Category: Interviews

Recently, Pandia reviewed Kosmix, a web portal and clustering engine rolled into one. We liked what we saw, so we talked to Venky Harinarayan, co-founder of Kosmix to find out more about how they see themselves in the search engine food chain.

Omgili is a search engine that indexes web-based discussion boards to see if your question might already be answered somewhere out there on the web. Since we reviewed Omgili back in 2006 it have kept evolving and now spiders Digg, MySpace and other social media sites for answers. I talked to Ran Geva, CEO at Omgili, to find out what’s new.

SortFix is a metasearch engine that searches Google, Yahoo and dmoz. What sets it apart from other metasearch engines is the way it presents the search result. Sortfix gives you a drag-and-drop interface which assists the user to describe a detailed and precise query. I talked to Yohay Barsky from the SortFix team to get an inside view of search engine innovation: How did the SortFix team decide on features for their metasearch engine and what do they see as their contribution to web search?

Dictionarist is a language tool resembling a Swiss army knife: It’s a free online talking dictionary which provide translation in 13 languages. This cool language tool translates to and from English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Dutch, Greek, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Nsyght is a fledgling human powered search engine, still in deployment mode, with the motto “Kick the algorithm to the curb”. Of course, every search engine needs an algorithm to find relevant web pages and rank the search results. So what are they up to at Nsyght? I asked Geoffrey to find out and got an interesting peek into the process of creating a new Web 2.0 service.

he search engine Ask doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves. News from the search engine war these days is mostly about Google, sometimes about Yahoo or Live, but all too little about the other great alternatives. I had a talk with Gary Price, director of online Info resources at Ask about the soul of Ask and how this search engine works to improve your access to online information of all kinds.

One year ago, we published a couple of posts on Fanpop, a Web 2.0 startup with a focus on sharing and commenting on links. A lot has happened over at Fanpop since then: It’s not all about links anymore, there are videos, articles, polls and more. And while the most obvious perk a year ago was sharing links on your favorite topic, today Fanpop is a community, a social networking site with a warm and safe feel to it.

The future of search is understanding information, not merely finding it. This is the claim of Dr. Riza Berkan, CEO of Hakia, a meaning-based or semantic search engine currently in beta. His motivation for plowing the field of ontological semantics is ultimately to compete with the giants of the search engine industry.