JavaScriptSearch Thursday, June 22, 2006; 03:35 AM
Many search engines get launched, and most get ignored. This is
understandable given that most of them aren't backed up by their own
proper index of pages – they are simply rehashes of information
available elsewhere on the web. There are surprisingly few genuine,
spider-based search engines around, and very few offer anything to
tempt users away from the big names.
Nusearch
(www.nusearch.com), based in Bristol, claims to be the UK's first
serious global search player. They have a distributed network of computers
powering high capacity spidering. They produce quality, spam-free
results (a big improvement on the previous version, it has to be said).
They also have user oriented features that are pretty unique in the
search space: instant preview, instant bookmarking (no registration
required) and search within domains all with a slick, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) driven user
interface.
What really makes Nusearch stand apart however, is
their approach to advertising. Firstly, let's get this in context –
Internet advertising is Big Business, and growing fast. Specifically,
search engine powered, keyword based advertising is great for driving
targeted users to your website, with folk like Google and MSN charging
upwards of a dollar per clickthru. But then they have Big Overheads
too.
Nusearch's Chief Software Architect, Giles Chanot,
explains: “Google's whole search system relies on having the entire
searchable web held in memory. Memory costs $100/GB and there's about
750,000GB of textual content on the web, conservatively – you do the
maths. Our software is a thousand times more resource efficient. We
pass on that saving to our advertisers.”
And they do:
clickthrus at Nusearch have a flat rate cost of 10 cents. And then
there's the Active Search programme – anyone with a website or blog can
put a search box on their home page and random web visitors get
converted - for free - into targeted users. This is a new proposition and might lead to the democratisation of keyword
advertising.
Next up, they plan to open up their search results to
any developer who wants to integrate them into their own website, with
no cost. Nusearch in "preview" mode.
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