Burf.com

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

By SAUL HANSELL
Published: June 3, 2007
Google’s top minds offer a peek inside the algorithm that provides search results for half a billion users
Read the full Story

You can now exchange links with Burf.com for free. This can help bring traffic to your site and even get you indexed in other search engines quicker. It also helps us index your site.

Exchange links with us now!

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

We are working on bringing our network of search engines and directories closer together to produce better results for our advertisers. As you can see, we now list our main search engines and directories on the Burf.com homepage. These will be our focus point for the next few months in increasing awareness and traffic to them. Each one will be setup for the ISEDN.org as this gives the best type of coverage for our customers. Our aim is to have 30 popular sites for people to use.

We are also looking at different advertising feeds (ppc etc) to increase the quality of results that users are presented with.

Lately I have had some serious problems with the search engine part of the site. This has mainly been due to our database expanding at a rapid size and reaching hardware limits. I have had 3 disks fail with over 300 Gigs worth of search data go down over the Christmas period this has also caused problems with the main software engine. I am still puzzled on why this has happened and I am working on making sure this does not happen again.

Happy New Year ALL

I have added a nice new tool to the webmasters resource section which will provide you with the following information:

• Google Pagerank


• Alexa Rating


• Thumnail of your site


• Link Popularity Report


• Estimated Domain Value Report

You can access this free tool here
New SEO tool

Let me know what you think and I will add more in the future

If, as author Philip K. Dick wondered, robots dream of electronic sheep, their collectivist cyber-equivalents, botnets live for the fleece. Used to enable or commit several types of fraud, including click fraud against PPC providers such as Google, Yahoo and the host of smaller pay-per-click programs, botnets are proliferating across the Internet at an alarming rate. The only thing matching the increase in criminal use of botnets is the increasing sophistication of their operators.

“The level of sophistication that we’re seeing – and the speed at which new fraudster techniques are introduced – is tremendous,” says Keren Levy, director of the Online Threats Managed Services group at RSA Security. In June of this year RSA Security and Panda Software collaborated to detect and dismantle one of hundreds of botnets operating online, one that was specifically designed to commit click fraud.

“Botnets are a silent epidemic,” states Ryan Sherstobitoff from Panda Software as he ducks behind a row of trade-show booths to find a quieter place to speak. “The botnet we recently helped dismantle with RSA had infected over 50,000 computers with the Clickbot.A Trojan. Imagine if each of those 50,000 computers made the botnet controller one dollar each day the system operated. If it takes us a few weeks to shut him down, the operator makes millions.”

Read the whole Story here

Hello there and welcome to the first ever Burf.com newsletter (warning it’s a mega issue).

I am sorry that it has taken me nearly a year to get the first issue out but I promise that the second issue will be a lot sooner and shorter (e.g. ever month!).

Ok, so what is this newsletter about?
I want this newsletter to give its readers inside information about Burf.com, discuss reader’s suggestions, offer special offers and free stuff, and be a helpful resource to people.

If this is not what you are interested in receiving then you can do 1 of 2 things
1)Unsubscribe via the link at the bottom.
2)Tell me what you do want in the newsletter! (No adult suggestions please!)

A bit of history!
Ok my name is Simon Burfield. The site is named Burf.com due to my surname! It was first started as a project to prove someone wrong and has been operational in one form or another for 5 years! It is not my main job, but a hobby which to be fair, probably has more time spent on it than my job.

What do I want out of Burf.com?
Well, money is quite good but not the main driving force of the site. My main focus is to create a site that people will use regularly and keep improving on that.

Main News
Ok now that I have got the history part out of the way, I will let you know what has, is and will be happening on Burf.com.

Has happened / working on.
The last few projects I have been working on are:

Burf.com Proxy (http://www.burf.com/proxy/).
This has been added as an experiment (I like to do them you know), to see what the effect of adding one would be. The first noticeable thing was that it took the server down, it was receiving over 200,000 page request (just this page) a day and due to this, I have moved Burf.com to a larger better server (yet again provided by http://dubhosting.com.

Caching and search engine improvements.

I have implemented caching to the main server so that searches are faster on popular terms. I have and am still working on improving the quality of the search engine.

PPC feeds
I have tried out Mirago and SearchFeed pay per click feed and well they just don’t impress me too much. I need to find someone who is not from the big 3 (Google, MSN, Yahoo) which also have some decent advertisers and not just show eBay all of the time. I have heard Feedpatrol.com is good and have applied! Update on that soon!

Controlling the search engine
If you do a search on Burf.com, your notice that the organic feed has a Burf rank, a star rating, and a few other options. These are designed to allow the visitors more control over the search results.

The Burf rank is based on how often your search terms (broken down to each word) are found in your url, meta data and body text. The higher this is, the better and is also dependant on how many words where in the search query.

The ban and adult options will instantly hide the site from everyone and can only reappear if I allow it or if I turn off the adult filter!

The star rating is purely for show at the moment while it is in testing. The plan for this is to be implemented in to how your site is ranked and so a 5 star site will appear higher than a 4 star site with roughly the same Burf rank.

Future improvements / New features coming soon

Newsletter.
The first thing I want to work on is improving this newsletter. Please give me your suggestions (contact details at the bottom) and feedback and I will mention them and discuss them! The best suggestion / comment or review could win a prize (well will win a prize when I get a suggestion of a good prize). I will also look at creating a html newsletter!

More improvements to the search engine results.
Yes this will be here forever until they are perfect! I am still writing the new formula for rating different types of pages

Ramping up hosting.
I want to integrate a proper way to sell hosting through Burf.com. This will include selling VPS accounts and reseller accounts. The idea of this is purely to offer cheap but reliable hosting to visitors and at the same time funding the future of Burf.com. Currently hosting starts at $2pm! http://www.burf.com/hosting.php

Online Shop.
I want to add a shop that sales e-books, and digital media at a very low price. This again will help fund the site but also be quite fun to manage. If anyone has any experience of online shopping carts and selling digital media, please could you contact me.

The big update!
Well I need to update the burf.com mini portals (e.g. Burf.info, Burf.us etc) and release Burf.mobi, Burf.ws, Burf.be etc and also interconnect my other 70+ sites with Burf.com. This will create one huge network once it is done and should bring in quite a lot of visitors.

Review(s).
I don’t usually fall for these crappie blog / web / email spamming pieces of software but I thought I would try out http://www.youtubemailer.com because I had several emails saying it was good and even a full blown conversation saying it was brilliant. I have tried if a few time and not noticed any increase in traffic or anything so I would not recommend this to anyone

Special offers.
Nothing special has been organised for this issue BUT, if anyone wants hosting, they will get double the spec/ features of what ever hosting package they purchase for free
http://www.burf.com/hosting.php

XMAS Special
Text links on the Burf.com network start from $3 a link for a PR4 site. If you refer to this newsletter your get a free PR4 link with every link brought!
For more information go to http://www.burf.com/buy-text-links.php

To subscrible to this newsletter go to
http://www.burf.com/newsletter.php