In 2007 we saw the vertical search game play with entries like Rollyo and others that created that Google introduced their service Custom Search and Yahoo Search Builder. Those services allows you to set a list of Urls or domains to focus your searches and integrate into your site.

But Buscaplus allows you even more. You can define all the variables that search engines like Google, Microsoft or Yahoo use to optimize for their private tests to personalize your perfect search service. From relevance depending on word location, to relevance of links, words inside anchors, type of resources, etc…

Sites

Here in Buscaplus we offer this kind of services. We call them “Sites” and offer “Sites” and “Sites Plus”. The Sites plus allows 2,000 urls or domains. The difference is that we offer the possibility to modify all the variables that affect relevance in a search engine, giving users much more power to personalize.

Topics

This service allows for a list of tags or keywords to create a search upon. Instead of sites, this one will search the web for the topics you enter. Also allows defining the search variables that affect ranking and relevance. I set up a search account with the tags from my blog to search for those in the net.

Internet Search

But probably the most revolutionary thing is to define a search account for the web (not sites or topics limited) and adapt the configuration for our vertical purposes. Our vertical services can be totally vertical, oblique or very much horizontal. You decide on how vertical to define things in Buscaplus.

Internet users when searching have a set of preferences. This preferences go from keywords entered shown in the title of search results, images integration, results related to the query entered, etc… When Bing appeared a few weeks ago I read on blogs that some people liked it (giving reasons), others did not like it (their reasons too) and other even loving it. All those users had search preferences that were not met (or were met) by this new search engine. What we want to introduce is that the Internet community defines these preferences so user may use search account A or search account B depending on those preferences.

Examples

We introduce some examples of personalization and verticality:

• Topic Categories: Search services targetted at content from web sites from topic categories like Arts, Internet or Computing (we have around 140 categories). Also you can define a categorized PageRank, setting relevance of links from those sites. If you build a search service about computing, you probably want to define high the relevance of links coming from computing sites. You can also define the link relevance site by site.
• Presentation: You can develop a search theme to integrate your presentation needs. We offer consulting work for any requirement you may have about this.
• Preferred Sites First: You can collect data from your users for their prefrence in blogs, sites, etc… and define a relevance for those in the framework.
• Resources Preferences: Any preference related to resources like content type, language, geographic zone, etc…
• Word Location Preferences: Preferences about relevance of words depending where they are located: Title, META, Body, Bolded content, Headers, etc…

Finally, you could define a search service horizontal with a link relevance mapping you define, preferences you gather from a set of users, etc…

We have many more options from the framework, some of them are manually operated (through editors or human feedback) which could take some time to work 100% because of the content of pages for those modules. Other computer-related modules are operative and give you personalization right after you create a basic free search account.

Source: Buscaplus