Happy holidays from “the Vark”

December 25th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in News, Social, Updates, iPhone | No Comments »

Dear AltSearchEngines,
 
Based on all of the phenomenal feedback we’ve received about the Aardvark iPhone App, we’ve just released an update! The new version has the most-requested features like typing in landscape mode, rating answers, and lots more.  
img-expand-learn
 
Meanwhile we’re hard at work improving every part of Aardvark — answers are faster, routing is more targeted, and the website is easier to use compared to a few weeks ago.  Give it a try!  This week try asking about gift ideas for the holidays, or activities for New Years Eve, or get help planning your New Years resolution.
 
As always, visit our Community Forum and our Facebook page and keep sending us comments, bugs, and other feedback.  We read and respond to everything we get from you.
 
Onwards and Varkwards,

The Aardvark Team

Social search engine HeyStaks wins €20k prize

November 18th, 2009 by Guest Author
Posted in Guest Authors, Social | No Comments »

heystaks

UCD spin-out company HeyStaks, which has developed a revolutionary social web-search platform, has won the inaugural Europe-wide, UNICA Entrepreneurship Competition for Students and Young Researchers and a prize of €20,000.

NovaUCD-based HeyStaks has developed a revolutionary social web-search platform which enables searchers to better organise and easily share the resources they find while searching and browsing the web.

European network

UNICA, a network of 42 universities from European capital cities, invited each university, including UCD, to nominate one entry for this competition, sponsored by the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation.

The winner was announced, following Dragons’ Den-style presentations by three short-listed finalists, to a five-person judging panel, during UNICA’s 2009 General Assembly, held on 6 November, in the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris.

The web-search market is driven by the need to find relevant information quickly and efficiently. The problem with today’s search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing is that they offer a one-size-fits-all approach to search-result selection and ranking, without regard for the differing needs of individual users.

Search engines now

Current search engines do not also take into account the context of a user’s search. They fail to recognise that a friend or colleague of the searcher may have already done all the hard work by finding the required information. Until now, there has been no effective solution which allows users who are searching on a common goal or shared interest to search in a collaborative fashion.

HeyStaks’ technology enables key collaboration and organisational features to be added as a layer on top of existing mainstream search engines so that users may benefit from social search enhancements without having to leave their favourite engine.

“It is a great honour and it will be of enormous benefit to us in raising the international profile of HeyStaks,” Dr Maurice Coyle, co-founder, HeyStaks, explained.

“The prize money will be used to drive the company to the next level in its development.

“Being the co-founder of an Irish start-up company, I hope that our success will further raise the profile of UCD in particular and Ireland in general as being at the forefront in the commercialisation of world-class university research.”

The masterminds

HeyStaks’ patented, social re-ranking core technology was developed by company co-founders Dr Peter Briggs and Dr Maurice Coyle during their PhD research at UCD’s School of Computer Science and Informatics.

Prof Barry Smyth, a leading UCD researcher in recommender systems, was their PhD supervisor and is the company’s third co-founder. Smyth is an experienced entrepreneur who was chief scientific officer and co-founder of the UCD spin-out ChangingWorlds Ltd, acquired last year by Amdocs for $60 million.

Briggs and Coyle are UCD post-docs in CLARITY, the Science Foundation Ireland-funded Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, a joint initiative between DCU, Tyndall National Institute and UCD.

HeyStaks is currently in beta release mode and the company intends to launch Version 1 of its technology before the end of the year.

HeyStaks was selected as UCD’s nominee for the UNICA competition following its success in winning SUSSED!, UCD’s €10,000 Entrepreneurship Competition organised and run earlier this year by NovaUCD.

UNIKI, an intelligent media-development company, representing the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, was the competition runner-up and received a €10,000 prize. Parelectrics, which has developed a non-invasive device for the diagnosis of skin cancer, representing Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, was the third finalist.

By John Kennedy
SiliconRepublic.com

Taptu and OneRiot Team Up to Offer Realtime Mobile Search

November 10th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Mobile, News, Realtime, Social, Updates, Verticals, iPhone | No Comments »

logoTaptu, the mobile search engine, and OneRiot, the real-time search engine, have launched a real-time search for mobile.  Available right now on Taptu, people can browse hot topics and discover the web’s most relevant new search.

2009-11-10_0936Taptu makes use of OneRiot’s real-time search API, incorporating the web’s freshest, most buzzed about content into Taptu’s mobile-touch friendly interface.  Mobile users can now search the real-time web or browse trending topics in a mobile-friendly format for touch screen devices, one of the most significant developments in mobile search to-date.

image002This partnership fulfills a need for people to discover real-time, socially-influenced content on the go in a mobile-friendly format.  The service is available on the major touch devices, including the iPhone, iPod touch, G1, Nokia N 97 and 5800, and the BlackBerry Storm 1.

OneRiot’s real-time results will soon appear within Taptu’s iPhone app, providing even more functionality for realtime search on mobile devices.

OneRiot’s API allows its partners to syndicate its real-time, socially-relevant results; Taptu is the first mobile search engine to leverage the company’s API.

Steve Ives, founder and CEO of Taptu commented, “Taptu introduced touch search to meet the specific needs of mobile users, and adding real-time search to this offering is a great feature.  For the first time, mobile users will be able to find out what is going on right now in a mobile friendly format.”

Tobias Peggs, General Manager of OneRiot added, “increasingly, people want constant access to new information – a need that can be even more pressing when on the go. Mobile is an ideal platform for the discovery of real-time information and we are thrilled to partner with Taptu to start offering users the power of real-time search on their mobile devices.

Source: OneRiot.com

What is Social Search? By Zakta CEO Sundar Kadayam

October 28th, 2009 by Guest Author
Posted in CEO Views, Guest Authors, Social | No Comments »

The Official Zakta Blog
By Sundar Kadayam
Founder & CEO, Zakta
The Personal and Social Web Search Engine

It is hot!  So hot that Google legitimized it with their recent update.  Buzz is building on social search like never before, as this handy trend graph from BlogPulse indicates:

screenshot-trendgraph-socialsearch

But what is social search?

According to different industry voices, social search …

“… involves combining social graph information with pure algorithmic search results.“

“… combines traditional algorithm-driven technology with online community filtering.“

“… helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle.“

“… is information retrieval, way finding tools informed by human judgment.“

These definitions are quite broad and varying, and the result is that so many solutions have come under the banner of “social search”. However, one thing common across these diverse set of tools and services is this: they’ve all used collective intelligence (wisdom of the crowds, if you will) in some way to improve what they present to users in the search process.

Here are some that come to my mind:
  • In the early days of the Internet, DirectHit (later acquired by Ask Jeeves) watched which links users clicked through more for a given search and used that data for dynamically ranking search results based on their popularity with the community of users.
  • Amazon has been a pioneer in the space of using social/community data to improve the searches for users on Amazon.com – much has been written about their recommendation engine!
  • Intelliseek’s ProFusion.com engine ( a product I helped design) used an adaptive search mechanism (community usage driven) to determine what are the best sources to pick for a given query in a distributed / federated search environment.
  • Wikia Search used the Wikipedia model of direct, swarm-editing of search result pages for different queries. i.e. Wikia Search users could interactively change the results on any result page, and impact what other users saw directly.
  • In reality, Google has always been a social search engine, in a couple of ways. They’ve always tracked what people have liked through who / what they hyperlink to – a core to their famed PageRank algorithm. In the recent years, they’ve also included user and community contributions (in the form of social media) into their search results, with content from Wikipedia and the blogosphere impacting search results in a noticeable way.
  • Yahoo has tried integration of Delicious (their social bookmarking system) into the search results.
  • Presently, the buzz is all about including social network data and data from popular social tools like Twitter into the search results. Bing did it. Now Google is doing it too!

My company, Zakta, is also a recent entrant in “social search”, and we refer to Zakta as a personal and social Web search engine.  Our aim is to improve informational searches on the Web.What prompted me to write this post was the recent Google announcement on social search.  Our small community of users felt that Google was encroaching on Zakta’s turf, and I thought I should help clarify where Zakta fits.

First, Zakta has no turf – Google dominates all :-) Second, we are trying to add value to the informational search experience of users through a comprehensive solution framework, so we don’t get into feature battles with giants that we don’t have a chance of surviving (as it is, I’ve been called “Nuts!” to start Zakta at this time, and having my tiny company enter into a feature race with the giants should surely bring me the label “Stupid” too – something I’d very much like to avoid!).

Here’s a personal framework that I’ve used to understand the social search space myself and to steer the design and development of Zakta.
screenshot-socialsearchlandscape2

On the X-axis, I plot the Personal (focus is on the individual) versus Communal (focus is on the community as a whole) continuum.  On the Y-axis, I plot the nature of information that users interact with, in terms of whether it is Disorganized (focus has been on mere collection of information) versus Organized (focus is on curation of digital information).

Using this framework, I’ve mapped a handful of social search services and tools that I’m somewhat familiar with. So, admittedly, both this framework and my characterization of these services in this framework are based on my personal viewpoint.  I’d welcome comments for improvement, or other viewpoints.  I hope you find this framework a useful tool to make sense of what is happening with this growing space that is simply called “social search”.

Now I can put Zakta into this context. As portrayed in this framework, Zakta is a personal Web search engine because it provides tools to deliver a personal search engine experience that puts the searcher in control.

Zakta is also a social Web search engine in many distinct ways:

  • It enables a searcher to collaborate with people they trust to find, collect, organize and share information on topics of interest
  • It enables a searcher to connect to others they trust and discover information relevant to their interests from the recommendations made by their trust-network
  • It enables a searcher to benefit from the contributions of the community of Web users in the form of published Zakta Guides on topics of interest
  • It enables a searcher to gain from the ongoing relevance ranking improvements that happen behind the scenes that take into account the signals of recommendation expressed by not only the user’s trust-network, but also the community as a whole not just on Zakta, but elsewhere on the Web

As you can see, Zakta is not as much about finding what your social network has been saying.  Rather it is all about empowering you personally and helping you benefit from your trusted network as well as the community at large to improve your own Web search experience and discover useful information on an ongoing basis on topics of your interest.

As always, I’d love to get your feedback!

TripWolf – The Social Travel Search Engine

September 26th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Global, Social, Travel, Verticals, iPhone | 2 Comments »

twolf
TripWolf is a social travel guide for individual travelers. tripwolf combines professional editorial travel tips with traveler generated content and offers travel experiences and travel help from a worldwide community of thousands of travelers like you. Create your own trips and download your free travel guide! Print our PDF guides or download our free travel iPhone app. Browse through 400,000 locations, city guides, recommendations and travel blogs using the tripwolf travel map. Find out with the help of your friends which tourist attractions are really worth visiting, which hidden places you might miss.

Join the tripwolf travel community of more than 40,000 travelers: Our trip gurus are keen to give travel advice and point you to the best locations in any city. Plus: You can upload and share your travel pictures. Completely free, with no upload limit.

Online travel guide tripwolf is also fully available in French at http://www.tripwolf.com/fr. (And German, Italian, and Spanish) Thus more than 400.000 descriptions of travel destinations are now available in french, after being online in german and english. Since tripwolf’s launch 8 months ago, more than 600,000 travel-enthusiasts not only gather information from high quality editorial travel guide content, which comes from leading partners such as MairDumont (Dumont- and Marco Polo travel guides) or british Footprint Publishing house, but also authentic and up-to-date information from both local travle experts (”trip gurus”) and reviews and additional pieces of information provided by the tripwolf users.

“I am really happy  that our friends from France and french-speaking countries can also enjoy tripwolf in their mother tongue”, says Sebastian Heinzel, CEO of tripwolf. “We already saw that rather many visitors were coming from France, which is why we spent a lot of time and sweat in the last months developing the french version, in order to show our gratitude to this interest by providing a native french version of tripwolf.”

tripwolf, a travel guide of the next generation, started in June 2008 in german and english language. The platform combines both professional editorial travel content from Print-travel guides and user generated content – Reviews, Tipps, Ratings – from thousands of enthusiast travelers all over the planet. Currently the tripwolf community consists of almost 15,000 registered users, whereas 1,000 of them are so-called “trip gurus”, who provide travelers with local knowledge and help.

tripwolf, qu’est-ce que c’est?

Le guide de voyage en réseau:

Tripwolf allie les conseils de professionnels du voyage à une multitude d’infos, d’avis et de bons plans voyage partagés par toute une communauté de globe-trotters dans le monde entier.Explorez plus de 400 000 destinations, guides, recommandations personnelles et blogs de voyage grâce à la carte tripwolf. En quête de renseignements plus précis, profitez des conseils experts de nos trip gourous et vous trouverez vos marques où que vous soyez. Pour mieux préparer votre départ, créez, téléchargez et imprimez votre guide de voyage PDF gratuit! Et bien sûr, importez votre liste d’amis facebook et partagez vos photos de voyage avec vos proches

2009-09-26_1220The tripwolf iPhone application: [http://www.tripwolf.com/en/page/iphone] allows users to search and download over 400,000 destinations worldwide and combines travel information from professional travel guides such as “Marco Polo” and “Footprint” with the cumulative knowledge of over 18,000 tripwolf members.

v0.9.9 update is now available. Thanks for everyone’s amazing feedback!

The new update simplifies registration, solves the auto-login bug, offers better GPS handling, displays the distance to every POI and makes the app faster and more stable. Most importantly – we have released more content on the iphone from sources like Wikipedia, Varta, and many more! We also included some advertising – gotta pay the bills somehow!

Most exciting feature: User reviews! Read reviews from the tripwolf community on over 500,000 points of interest worldwide. Loved the place? Thought the beer was too warm? Add your own review directly from the iphone and share them with everyone else, even offline while you are on the go and upload them automatically once you are online!

We are hungry for your ideas – We thrive on your input – We love your feedback – so keep it coming and let us know how we can make the tripwolf app even better!

Yours truly,

The tripwolf team

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