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Glam Media launches vertical search for women-focused content

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glam.jpgGlam Media today announced the launch of Glam Search, a proprietary search tool aimed at delivering top quality and highly relevant content from Glam Media’s Publisher Network of 350+ lifestyle, celebrity and fashion sites, as well as its flagship site, Glam.com. Glam Search utilizes intelligent search, filtering and indexing technology to bring users comprehensive, relevant and timely results in a format not available from general search engines.
In keeping with Glam Media’s distributed media model, network publishers can add a customizable Glam Search Widget to their site or channel and configure results accordingly.

In addition to classic search and indexing technologies, Glam Search uses a proprietary “curated rank” algorithm, which assigns a weighting to a page based on relevance, timeliness and an editorial analysis of the content source. This gives Glam Search results a higher contextual relevance to the item being searched.

“Glam Media is about bringing together the most relevant voices and indie publishers in fashion, celebrity style and lifestyle entertainment,” said Samir Arora, Glam Media’s Chairman and CEO. “Glam Media knows women, and Glam Search helps them find what they want. Applying proprietary search technology to our network of publishers is a natural evolution for Glam Media.”

Originally posted on August 13, 2007 @ 9:26 am

Local.com sells stocks, raises $13M

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Local.comLocal.com, top local search engine that provides information on local businesses, products, services, and jobs, completes $13 million worth of financing by selling about 2.4 million shares in a private transaction worth $5.50 per share.

The amount raised is expected to be spent on new possible acquisitions, direct sales channel development and expansion, and protecting the company’s growing intellectual property. In addition to this, the investors were issued to purchase additional shares at beginning February 2008, securing Local.com enough funding to last the next five-six years.

Via Search Engine Journal

Originally posted on August 3, 2007 @ 2:22 am

Wikia acquires distributed search project Grub

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grub.jpgWikia co-founder Jimmy Wales waded deeper into open source territory today as his company announced it had acquired Grub, a distributed search project. Financial terms of the acquisition were not revealed.

Grub, acquired from LookSmart, works under a model of users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal. The application has been released under open source license by Wales and company for download and is “designed with modularity so that developers can quickly and easily extend and add functionality, improving the quality and performance of the entire system.”

Grub, described as “a massive, distributed user-contributed processing network,” is being combined with the open source Search Wikia project and is seen as a large step “towards a future where search is open and transparent.”

“We’ve had a tremendous response from very interesting commercial players in the search space,” said Wales. “The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses. Look for other exciting announcements in the coming months as we collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box.”

Originally posted on July 27, 2007 @ 6:12 pm

Hakia toolbar eliminates double Web searching

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hakia-scoopbar.jpgHakia, a meaning-based search engine, unveiled today a toolbar for Internet Explorer users. The new Hakia ScoopBar is designed to eliminate what Hakia calls “double searching.”

“Double searching” occurs when you first find a Web page for a specific term and than have to search through that page to find exactly what you were looking for. The toolbar automatically highlights the relevant text in response to your search and locates the text by scrolling directly to that portion of the Web page. An additional feature lets you save the relevant section of a Web page for later use offline.

“When most people search, they have to search and search again through a results page to find the relevant text,” said Dr. Riza C. Berkan, founder and CEO of hakia.com. “The automated sequence of highlighting, positioning, and scooping saves researchers a great deal of time. We are cutting the work of search in half.”

Originally posted on July 27, 2007 @ 5:23 pm

Chokti puts the nomad in your travel plans

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chokti.jpgA new travel Web site has popped up which is taking an interesting approach to providing travelers with information they need regarding destinations around the world. Extremely puff-piece style press release aside, Chokti looks to have a different spin on researching your next travel location.

Chokti pulls together information for a specific location from not just the official source itself but also a variety of other sources such as user opinions and guides. The information, often collected through RSS feeds from various Web sites, is geotagged and organized into a search engine. It makes use of a searchable map and accepts user generated content.

Chokti said it will pull “together as much content as possible that relates to a certain topic in an easy-to-use format. The site can be used to: access guides to cities, museums, historical sites, parks, zoos, restaurants, hotels and amusement parks; distribute supplemental information through pdf files containing maps, coupons and vouchers; and promote current and upcoming events such as gallery exhibits.” It fully launches this fall.

Originally posted on July 26, 2007 @ 5:40 pm