Burf.org.uk has just had a facelift. It purpose has also changed. It is now going to be a search engine technology testing portal so that when we create new backend search technology, we will use this site to give people access to it. This should give our users a real insight in to what we get up to!
Please let us know what you think
Thanks Simon
Yes people its coming back and not as some naff half arse copy. Burf.org.uk is going to be my test site to test out new search engines technologies, concepts and well anything I fancy. It will initially have a basic design but probably be rewritten in Ajax once the backend produces half decent results. This will affect Burf.com as they both use the same engine and produce the same rubbish
Watch this space!!
If your interested in Burf.com and related projects please check out
Burf2000
You can find out all types of things including what I am working on (new search engine coming soon), my crazy pets and well anything I am thinking about
Well I know we have been quiet quite over the last few months, but we are still here and still going strong! The changes to the indexing service has allowed us to index over 10,000,000 pages , be stable and produce search results in a timely fashion. We hope to start offering some new services after Christmas too!
After months of work, new ideas and starting again we believe we have the fixed stability issues with Burf.com. No more will you do a search, wait 10 seconds and be returned an error. The answer was down to clustering of the search index into 37 different tables to spread the load. This has resulted in a small decrease in speed in indexing sites and producing search results however will allow for a greater uptime and a much larger index!
This Monday (14/07/2008) VuYou launched their FREE Video Emailing application. The brain child of Terry Flores, this application has been designed to cover a wide range of users from the very young to the silver surfer. Those that are hearing impaired have also been considered with welcome videos explaining how to use the site in both British and American sign language. You can video blog, upload videos and Podcast them. As the popularity of the application grows more functionality and services will be added to further enhance the user experience.
There is no need to download any software, all you need is a webcam attached to your PC or laptop and you’re in business! Videos are recorded direct to the VuYou server and encoded in real time. Preview your video once recorded and send straight away in just 3 easy clicks!
Sign up for your FREE account today and start sending video emails today!
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!
