This weekend (28/06/08) we will be applying some upgrades to the site. Most of them won’t be visible but will fix some of the current issues.
The main focus points are:
We hope this does not affect our users, thank you for your patience
I have just read an interesting article from The Mac Observer about Microsoft paying users who search and buy products from their advertiser (AdCenter). To be honest, it’s not a bad idea and it’s giving back something to the consumer. If the service is easy to sign up and available, I think that will be my new home for buying products online for a while. My concerns are will it get abused? I did think about adding a paid-to-search feature to Burf.com like WebFetch.com however it could be extremely hard to monitor and stop spammers. I think its worth keeping a eye on Microsoft’s live search for mean time
Wombat is still in beta at the moment because we have ran in to problems with duplicate site data due to us importing the DMOZ feed. I don’t think we expected it to have the same site listed many times for different categories. Thinking about it now, it was quite obvious. We are not running a large de-duping process to remove the sites. ETA is 3 days for the process to finish, after which we can start indexing submitted sites again
We have also gone back to the ISEDN.org PPC feed for the main search engine as it offers better value for our customers and also produces more reliant results on our SERP compared to Google.
We have now added the search engine command site: which lists all the pages we have indexed for a certain domain or url
For example, typing site:http://www.myvue.com in the search box would list all of the areas of the site that we have indexed (only being 3 at the moment)
We will be adding more commands soon so that people can get more out of our searches!
Burf.com’s new search engine technology code named wombat is finally here! It is now being used to produce all of our search results however it is still being tweak a lot!. The complete rewrite of the backend technology was due to the old system being very slow to produce search results and also had a habit of killing hardware (mainly hard drives). Test so far show that Wombat is over 10 times quicker than the old system and also indicates other areas that are causing problems (e.g. our internet pipe). Tests also show that since the speed increase, daily search numbers have tripled
Apologies for the downtime we have had over the last week. This was due to us trying to upgrade our servers to MySql 5 to help prevent hacking attempts. This sadly went very wrong and took our hosts Dubhosting quite a while to fix. Dub, do an outstanding job at providing support and help which you just would not get from the larger companies. We are hoping that these security fixes will now keep Burf.com up for good.
We are pleased to announce that work is going well on our new search engine, code named wombat. We have struggled for years to index large sums of data on budget hardware and serve up the results in a timely fashion. With the Burf.com Search Engine, we currently have many different layers to go through for a site to be indexed. The new project goes back to the basics and its initial data set is based off the Dmoz directory. However the actual results provided to the user will be far from simple. We are working on a stronger algorithm which we will actually describe on this site soon!
Reading this, your probably thinking, ok good news however what does the title have to do with the post. Wombat wont just be a search engine like the current one. We are planning on storing data on thousands of different topics like jokes, game cheats, business listings, even baby names. Soon you will be able to select a search filter that will return just one type of data to you.
The type of examples we hope will be:
Now a few sites do offer some of these services but hopefully we are going to offer so much more!
We hope to beta wombat by the end of May! We will keep you informed!
Yep thats right, I am another year older. At the grand old age of 27, I have been working on Burf.com for 7 years. Seems a hell of a long time. At the same time its been extremely fun and this year looks very promising! Lots of new features and the traffic keeps going up!
Burf.com would like to welcome Steph to the team. Her role will be adding new content to the site and maintaining the Burf.com blog and new forum. I hope you will join me in welcoming her to site.
Burf.com has finally been updated with a new simple design to focus users on searching. It now offers users many different types of searches like music, torrent, video and many more.
Some site content has not yet been updated to the new design, however this will happen over the next few days. After this we can then focus on adding new areas to the site to help you make the most of your experience.
