
Posted in Global, Newcomers | 2 Comments »

setooz-wwwSetooz, aims to become the world’s local language search engine. The search engine, developed by an Indian start-up company, can currently search web pages written in Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovakian, Bulgarian, Greek and Turkish.

Arabic, Persian and Urdu are to come soon. According to the founders of the company, Setooz is designed to automatically learn the nuances of a language based on the way users search on the website. The search engine can then use such learnings to perform a wide variety of tasks, such as recognizing a language text to understanding the morphology of the language. This, they say, directly improves the quality of the search in a local language.

Talking about the need for such a new search engine, Prasad, the founder and CEO of the company said, “Most of today’s popular search engines view search as an information overload problem. Whereas, most of the local languages face information under-load problem. Hence local language searching without language intelligence just does not work well. We are trying to improve search engines with some language intelligence.”

On the future plans for the search engine, the founders said that they are working on some very interesting problems that come up in non-English languages. However, they feel the initial version of Setooz is a step in the right direction and provides a platform for further research.

When asked about the existing search engines and how Setooz fares against them, Prasad said, “With enormous amount and the variety of information on the web, the search engines complement each other, each bringing in some uniqueness and focus. At the end of the day, all this will benefit the user and bring in newer markets and user-base.”

Setooz (pronounced as say-th-uuz) is a web search engine catering to most of the “Lesser-Used Languages” of the world. This engine is designed to understand different morphological variations of keywords and their spelling forms, there by increasing the chance of finding the information you are looking for.

Source: Setooz

South Korean search engine Naver heads to Japan

June 22nd, 2009 by Steffen Schilke
Posted in Global | No Comments »

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Naver.jp is in closed beta, but you can visit it here.

Face up to Reality with Face.com

June 22nd, 2009 by Rafi Farber
Posted in Image, Newcomers, Reviews, Verticals, Visual | No Comments »

3645659143_8d042162a2_mAnother cool thing out of Israel. While everybody’s wondering if they’re going to stop building in the West Bank, the Hi-Techers are busy ignoring politics and creating software applications, such as the Face.com Friend Finder—a Facebook face-searcher!

I know, I know, everybody likes video, so here’s a video.

In short, your face is probably everywhere all over facebook. Maybe even in places you don’t want it to be! Is it possible? Yes…but if you’re not tagged, how ever will you find it? Use the friend finder, upload your face, and it will cycle through your friends to find you, or whoever you put in to the finder.

There are 15 billion pictures on Facebook, and about 60% of all photos on the web can be found on Facebook. Now that’s crazy. Here are some amazing quotes from Israel21c:

“In the first month of our alpha test, we scanned some 400 million photos, identifying about 700,000 people, with users confirming the identities of about 150,000 people,” says Gil Hirsch, Face.com’s CEO and co-founder. Hirsch decided to work initially with Facebook because it was a good place to get started, but the technology goes far beyond identifying friends you don’t know.

“Without getting too technical, our technology looks at information that is already known – photos in your Facebook account, for example – and compares them with elements of other photos with unknown elements. Our algorithms compare the photos, and Friend Finder makes an educated guess on the identity of a person. The user is then asked to confirm, and a tag is attached to the identified person, with that photo now added to the recognition database,” he says.

In other words, Face.com’s technology learns as it goes. (Insert Twilight Zone music theme here. *neenee-neenee neenee-neenee*)

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