Wowd Blog

AltSearchEngines offers early access to Wowd

AltSearchEngines has a short (but accurate) write-up on Wowd, and they're offering access to the first few people to act on the invitation token they provide.

Wowd is started to get noticed as a real-time search engine that offers comprehensive coverage of the web (not just one or two or three sites), and that also brings discovery into the experience...

With Wowd, you can learn about new things that you wouldn't normally have thought to search for.  And when you do use Wowd to search, you can rank your results in terms of Popularity (to real humans) or Freshness (how recently the new material appeared).

We say, check out the AltSearchEngines article.

A data center isn't a cloud!

Can a cloud really live in a warehouse-sized data center?  Is that even a fair use of the term "cloud"?  Well, maybe, if the billing and provisioning used are all incremental and consistent with the overall cloud mantra.

But a warehouse-sized data center sure brings back memories (for those old enough to remember) of mainframe computers and time-sharing operating systems... .

The Wowd approach to cloud computing is quite different.  Imagine a planet-sized collection of small computers, all connected and working to deliver the best search, discovery, and recommendation experience possible.

That's a picture of the Wowd cloud computer, and you can learn more about its basic architecture in the latest Wowd white paper, "The Distributed Cloud: A Foundation for Planetary-Scale Computing".

Your thoughts and feedback most welcome!

VentureBeat on Wowd

Paul Boutin understands real-time search, and Wowd's ability to scale.

His VentureBeat article on Wowd, "Wowd aims to replace PageRank with Popularity", covers Wowd's new people-powered approach to ranking web pages, for superior real-time search results.

Wowd's approach to ranking is in fact an instance of a so-called "link-based algorithm", meaning that pages are ranked based on an analysis of how people could move between them.  Doing this at scale is extremely computationally intense, and Wowd makes it scalable by implementing the algorithm on top of a distributed cloud-based architecture. 

We'll soon be issuing a whitepaper that describes this distributed cloud architecture.  So, watch this space.

The efficiency of attention

How useful is it to understand what the Interwebs are interested in?  Very useful, as it turns out.  People are the ultimate judges of what's good, and using the "attention frontier" of a set of people is a very powerful way to run a real-time search and discovery engine.

See more at Boris Agapiev's blog:

http://distributedsearch.blogspot.com/2009/09/attention-frontier-efficiency.html

Stephanie Sarka for Wowd on OMMA Panel

Stephanie Sarka is speaking for Wowd today (Sept 22, 2009) on an awesome panel at OMMA, called Can Real-Time Results Be Found in Real-Time Search?

ReadWriteWeb lives at the sharp end of the stick

Great article by Jolie O'Dell of ReadWriteWeb...

http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/09/could-wowd-be-the-skype-of-rea.php

Excellent and accurate analysis, plus invitations for the first 300 people to act!

Lunch with a camera up my nose

At Gnomedex in Seattle, back on August 22, the most excellent and capable Tim Reha stuck a camera in my face after lunch, and asked about Wowd.

You can see Tim's site for the resulting video, if you dare.

Wowd will be at the Web 2.0 Summit

It's official... Wowd is "mind blowing"... :)  So suggests John Battelle, in explaining his selection criteria for companies asked to present in the Web 2.0 Summit's "High Order Bit" slot.

You can see the Web 2.0 Summit schedule here: http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/grid .

The Wowd presentation is on Tue 10/20 at 4:25PM.  In this presentation we'll explain how the web has evolved, and how the problem of search through a space of documents has rapidly turned into the problem of finding topics in a global, public, high-velocity conversation.  

OK, we agree with John Battelle: it is a pretty mind-blowing transition, and the new tools that we need to keep pace are just starting to become available.  (Did we mention that Wowd is a tool for finding topics in the global, public, high-velocity conversation that's taking place on the web?)