Burf.com

Honest, we have fixed it this time!

Burf.com — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:59:07 +0000

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!

VuYou Free Video Emailing Application

Burf.com — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:36:55 +0000

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!

http://vuyou.com

A weekend of Maintainence

Burf.com — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 13:34:41 +0000

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:

Adding reliable sources to the music search

Adding failover redundancy to the search engine index incase an issue arises

Adding the ground work into the site so that adding new media searches becomes easier

We hope this does not affect our users, thank you for your patience

Microsoft paying users to use Live Search

Burf.com — Fri, 23 May 2008 12:32:18 +0000

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

Update 17/04 : Wombat still in beta

Burf.com — Sat, 17 May 2008 16:13:33 +0000

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.

More information about ISEDN.org can be found here

Burf.com supports site: command

Burf.com — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:01:22 +0000

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!

Now powered by Wombat! Well beta anyway

Burf.com — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:59:35 +0000

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

Downtime explained

Burf.com — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 08:26:30 +0000

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.

Data Data Data!

Burf.com — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:57:25 +0000

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 Burf.com owners Birthday!

Burf.com — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:55:30 +0000

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!