Burf.com

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Hello all, I just started getting my MySpace Profile up and running and would like to invite all of you to join it There you can find out what Burf is really about, the person not the engine!

Burf.com’s MySpace Profile

The open source community is in a state of shock this morning at the news that Microsoft has released a version of popular browser Firefox.

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Burf.com has cut the price of all of its website hosting packages which now start from just $2 per month. Burf.com will soon be offering reseller and VPS hosting!

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Sorry for the delay, the web proxy can be found below
Free Secure Web Proxy

Thanks to Dub Hosting, we are now on a nice new faster bigger better server that should run a Burf.com a lot for a good few years! We had to take down the proxy as the old server could not keep up, but this new one has enabled us to turn it back on!!

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