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The big aspects of the evolution of PreFound.com lately have been coming in the form of adding RSS feeds to all kinds of information that is being shared with all us lazy guys. I mean, we're often too lazy to even visit PreFound.com, so we need PreFound.com to come to us. That's what RSS can do.

You've probably noticed that you can now:

- Get an RSS feed from your favorite Featured Finder. So now, whenever your favorite Featured Finder shares new Groups with the PreFound.com community, you'll be notified automatically via their RSS feed. Cool, huh...

- Get an RSS feed from any of your favorite Finders. So if you've noticed that a Finder in the PreFound.com community is sharing links that you often have used or enjoyed, you'll be notified automatically whenever they share new Groups. So, anybody can share their knowledge with the rest of us.

- Tell your friends and colleagues that they can get an RSS feed of the Groups that you are sharing with the PreFound.com community. Now everyone will know how smart you are and how many great sites you're finding on the web.

- Get an RSS feed of any search term you can think of. Yeah, it's what you think it is... For example, if you're interested in "Orthinological Palaeontology", just do a search for it on PreFound.com, then click on the RSS icon. Then, whenever new Groups are shared with tags related to "Orthinological Palaeontology", you'll be notified automatically via that RSS feed. It's really a great way to keep current on what people are sharing about topics you're interested in. I've already tried it with one of my favorite search terms, "Wiley Coyote". I don't even know what "Orthinological Palaeontology" means.

We're hoping that adding these feeds will make it even easier for you to utilize the human-indexed web via PreFound.com. Let us know how we're doing.

community, search, community search, social search, social bookmarking, search engine, paid search, prefound, prefound.com, wsj, wall street journal

The PreFound.com Team ventured forth from our Global Headquarters this week to attend the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York. Thanks to all the folks there for their hospitality and hard work. Special thanks goes out to our PR partners, PAN Communications, who were great to work with.

Also, we wanted to thank all those who dropped by our little roundtable discussions. We hope we were able to answer everyone's questions and move the human-indexing of the web revolution forward during those talks. We are big believers in people powering Internet searching as the web evolves, and need all you guys to help us spread that message.

The guys in the pic are PreFound Chief Finder, Steve Mansfield (the one who is a little hair-challenged) talking with Chris Logan of Search Engine Forums about PreFound.com and online advertising strategies. Thanks to Chris for his great input and we look forward to seeing his impressions of PreFound.com on the web.

Since our introduction of manual posting and import posting, we've been getting significantly more Groups of links from you guys. But we need more! Come on... we know you have some great links to share. We make it easy, so why not? And remember, if you can, use the PFfinder toolkit. It's the easiest way to gather, organize, tag and share.

community, search, community search, social search, social bookmarking, search engine, paid search, prefound, prefound.com, wsj, wall street journal

PreFound.com was mentioned today in the Wall Street Journal in an article about search engine rewards programs. That's the second time the WSJ has written about PreFound.com in our 36 days since launch, so we just might be doing something right.

A thought that comes to mind as we read the article was just how different the motivations are for reward programs comparing sites like Yahoo and Microsoft to sites like Blingo or Goodsearch. Yahoo and Microsoft are motivated by full out attempts to erode Google's market share in the search space. A battle among giants, so to speak. Blingo and iWon are among sites that seem to be comfortable being niche sites that offer nothing new in search but just want to get traffic by offering prizes. The exact same results as users would get on Google or Yahoo, just with prizes attached. Goodsearch is primarily philanthropic in nature, again just using Google results, wanting to help the world, etc. A9? It's owned by Amazon, so it's all about the retail in their program. All of these programs are so different than what is motivating us at PreFound.com, it seems odd that we would have even been mentioned in the article (but we're sure glad we were).

PreFound.com wants to ensure that we get this human-indexed web search revolution going. One of the many ways we're doing that is by rewarding our best and most qualified Finders (people that are sharing the links they find with us) with the ad revenue derived from their pages and call them Featured Finders. That way, we get the best Finders we can, we motivate our regular users to share great links so they can apply to be paid Finders, and it will keep people coming so they can see great, human-shared search results. It's all done so PreFound.com can provide a unique and high quality search experience.

We have a rewards program at PreFound.com and a search site that does not use metasearch results, but utilizes human-indexing of the web. Thanks for participating.

community, search, community search, social search, social bookmarking, search engine, paid search, prefound, prefound.com, wsj, wall street journal

As of yesterday, PreFound.com allows users to share links with the PreFound.com community without the use of the PFfinder toolkit, which means "no download required". With this feature live on the site, we've implemented the two most requested enhancements to the PreFound.com site, which were RSS feeds from user pages, particularly Featured Finders, and the ability to share links with the community without the need for a download. Now, users can simply type in or paste in URL's directly onto the PreFound.com site just like many other tagging sites like Del.icio.us or MyWeb 2.0. All you need is a browser. We understand that in many corporate environments downloading and installing third-party applications takes tons of paperwork and approvals, so we're trying to be there for all you guys.

Beyond this new feature, PreFound.com now also offers a quick way to import the links you've saved on other sites and share them with our community. We've started with Del.icio.us, but will be adding Yahoo's MyWeb and Furl very soon. So if you've already saved some great links on another site that you'd like to share with us, we're trying to make that process as easy as possible.

So now, RSS feeds are available for all user pages, so if your favorite user shares new links with PreFound.com, you'll be notified immediately via RSS if you desire. And, users can now share links in two different ways without a download. We'd like to let everyone know that it's best to share Groups of associated, related links with us, rather than single links.

Of course, the PFfinder is a next-generation link gathering, organizing, sharing and tagging application, that provides the easiest and most efficient way of gathering and sharing links with PreFound.com. With PFfinder, you can save graphic links, organize them by folders, associate links with graphics even if they're not originally done that way. PFfinder will even suggest tags for your links when you share them with PreFound.com. So, needless to say, use it when you can. But if you can't, we're giving you additional paths to be part of our community.

community, search, community search, social search, social bookmarking, search engine, paid search, prefound, prefound.com

PreFound.com was mentioned in John Battelle’s Blog today. He mentioned we were in the Kentucky and called it “the land of Fark and Bourbon”. Well, we sure agree that Lexington’s own Fark.com can offer hours of entertainment and if you’re looking for great Kentucky Bourbon, try the new and improved Four Roses Single Barrel. It’s distilled just a few miles away in Lawrenceburg, KY and has a great Hall of Fame Master Distiller in Jim Rutledge. So John, if you ever visit us, we’ll sure give you the tour.

In another blog, another Kentucky connection crops up in Garrett French’s Search Engine Lowdown, as he gave us a quick mention today, as well. He’s a Kentucky refugee, so we always read his interesting and informative blog. Finally, we’ve been discussed in Web Metrics Guru and Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim lately, and we have great respect for their views as well.

“Social Search” is the buzz-word for a lot of what PreFound.com and some others are doing with their technology. But, we like the term “human-indexed Web” better. Our vision is for an Internet that humans have indexed by using the power of human intellect. Then make that human-indexed information available to everyone using a simple search engine metaphor.

As we’ve discussed many times here, humans are just better at relating like things together and knowing what’s the good stuff from the not-so-good stuff compared to computers, regardless of the processing power thrown at the problem.

Join the revolution. Give us a hand in indexing the web. Hey, you might even get paid.

community, search, community search, social search, social bookmarking, search engine, paid search, prefound, prefound.com, john battelle, andy beal, search engine lowdown, web metrics guru, four roses, fark, marketing pilgrim

PreFound.com had a nice write-up in the Louisville Courier-Journal today by their business writer, Bill Wolfe. Mr. Wolfe came down to the PreFound.com Global Headquarters last week to do some interviews, take some pictures and spend some time talking about social and community search with Steve and Pat. It was really nice to have a local newspaper cover what we're doing and what we want to do in Search, and we really enjoyed Mr. Wolfe's company. He even used our term to describe our area of the country, "Silicon Holler", which always fills us with extreme jocularity. Of course, we had to hide our corn-cob pipes and moonshine, put the blue-tick hounds out back and move our "inside" furniture off the front porch to make sure we gave out the right impression. All kidding aside, it's great to talk about social search, and get the word out about our goal of human indexing the Web.

On that note, we wanted to say that we're very close to introducing a bunch of enhancements over the next few days and weeks ahead (many that we've been promising for a while). Included are things like:
- implementing the Featured Finder program (get paid to search!)
- putting in the manual input and import functions
- putting in the RSS feeds feature in the user pages
We're literally only days away, so keep listening and we'll let you know as soon as these new features are live.

Remember, with PreFound.com you never have to sign-up or sign-in to search the site. We only need you to sign-up if you want to be a Finder for PreFound.com, and share the great links that you find out on the Web with all of us. We understand that not everyone will want to do that, and many of you will only want to use the site for search. But to those intrepid souls that want to share what they've found, we salute you, and look forward to you signing up and seeing what you find. Thanks for being a part of the human-indexing revolution.

community, search, community search, social search, social bookmarking, search engine, paid search, prefound, prefound.com