If you can't make it to Mountain View, California in eight days, get ready to watch selected sessions streamed live online (thanks to Justin.tv). This isn't going to be talking-heads pushing their products on stage, this is going to be a high-value brainstorming, networking and collaborative learning. Check out the companies below; they are bringing financial support to this important gathering to talk together about the future of the internet.

Now check out these fabulous sponsors.

Enterprise

TIBCO

TIBCO's technology digitized Wall Street in the '80s with its event-driven "Information Bus" software, which helped make real-time business a strategic differentiator in the '90s. Today, TIBCO's infrastructure software gives customers the ability to constantly innovate by connecting applications and data in a service-oriented architecture, streamlining activities through business process management, and giving people the information and intelligence tools they need to make faster and smarter decisions.

Filtering

PostRank

PostRank offers a website and developer tools that make sense of social engagement data on the web. Want to discover the bloggers with the most reader-engagement or the blog posts that are hottest, in any niche? PostRank will do that for you, in real time. Whether you're a very large company or an individual blogger, PostRank can do things for you that no one else can. We at ReadWriteWeb like and use PostRank a lot.

Search

Faroo

Faroo is a P2P real-time search engine that combines explicit and implicit data to power its indexing and ranking technologies. The company specializes in difficult real-time analysis of international content, like breaking up long strings of Chinese characters for text analysis.

Publishing

WordPress

WordPress is one of the world's leading blog publishing services and software. WordPress made free real-time updates from millions of blogs available last month.

Aggregation

Nomee

Nomee is an application to manage the most important parts of your digital life. The Nomee desktop client aggregates activity updates from more than 120 different sites that your friends and favorite public figures are using, filters those streams and lets you view media in a beautiful interface.

These sponsors have made an important move in supporting the Real-Time Web Summit so please check out their products. If you're interested in sponsoring the event as well, it will be worth your while. Contact sales@readwriteweb.com for info.

Please join us for this important conversation on October 15th in Mountain View, California and streaming live online.

We want to take a moment to highlight five international companies that will be at the Summit. We really appreciate the distance they are traveling to help make this event an important one. You can learn about more highlighted participants signed up so far on this page and you can sign up to join us here.

Faroo (UK)

Faroo is a P2P real-time search engine that combines explicit and implicit data to power its indexing and ranking technologies. The company specializes in difficult real-time analysis of international content, like breaking up long strings of Chinese characters for text analysis. Faroo is also a sponsor of the Real-Time Web Summit, so they are helping it happen as well as helping its international relevance!

PostRank (Canada)

PostRank provides social media analytics on top of traditional web content analytics. We've written about PostRank over and over again here (we're going to again later today) and we use their technology every day. We're very excited that PostRank is going so strong that it's a major sponsor of the Summit as well.

Mendeley (UK)

Mendeley Research Networks is a fascinating real-time citation tracking, recommendation and organization tool for scientific research papers. It's backed by founders of Last.fm and Skype. It's like Last.fm for scientific research. The company believes it is on a pace to have the largest online repository of academic articles in the world sometime next year.

Twingly (Sweden)

Twingly offers blog search, trackback discovery and comment aggregation in real time. The company already has a thriving business providing real-time inbound links for European newspapers and just launched a new product called Twingly Channels this week. (Watch this space for a review later today.)

Sysomos (Canada)

Some of these companies are bringing multiple representatives and we hope that even more international participants will sign up in the next two weeks leading up to the event. To register to join these companies and many more at the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, please visit this link. Feeling unable to make it? Make sure to put the event down on your calendar anyway, we'll be broadcasting select discussion sessions live via Justin.tv. See you on the 15th!

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision-makers. We have several innovative new features in our sponsor packages that we'd love to tell you about. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

Skip to info about: Mashery: API management services | Rackspace: cloud computing experts | Aplus.net: Web hosting | Crowd Science: demographic data | Hakia: semantic search | Domain.ME: .me domain registrar | Codero: Managed hosting | Faroo: Real-time search | Groupsite: Social collaboration | Media Temple and SixApart: our hosts and blogging software

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

Sign up to get demographic data from Crowd Science.

Thank Crowd Science on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

Thank Mashery on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. Rackspace Cloud Hosting offers a suite of services which combines a scalable web and application hosting platform (Cloud Sites) with a cloud storage solution (Cloud Files) and on demand server instances (Cloud Servers). The addition of SliceHost a popular cloud computing and hosting provider and JungleDisk, a favorite online backup service that supports Cloud files, makes the Rackspace Cloud a powerful cloud hosting solution.

Explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Thank Rackspace on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, dedicated server, managed hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Thank Aplus.net on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Hakia

Hakia is a semantic search engine. It delivers a new search experience based on focus, clarity, and credibility. You can compare Hakia to Google and Bing here.

Hakia currently powers the contextual advertising link engine at ReadWriteWeb with its semantic advertising module, Contexa. Contexa provides page-level contextual analysis (in this case, of blog posts) on the fly and outputs keywords that represent the meaning of the page along with their meaning score. The Contexa system then matches ReadWriteWeb sponsors' requirements with the contextual representation of the page to provide relevant ads for readers. Contexa is offered as a service and can be integrated into any ad system.

Learn more about Contexa.

Thank Hakia on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Domain.ME

.Me is a true phenomenon among TLDs. With its unforgettable meaning and limitless word combination possibilities, .Me gives a truly personal tone to your domain name. If you are looking for a name that speaks for itself .Me is your best choice. Let .Me speak for your online business or personal blog.

.Me potential is enormous and it simply asks for you to be creative and coin the name that suits you best. If you have a great, original idea for a domain name, register .Me before it's taken. To check out other ideas, explore the world of .Me.

Thank Domain.ME on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Codero

Codero is a former division of Aplus.net. Codero became a separate entity focusing on dedicated and managed hosting solutions after the acquisition of Aplus.net's shared hosting, web design, and domain registration services by Hostopia. "Codero" stands for collaboration, engagement, focus, reliability, and flexibility. It means a more secure computing experience for email, shopping, and data transfer.

Codero is a dedicated and managed hosting company focused on the real needs of today's small and mid-sized businesses. The company believes in supporting robust websites, storefronts and online communities that will grow and adapt.

Faroo

Faroo is a peer-to-peer Web search engine that has no centralized index and crawler. Each web page visited by users is automatically included into the distributed index. Search results are ranked based on distributed usage statistics of Web pages visited by Faroo users, which leads to more democratic, user-centric ranking.

Faroo protects the privacy of users by encrypting search queries and anonymizing its distributed architecture. The decentralized peer-to-peer architecture scales with Internet growth and requires no infrastructure or operational cost.

Thank Faroo on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Groupsite

Groupsite.com is a self-serve platform for creating social collaboration communities called Groupsites. Groupsites combine the most useful features of social networking and collaboration tools enabling groups large and small to communicate, share and network. Groupsites are currently in use by more than 30,000 groups as user communities, intranets, member communities, team workgroups and social networks. Each Groupsite can be branded and customized and includes discussion forums, calendaring, file sharing, member profiles (professional or social), activity feeds and full-featured sub-groups among other group-centric features.

Sign up and create a free Groupsite in minutes.

Thank Groupsite on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Our Gracious Hosts and Blogging Software

ReadWriteWeb is hosted by Media Temple and is published using SixApart's Movable Type.

If you've ever wondered what ReadWriteWeb looks like behind the scenes, or if you've never seen the Movable Type publishing interface - that's it on the left. We recently upgraded to MT 4.23, which is the latest version. We got onto this release as soon as it was available - in fact our contacts at Six Apart emailed the actual code to us before it was up on their website. That's customer service for you!

Thank Media Temple and SixApart on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you'll stop by their sites and see what they've got to offer.

Have you got a smart company that could use some more visits by the sophisticated readers of a blog like ReadWriteWeb's? Drop us a line and let's talk.

Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support!

Many of the recent real-time search engines are based on Twitter. They use the URLs enclosed in tweets to discover and rank new and popular pages. In this post, we'll take a look at the quantitative structure of the underlying foundation, to determine the feasibility and limits of this approach. We'll also look at how to overcome these limitations by using the implicit Web.

But it also shows another fact: that those people who contribute publish an even smaller fraction of the information they know.

Both of these factors account for the huge difference in efficiency between implicit and explicit voting. Explicit voting, as the name implies, requires users to actively express interest in a page; for example, by tweeting a link. Implicit voting requires no deliberate action on the part of the user; a simple visit to a Web page would count as a vote.

A Quick Calculation

Twitter now has 44.5 million users and delivers about 20,000 tweets per minute. If every second tweet contained a URL, that would be 10,000 URLs shared per minute.

According to Nielsen, the number of visited Web pages per person per month is 1,591.

Twitter's 44.5 million users visit 1.6 million Web pages per minute and explicitly vote for only 10,000 per minute. That is to say, implicit voting and discovery generates 160 times more attention-getting data than explicit voting.

This means that 280,000 implicit votes could provide as much information as 44.5 million explicit votes. Put another way, as many Web pages are implicitly discovered during one day as there are Web pages explicitly discovered during half a year.

This dramatically shows the limits of Web searches based solely on explicit votes and mentions, searches whose potential could be leveraged by using the implicit Web.

Beyond the Mainstream

This becomes even more important if we look beyond mainstream topics and the English language. Then it becomes simply impossible to achieve the critical mass of explicit votes needed to have statistically significant attention-based ranking or popularity-based discovery.

Time and Votes Are Precious

Time is also a crucial factor, especially with real-time search. We want to be able to discover new pages as soon as possible. And we want to assess almost instantly how popular those new pages are. If we fail to reliably rank a page quickly, it will get buried in the noise. But the goals of speed and votes conflict with the fact that the number of votes a page gets is inversely proportional to the time it took to be viewed.

Again a much higher frequency of implicit votes would help.

Relevance vs. Equality

We could also improve on explicit votes. But we should not treat them as being equal because they are not. We trust some of them more than others, and our interests overlap with some more than others, for the very same reason that we follow some people and not others. This helps us get more value and meaning out of that very first vote.

FAROO is moving in this direction by combining real-time search with a peer-to-peer infrastructure.

A Holistic Approach

Discovering topical, fresh, and novel information has always been an important aspect of search. But the perception of what "recent" is has changed dramatically with the popularity of services such as Twitter, and it has led to the emergence of real-time search engines.

Real-time search shouldn't be a silo, but rather should be part of a unified and distributed approach to Web search.

The era of purely document-centered search is over. The equally important roles of user and conversation, both as targets of search and as contributors to discovery and ranking, should be reflected in the infrastructure.

A Distributed Infrastructure

As long as both source and recipient of information are distributed, then the natural design of search is distributed, too. P2P offers an efficient alternative to the ubiquitous concentration and centralization of search we find today.

A peer-to-peer client allows every visited Web page to be implicitly discovered and ranked according to attention received. This is important, because the majority of pages in a real-time search are in the long tail. They appear once or not at all in the Twitter stream and can't be discovered or ranked through explicit votes.

With real-time search, the amount of indexed data is limited, because only recent documents (those that have gained a lot of attention and a high reputation) are accounted for in the index. This allows for a centralized infrastructure at a moderate cost. But as soon as search moves beyond the short head of real-time search and aims to fully index the long tail of the entire Web, then a distributed peer-to-peer architecture provides a huge cost advantage.

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision-makers. We have several innovative new features in our sponsor packages that we'd love to tell you about. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

Skip to info about: Mashery: API management services | Rackspace: cloud computing experts | Aplus.net: Web hosting | Crowd Science: demographic data | Hakia: semantic search | Domain.ME: .me domain registrar | Codero: Managed hosting | Faroo: Real-time search | Groupsite: Social collaboration | Media Temple and SixApart: our hosts and blogging software

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

Sign up to get demographic data from Crowd Science.

Thank Crowd Science on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

Thank Mashery on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. Rackspace Cloud Hosting offers a suite of services which combines a scalable web and application hosting platform (Cloud Sites) with a cloud storage solution (Cloud Files) and on demand server instances (Cloud Servers). The addition of SliceHost a popular cloud computing and hosting provider and JungleDisk, a favorite online backup service that supports Cloud files, makes the Rackspace Cloud a powerful cloud hosting solution.

Explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Thank Rackspace on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, dedicated server, managed hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Thank Aplus.net on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Hakia

Hakia is a semantic search engine. It delivers a new search experience based on focus, clarity, and credibility. You can compare Hakia to Google and Bing here.

Hakia currently powers the contextual advertising link engine at ReadWriteWeb with its semantic advertising module, Contexa. Contexa provides page-level contextual analysis (in this case, of blog posts) on the fly and outputs keywords that represent the meaning of the page along with their meaning score. The Contexa system then matches ReadWriteWeb sponsors' requirements with the contextual representation of the page to provide relevant ads for readers. Contexa is offered as a service and can be integrated into any ad system.

Learn more about Contexa.

Thank Hakia on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Domain.ME

.Me is a true phenomenon among TLDs. With its unforgettable meaning and limitless word combination possibilities, .Me gives a truly personal tone to your domain name. If you are looking for a name that speaks for itself .Me is your best choice. Let .Me speak for your online business or personal blog.

.Me potential is enormous and it simply asks for you to be creative and coin the name that suits you best. If you have a great, original idea for a domain name, register .Me before it's taken. To check out other ideas, explore the world of .Me.

Thank Domain.ME on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Codero

Codero is a former division of Aplus.net. Codero became a separate entity focusing on dedicated and managed hosting solutions after the acquisition of Aplus.net's shared hosting, web design, and domain registration services by Hostopia. "Codero" stands for collaboration, engagement, focus, reliability, and flexibility. It means a more secure computing experience for email, shopping, and data transfer.

Codero is a dedicated and managed hosting company focused on the real needs of today's small and mid-sized businesses. The company believes in supporting robust websites, storefronts and online communities that will grow and adapt.

Faroo

Faroo is a peer-to-peer Web search engine that has no centralized index and crawler. Each web page visited by users is automatically included into the distributed index. Search results are ranked based on distributed usage statistics of Web pages visited by Faroo users, which leads to more democratic, user-centric ranking.

Faroo protects the privacy of users by encrypting search queries and anonymizing its distributed architecture. The decentralized peer-to-peer architecture scales with Internet growth and requires no infrastructure or operational cost.

Thank Faroo on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Groupsite

Groupsite.com is a self-serve platform for creating social collaboration communities called Groupsites. Groupsites combine the most useful features of social networking and collaboration tools enabling groups large and small to communicate, share and network. Groupsites are currently in use by more than 30,000 groups as user communities, intranets, member communities, team workgroups and social networks. Each Groupsite can be branded and customized and includes discussion forums, calendaring, file sharing, member profiles (professional or social), activity feeds and full-featured sub-groups among other group-centric features.

Sign up and create a free Groupsite in minutes.

Thank Groupsite on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Our Gracious Hosts and Blogging Software

ReadWriteWeb is hosted by Media Temple and is published using SixApart's Movable Type.

If you've ever wondered what ReadWriteWeb looks like behind the scenes, or if you've never seen the Movable Type publishing interface - that's it on the left. We recently upgraded to MT 4.23, which is the latest version. We got onto this release as soon as it was available - in fact our contacts at Six Apart emailed the actual code to us before it was up on their website. That's customer service for you!

Thank Media Temple and SixApart on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you'll stop by their sites and see what they've got to offer.

Have you got a smart company that could use some more visits by the sophisticated readers of a blog like ReadWriteWeb's? Drop us a line and let's talk.

Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support!

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision-makers. We have several innovative new features in our sponsor packages that we'd love to tell you about. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

Skip to info about: Mashery: API management services | Rackspace: cloud computing experts | Aplus.net: Web hosting | Crowd Science: demographic data | Hakia: semantic search | Domain.ME: .me domain registrar | Codero: Managed hosting | Faroo: Real-time search | Groupsite: Social collaboration | Media Temple and SixApart: our hosts and blogging software

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

Sign up to get demographic data from Crowd Science.

Thank Crowd Science on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

Thank Mashery on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. Rackspace Cloud Hosting offers a suite of services which combines a scalable web and application hosting platform (Cloud Sites) with a cloud storage solution (Cloud Files) and on demand server instances (Cloud Servers). The addition of SliceHost a popular cloud computing and hosting provider and JungleDisk, a favorite online backup service that supports Cloud files, makes the Rackspace Cloud a powerful cloud hosting solution.

Explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Thank Rackspace on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, dedicated server, managed hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Thank Aplus.net on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Hakia

Hakia is a semantic search engine. It delivers a new search experience based on focus, clarity, and credibility. You can compare Hakia to Google and Bing here.

Hakia currently powers the contextual advertising link engine at ReadWriteWeb with its semantic advertising module, Contexa. Contexa provides page-level contextual analysis (in this case, of blog posts) on the fly and outputs keywords that represent the meaning of the page along with their meaning score. The Contexa system then matches ReadWriteWeb sponsors' requirements with the contextual representation of the page to provide relevant ads for readers. Contexa is offered as a service and can be integrated into any ad system.

Learn more about Contexa.

Thank Hakia on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Domain.ME

.Me is a true phenomenon among TLDs. With its unforgettable meaning and limitless word combination possibilities, .Me gives a truly personal tone to your domain name. If you are looking for a name that speaks for itself .Me is your best choice. Let .Me speak for your online business or personal blog.

.Me potential is enormous and it simply asks for you to be creative and coin the name that suits you best. If you have a great, original idea for a domain name, register .Me before it's taken. To check out other ideas, explore the world of .Me.

Thank Domain.ME on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Codero

Codero is a former division of Aplus.net. Codero became a separate entity focusing on dedicated and managed hosting solutions after the acquisition of Aplus.net's shared hosting, web design, and domain registration services by Hostopia. "Codero" stands for collaboration, engagement, focus, reliability, and flexibility. It means a more secure computing experience for email, shopping, and data transfer.

Codero is a dedicated and managed hosting company focused on the real needs of today's small and mid-sized businesses. The company believes in supporting robust websites, storefronts and online communities that will grow and adapt.

Faroo

Faroo is a peer-to-peer Web search engine that has no centralized index and crawler. Each web page visited by users is automatically included into the distributed index. Search results are ranked based on distributed usage statistics of Web pages visited by Faroo users, which leads to more democratic, user-centric ranking.

Faroo protects the privacy of users by encrypting search queries and anonymizing its distributed architecture. The decentralized peer-to-peer architecture scales with Internet growth and requires no infrastructure or operational cost.

Thank Faroo on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Groupsite

Groupsite.com is a self-serve platform for creating social collaboration communities called Groupsites. Groupsites combine the most useful features of social networking and collaboration tools enabling groups large and small to communicate, share and network. Groupsites are currently in use by more than 30,000 groups as user communities, intranets, member communities, team workgroups and social networks. Each Groupsite can be branded and customized and includes discussion forums, calendaring, file sharing, member profiles (professional or social), activity feeds and full-featured sub-groups among other group-centric features.

Sign up and create a free Groupsite in minutes.

Thank Groupsite on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Our Gracious Hosts and Blogging Software

ReadWriteWeb is hosted by Media Temple and is published using SixApart's Movable Type.

If you've ever wondered what ReadWriteWeb looks like behind the scenes, or if you've never seen the Movable Type publishing interface - that's it on the left. We recently upgraded to MT 4.23, which is the latest version. We got onto this release as soon as it was available - in fact our contacts at Six Apart emailed the actual code to us before it was up on their website. That's customer service for you!

Thank Media Temple and SixApart on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you'll stop by their sites and see what they've got to offer.

Have you got a smart company that could use some more visits by the sophisticated readers of a blog like ReadWriteWeb's? Drop us a line and let's talk.

Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support!

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision-makers. We have several innovative new features in our sponsor packages that we'd love to tell you about. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

Skip to info about: Mashery: API management services | Rackspace: cloud computing experts | Aplus.net: Web hosting | Crowd Science: demographic data | Hakia: semantic search | Domain.ME: .me domain registrar | Codero: Managed hosting | Faroo: Real-time search | Groupsite: Social collaboration | Media Temple and SixApart: our hosts and blogging software

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

You can sign up to get demographic data by clicking here.

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. Rackspace Cloud Hosting offers a suite of services which combines a scalable web and application hosting platform (Cloud Sites) with a cloud storage solution (Cloud Files) and on demand server instances (Cloud Servers). The addition of SliceHost a popular cloud computing and hosting provider and JungleDisk, a favorite online backup service that supports Cloud files, makes the Rackspace Cloud a powerful cloud hosting solution.

Click here to explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, dedicated server, managed hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Hakia

Hakia is a semantic search engine. It delivers a new search experience based on focus, clarity, and credibility. You can compare Hakia to Google and Bing here.

Hakia currently powers the contextual advertising link engine at ReadWriteWeb with its semantic advertising module, Contexa. Contexa provides page-level contextual analysis (in this case, of blog posts) on the fly and outputs keywords that represent the meaning of the page along with their meaning score. The Contexa system then matches ReadWriteWeb sponsors' requirements with the contextual representation of the page to provide relevant ads for readers. Contexa is offered as a service and can be integrated into any ad system.

Learn more about Contexa by clicking here.

Domain.ME

.Me is a true phenomenon among TLDs. With its unforgettable meaning and limitless word combination possibilities, .Me gives a truly personal tone to your domain name. If you are looking for a name that speaks for itself .Me is your best choice. Let .Me speak for your online business or personal blog.

.Me potential is enormous and it simply asks for you to be creative and coin the name that suits you best. If you have a great, original idea for a domain name, register .Me before it's taken. To check out other ideas, explore the world of .Me.

Codero

Codero is a former division of Aplus.net. Codero became a separate entity focusing on dedicated and managed hosting solutions after the acquisition of Aplus.net's shared hosting, web design, and domain registration services by Hostopia. "Codero" stands for collaboration, engagement, focus, reliability, and flexibility. It means a more secure computing experience for email, shopping, and data transfer.

Codero is a dedicated and managed hosting company focused on the real needs of today's small and mid-sized businesses. The company believes in supporting robust websites, storefronts and online communities that will grow and adapt.

Faroo

Faroo is a peer-to-peer Web search engine that has no centralized index and crawler. Each web page visited by users is automatically included into the distributed index. Search results are ranked based on distributed usage statistics of Web pages visited by Faroo users, which leads to more democratic, user-centric ranking.

Faroo protects the privacy of users by encrypting search queries and anonymizing its distributed architecture. The decentralized peer-to-peer architecture scales with Internet growth and requires no infrastructure or operational cost.

Groupsite

Groupsites embody the Web's evolution into a social/collaborative medium by bringing together the most useful features of traditional websites, discussion forums, listservs, blogs, collaboration software and social networks.

With Groupsites, people from a wide range of professional and social groups within companies, communities, non-profits, families and more are now able to instantly and easily communicate, share, network. Best of all, basic Groupsites are free to create and can be setup to be public; completely private and secure; or somewhere in between.

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In terms of user experience, the gap between the major search engines and their alternatives continues to widen -- a lot. Google has been compared to a luxury liner that turns around very, very slowly, whereas the startups are speedboats that can turn (or innovate) on a dime. I guarantee that if you try any of these top 10 alternative search engines of 2008, you won't come away saying, "Hey, that was just like Google."

As evidence of just how much the landscape is changing, three of our top 10 products require one-time downloads: once thought to be the kiss of death when Google sits in wait. But AltSearchEngines thinks that 2009 will be the tipping point when the rewards outweigh the "risks," at least for power users. For everyone else: 2010. Faroo, KallOut, and Surf Canyon (and, again, Tazti) are all well worth leaving your comfort zone for.

How many of these 10 search tools had you used, seen, or even heard of before today? The latest data from Hitwise shows that the four major search engines get over 98% of all US search traffic; the rest, combined, get less than 2%. These wonderful inventions need and deserve more exposure, so do your part and take the time to try out each one! On that note, let's begin.

This is the ninth in ReadWriteWeb's series of top products of 2008:

• Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 International Products of 2008
• Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
• Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Real World Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 Digital Lifestyle Products of 2008

Note: these 10 search engines are listed alphabetically.

1. ChaCha

ChaCha, as a search tool, is human-powered, general, and mobile. There is no website, no search box, and no page witih a list of ten links. To use ChaCha, simply call 1-800-2ChaCha (1-800-224-2242) in the US, or send a text to 242242. When you call, leave your query just as you would any other voice-mail message, and hang up. Within 2 to 5 minutes, a human guide will have researched and texted you the answer. I used ChaCha with only my cheap cell phone when I was lost in New York City at midnight. And that's an important point: you can call ChaCha at any time with any question for any reason on any phone -- as long as that phone can receive text messages. And, aside from your carrier's incoming text fees, ChaCha is free. We recently reported on ChaCha over at AltSearchEngines.

2. Cooliris

2008 was the year when search visualization met the iPhone. Cooliris has already won one ReadWriteWeb award, making it onto the list of the Top 10 Consumer Apps of 2008. RWW wrote in that post, "Visual browsing is still coming into its own, but Cooliris is leading the charge in a way that consumers will embrace." We at ASE have been following Cooliris since its PicLens days. Following right behind are SearchMe and Viewzi. Each of these three visual search engines displays your search results beautifully and fluidly on your iPhone, but with different styles, so you might as well download all three and experiment. There is a demo video on each site.

3. Faroo

Alternative search engines need at least one thing that differentiates them from the major search engines. Faroo, for its part, turns your conception of search around 180 degrees. Instead of one giant company (say, Google) storing billions of web pages on thousands of servers at a cost of millions of dollars, Faroo, now in public beta, relies on the P2P (peer-to-peer) network, which connects Faroo members with each other through their PCs. The result is an organic-looking web that can grow as the Internet grows, but without the need for massive server farms. So, check out Faroo by downloading it here.

4. KallOut

KallOut was one of our favorite discoveries this year, as we noted in the ASE review. Once again, it's time to put away that image of a rectangular search box! It's 2008! With KallOut, you don't have to stop what you're doing and mess around with a toolbar, tab, or window. You simply drag your cursor over content with your mouse, and KallOut performs the search for you right there -- literally, right there. Download KallOut here, and then practice a bit until you get the hang of it. No, it's not a harder way to search; it's a more efficient way to search. You'll see.

5. Kosmix

Kosmix is, in a way, an evolution of the old meta search engines. Kosmix answers your query with a long tabloid-like page of results in every possible category you might want. There are multiple news sources; images from various sites; audio from SeeqPod; opinions from Omgili; video from Truveo; info from Mahalo and Snappyfingers; plus content from all of the major sources, such as eBay, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Just about everything! For every search query, you essentially get an on-the-fly multimedia encyclopedia laid out on one page. Kosmix recently came into a little money, too. (Disclosure: Kosmix is an AltSearchEngine sponsor.)

6. Mednar

We had no idea how many health search engines there really were until Hope Leman started covering them on AltSearchEngines. Mednar is one we're particularly fond of: "I am in jaw-dropping, stupefied awe at the general excellence of the products of his (CEO Abe Lederman's) firm. Anything that saves all of us time as we hunt for relevant data amidst overwhelming amounts of information on every conceivable aspect of disease day after day catches my attention, and it has been caught today by Mednar."

7. Quintura

When you search with Quintura, you'll see a two-dimensional tag cloud (i.e. not a list). The other words in the box are there to allow you to explore concepts related to your original query. See something you hadn't thought of? Click on it and the cloud re-orients itself around that new term. You can delete irrelevant terms as well. But don't worry, it also provides a traditional list for you, just in case. Quintura is now available in several language "flavors" as well! Content publishers should investigate Quintura for possible use on their sites. (Disclosure: Quintura is a sponsor of both AltSearchEngines and RWW.)

8. SeeqPod

Speaking with SeeqPod's CEO Kasian Franks, I was shocked, shocked, to learn that not everyone owns an iPhone! Apparently there are millions of people who have nice smart phones that run something called "Windows Mobile." Anyway, SeeqPod has been constantly improving its music search engine ever since we came across it. And now, it can be installed on millions of smart phones that use the Windows Mobile platform (v.6.0 or higher). This, as RWW noted the other day, "is a bold move from one of the most innovative companies in online music. The SeeqPod API is already one of the most popular for third parties to integrate streaming music into other apps, and the company seems to launch something unexpected every month. This has got to take the cake, though."

9. Surf Canyon

Can I say it again? Search, after ten years, is no longer that ubiquitous box in the middle of the web page. In 2008, it gave way to innovative search tools that integrate useful features in new ways. Surf Canyon is also a download. I wonder how many commenters will say that no one will download an app? (Sigh.) The reason it's worth the download is that it turbo charges your regular searches. Surf Canyon actually watches what you do -- and don't do -- and what you click on, and it instantly pulls search results from deeper pages (say, page 8) and brings them forward if it determines that they can save you time -- a lot of time. And if you're still hesitant about the download, watch the video.

10. Taggalaxy.de

What's this? A personal favorite? This write-up is just a sneak peek of Taggalaxy.de; the rest is up to you. Taggalaxy.de (in German) was created by a German graduate student for a class project. There are almost no instructions: I had to learn how to use it by clicking, double-clicking, dragging, and just playing around with it. But I can tell you this, once you've got the hang of it, find a dark room with a monster screen, and then perform a search. What you see will be not just an alternative search engine, but an alternative search galaxy!

So, there it is. In 2006, I began a mission to find every search engine, one by one. The resulting list of 100 Alternative Search Engines was published on ReadWriteWeb in January of 2007. Four months later, AltSearchEngines was launched by myself and Richard MacManus, with an index of 1,000 alternatives to the major engines. Since then, AltSearchEngines has published over 2,000 posts about, "the most wonderful search engines you've never seen." Having honed our search-engine-finding skills, I can tell you that this list of the top 10 alternative search engines for 2008 is as current as today's news. Want more? AltSearchEngines reports on important updates, features guest posts from search experts, and of course explores the as-yet-unseen search engines of 2009, every day. Come and join us!

P2P Innovation in Startups

This week we also saw the launch of Wuala, a P2P Cloud Storage solution (our review here).

Earlier, we reviewed a P2P approach to search (Faroo) and a P2P approach to video sharing (Metaaso).

With the exception of Skype, these are all tiny little start-ups. Interestingly, they have all originated outside America:

Skype - telephony - Estonia
Wuala - storage - Switzerland
Faroo - search - Germany
Metaaso - video - India.

This geographic origin may not be coincidental.

You need $ gazillions to be a Cloud Computing Platform. Those server farms cost a lot. Skimping, or misjudging demand, leads to outages, slow response and other confidence-killers. This is a game for the big boys - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, AT&T, Sun. These are all American firms, with access to plenty of capital. Disruptive innovation usually comes from start-ups that are starved for capital. You replace capital with technical innovation. That was true for Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, AT&T, Sun as well when they started.

That is why I have believed for some time that P2P is the next big disruptive technology at the infrastructure level.

P2P and Bigcos

Disruptive technology sometimes needs support from big companies as well. Fortunately for P2P, 3 very big companies would benefit greatly from more use of P2P as infrastructure - Microsoft, Apple and Intel. It's a great way to mop up those underutilized desktop CPU cycles. And attack the cloud computing incumbents.

Historically, P2P start-ups have tended to focus on music sharing and have been hurt by legal issues, but they have been fine technically. Skype makes P2P respectable and proves that scalability does not have to be an issue. Skype is taking on one the biggest and most entrenched industries in the world and millions of people increasingly rely on Skype as a mission critical alternative to landlines or cellphones.

P2P: Next Big Thing for Infrastructure

P2P infrastructure could play very well behind the enterprise firewall. It reduces CIO security fears about too many cloud based apps outside the firewall. This is important for P2P start-ups. They would need a lot of capital to go to market entirely with a consumer/SOHO offering. If they can get enterprise adoption at the same time, then they can accelerate cash flow and reduce need for funding.

Watch the P2P space. It's the next big wave of innovation at the infrastructure level.

The game-changing FAROO advantage is not that it is free software, it is their Peer To Peer (P2P) architecture. This can totally change the economics of search. To quote FAROO's front page, "Copy the entire Internet to one system? Strange idea. That's what search engines try to do. Therefore they require 450,000 servers and $2 billion."

That's it. You don't need to read any further. There are a some other advantages that flow from this architecture, but the basic proposition is really that simple.

FAROO's Potential

FAROO has 3 big potential advantages and 3 major hurdles. First, the 3 big advantages. These were articulated on a site called ReviewSaurus, which is one of the few blogs paying any attention to FAROO:

"1. The search engine index is based on a real users [sic] browsing habits : That means that web index will not serve those websites on which you don’t spend time thus reducing spam results.

2. The data is not stored anywhere but your own computer and you have the control of your own data. Searching is completely anonymous.

3. As per Faroo’s plans, you’ll be able to earn money from their advertising based revenue model. This is yet not implemented, however, it’s one of their declared plans."

It is the latter point that is critical. FAROO can do this because they don't have to invest in huge server farms. The search business is about giving a good deal to both publishers and advertisers. You can offer a better deal if your costs are lower.

The "publishers" in this case are you, me, and everybody else who contributes to the growth of the FAROO index by searching and using their software. It is a real "show me the money" proposition. Imagine if every search you did put money in your pocket. By searching, you make FAROO better, so it is quite reasonable to expect a cut of the revenue. And if your search doesn't cost them much, they can share more of that revenue.

If their costs are low, they can reduce the cost of search terms for advertisers, and as Craigslist has discovered, reducing price in a zero cost environment has a dramatic effect on volumes and market share.

If they then create an API that enables entrepreneurs to build value on top...

Problems Facing FAROO

The 3 big hurdles are:

1. Can P2P search scale? I am not technically competent enough to answer that question, but I have not yet seen evidence to convince me that it is impossible. The success of other P2P services such as Skype make me willing to at least reserve judgment on this issue.
2. The chicken and egg problem, based on the fact that the P2P search index scales with the number of people using FAROO. When I first looked at FAROO last year, this looked like a show-stopper. As the number of searchers is very low right now, people are likely to try it, get lousy results and forget about it. When I revisited FAROO in March, I noticed that they had taken steps to address this. Their solution (not by itself a big deal and used by other alternative engines) is to aggregate search results from other engines in addition to results from FAROO. So you get some results no matter what you're looking for and thus may continue to use the software. This also scales their index faster.
3. FAROO, being P2P, requires a client download. That can be an incredibly big hurdle to adoption. When I first looked at FAROO, I thought their best shot was to build on top of existing P2P services such as LimeWire or Gnutella. I now see that they have a fundamentally different strategy. They are building on top of .Net. Oops there go all the Mac and Linux heads... bye. This is potentially a serious issue as lots of early adopters tend to be on the Mac. I am a Mac user, so I could not use FAROO without borrowing somebody's PC. OSX and Linux support is "coming soon." I assume this will be via Mono. Having been so much in the Java world recently, I have no idea how well Mono works in practice.

When ReviewSaurus asked why they don't use Google for secondary results, FAROO responded in the comments:

"Google doesn’t provide a search web service API anymore (http://code.google.com/apis/soapsearch/reference.html)
The terms of service of the second Google AJAX Search API do not permit to integrate their search results into a client application.
Unfortunately not always an API is really open."

So it does look like FAROO is in the Microsoft camp - a fundamental threat to Google built on Microsoft technology, with Google not willing to play with them.

What FAROO Needs

However, FAROO needs to show the world that they are not just Microsoft acquisition-bait. That fear would alienate much of the early adopter crowd who they need to help them gain initial traction. They need some patient capital that sees this as a really big play that can eventually go public. In Europe, small, young technology firms still do go public.

FAROO needs some independence because their potential is huge. Apart from the basic economics, FAROO has really addressed the privacy issue as they explain here. It does appear that they have overcome the conflict between personalization and privacy that I wrote about in a previous post on this blog. That is huge. If users feel 100% confident that their privacy is being protected, they will reveal more and thus create a more accurate database of intentions (which will be more useful to advertisers). But that confidence is one part technical and one part institutional trust. So if they get bought by Microsoft, too many people will fear that their privacy will not be as safe as advertised.

FAROO also appears to have a simple and elegant "implicit web" approach to social search as they explain on their blog. Their key point is that the user does not have to tag or take any other explicit action to take advantage of social search:

"FAROO utilizes the implicit web to direct the crawler to places the users are interested in, to select, rank and personalize results according to the attention users paid to the content visited, and to implement behavior targeting for advertising based on present and past behavior."

At a conceptual level, combining the two Internet megatrends - search and social networks - is an obvious direction, so that your search is augmented by searches done by people in your trusted network. In practice that is tough to get right. FAROO looks like they maybe on the right track to do it, though.

Has anybody tried FAROO? Do you think P2P search can scale? Does .Net on OSX via Mono work? Let us know in the comments.