Every few years an article pops up that’s surprised that human beings tune search engines. Here’s the latest from the New York Times: Algorithms Get a Human Hand in Steering Web
It’s a good thing that humans do this, otherwise I’d have no job!
An update on my 2006 “Search Engines by location” article
Back in November 2006 I wrote this post: Search Companies by Location. Time to check in on the list. It’s a bit of a randomish list. I mean what exactly is a search company?
And obviously there are lots of new companies so maybe some day I’ll make a new list. But here’s the list from 2006 updated with current status:
United States
Silicon Valley/Peninsula/South Bay
A9 – Palo Alto still there
Become – Mountain View – Sunnyvale
Collarity – Palo Alto still there
Google – HQ in Mountain View still there last I checked
Kosmix – Mountrain View acquired by Walmart Labs, moved to San Bruno
Krugle – Menlo Park Redwood City
Oodle – San Mateo still there
Riya – San Mateo became Like.com and then purchased by Google (right?)
Spock acquired by Intelius in 2009
Surfwax – Menlo Park not sure
Yahoo – HQ in Sunnyvale yup yup
Zvents – San Mateo i think still there
San Francisco
Groxis closed
LookSmart my former company carries on as an advertising network. still in SF
Powerset acquired my Microsoft, still has an office in SF
Rojo not sure, but rojo.com redirects to blogs.com
Technorati still in SF
Trulia still in SF
East Bay
Ask – HQ in Emeryville still there
Seeqpod – Emeryville closed
Washington State
Findory – Seattle, WA closed
Infospace – HQ in Bellevue still there. corporate name is now blucora (at least I think that’s what’s going on)
MSN – HQ in Redmond ok
Zillow – Seattle still there
Elsewhere in the US
Answers.com – New York, NY and Jersulem, Israel. hq in St. Louis. owned by AFCV Holdings, LLC (I think)
AOL – Dulles, VA hq in New York City now
BusyTonight – NYC closed
Gigablast – Albuqurque, NM still there
Icerocket – Dallas, TX still there
Indeed – Stamford, CT and Austin, TX hq in Stamford
Lycos (Hotbot) – Waltham, MA still in Waltham. owned by Ybrant Digital.
MetaGlossary – Aventura, FL Palo Alto
Relona – Nashua, NH still there
Searchles – Washington D.C. still there
Snap – Pasadena, CA not sure
Vivisimo (Clusty) – Pittsburgh, PA still there
Outside the US
Exalead – France Paris, France
Kartoo – France meta search
Lexxe – Australia Epping, Australia
Not sure where these are located
Accoona ?
Eurekester -SF, New Zealand? San Francisco
Dogpile part of Infospace. HQ in Bellevue
Keotag New Caledonia (?)
Ixquick The Netherlands
Metacrawler another infospace property
Metafind another infospace property
Rawsugar appears to be closed
Rollyo appears to be closed
Webcrawler another infospace property
Wink part of mylife.com
Web search engine query language – what’s it called?
I have a question:
Natural language search is: what is the population of Portland?
Boolean search is: salt AND pepper
So what do we call the sort of “regular” syntax that web search engines have made so popular and common as a way to query for information?
Watson is just a super search engine
Not like I’m so smart or anything since I’m sure lots of people thought the same thing, but the first thing that went through my mind when I heard about Watson was that it was a search engine disguised as a Jeopardy contestant.
Watson is just a super search engine.
If you’ve ever wondered what search quality/editorial/analysis people like me do at search engines, a big part of our jobs is training and evaluating machine-learning systems like Watson.
Bloglines is closing
I just saw that Ask.com is officially closing Bloglines. Read more here: Bloglines Update. I’m sorry to hear it. I’ve been using Bloglines for 5 or 6 years. The first couple years I checked it obsessively for new articles about search and other interests. Now I check in much less frequently, maybe a couple times a month. But it’s still a good place to catch up on articles that where timeliness is not so important. I’ll have to decide whether to find a new RSS reader. Or not.