Take my invites – please!

October 15th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Dear AltSearchEngines,

clickerToday marks one month since we first opened up Clicker for testing. Tens of thousands of you have signed up for invites, and we’ve been spending our days and nights watching and listening to your feedback. We now have full launch within our sights!

You can read about that and more on our blog: http://blog.clicker.com

As we gear up for a full launch, we’re ready to start letting a bit more traffic onto the site. So, here are 5 invitations, bundled in one convenient link to distribute whomever and however you wish.

Email your friends, invite your Twitter followers or Facebook friends, or dangle the invite code in front of someone like a salmon in front of a hungry bear. It’s your call. The link below will work for the first 5 people who use it. Just pass it along and we’ll do the rest.

http://www.clicker.com/invite/NFdzQdZUjfb7IGxbcWPVDA

Remember, only the first 5 people who sign up using your special link will be able to get into Clicker.

And, by all means, keep your feedback coming, either by clicking the Feedback button on any page of the site, or by emailing us. We honestly can’t get enough of it — positive or negative. It’s all useful for honing Clicker into the complete programming guide to Internet television.

Thanks again for signing up for the beta!

Team Clicker

Stinkyteddy is a real-time gossip search engine

October 15th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Newcomers, Realtime | No Comments »

StackedWordsAndBearStinky Teddy is Real-Time Gossip Powered Metasearch. A metasearch engine submits a user’s search request to multiple search engines. The responses are combined to give the user the best possible results. Rather than being a simple mashup or utilizing a simple initial rank algorithm, Stinky Teddy analyzes the content of the search feeds to find the best results. If the real-time web is buzzing with chatter about a set of search terms, we use this real-time gossip to decide what is relevant at that moment.

50205194_2100Stinky Teddy empowers specialized search engines. Google is brilliant for many searches, but not all. In the past few years, numerous search engines have been created that are outstanding in certain areas and for certain types of content. It is simply impractical, however, for a user to know which search engine would be best for which query.

Stinky Teddy allows one to simultaneously preview multiple search engines at the times when they might be most useful. We allow the user to preview multiple content types and decide what is best for that search. We are currently using Bing (web, news, image), Yahoo! (web, news image), VideoSurf (videos with thumbnail previews), Twitter (microblog), and Collecta (blogs, comments, news), and are working to add more providers and more intelligence.

1,010,000 web, 100 news, 22,640 video, 391,000 image results for sarah palin

  1. McCain strategist who criticized Palin’s presidential hopes defends …

    Daily Press: 8 hours ago

  2. Adviser: McCain’s Palin pick helped GOP

    Detroit Free Press: 44 minutes ago

  3. McCain strategist defends Palin as VP choice in 08

    Charleston Daily Mail: 7 hours ago

Stinky Teddy makes the easy searches faster. Our instant universal search box for Internet Explorer 8 brings our intelligent metasearch directly to your browser as you type. You will not need to navigate through our search page to go where you want.

Stinkyteddy was founded in June, 2009 by David Hardtke.

The name refers to his daughter’s trusted (and abused) stuffed bear.

Source: Stinkyteddy.com

Collecta releases XMPP-based API to power streaming, real-time apps and issues streaming API, and challenges developers to push the real-time envelope – whew!

October 15th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in News, Realtime, Updates | No Comments »

Collecta-design-3-home

In its mission to accelerate the pace of the Internet search, Collecta launched the second of its APIs, the Collecta XMPP-based Streaming API (CXS), to spark the creation of streaming real-time applications that bring the web to life and fundamentally change how we access information on the Internet. In addition, Collecta announced the opening of its AppMaster Challenge 2 contest, along with the winner of AppMaster Challenge 1.

Collecta’s latest API is based on the open messaging standard XMPP and is the same framework that powers the Collecta site (www.collecta.com) itself. This new API means third-party developers can now push streaming results from Collecta’s broad base of social media, established news, and unique content sources directly into their applications, for a more engaging experience. The company is working directly with publishers of news, sports and entertainment information to provide the freshest, most reputable stories right as they’re published.

“The Streaming API is a push mechanism that flows results from across the web as they are published. As a result, developers are able to build highly sophisticated and lively applications that offer a streaming view of what’s happening on the web right now,” said Gerry Campbell, CEO of Collecta. “The span of the real-time web is now available and accessible to a wide range of applications —whether it’s pushing live content from chat rooms or images posted on photo sites.”

The XMPP-based Streaming API marks the first real-time results API built on the XMPP protocol. And developers working with the Collecta XMPP API can leverage the experience and technical synergies with another XMPP-based platform, Google Wave.

StackedWordsAndBearIn September, Collecta began to engage the developer community with the release of its HTTP-based “Collecta Results Set” (CRS) API. More than 100 developers have already begun developing on the Collecta platform — and along with applications, several libraries have also been built by the community to help fellow developers.

AppMaster Challenge 2
In conjunction with the XMPP API release, Collecta has launched a second developer’s challenge, AppMaster Challenge 2 through ChallengePost.com. Developers can enter their application or plug-in based on the XMPP API for a chance to win a $2,000 gift certificate to Amazon.com. Submissions will be evaluated by the Collecta team to determine which application best exemplifies the potential of real-time results. AppMaster Challenge 2 entries are due on or before November 27th.†

AppMaster Challenge 1 Contest Winner Announced
AppMaster Challenge 1 ran from September 10 to October 8. Developers were asked to submit a plug-in or application based on the HTTP-based CRS API for a chance to win a 15″ MacBook Pro.

circle“The response to the AppMaster Challenge has been tremendous, and reinforces our belief that there are a lot of smart and creative developers out there who want to work with real-time information,” said Campbell. “Choosing a winner wasn’t easy — top entries included a radar-style app that visually depicted how often and recently terms were mentioned, a greasemonkey script that put Collecta real-time results alongside Google search results, and a map application that showed the locations for incoming real-time content.”

The final winner is Daniel Goodwin. Daniel built an easy-to-install Firefox extension that pulls in real-time web content based on what’s in the current page of the user’s browser. The application gives users an ever-updating (but also user-controllable) live feed of relevant results as they travel from page to page.

Daniel explained that his app is unique since it brings the web to him: “Sitting at a site on the web is kind of like sitting in a contained area with no idea of the world going on around you. Collecta is definitely helping to make the web more ‘alive’.”

To learn more about the AppMaster Challenge 2 and Daniel Goodwin’s winning entry for AppMaster Challenge 1, visit blog.collecta.com.

To see all the great entries in AppMaster Challenge 1, check out http://developer.collecta.com/gallery.

And for the Collecta XMPP-based Streaming API, go to docs.collecta.com.

Collecta represents a new way to experience search, in real time. Collecta is a powerful real-time search engine, posting matching stories, blogs, photos, and comments as they happen. By aggregating content in real time, Collecta offers a new and more comprehensive view of what’s going on in the world right now.

Source: Collecta.com