Burf.com

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!

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

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

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:

• List all accountants in New York


• I know there is a joke about a carrot, list all jokes that contain the word carrot


• Whats that song called, it has the words let me be your fantasy

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!

Its time to give Burf.com a facelift and focus the site more on being a search engine. Based on this, we are hoping to have the nice new site up and running by the end of Easter. It will hopefully feature new media searches like torrent, music, video and file to enable users to find just about anything on the site. The downside of this is that certain areas of the site are down or have been removed. This is because we want to focus our efforts more in one direction instead of many.

Thanks Simon

Work on a new improved search engine has started. This is a change of technology (from Equinox to Microsoft .net 2.0) and a complete rewrite of the site and even server side language. We plan to user SQL 2005 instead of custom indexing services and remove most of the different layers that have slowed progress in the past. No firm date is set for when this will be live and if it will even be live, as the technology is new to us and may not suit our needs. Regular progress updates will be posted on the forum

After visiting Internet World 2007 today (review coming soon), we have decided to flush our index and start again. Yes thats correct we have just removed our complete index of sites and started again. May sound rather mad but we feel that we can improve the quality of our search results.

A few new features have been implemented and many more to come. We are really going to be pushing our new search and expanding it with lots of new features over the next 3 months

2 features that have finally been added are:

An Adult filter: All new sites submitted, will be checked for adult content and flagged. These will not be indexed in our main search results. Be warned this is in testing!

An option to index a complete site. This is not available to end-users yet but allows us to force our spiders to index important sites like Wikipedia, Myspace and the BBC. This is a test to see if indexing the big sites improves the quality of our search results.

We are also going to be releasing an adult search engine, a file search engine and adding many more features to Burf.com

A final note is that we will be holding a competition on our forum to redesign the front page of Burf.com. Lots of fame and maybe even some good prizes will go to the winner!

We have spent some time testing our search engine and discovered a number of bugs.

Banning, rating and marking a site as adult now works!

Improvements to the free search engine for webmaster (Free Search Engine) has had some improvements to.

We will continue our testing and let you know what other areas we fix

Our search engine query server was down for most of yesterday due to someone hacking the network layer of the server. The server decided it knew nothing about networking; disabled a few antivirus and anti spy ware programs and added a few dodgy looking services! It turns out a remote service, a couple of Trojans and a few other nasty things were put on the server. How, we do not know yet. Hopefully over the next couple of days, we hope to improve the security of this machine to stop these things happening again!