Sunday, 13 September 2009

Something New and Cool - Search by Sentiment



RankSpeed is a very cool new search engine that claims to search by sentiment according to the blogosphere/twittersphere. Here is the information from the actual website:


RankSpeed is a search tool that does a sentiment analysis on the blogosphere / twittersphere to find the best websites, the most useful web apps, the most secure web services, etc...

You can search for any website category using tags and rank by any criteria: good, useful, easy, secure, etc...

For each result a statistical analysis computes the percentage of bloggers who have said it is good, easy, ...

For example, a website is ranked as more useful than an other if its name is more often associated with "useful", "helpful" or other synonyms in blog posts and tweets.

RankSpeed tracks 3 millions of websites, selects the most commented in the blogosphere / twittersphere and ranks them by your own criteria.



Pretty cool is all I can say as it appears to work pretty well and provides some interesting insights.

Check it out today for free at - RankSpeed

Visual Search 2.0 - SpaceTime3D



As many of you know, I loved SearchMe and their visual search interface. It was better and faster than anything else out there before it's demise not long ago. Well, I just found my new favorite visual search engine. It is called SpaceTime3D and it ROCKS!

It has been around as a standalone browser since the middle of 2007, but who wants another browser? Recently they launched a version of SpaceTime3D that does not require you to use their browser and/or any plug-in software. This completely changes the game for them (and us).

My only complaint is that they do not have their own database or crawlers they use Google, Google Images, Wikipedia, About.com, Answers.com and Amazon for their data which is good, but could be much more robust. If they do not plan on having their own index and crawlers why not at least make it a meta search engine? Just a thought.

Below is a YouTube video of an example of someone using this new standalone engine:



Anyway you can check it out for yourself below - I wish them luck as their engine sure looks good!

Click here to visit - SpaceTime3D


Sunday, 6 September 2009

Save 20% Off on Best of the Web Submissions (BOTW Discount)


My favorite web directory is at it again with a special and not well known promo code until the end of September. This code is for 25% off any of their services - web directory listing submissions (my favorite), local listing submissions, blog listing submissions, advertising, etc., etc. All the details are below:

Code: SINCE94

Link: Best of the Web Discount Link (use code on checkout)

Good luck and happy submitting!

Wednesday, 26 August 2009

Please Go Away Already!


Just when I thought that Cuil was all but dead, they decided to go and try and reinvent themselves. While I love competition in the search space, especially with the Yahoo/Bing search merger I just cannot for the life of me figure out how Cuil manages to still hang on while great concepts like the now defunct, SearchMe search engine have to die.

So, Cuil has added a couple of new things. First they have added real-time results within their results. While this is interesting, I am not sure why it really matters as others are already doing it much better. Also, they have started to run Google ads (amazingly without the 'Ads by Google' wording next to them) at the bottom of the search results.

Basically, it always seems like Cuil half tries everything it does. It claims to have the largest database index (bigger than Google), yet it can't seem to find easily indexed sites. It claims to provide better results, but hell look at any search result and if you can tell me where they grab most of those images and why are they relevant you will win a prize (not really, but you will have fixed their engine). And now they finally try to create a revenue model? Well, they would be hard pressed based on their traffic volumes and where the ads are placed to even generate a $1,000 a day in ad revenue.

So, the question is, why do it if you are not going to do it right? That can be said for everything they do. Everything seems half baked and not well thought out.

That brings me to my final rant about Cuil (for today). If you are going to release new features why not even post information about them on your own blogs? For that matter why not just update them at all as the last posts were over 2 months ago. Seems their blogs (main and Tom's) are as dead as their engine should be.....:-)

Saturday, 15 August 2009

SEO Faction - The Next Big Thing in SEO


I have to give out props to my buddy Zachary at SEO Faction. His new SEO/SEM corporate website is launching soon, but he has already released a great new marketing blog that is sure to become a 'must read' for all online marketers.

His first post is entitled, "Company Branding: Learning From Coca-Cola And Pepsi" is a great read and deeply thought out. I am always amazed (and a little jealous) by people like Zachary and others such as Aaron Wall (SEO Book) who can provide posts with such insight that are not only interesting to read, but make feel like a better person for reading (okay maybe not a better person, but maybe a bit smarter).

Check it all out here - SEO Faction Blog
(in addition you can always find a link in my favorites section in case you forget)

Thursday, 13 August 2009

Get Crawled Faster and Better by Google



This is a great presentation from Google to better explain how difficult it is for a search engine to crawl and index basically an infinite amount of data available on the Internet. If you make it easier for Google (which has 65-70% of all search traffic) to crawl and index your website and associated content, then you will increase the likelihood (nothing is guaranteed) that your website and content will be crawled and indexed correctly.

Find additional support and help from Google here - Google Webmaster Tools