The Seekum blog is now going to be at:
http://www.seekum.com/blog

We wanted the flexibility of having wordpress on our servers. All posts and comments have been moved except for this one. We hope to be seeing you there!

We have noticed a tidalwave of traffic today, and Seekum in general was feeling the pain of the extra traffic. We modified some of our core search code to make it leaner and meaner, and we also will be adding some more servers over the week. As many new users signed up today, I would like to welcome them and apologize for today’s overall performance. It is working much faster tonight now that the code has been updated, and look for even more improvement this comming week.

Tonight I posted a slight interface change. I have had some concerns voiced to me about the inteface namely a compaint about the readability of the content. The descripitions were a little tough on the eyes. So with a dash of CSS and some color changes we improved the site readability, and a few other things as well. First the URL has been modified to be a little smaller, and a different color. The main description is a tad bit bigger with a different color as well. The title is also bigger with the same color for the link. I also changed the word “votes” to “WeRank.” As for the future many more changes will be comming. Some new features will be due this week, and the interface is still up for discussion. We also will be adding Ajax in the comming months to decrease the need for refreshing the page.

I have noticed that when Adsense does not display results based on the search. John Sena ads seem to come up. Many World Wrestling Entertainment ads also come up. After looking at all of the content on the site, I’m stumped. Anyone know why this could be happening?

I took some time to interview with Chris Brogan which he has posted on his blog. I hope that you enjoy.

We added a new feature today that allows users to search by looking at new links only, top to bottom or bottom to top. We believe that this will help users identify new links to help vote on, and allow older links that have plumeted to the bottom to be redeemed.

Over the past couple of weeks we have implented many fixes to the Seekum search experience. We have fixed various problems with tagging including multiple word tags, tagging when signed in, and have implented a similar tags feature. We also have improved the look for the firefox browser. There are still some kinks, but we are working on it. Sorry for any problems that you might be having on the firefox browser. Currently IE, and Safari are both fully working. In the next few days even more fixes will be worked out with a few feature enhancements as well. If you have any ideas on how we can make Seekum better just let us know.

We heard through the grapevine a.k.a. TechCrunch about a new search engine called Gravee. We feel that they are solving a large problem that Google has begun to have more and more. Content providers don’t like search engines crawling their site only to profit from the content. Gravee is trying to solve this problem by allowing site owners to share a piece of the advertising pie. Seems pretty smart to us. Keep it up Michael your doing fantastic.

We have added another small update today…Tag search. You can now search for pages just using tags. Tags on pages are now displayed as links. When you click them you will see other pages with the same tags. We will be adding even more functions very soon relating to tagging. We feel that allowing user to tag pages easily will help with the overall search results.

We have added a couple new features including Tagging, and Discussions. There were also a few bug fixes. As always if you find a bug you may comment on our blog, or let us know at bugs @ seekum.com We will work hard to squash them. We have integrated tagging directly into the results. You may now tag pages which helps Seekum identify what the page is about and adds more pages per search query. We will be adding even more tagging functions in the future, but for now we will just stick to tagging pages themselves. We also added discussions. You can learn about discussions here. Basically discussions allow our users to talk about the search results and help each other make them better. More features will be on there way.

Another small update was added today, with a few more coming most likely this week. I actually had the honor of working on code this week with my new ipod nano. The ipod nano is for serious programmers that need an mp3 player that is very small so they concentrate on what matters…the code. JK. Seriously though we added a search box underneath the logo on the results pages which if you have been using Seekum you will know is very useful. Look for some major feature enhancements this week, and if you are interested in really learning about the nano just let me know I love mine.

I had a seriously good long look at Wink today. The people at Wink really have put something interesting together. Wink is a social search engine that focuses on bookmarking technologies to gather interesting results to the top. Wink unlike Seekum separates results based on whether they come from Google, or Users. We at Seekum allow all search results to come up, and allow our users to sort through the best of them. Wink is a pretty cool way of organizing pages, and lets you add tags to regular google results.

We have made a few improvements to the site. First of all numerical numbers were placed along the sides of the search results. The actual web page is now displayed so a user can know where the link will take them. i.e. underneath a description you will see something like www.example.com/examplepage.html. We have also added a few usability enhancements and bug fixes. As always let us know about any bugs you find so that we can work any kinks out. We will keep you posted.

Seekum is now up and running! You can sign up for a free account on our sign up page. We are looking forward to building the next great search engine. What do we need? We need lots of users adding pages to Seekum’s database, and lots of users voting on results for search terms. Well check out what we got so far. Note the site will undergo massive changes in the next week alone.

Our interface is still being developed. If you want to see an extremely early version of the Seekum interface look no further. Here you go! Keep in mind that this is not the search engine at work, but just a mock up of the UI. Also we are trying to degoogilize it, but we need some suggestions. We find that other search implementations are really ugly.

There are quite a few search companies out there. Though thought to be in the thousands only several are relevant. I use Google every day, and I also use Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and Clusty. Yet there seems to be something missing. Although these engines seem to display relevant results most of the time it seams as if the results are becoming more cluttered, and less relevant. Seekum will be joining Wink and several other new engines in defining a new search engine style based on user input. Seekum will be quite different then Wink, and we will talk on that more later.