Burf.com

The search engine has a common problem, which is Quality vs. Speed. The more relevant the search results get, the longer they take to produce. One solution, which I was going to go with, was to throw more hardware at it! Though this would work, it is avoiding the issue, which could be summed up as poor design.

So do I go with the quicker approach of adding more hardware OR do I rewrite the engine from scratch to meet my needs (engine was first designed to handle only 1 million sites). Well what I plan to do is a little of both. Over the next couple of weeks I will be tweaking the engine to produce better quality results for cached searches and tweaking the non-cached results to return at a fast rate. Adding extra hardware to make sure I have redundancy and better caching should prove beneficial too.

The only pothole I will fall into is that a non-cached result could be rubbish and scare off the user. This will be something I will have to monitor. So far the lack of speed has managed to scare many people off!

There seems to be a craze on the Internet for anonymous surfing. So I thought, hey why not add one and see if I can help a few people out.

For people who do not know, a Web Proxy is a web-based free anonymous proxy, which allows anyone to surf the Internet securely and with total privacy. This proxy hides your IP address, stopping hackers or website owners from identifying or tracking you.

Best thing about our proxy is there is no Ad’s on it!

Web Proxy

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If you have not noticed, Burf.com is now using the SearchFeed.com advertising feed within its search engine results page. It is directly embedded in to the main page and not the right hand column where you would typically see Adverts. I have made the feed look like it is part of the results and not sponsored links.

Why you might ask?
Though this does products some revenue, I am more interested in how people use it. So far it looks like 1% of people click on Adverts when they release that it is a paid adverts. This is only marginally higher (0.8) than when they were marked as Sponsored Adverts! (Last weeks test) I am not sure why this is because I would expect the click thru rate to be a lot higher.

The next test is to put the feed in to the right column and see what results that produces. Will people think its Google Adsense and assume it is extremely relevant and then click more? I expect there to be a huge drop in click thru’s

We have 2 big problems with Burf.com. One is the quality of our search results and the second is speed. The better the search results, the slower they appear (usually). Last weekend I did an update to the caching so that the files are written out to the main server instead of the query server. This should see popular searches appear instantly (well as fast as the rest of the site). The cache will be updated everyday and will be rolled out to the mini portals (euroburf.eu, burf.biz etc) by this weekend.

I have also made a few tweaks to improve normal searching. This should improve the page loading times a little but far more work needs to be done.

I have been receiving a lot of emails requesting the old Java Games back like Yahtzee and Gems. I like to give the users what they want so, as requested the Java games are now back and can be found below
Java Games

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!

Burf.com traffic portal is back and better than ever. All new members get 10,000 free credits (site visits in english)

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Burf.com homepage is currently being updated to be a more user friendly portal. If you see any weird errors, don’t worry, they will be gone by the time you visit again (please visit again!)

If you have any suggestions or content for the front page, please contact us and if we use your idea or content, we will mention you on our links page.

We are currently working on a search webservice and would like any idea’s on what functionality users would want like filters and functions. We are looking to release a basic search results service by the end of the week. This will allow people to query and retrieve data from Burf.com in a xml based format.