gloofi Version 1.3 is online

Hello all,

finally, Alpha Version 1.3 with Amazon integration is online.
Also, the German translation is done and French will be done soon. Emails and letters are now going out to friends, users and Newspapers to get users to find and use the site.

For now, it is important to get more Feedback as there are still many things to do and make better. The eBay integration and RSS connections to display many other sites will be done in the next 1 – 2 weeks.

The thing that I hate to do is asking people to PLEASE check it out and since I do not have friends that are into the Internet at all, it is a tough job to get users to the site. I sent a letter about 3 – 4 weeks ago to Michael Arrington at www.techcrunch.com but didn’t hear anything back. I know that he and his team is very busy but a quick note would be nice. I hope that my emails and letters to users and newspapers will help to get some attention as that is all I can do. I do not have the money to advertise somewhere or to buy email lists. I just have to go the long way to get users.

So, if you find www.gloofi.com, register and check it out and give feedback. And, don’t forget, you get Reward Points with each item entered and with each item approved.

Hope to see you soon at gloofi;-)

Best,

Martin

Why need Investors?

Hello all,

haven’t updated my blog in a while, just because there was so much going on.
As you know, I am building this search engine www.gloofi.com and so I was also looking for Investors.

Well, let me tell you, don’t waste your time on this when you have a good idea and can start without them!

In September 2007 I talked to 2 investors in Europe. Both know each other and work mainly together. I showed them gloofi and made a nice Business Plan with all the bells and whistles, financial projection and so on. They both liked it very much, so much in fact, that one investor asked me to do this without the other investor! The other investor said “This can be bigger than Google” but he needs a mathematics guru for 6 – 8 month to look into the code to see if the volume can be handled!!! What?!?

Of course, I didn’t here back from them any more and I don’t have time to bother.

Than I got a lead to a Washington based Venture Capital company. It took about 6 – 8 weeks to set up a phone conference including Web Meeting to show the solution. The investors liked the idea but as they have invested in another search engine with “Human Search” they didn’t see the wooow effect in gloofi just yet. Well, at least that was honest but the site they invested in is under a bad star, but we will see!

Than, a friend told me about this real estate investor which has no clue about Internet business but we arranged a meeting. He was all blown away and said “We will do this”. 2 hours later he talked to a banker and all was gone again…”To risky”!

After all, I think if you can do it on your own and if you are able to get the community behind it, you can start without investment. Just built the solution in your spare time and open it up for everybody to use. The time you waste with investors is often not worth it, only if you have enough money to travel and enough time to built nice, useless Business Plans with good numbers in them.

Get the site out and see if investors come to your door rather than spending time and money to get investors before hand, because if you are a developer, you should focus on your strong suit and not on something you fall short.

That is why I decided to bring gloofi.com online in the first week of February 2008, without investors!

Best,

Martin

gloofi is adding some more unique search functions!

Hello all,

sorry for not adding a blog lately but there was so much going on with gloofi that it was nearly impossible to do other work. Hundreds of Alpha user requests and many questions about gloofi arrived in my inbox over the last 2 month. Most or all of the questions and answers are very positive. Everybody likes the idea and is excited about what the possibilities of gloofi are.

And again, gloofi is adding some more functions to its current release before going live.

An all new search “Sticky Bar”!?!

Have you ever searched for something and found several sites that might be what you are looking for but you are still looking or still searching other possibilities and you do not want to Bookmark each one of them since you are not finished searching yet. The gloofi “Sticky Bar” allows you to add items from the result to a temporary Bar that opens up on the right of the result and shows all the “Sticky” items on there. After you have added as many as you like to the “Sticky Bar” you can go to them one by one and compare the items without leaving gloofi!

Please see a screenshot of that function how it looks in the Search Result:

And here how you can browse through the items by having the Sticky Bar next to the Web Page.

I will post more Info soon and hope to open the site in December;-)

Best,

Martin

Personalized Search result

Hello all,

today I want you to show the gloofi “Personalized Search Result” that shows only one Item at a time.

I know, this is totally against what others are doing, as they usually want to show more results with less information, but when you use the “Personalized Search Result”, you can make a much better decision if the Item you are seeing is really what you are looking for so you do not click on old, outdated or useless links.

So, how does this work?

First, you can save search settings that are used any time you use the “Personalized Search Result”, including Semantic Search, Human Search or according to your last searches. The result can be many pages but only one is displayed at a time.

By using the Keyboard “Up” and “Down” Keys you can navigate very easy and fast through the result. The text found is more specific and the information below the found text shows links to and from the page as well as what Category the Item is in, what Groups it belongs to and how many Votes and Comments it has. Furthermore, by hitting the space bar the Real Web Page of the found Item will be displayed below the result, so you can browse the result and see the found pages at the same time.

By clicking on the Icons below the result you can send the link via email, preview comments, write comments, or preview pictures, videos and maps.

gloofi has many ways displaying and changing the search result, so go to www.gloofi.comand get an ALPHA account and let me know what you like or don’t like about gloofi.

gloofi is in Alpha now

Finally,

gloofi is ready to go in Alpha version.

Still many things that needs to be done but overall the site is functioning. You can go to www.gloofi.com and request a username and password for an Alpha login. Than you can add content, approve content or just see how all the unique functions work on gloofi. Also, newly added Semantic Search features and a one of a kind Personalized Search with soon to be added Global Search Collaboration Widget is online now.

Search as we know it today will be gone as users are in control of the content and therefore OLD and UNUSABLE content will be gone. Just yesterday I used Google again to search for “world wide daily Internet search queries” and I got only 10 year old pages telling me about HotBot, AltaVista and Excite!!! I am tired of this nonsense and that is why I want you to be involved to make it better.

In gloofi you have the chance to vote for sites and each click and time you spend on a site is counted to come up with a more “personal” algorithm for ranking the sites. This algorithm will eliminate those unwanted and out of date sites and will provide the most accurate and up to date result there is. Even the newly Beta Version of “MyLifeSearch” has the same issue as the OLD guys as that search engine relies on the start index of one of those OLD search engines, so they will find the same old pages.

Go there and check it out. Many enhancements will be made shortly to provide the best search there is.

Some comparison between gloofi and other search engines

Hello all,

yesterday I found a new article about Mahalo at Techcrunch and I had to check it out. Go to http://www.mahalo.com/ and see for yourself to make up your mind. The following blog by PassingNotes.com hammers it down as shit!

Also anounced this week was new MyLifeSearch, check out the Techcrunch blog about this. Nobody knows what it is or what it can do, but they already got some buzz.

Well, I do not have that buzz but I am sure that gloofi would easily surpass each one of those contestants and might even come close to some bigger guys like Google, Yahoo! or MSN.

Why?

Here are some quick comparisons:

	Google	Yahoo!	MSN	Mahalo	gloofi
Page Ranking	Unique and proven automatic Google algorithm	Some type of ranking similar to Google	Some type of ranking similar to Google	No ranking!!!	Very complex ranking, considering Links, traffic, hits, user rating, bookmarking, social linking and more
How get pages entered into search index	Mainly through automatic crawling	Automatic crawling	Automatic crawling	All hand made by specified personnel	Hand entered by ANY user plus automatic crawling
Updating of search index	Pages are updated automatically between 1 day and 4 weeks	Pages are updated automatically between 1 day and 4 weeks	Pages are updated automatically between 1 day and 4 weeks	No automatic update	Pages are updated automatically between 30 minutes and 4 weeks (Regulated by users) plus immediate push technology
Saving used searches	Yes, but have to log on	No	No	No	Yes, access able through the “My gloofi” Menu at any time
Marking unwanted pages	No	No	No	No	Yes, you can mark pages as positive or negative so you do not click on pages you don’t like
Sending Links from search result via email	No	No	No	Yes, but only for the Mahalo page	Yes, for any link found in the search result to send to   friends
Bookmarks	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes, easily access able through the “My gloofi” menu
Voting for results	No	No	No	No	Yes, plus entering comments for each entry
Creating Item Groups	No	No	No	No	Yes, ANY entry can be grouped together by users for better results
Notes and Tags for Item	No	No	No	No	Any user can save notes and tags for each entry, only seen by the user
					Well, so much more…

I will open the site by the end of June in an Alpha version for you to get feedback. I also will reward each user for entering sites to the system by allowing to receive shares for the first million pages, because it is you, the users that make a site successful and so you should get something back;-)

OK, I will also upload a couple of videos soon about the current features so you can see, that Google and Co. is not the only way to search for items.

gloofi….search, find, connect!

gloofi heading on the big and small search engines!

Hello all,

Soon you will see an all new way to search the web.

End of July I will open up gloofi.com to the public in a first Alpha test run. gloofi will be the first “Web 2.0″ search engine there is. It does not solely rely on algorithm but more on users input. You are in control of what sites are indexed, what quality ranking they have and how they are displayed for your convenience. There are tools to send messages right on the search result, vote for entries and group them for better search results.

You decide whether the searches or your site hits are saved or not and with a never before seen super fast log-in for returning users, customizing your results have never been easier.

Real time indexing and updating is in your hands. Your Website can push via XML any second the updated data onto the gloofi server, even if your site is fully dynamic or AJAX driven. You can tell gloofi what Tags you want for the sites indexed and choose an update interval of your liking.

With many never before seen features representing in a search engine, gloofi will fight against Goliaths and Davids in the same field and show them that search can be personal. It is not about the algorithms it is about the users, about YOU.

See you real soon.

Martin

Introducing some unique search functions

As said in my first blog, this search engine has functions never before seen in any search engine. It gives you, the user much more possibilities than any other search engine out there.

For an example, you will see at time of the search result is displayed, what rating each item has and how many comments have been written for it. You can vote right at the result page or read and write comments for the item. You can send it via email or bookmark it in one of your favorite social bookmark sites. You can mark it as “positive” or “negative” as a hint for you in case you find that page again in a result so you do not click on that “bad” page over and over again. You see when you have visited the page last and can get a list of all search results and pages in specified period of times. Furthermore, you can write your own notes and tags for each entry in the search engine, only assessable for you.

There is much, much more but for now I will just show you some screenshots and you can decide if this is something you would think is a great idea. If so, please let me know as I want to bring the page online as soon as possible.

If you have any comments, ideas or questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Thanks,

Martin

gloofi…search, find, connect!

How many times have you searched on Google, Yahoo and others and not found what you are looking for?
How many times did you get millions of results and the information you were interested is on page 563?
How many times did you think “Why is my page not showing anywhere?”?
Well, I had all those issues and so I thought I want to change all that by creating a new type of search engine. What is so new about it? It has many things I think are unique.

1. Users provide the data (Web Pages).
2. Users vote for pages.
3. Users leave comments for pages.
4. Users save notes and tags for pages.
5. Users select pages as positive/negative to not click on the same “useless” page over and over again.
6. Users can see when they have last looked at specific pages or get a list of all clicked on pages.
7. Users are able to link to and from pages found in results.
8. Search is international as tags are being translated to other languages.
9. Searches are performed real time on different sites (ebay, google base…)
10. Results can be reduced by categories or type.
11. Results can be reduced by “Human Searches”.
12. Sites can be dropped as SPAM.
13. Small previews can be seen at search result.
14. Sites can be Bookmarked, Ranked or sent via email.

There is much more, like setting up Jump Words, adding Tags, declaring adult content or use your previous searches, bookmarks easy in the “My gloofi” menu.

I thought, why not change the way we search and let you, the user be involved in it.

Soon, you can go to http://www.gloofi.com/ (global find) and check out what I have created so far (This is not final, so do not compare it to any other search engine at this time;-).

See you soon….at gloofi.com