Y Combinator-Backed Swi...

In my four-plus years covering tech, I don’t think I’ve ever met another blogger who was happy with the search feature on their website. The options range from terrible to functional, but it’s never good , and I’ve always found that it’s easier to just search via Google. Apparently Matt Riley and Quin Hoxie saw the same problem when they were working at Scribd . So they left to build a better website search engine, one that they’re calling Swiftype . The startup was part of Y Combinator’s latest class of companies, and it’s launching today. What makes Swiftype better? For starters, Riley and Hoxie say that unlike Google Site Search, it’s not just taking Google’s global web rankings and filtering them for one website. Instead, it builds (in Hoxie’s words) “a PageRank that’s specific to individual websites.” So it looks at the signals of importance on your website and prioritizes content accordingly. For example, if you link to anything from your front page, that’s a pretty big signal that it’s important to you and should be ranked highly. On top of that, Swiftype also allows site owners to pin and unpin different items to the top of their search results. If you’re a news site, that might mean pinning the most popular and best articles, or it might mean promoting content that’s related to an ongoing sponsorship campaign. And Swiftype offers a set of tags that publishers can include in their pages to show which content should be surfaced in the results. Other features include analytics data and auto-complete for people typing in their search. Riley and Hoxie showed me the process of creating an engine for your site. You point Swiftype at the URL, and it crawls the site multiple times, refining the results as it goes. Then you can adjust the rankings to your liking, choose from a couple of different layouts, and finally grab some code to add to your site. (Among other things, Swiftype is supposedly easy to integrate with Tumblr.) In other words, there’s virtually no technical work required from the publisher — something else that distinguishes Swiftype from the various other search products and open source libraries out there. At same time, companies who want a little more control can access Swiftype through its APIs. Swiftype has been working with a few beta customers, including Twilio, TwitchTV, Parse, Listia, and Fastly. These are technically sophisticated companies, so it’s not like they couldn’t build their own search features, but Riley says they realize it’s “not their core competency,” so they’re looking for something like Swiftype that’s “dead simple to use.”

Bing UI Changes Harken ...

Before I go into any discussion here I will admit that I use Google for about 99.9% of the searches that I do. I can’t say it’s because Google has better results than any other search engine because I honestly don’t take the time to compare. Instead I am one of millions, or more likely billions, here on the planet that have developed a Google habit. Having quit smoking a long, long time ago I can tell you that Google might be a more powerful addiction. So the new UI changes by Bing are of interest but it’s not like I can compare my past experience with the engine to the “new” look. Here’s what Bing has to say from its blog post of today. Bing is getting a new look. Starting today you will notice a fresh, de-cluttered experience designed to help you find the results you want faster. Over the past few months, we’ve run dozens of experiments to determine how you read our pages to deliver the link you’re looking for. The results themselves are cleaner. Removing the “left rail” and minimizing the header raises the level of consistency and predictability while making it easier to scan the page and quickly find the information you want. Increasing the space between lines improves readability and optimizes the page for touch devices. Putting all our result annotations and social data in one consistent spot makes the page easier to use and understand. So how does it differ? Take a look at the old Versus the new Is it me or does the new Bing look a lot like the old Google? The claim by Bing is that the less clutter (like removing the left sidebar) gives a cleaner experience. I agree. As I look around at posts from TechCrunch and others however, there are plenty of comments asking what’s wrong with the sidebar in Google for instance, especially if what it offers enriches the search experience? Once again I have to agree. In the end it’s the quality of the results that still matter. You can put a different package on anything and make it look nice on the outside but unless the inside is different there is really no change. Bing claims that there is more here than meets the eye. The new experience is more than skin-deep. You will also notice faster page-load times and improved relevance under the hood. After all, our goal is to help people spend less time searching and more time doing. And changing how we look is the next big step in doing just that. Is this going to make me a Bing user? No. Will it make the world take a look in larger numbers thus shifting market share? I doubt it. Why? Because this change will be most noticeable to those who are currently using Bing while those who don’t (we’re talking the masses here that can move market share, not just the tech geek community) will never know this change even happened. I am not trying to be negative on Bing here. I have had discussions with Bing insiders and their biggest problem is breaking the habit I mentioned at the top of the post. That’s a tough nut to crack no matter who is backing you. They face the reality that people use Google because they use Google. It’s ubiquitous and requires little thought so they do it (guilty as charged). Not many other brands enjoy that kind of “loyalty” and Bing is fighting against this day in and day out. I hope that this UI “upgrade” makes a difference and there is ultimately greater competition between Bing and Google. I would rather this get fought in the free market than the courts, which is where Microsoft has tried to sully Google’s image thus trying to break the “Google habit” through legislation. That’s a bad move. Getting better and getting more users based on merit is a good move. But will any changes help break the “Google habit” for the masses? I sincerely doubt it. What do you think? Is this move something that could help Bing in its fight against Google or are they simply spitting in the wind at this point?

Meet MillionShort: The ...

Recently I tried to do a Google search for a wine to pair with swordfish, and it was pretty much a disaster ( first world problems , I know, but still.) The problem is, web search results for certain topics are just overloaded with dummy websites with little to no valuable content, many of which have utilized “ search engine optimization ” (SEO) tactics. Of course, search engines work overtime to stay one step ahead of the SEO spammers, but sometimes the bad guys just win out. There’s also the issue of discovering new content. Say you’re looking for a new recipe for a dish you’ve made lots of times before. The top 20 search results are going to be from very popular food sites, of recipes you’ve probably already seen What if you want something fresh? That’s what a neat hack called MillionShort aims to help with. The website is a search engine that lets you remove the top million (or 100,000, or 10,000, or whatever) hits from the results list. It’s a lot like pruning a plant, or skimming the film off the top of a stew: MillionShort lets you remove the old or non-useful stuff from traditional web search to find new or interesting content. Results for "ratatouille recipe" search (click to enlarge) The website, which is apparently built on top of Google search (we’ve reached out for an interview and more details and will update this post when we hear back), describes itself like this : “We thought might be somewhat interesting to see what we’d find if we just removed an entire slice of the web. The thinking was the same popular sites (we’re not saying popular equals irrelevant) show up again and again, Million Short makes it easy to discover sites that just don’t make it to the top of the search engine results for whatever reason (poor SEO, new site, small marketing budget, competitive keyword(s) etc.). Most people don’t look beyond page 1 when doing a search and now they don’t have to.” Technically it seems pretty basic, but the idea is pretty powerful. The community at developer-centric news aggregator and discussion site HackerNews has had a pretty big response to MillionShort: The post about the site has garnered nearly 200 comments in less than 24 hours. As one commenter, jaems33, noted : “It reminds me of why I first moved to Google from Yahoo/Webcrawler/Altavista/etc in the first place.” Social search and dedicated apps may be great and all, but it seems there is still an appetite for discovering fresh new things from the world wide web at large. If the search powers-that-be stop focusing on that, it’s good to see that there are still enterprising developers keen to hack out their own solutions to the problem.

Ark People Search Raise...

“The series A is essentially dying. If I can get an amazing valuation at a seed round, not give up a board seat, and keep complete control of the company, why not?” This is Ark co-founder Patrick Riley’s reasoning for why instead of raising a Series A round, his people search engine just locked down a jaw-droppingly massive $4.2 million seed round . Ark will use the money from Andreessen Horowitz , Greylock Partners , SV Angel and more to build out its mobile and search teams, and do a big marketing push when it opens to the public. Riley believes more founders will try to avoid early Series A rounds that often come with an investor board member attached. This will help them stay more agile and avoid having to approve pivots or other big changes through outsiders. Riley tells me, “I think the future is larger seed rounds.” It seems much of Silicon Valley sees a big opportunity for Ark to capitalize on the people search shortcomings of Facebook and Google. So big that even with less control, Charles River Ventures , Intel Capital , Atlas Venture , Crosslink Capital , Expansion Venture Capital , Felicis Ventures , Lightbank ,  Transmedia Capital , Salesforce , Tencent , and several angels are also in on the round according to AllThingsD ‘s Liz Gannes. The round ranks amongst the largest publicly disclosed seed rounds in Y Combinator history. I was the first to write about Ark’s beta last month , where I detailed how the product lets you layer filters to find out which of your friends are single, who are in your current city and is fluent in a language you want to learn, or who lives somewhere you’re visiting and Likes a band performing there so you could go to the concert together. This is all data scattered across Google+, Twitter, and particularly Facebook. Ark’s search pulls in info from all these sources plus profiles on LinkedIn, Foursquare, Myspace, Orkut, Meetup, Vkontakte, and Ren Ren. It’s got a special arrangement brokered through Facebook’s CTO Bret Taylor that allows Ark to hammer Facebook’s Graph API for profile information. By pulling data from across platforms, there’s less chance for Facebook or of the others to steamroll Ark. Beyond helping you find people, Ark wants to surface contact info and other important characteristics about your friends without you having to know which network that data’s hosted on. “We’re essentially trying to do the other side of search — the personal search, what Greplin attempted to do to a limited extent.” Mobile apps for tracking down this info are coming this summer. And while there’s plenty of startups offering some of what Ark does, none I’ve seen are as clean and straightforward. For example, people set up whole accounts on Classmates.com or schoolFeed just to reconnect with who they went to high school with because Facebook buries that capability so deep within its Find Friends feature. Ark makes it as simple as layering your high school’s name and your graduation year. Raising the seed round was simple too, as Ark used AngelList . “It’s almost like an API for funding. It accelerates the process”, Riley tells me.  As for why so many dollars? “It’s a really big space, our competition is pretty well funded, and we have larger ambitions. To market something like this you need substantial funds.”

Please Welcome TechCrun...

There’s lots going on behind the scenes here at TechCrunch — not only are we hiring top writers and putting together a kick-ass lineup for Disrupt in New York next month, we’re also getting a chief operating officer (among other moves soon to be announced). Ned Desmond , a veteran media executive from Time Inc and more recently an entrepreneur, will be joining us as COO on May 7th. He’s going to be leading all of our non-editorial operations out of our San Francisco headquarters. He’ll also serve as the general manager of the AOL Tech properties. which include Engadget , TUAW and Joystiq . As Heather Harde’s replacement, Desmond is filling big shoes along with the rest of us. But also like so many of us at the new TechCrunch, he’s coming in with years of experience — that began with writing, actually He was a foreign bureau chief with Time Magazine during the 90s, and had a stint as a senior correspondent for Fortune. But he got caught up in the dot.com craze like so many others in Silicon Valley, heading up business development for then-popular search engine Infoseek before getting sucked back into the media world. Ned began last decade as the president and editor of Business 2.0, then leveled up to be the president of Time Interactive. That job included running its digital new business development and ad operations, as well as product, design and technology support. Among other accomplishments, he led successful relaunches for People, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, My Recipes, Life and Health. He got back into the startup world in 2009, co-founding an outdoor sports site called Go Sportn, Inc., which has become a category leader in fishing and hunting verticals. Between his experience in startup and media operations, and his focus on creating great content, he’s going to be able to do a lot to build up TechCrunch and the other AOL Tech sites. Please give him a warm welcome.