Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Find Groups and You...
Okay, and now to all you guys who have signed up, and have installed the PFfinder toolkit, and have not, as of yet, uploaded any Find Groups: we know you can do it. So, if you upload only a single Group, we'll Spotlight you on the top page of PreFound.com in our rotating list. The more you upload, the better.
Come on, if we can get Groups from the guy who brought us links to the Flaming Carrot comic, we know that you can do it, too. It really is easy and kind of fun. Soon, you'll be able to do it without downloading or installing anything, and we'll let you know the minute that's up on the site. But, in the mean time, you've signed up, you're using the PFfinder toolkit. We know you're searching for things out there on the web, so be a pal and upload some things you've found. It's what community search is all about.
community, search, community search, social search, social bookmarking, search engine, paid search, prefound, prefound.com
Monday, January 30, 2006
Viva Le difference
At its base, PreFound.com is about sharing “groups” of like links. These groups of links are saved, then tagged all at once before sharing. Then, when users search PreFound.com, they are presented with links to those organized groups of links that another user has been good enough to share. It’s kind of like bizarro world compared to similar sites (all nerds like me read Superman comics). Most sites save one link at a time, that are connected in some way by a “group” of tags, which is in a strange way the opposite of how PreFound.com does it. Of course, we think our way is great and easy to understand, but it’s personal preference, needless to say.
Another major difference is how we approach the whole “tagging” thing. Of course, users can just “post” groups of links by entering them into boxes (no download or anything, coming soon), but the best way is to use PFfinder if you can. PFfinder has tools to assist users in navigating the web (browser helpers) and advanced ways of saving links (even graphical links and showing the graphic with the link), organizing links and sharing links. It’s much more than just a way to post a single link to your space, it’s a tool that you can use for a variety of useful things. The trade-off for all that functionality is that it’s a download, it saves the links you’ve saved to a file on your computer, not to some space on the web and to share it you have to go to the PreFound.com Upload Center to share that file. So, a lot of functionality given to the users to do some next-generation stuff with links they discover, but a little more work to share them compared to other similar sites. We think it’s worth it, and hopefully many of you do, too.
Try ‘em all out. See which works best for you.
community, search, community search, social search, social bookmarking, search engine, paid search, prefound, prefound.com
Friday, January 27, 2006
Import from del.icio.us, post manually or use PFfinder
We've been busy here in the bowels of the PreFound.com Global HQ working on new enhancements to the site. One of the big things that you guys have been asking about for a while has been alternate methods of posting Find Groups to PreFound.com in addition to, or instead of, just using the PFfinder. Another is giving you a way to import the bookmarks you have saved on del.icio.us into PreFound.com. Well, ask and ye shall receive.
We understand that sometimes you don't have access to the PFfinder, or just can't download and install it (like in an office environment where they block downloads), or just don't want to download it. So we're implementing a way to just type in or cut-and-paste URL's into our upload (post) page instead of using PFfinder. See the graphic to the right here. Now, no download required.
Also, we're implementing a way for you to quickly and easily import your del.icio.us bookmarks into PreFound.com. You really should do that, because the data you've saved in del.icio.us will be much easier for people to find on PreFound.com with our easy search interface. The importation process is really easy, as you can see here.
Look for these new enhancements in the next week or so. We'll let you know the minute they're live. Keep those suggestions coming. This really is about community search, so keep in mind that we're listening to the community and communication is the key.
community, search, community search, social search, social bookmarking, search engine, paid search, prefound, prefound.com, del.icio.us
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Google, Yahoo and the Bloggers Who Love Them
So, sour grapes on the part of smaller search sites like prefound.com, huh... While it might sound like that, it's really not the case. I mean, what's going on at some of the alternative search sites out there? What innovations have there been in search software development? What are some emerging trends in pure search? Does anybody care anymore?
As I wrote on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal wrote an article entitled, "The Next Big Thing in Searching". The Wall Street Journal is a fairly well respected newspaper, I understand. And they wrote "The Next Big Thing in Searching"! Now, you might have thought that would have been a big story in the blogosphere, particularly the bloggers that cover the search industry, right? Nope... Nada... Virtually none of the "big" search blog sites picked up on the story at all.
So, hey... Google and Yahoo have their own blog. Can we please talk about something else from time to time?
community, search, community search, social search, social bookmarking, search engine, paid search, prefound, prefound.com
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Google vs DOJ - Privacy and Community Search
We at PreFound.com have been deluged with questions related to how this issue might affect the usage of community search sites, since sites like ours ask for specific information about users and users can even interact with each other. The general feeling is that the Google vs DOJ could have a cooling effect on people using community search sites. We don't think that is the case.
First, any trending downward of usage of search sites (or any type of site for that matter) will take a while to track. The sheer number of users out there that search is a big mass to push in any direction, and any effect this case will have will take a while to be statistically analyzed. So, basically, we won't know anything for a while. Any data at this point will be colloquial in nature, but still potentiall useful.
Second, community and social sites, including community search sites like PreFound.com are actually less likely to be affected by the Google vs DOJ case than traditional search sites like Google, Yahoo, et al. Why? Because on community sites like PreFound.com, users are making a conscious decision to be part of a community and expose a very controlled amount about themselves, tend to read the sites privacy policy carefully because of this decision and expect interaction from the site and from the community.
The New York Times ran a story today that quoted a PreFound.com user, Dr. Genny Ballard of Danville, KY, that relates to this idea. Dr. Ballard also discussed the issue with me and said, "There is plenty of information to be gathered about me though as I belong to online groups and listserves and I leave cookies on my machine. Using a search engine, like Google, is more depersonalized than being part of a Wiki or an online community, like Prefound, because as an active member of an online community, you expect to share information. While we know search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo collect personal data about their users perhaps we might have to start thinking about what they should be allowed to do with that data." This states the issue succinctly.
Bottom line, it's doubtful that the Google vs DOJ issue will have much effect on community search and social web sites in general. But, any perceived threat to user privacy on the web is a negative for Internet commerce in general. The fundamental difference between the Internet and television is that one can INTERACT with the Internet. Threaten that, and it could be a problem in the long view.
community, search, community search, social search, social bookmarking, search engine, paid search, prefound, prefound.com
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
The Next Big Thing In Searching - WSJ
That's big news, not only for us but for our segment of the search world. We at PreFound.com have been preaching the gospel of tagging ever since our launch, and the WSJ may have set up the "what and why" best when they wrote: "...The new method, dubbed "tagging," addresses a common complaint of many Internet users -- that searching is often clumsy and inefficient. Web surfers often must sift through multiple pages of search results to find what they are looking for. And retrieving the best sites a second time often means redoing the search or trolling through an unorganized list of sites that you have haphazardly saved in a "favorites" folder.
Tagging, however, can cut through the online clutter to deliver more relevant bits of information. That is because many versions allow users to search only sites that other people have already deemed useful. It also makes it easier to find desired information again. Users says tagging services can simplify online endeavors like shopping for a new road bike or acoustic guitar because they allow a prospective buyer to quickly access saved information."
No way I could have said it better myself. PreFound.com is The Next Big Thing In Searching.
What makes us different than all the other guys out there? A lot of things; first of all we're about searching the entire web, not just news or technology information. Second, we have an interface that most people find very familiar and easy to use. This is not so with many other tagging sites. Third, we allow you to virtually instantly build lists of text and graphic links to any type of media including video and podcasts, organize that list, assist you with tagging the list and offer "click a button to upload" sharing your list on PreFound.com, all done with our patented PFfinder technology.
So, ya' wanna be part of the Next Big Thing In Search. Be a part of PreFound.com. We really are trying to make searching the web a community search experience. And, hey, someone's probably already "pre-found" whatever it is you're looking for, so you just might save yourself a lot of work.
community, search, community search, social search, social bookmarking, search engine, paid search, prefound, prefound.com
Monday, January 23, 2006
Find Groups Needed
We want people to search and find what you guys have found out there on the web, not us. It's a community, and building it is the priority. We appreciate your help.
PreFound.com is, at it's foundation, a tagging site, like Del.icio.us and many others. What makes us different is that we have an interface that's familiar and easy to use, and a great tool, PFfinder, that makes saving and sharing links a snap.
So, get out there and find some information, use the PFfinder Toolkit to organize it and upload it to PreFound.com. That's what the site is all about...
community, search, community search, social search, social bookmarking, search engine, paid search, prefound, prefound.com
Friday, January 20, 2006
The Next Thing - making it better all the time
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 forward.
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.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
A little "social", but a lot "search"
PreFound.com will never really be as "social" a network as many of the other social search 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 its 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.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
John Battelle and the Future of Search
"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 it's great to be a part of it.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Welcome to www.prefound.com
Never Search Alone. That’s our philosophy here at PreFound.com. Here, we allow you to search what people like you have already found… “pre-found”, get it? And, we need you to help us. We’re the Search Engine, You’re the Fuel. We really mean that. We’re the new guys on the block and we need to grow our community, which will grow our content base, which will make our site more useful to everyone. We know you’re better at finding information compared to some algorithm. Help us make PreFound.com a great place to find information. Find out how.
Unless you’re searching for something truly obscure, you can bet other people have already searched for and found the information that you’re looking for. With PreFound.com, you can leverage the work already done by others and build on that base rather than repeat it. Why re-invent the wheel? PreFound.com is designed to cut through the confusion that a typical Google or Yahoo search might return by adding the human element. We’re convinced that communities of knowledgeable, interested people can identify relevant sites much better than a traditional search engine. Also, PreFound.com’s results are in the form of Find Groups, which are folders that have been organized by us or our users that contain the links and information you’re looking for, not just links like on traditional search engines. Those Find Groups can contain multimedia links together with traditional text links, which is a great feature.
One problem that has plagued some of the other “tagging” oriented sites is that their interface takes a little getting used too. Not here at PreFound.com. PreFound.com works like a regular search engine and utilizes a search interface that’s familiar and easy for people to use, easily distinguishing it many of the tagging sites out there. PreFound.com’s effort is to be more than a tagging site and redefine web-search, moving away from the algorithmic methods defined by Google and others. With Yahoo claiming to index 20 billion items and Google claiming to be 3 times larger than that, the web is becoming far too big and traditional methods of finding things on the web have to change, and human information gathering is a big part of the answer.
PreFound.com offers the PFfinder, a patented technology for easily and quickly finding and tagging sites of interest, then organizing them into usable Find Groups, to keep for yourself or share with others in the PreFound.com community. It’s the next evolutionary step in tagging technology, providing enhanced methods of navigating web pages, advanced tagging, organizing and archiving of all types of links, as well as virtually instantaneous sharing of groups of links.
During our Beta Testing process, we’ve been discussing some interesting issues related to tagging and community search. We’ve kept some of the more relevant entries available on this blog. Please take a look if you can.
Monday, January 16, 2006
T minus 14 Hours until PreFound.com Launch
So, this is the PreFound.com BetaDev Team signing off from the ultra-secure Global Headquarters magaplex in central KY. We'll be back tomorrow as the PreFound.com Support Team so really the signing off will only last for a minute or two. But, it's pretty dramatic anyway. Tomorrow, we'll be talking all about the launch and reviewing some of the highlights of the beta period. See you then, and THANK YOU.
Friday, January 13, 2006
And guys, please make sure to load up your Find Groups with links to multimedia when you can. Take a look at http://preview.prefound.com/view.php?cp_id=274065 as an example. In that Group (about sweet potato pie recipes) you can get a nice text-based recipe from Cooks.com and Low-Fat-Recipes.com, listen to how to make the pie in a podcast from KCRW and watch a chef make the pie in a video from the Food Network! All in one Group result from simply searching on "sweet potato pie" on PreFound.com. That's really taken full advantage of what the web has to offer in one quick swipe.
Let's see you do that on Google or Yahoo!
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
We keep talking about multimedia search and trying to mix your regular links with links to multimedia sites in your Find Groups, but some of you are wondering where to find that type of web content. Well, ask and ye shall receive. Check out http://preview.prefound.com/view.php?cp_id=274057 and you'll get links to over 60 podcast search sites and directories. That ought to at least get you started!
Thanks for helping us out by testing PreFound.com
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Some interesting blogs out there dealing with community search. In SearchViews, Anthony Iaffaldano discusses the up-and-coming domination (prediction) of community based searching, and the major problems associated with Google's Page Rank. "Yahoo!'s definitely got it right if their effort is to redefine web-search, moving away from the algorithmic methods defined by Google..." and "...this new "Web 2.0"-titled wave of social networking, social bookmarking and wiki-style folksonomies represents a move towards the more collaborative global community first described in Howard Reingold's seminal book from 1991 "The Virtual Community". There, the man known as the "first citizen of the Internet" spoke of true online communities defined and constructed by the participants, with the users as architects to the web... ...Google may always form the basis for search algorithms, but the new guard will create an Internet that more closely reflects the contents we create online, and how those contents mirror our personal interests, values and connections..." Well, we at PreFound.com couldn't have said it better ourselves. Well, actually, we couldn't have said it nearly as well as Mr. Iaffaldano just did. Check out his excellent blog at http://searchviews.com .
Meanwhile, over on Charlene Li's Blog (http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli), she was discussing the del.icio.us acquisition the other day and had some interesting things to say, "...The key: making del.icio.us and tagging accessible to users. It took me a while to “get” del.icio.us, (and the URL still isn’t easy for me to type!) The key problem is this is not an interface that my mother – or for that matter, most of my techie friends – understands...". As everyone who reads this blog knows, that's exactly what PreFound.com is trying to do; make tagging sites easy to understand and use. We really want to be part of the solution.
Thanks for hanging with us! Just one more week to go.
Monday, January 09, 2006
And it's going to be even more important moving forward. All the major networks and movie makers are going digital. Watching video on your video iPod of yesterday's Battlestar Galactica... I mean, yesterday's big ball game (oops, I almost gave away that I am a nerd there, whew...) couldn't be easier, and according to all the pundits, multimedia (like video) is the future of the Internet. Check this out: http://engadget.com/2006/01/09/the-engadget-interview-bill-gates-again/
So please, include multimedia links in your Find Groups if they are important and relevant to your subject. You can only do it on PreFound.com!
Friday, January 06, 2006
Another find was an article that actually printed last October in PC Magazine, which reviewed the early versions of a number of community search sites. The article contains quotes like, "Such sites can cut through the clutter that a typical Google search might return by adding the human element. After all, communities of knowledgeable, interested people can identify relevant sites with greater accuracy than a search engine. Plus, you can leverage the work already done by others and build on that base rather than repeat it." Wow, you would have though this was a press release about PreFound.com. You can check out the whole article at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1875208,00.asp
Lastly, a lot of important people are saying that traditional search engines don't meet the needs of everyone. One is Mr. Sour Grapes himself, (too late to the search party) Bill Gates. In an article printed on Cnet he's quoted as saying, "Well, search is bad today." And his CEO, Mr. Ballmer says, "Half the searches don't give you an answer that you wanted anyway.", so clearly there is room for human indexing of the web, like we're trying to do at PreFound.com. Check out the article at http://news.com.com/Microsoft+Were+in+fighting+shape+-+page+2/2008-1082_3-6020157-2.html?tag=st.num and thanks for testing PreFound.com
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
In the very near future, it looks like we'll all be able to link to all kinds of TV shows and movies, as well as audio files, radio shows and podcasts. At the CES show, now gearing up in Las Vegas, they are showcasing a bunch of new gadgets that will take advantage of this emerging technology. Check out:
Slingbox set to go mobile with home TV
Starz to Offer Download Movie Service
At PreFound.com, we want to make sure that all our Finders utilize these new multimedia formats in their searches, and share links to them with all us lazy PreFound.com users that don't want to duplicate your work. Thanks for hanging with us! Launch is only a few weeks away.