New Mirror at www.surrch.eu

I’ve been working on putting up an independent wordpress host over at www.surrch.eu. For those of you who have this address bookmarked and enjoy reading here, that’s no problem you can continue to do so because all content is going to be mirrored here.

I may take a little time to move it across but nothing extravagant – if you’re desperate to read up asap then Surrch.eu is the place to go to for now because that’s where I’ll be posting to first. In a few days I’ll move across Surrch.com as well.

Surrch Pre Release Available

I’ve uploaded a small pre release version of Surrch to the internets. It’s available for all readers to have a go with and hopefully give me some feedback on. The basis is very simple, but it’s hopefully an eye opener to what you can achieve with a very simple desktop application.

http://www.surrch.com/Standalone.zip is the url, there’s a basic readme included – but if you have any questions about this very early iteration of the first semantic desktop engine then please do email me at phillmidwinter@hotmail.com or phill@home-james.co.uk.

Failing that, then just leave me a message in the comments, I’ll definitely read and get back to you. Thanks.

EDIT: OK, as i’ve had a lot more non tech people looking at this than I realised would be around I’m going to put up a file with all the installers you need to have before you put this on your machine (not much actually – will be installed automatically in beta of course).

http://www.surrch.com/Standalone.zip

http://www.surrch.com/surrch-pre.zip

GUI design started today, so I’m going to be taking a break on it for a little while – expect some further SEO posts in the meantime.

Redefining Search as Surrch

I’ve been working hard on moving the search engine to desktop this past week, and can finally say that the crawler code is working and indexing as quickly as that with a full MySQL database and dedicated machine.

I’d love to see some benchmarks run on it to see exactly how speedy the index is but no time just yet.

Recently I’ve been through some of the applications we’re planning to make available over the next few months, and the direction we’re going to take on such crucial matters as Open Source and outside developer interaction. I can fill you in now on some of the planned uses for the semantic layer.

Googe? Valentine’s Logo

A number of people today are slowly noticing a slight oddity with the Google logo, we’re all used to them changing it for special occasions… but can you see exactly what the difference is today that’s slightly out of the norm?

No prizes for guessing, but there are some theories as to exactly why: feel free to post your explanations in the comments!

Now You Can Have A Personal Search Engine

I realise that I the semantic engine was supposed to be up last week – but unfortunately I hit a few snags back there:

• I was unable to get the server resources I needed, namely a windows based server on a backbone internet connection.
• I realised that there was little point in releasing a web based demo, when I constantly talk about the advantages of personal search.

I have more than enough bandwidth and facilities to distribute a personal search engine, I’m working on integrating the Firebird embedded database so that nobody is going to have to deal with any fussy MySQL issues (which is currently what the index is using). Once the embedded database has been successfully integrated, you’ll be able to use the search engine to index topics of your choosing with an intelligent semantic engine powering those choices, as well as your searching of indexed content.

I can’t promise built in web server at this stage to search from, it’s not something I’ve really looked into but you will be able to search directly from the application itself.

If you’re planning on checking it out, the only requirements are Windows and the .Net 2 Framework. No, i’m not a devil worshipper, this product was originally developed in PHP in fact – and there are plans to port using Mono for Linux at a later date.

Search spelt differently

I have taken the time to put together what I’d consider an Alpha version of the search, semantic and NLP (natural language processing) techniques I’ve been talking about to give an idea of the power that’s going to be available to us within the year most likely.

The New Science of Inbound Linking : Part II

Generating traffic to your website is often the easy part. To have your traffic return frequently, building an active community for discussion is where it gets tricky.

I talk about trying to write originally, and bring up some ways for us all to interact more intelligently with our audiences (however limited they may be). This post sponsored by Original Thought.