The problems associated with super-dominate search sites are many, but sometimes they are balanced by providing a consistent solution for the majority of searchers. One of the issues that many searchers aren't aware of is related to how "search" is a business and that's why we are able to use the service "for free". Of course, nothing's free in the search world any more than it is in any media related field. So in the very large search sites, like Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc., decisions are necessarily influenced by business needs in addition to user needs.

Along that same vein, it's important for commercial entities to work hard to ensure that search results related to their business are presented as close to the top of the results pages on these large search sites as possible, in order to be noticed quickly. And it's difficult. Those big sites use complicated algorithms to order their lists and these businesses have to figure out how to work with those constructs. That's also why these same companies purchase Sponsored Links. It's just so people will notice them and visit their sites.

With search sites like PreFound.com, virtually all of that is eliminated. The things you find on PreFound.com are sorted by relevance to the words you put in the search box, and are rated by the PreFound.com community for how well they serve their topic. No complication here. If it's relevant and the community says so, then it will show up near the top of the search page. It's a simpler and we believe, more open way to work.

By the way, there's a pretty good story on the state of search for '05 at http://www.pandia.com/sew/141-the-expanding-role-of-search.html take a look if you get a chance. He doesn't talk about social or community search, but we all know '06 will be all about our type of search. Thanks again for participating.

The comedian Steven Wright once said, "I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done, so now I just have to fill in the rest." Sometimes we here at PreFound.com use that philosophy in building the site. We know we have to build the site to do what we know you guys want, but it can be a little blank without your feedback. Thank goodness you guys have been great about helping us fill in the pages as we move closer to launch.

We've been busy making all the updates and changes that we can make before launch every day here at the PreFound.com global HQ. But, between our crazy ideas and your feedback, some of the things that we really want to get into PreFound.com just aren't going to make it by our 1/15/06 deadline. But, we're still going to make sure they make their way into the site very soon. For example, we are going to list the Top Ten “uploaders” for whatever is currently being searched. These could be added under the category tree. So, with things like that in mine, here are a few of the things we're working on that won't make it into the site prior to launch, but will in the days and weeks following the launch:

• Favorite Finders
- Modify the Advanced search area to add the ability to search for users in the PreFound system.
- Add the ability to search only within the user’s Favorite Finders
- Add a link on the User Profile page which allows for adding this user to my “Favorite Finders”. - Add an option on the My Account page to allow edits of “Favorite Finders” list.
- Add checkbox on each “Favorite Finder” to notify me whenever this Finder adds a new Find Group to PreFound.

• Intra user Messaging
- Add the ability to send members messages (opt in only).
– Receive messages from other PreFound Members (On the PreFound site only. PreFound will not provide your email address to anyone.)

• Finds Wanted
- Add a Bulletin board (or blog type) structure for posting questions, suggestions where you would ask others to research a topic for you and post a find group.

• Saved Searches
- Add a button on the search results page which would allow the user to save the current search criteria.
- Once saved, the user will be notified when new items are added which would be included in the specified search
- On sign-up page and My Account page add Profile text box for short description of the user. This would include interest, job title, hometown, etc.

In an article today posted on CNN.com at http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/12/23/john.bartelle/index.html

John Battelle, who has become something of a celebrity pundit on Search technology primarily through his highly successful book, The Search, how Google and it's rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture, was asked about what he saw as the future of search. According to him, social searching will be a focus. Check out this excerpt:

"CNN: What is the next big thing on the Web?

JB: The idea to create a semantic Web where everything is described not by one researcher and his team but rather by all of us as we root about the Web. I might say, "This is a picture of a seaside with a sunset," but someone else comes and says, "No this is a picture of a beach in Thailand," and another person comes along and says, "This is a picture of a place I like to go diving." And over time, this one object, and every object in the world gets thusly tagged, gets enough intelligence around it that it can be found no matter how you might ask for it, the brittleness problem is solved.

The idea is that we might get to the point where everything in the world of value is in the index correctly, is on the Internet and some way represented, whether it's your car, your child or whether it's a media object like a page or an audio file or whatever, or in this case a picture. And then you create these vast semantic attachments to everything and that becomes the seedbed for the next generation of search to crawl and make sense of.

That's a long way off but we are starting to see any number of applications that are making this possible right now where people are starting to tag things and create engines based on those taggings and we are just seeing the beginnings of it. Whether it will be the next great breakthrough in search remains to be seen but it is a promising development."

Hey, John, we get 'ya, and we agree. We believe only people can really index the universe in ways that people can access quickly and easily. It's science. That's one of the big ideas behind PreFound.com. It's the future and thanks for helping us be part of it.

Using RSS feeds to keep current with PreFound.com. The PreFound.com.blog RSS feed is now available at:

http://prefound.blogspot.com/atom.xml

To subscribe in IE:
- IE has no integrated RRS reader, so in order to subscribe to any RSS feed (including PreFound’s) you’ll have to install one. A good one is http://www.feedreader.com/ but there are tons more. Look at Download.com to see them. They all have instructions on how to get going.

To subscribe in Firefox:
- Just navigate to prefound.blogspot.com and click on the Live Bookmark button on the URL line box and click “OK”.

To subscribe in Opera:
- Once you navigate to "prefound.blogspot.com, you'll see in the Address box a blue box that says "RSS", click that and it'll automatically add the feed. Or, just click on Feeds and then Manage Feeds, then add the PreFound feed to the list using the URL above.

Using RSS feeds can be a great way to have information you're interested in delivered directly to your browser, regardless of what you're interested in. And hey, you can add the link to the RSS Feed to your Groups and upload them to PreFound.com. Would'ya please? Also, we're thinking about doing things like providing a way for you to select favorite members and/or tags and having any new uploads to PreFound.com related to these members/tags available to you via RSS. What would you think of that? Let us know!

Monday morning tip: adding images to Finds. You guys know that you can easily (one-click) put a copy of a graphic link in the PFfinder box. No problem, right? But what if you put a text link in your PFfinder box and want a graphic associated with it? For example, let's say you found a cool text link to a great recipe. There is a picture of the completed dish on the site, but it's not a link, just a picture. How can you get that picture into the PFfinder box next to the text link you put in there about the recipe? Easy!

In the PFfinder box, just right-mouse click on the text link you want the picture to be associated with. A menu will present itself. Select Edit and see the Edit Find dialog box. There you will see a box labeled "Image:". We need to fill that box with the "address" of the picture you want to show. But how do you know a pictures' "address", you ask? Here's how; just hover your pointer (cursor) over the graphic you want and do the old right-mouse click trick again. A menu will pop-up and one of the functions will be "Properties" (usually on the bottom). Select "Properties" and the Properties dialog box will show you a bunch of information about that graphic. We want the information in the line labeled "Address (URL)". Highlight that information, copy it, then paste it into the "Image:" box in your Edit Find dialog box. Once that's done, just click "OK" in the the Edit Find dialog box and you'll see the graphic right next to your text link. Isn't that cool? Once you do this a few thousand times, it'll be second nature!

Please contact us with questions. Remember who the "fuel" for PreFound.com is... Uh, it's you.

Is PreFound.com, a social search site, launching at a good time? The following article from The Guardian illustrates fairly clearly how important social searching is becoming related to the future of the Internet. The timing for the introduction of PreFound.com, a social search site that we believe has the most accessible user interface and a patented, advanced application for gathering information to share, seems to be right on target.

The following quote from the article is telling:
"You can probably stitch together our plan from the moves we've made, the acquisitions we've made, the products we've put out to market," says Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo's senior director of technology development. That plan: to try and make social search the next stage in the evolution of search engines."

Joshua Schachter, Delicious' creator: 'We're excited to be working with the Yahoo search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. We're also excited to be joining our fraternal twin, Flickr!' And why Yahoo's interest? The article opines: 'It takes a lot of the hard work out of searching the web. The very clever thing about social software is that it puts the burden on to the user, not the provider.'"

Read the article here:
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,16376,1667276,00.html

Social search could very well be where search engines are going as the Internet evolves. PreFound.com wants to be the best place to utilize what other people have found and we want to do it in the most accessiblele and effective way possible. Please help us make that happen.

Using alternate search sites to find information to post to PreFound.com. That's one of the great things about the PFfinder and PreFound.com. You don't have to just find and post search results from sites like Google or Yahoo onto PreFound.com. Instead, you can post any link you find to PreFound.com. If you are limiting your searches to just text results, you're really not using the web to it's fullest capacity. There are tons of good sites out there to search for things like video, audio, podcasts, blogs, photos, graphics, people, etc. Posting links from sites that search these things will really be appreciated by other PreFound.com users that are looking for the same information you are. In a number of Groups I've uploaded, I've included photos, videos, podcasts, etc. in them and it can give you a very well rounded collection of information about any subject.

Looking for where these sites might be? Well, the best place to look is PreFound.com. Check out:

Video/Audio Search
http://preview.prefound.com/view.php?cp_id=274031

Blog Search
http://preview.prefound.com/view.php?cp_id=274014

Podcast Search
http://preview.prefound.com/view.php?cp_id=66346

Hope this helps. Look forward to hearing from you.

A little "social", but a lot "search".

That's a decent way of describing PreFound.com. PreFound.com will never really be as "social" a network as deli.cio.us or Digg or many of the other social bookmarking sites out there. That's just not our thing. But, PreFound.com does have a great way of gathering information from the web and keeping it for yourself or sharing it with others, which is at it's base similar to all the other social sites out there (at last count, about 60 sites).

Dave Taylor has a blog out there called, "The Intuitive Life Business Blog" and it discusses a variety of issues, but one of interest to us was the one where he asked what was so great about Deli.cio.us. One of the comments was telling:

"...As for utility, the simple fact that it doesn't fully support multi-word, phrase tags renders it uninteresting for my level of work. You should be able to tag pages as "Intuitive Life" and somebody should be able to query for "Intuitive Life" and get the bookmarks for the phrase and not the disconnected words, unless I choose to write my query as disconnected words. Actually, the service does appear to search through page titles using phrases, but the bookmarks themselves are not tagged by phrase, and even the searching varies between different search boxes for the service. It's rather confusing..."

Solving a lot of the issues the commenter discusses above is why PreFound.com was created. We want to be the place where people go to find what people have already found easier than anywhere else.

Thanks for being a part of it.

Monday morning tip: "This Page is a Potential Find" function of PFfinder.

I'll bet some of you are not using this function to its fullest extent. Remember, the function; "This Link is a Potential Find" will put the link you are currently hovering over (graphic or text) into the PFfinder window. Selecting "This Page is a Potential Find" will put the PAGE ADDRESS of the PAGE YOU ARE CURRENTLY VIEWING in the PFfinder window, not the link you are currently hovering over. There's a big difference there, huh... So if you select "This Page is a Potential Find", then PFfinder will place a copy of the text that's in the "Address" box on your browser into the PFfinder window. Got it? Please contact us with questions if you have them.

Here's another little known tip for Internet Explorer users related to this function: move your cursor out to any blank section of a web page (just so the cursor is the "arrow" and not the "pointing finger"). Now, right-mouse click. You'll see a menu appear that's the standard menu you get from IE. But, look closely and you'll see a function that says "Add this Page to PFfinder". Exciting, right... Keep your chill-bumps in control and click on that function and you'll see that it performs the same function as the menu function we just discussed; "This Page is a Potential Find". Using this method, you can put the Address of any page in the PFfinder window without having to hover over any links on the page. Cool, huh...

Okay, you might have questions. If so, let us know!

Del.icio.us has been acquired by Yahoo, as of last Friday, December 9, 2005. Check out their blog at http://blog.del.icio.us/ or this story from AP: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/Y/YAHOO_ACQUISITION?SITE=CAVEN&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
This is a big happening in our neck of the woods because it illustrates how important "social" usage of the web has become. Del.icio.us only had about 300,000 subscribers (I say "only" because that's not much compared sites like Yahoo) and have an interface that, while totally easy for us geniuses here at PreFound.com, some have compared it to reading Mayan hieroglyphics. But they have become a highly "buzzed" site and Yahoo must have figured they had to make a move. Oh well, it's good news for all of us because PreFound.com is a type of social search and tagging technology, and we have a great platform for finding information and sharing it, so the more buzz the industry gets, the better.

If you're like us here at PreFound.com, and you're doing virtually all of your holiday shopping online, then now is a super distracting time for you. We have to order the stuff very soon or we either won't receive it on time at worst or we will have to pay high shipping costs at least. Here's hoping that the PFfinder tool is helping you in your digital shopping needs.

We know how busy it gets, and appreciate your help in testing PreFound.com and the PFfinder. We noticed that uploads to the site have started to ebb a little, naturally, but please upload things you find on the web when you can. It's an important part of our testing process here to make sure that's working correctly and consistently.

We're going to release a new version of the PFfinder soon, that fixes some of the bugs and cleans up the interface. The Anchor function will operate a little differently (per your request) and we've added a few tweaks that will make uploading even easier, among other improvements. Oh, and you Firefox users, please try out our Firefox extension. We already know it doesn't play well with the very latest version of Firefox, so watch out for that, but if you haven't installed that version yet, we'd appreciate your feedback about PFfinder.

Thanks again and we look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks for all your feedback related to our PFfinder Christmas List effort. We were hoping that it would be a way to illustrate how versatile the PFfinder tool can be and how it can be used to help you browse, find information, save information, even if it's not something that you would ever upload to PreFound.com (but please keep uploading those Groups that would help others on PreFound.com). We should note that the kids can use it to show you what they really want, and make it their "list to Santa", as well (Thanks Ken and Casey for your feedback there). It's important to know that the PFfinder tool is much more than a way to gather stuff to upload to PreFound.com.

Before PFfinder, traditional browsing meant that you had to visit a page before you could do anything with it (like bookmark it, save it, etc.). With traditional browsers, there's not much of a "scratch pad" type function. Users are so ingrained into this behavior that we've noticed in the Beta testing that it's tough for users to get used to just throwing links into the PFfinder window BEFORE looking at them. Hey guys, if you're not doing that, you should. It's a great aspect of how the PFfinder works and if you're not doing it, you're not using all the power of the tool.

For example; say you're reading the news on CNN.com. You know how you just have to click on a story, read it, then go back to the main site, pick another, read it, repeat... Sometimes the CNN.com site updates automatically and a story you had wanted to read disappeared and you now you don't know how to find it? Or maybe you're opening a bunch of articles in new windows or tabs? The PFfinder eliminates all this stuff. Just scan the main page of articles, use the PFfinder to throw the articles that you want to read into the PFfinder window right from that main page (don't actually visit the page!), and then whenever you're ready to read the articles just click on the links in the PFfinder window! It's faster, easier, you can read them whenever it's convenient and you'll never "lose" a article again.

The same concept works when you're searching on Google (or any other search site). Just pick out any links on the Results pages that you think "might" be what you're looking for and put them in the PFfinder window BEFORE visiting them. That way you can go through a bunch of Results very quickly and then review them at your leisure. It's a much better way of finding the information you need.

Feel free to comment on anything you read here, ask questions, give feedback. We appreciate your help.