The page “Intense Debate” seems to be about some sort of video blogging system. See screenshot:
What is going on?

Update: redirect is no longer happening as of 7:06 pm PST.

Congrats!

Mike is (implicitly) comparing Blekko to Cuill. Cuill (pronounced “cool”) also in stealth mode claims to have a much cheaper, and more efficient way of indexing the web compared to Google. I think this is a bit premature since no one really know what Cuill or Blekko are doing.

Links

Blekko raises round from Marc Andreessen

Google Challenger: Blekko

It will be interesting to see how competitor Hakia responds.

I’m a little underwhelmed with powerset, especially since it is searching semi-structured data where some of the relationships are more explicit than out in the wild.

http://20bits.com/2008/05/12/powerset-launches-verdict-meh/

http://venturebeat.com/2008/05/12/powerset-opens-to-everyone-now-whats-next/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/11/powerset-launches-showcase-for-user-search-experience/

http://gigaom.com/2008/05/11/powerset-is-live/

The Spock Proxy project page mentions that Spoke is built on Rails, and ActiveRecord, but from the description it seems like this could be transparently applied to other frameworks that make it hard to split up database requests (Django, I’m looking at you).

All the other cool kids(Ostatic, VentureBeat, The Open Road) are blogging about “Marketcetera” so I’ll yield and follow along…

The platform which is currently at the 0.4.2 release — 1.0 scheduled for Q3 2008 uses the “FIX” protocol to execute automated trades with brokerages and banks.

Marketcetera has received a 4 million dollar A round from Shasta Ventures and Jack Selby (Clarium Capital (hedge fund))  — the general plan is to start charging for data that will be helpful to the analysis the big boys (hedge funds) do.

Oh, right, that open source thing. I started poking around on the site, and on the left navigation there is a link to “Contribute”… sounds promising… I was redirected to a page with a license agreement… and things get interesting… I was presented with the following license agreement (see below, link here for full version: http://www.marketcetera.com/contributors/display)

I’m wondering… this doesn’t sound like the licenses I’m used to, this clearly isn’t OSI ratified yet… is it fair (and legal) to call this open source (Disclaimer: not a lawyer)

This is the current version 0.1 of the Marketcetera Contributor License Agreement, as of March 23, 2007.

Summary (see below for full license):

The Marketcetera Contributor License Agreement (CLA) means, in simple terms, that:

• You assign and transfer the copyright of your contribution to Marketcetera to the extent permitted by applicable law. In return you receive back a broad license to re-use and distribute your contribution.
• You grant a patent license to Marketcetera and its users, in the event that you own a patent that covers your contribution.
• You represent that you coded and own the contribution, and are legally entitled to grant the assignment and license.
• You may provide support for free, for a fee, or not at all.
• Marketcetera has no obligation to accept or use your contribution.

The “Elastic IPs” come with a little “Amazon special sauce” and can be re-assigned to your EC2 instances programatically on the fly. There are some initial limits, currently you can only request up to 5 “Elastic IPs” per account.

“Availability Zones” allow you to specificy the (abstract) location of the physical machine that will host your virtual instance. You can for example specify that your two ec2 instances should be created in two separate datacenters, geographically separate enough to satisfy disaster recovery plans…etc

RightScale, a company that provides a management interface (written in Ruby on Rails) to Amazons infastructure has a good blog post on the new changes here: “Setting up a fault tolerant site using amazons availability zones“.

The interesting thing is that they are running their startup in a “choose your own adventure way” soliciting advice from their users as to whether or not they should open source their project, take on VC funding …etc

Keep this on your radar but I’m disappointed with the basic premise.

Here is a link to Wired: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/news/2007/12/YE_10_startups

The Dallas based startup explains its name as the Sanskrit word for “universe”, and their tag line is: “its our universe”. After the customary grandiose and unqualified statements about how advanced they are Visvo claims to have developed the “automatic categorization search engine for web content”. While this implementation of this wasn’t immediately obvious to me after trying their search engine, I decided I like them as a company for other reasons.

I immediately did my favorite search — a vanity search on my full name (should be fairly unique). The Visvo engine returned two (and once three) results that were highly relevant: The “Debian as a Desktop System” article I wrote for the Free Software Magazine, and a ping back for a blog entry I wrote about the upcoming FreeBSD installer “finstall” . Here is a screen shot of the results page for my vanity search above (Click on image for full resolution):

Each search result has an “explain” link (see screen shots ) where so-inclined users can view the technical details of how the search result was ranked by the Visvo engine. It shows factors such as the tfidf score of the document, which is probably the most used statistical model for measuring the frequency of a term in a document relative to documents in the rest of the corpus. (Click on screen shot for full resolution)

The fact that they are building their own index is relevant, todays search giants have amassed too much power — in essence a monopoly on who finds what — and my hope for the future is that startups like Visvo can challenge the entrenched incumbents. The fact that they also open up their ranking is important, and this level of transparency is something Google could learn from.

The technical presentation by Dennis Kubes, founder and CTO of Visvo (linked at the bottom of the page) gives us some juicy details about their architecture. Visvo is indeed using Hadoop, the open source Map-Reduce implementation, occasionally supplements its dedicated hardware with Amazons EC2 hardware service.

I’m impressed so far. I wish them success, as their success is also the success of the open source community, more so than with Google.

I encourage everyone to give it a go, although the product is still in Alpha, so probably won’t be ready for your day to day search needs for a while.

Resources:

http://www.visvo.com

http://www.visvo.com/bot.html

Visvo Technical Presentation