Wowd Blog

Wowd launches today

Today, Wowd will launch its public Beta at this year's Web 2.0 Summit at San Francisco's Westin Hotel.

We invite you to visit Wowd.com to see our new look and feel.  Use the "feedback" button to tell us what you think.

Now that Wowd is open to the public, please tell your friends to visit Wowd.com so that they can also enjoy fresh, real-time search results from sources across the entire web as well as Wowd's Hot List of popular pages.

TechCrunch on Wowd

From TechCrunch, the folks who brought the world the first-ever Real-Time CrunchUp (which was an awesome event, by the way), we have an excellent analysis of Wowd's entry into the real-time search market.  See the TechCrunch article by Erick Schonfeld, here.

MIT Technology Review's Erica Naone on Wowd

Erica Naone of the MIT Technology Review has written about various forms of distributed computation in the recent past, and has done a great job in explaining what they do, and why it's valuable.

Today she's explaining the Wowd approach to distributed, user-powered page nomination, and real-time search.  Definitely worth a review!

Wowd cited as an example of innovation in search

Nice reference to Wowd as an example of innovation in search in Kaila Colbin's post about the Bing/Google struggle. We (obviously) think she is right that it will take more than just following the existing model of "reference search" to make significant advances in the field.

MediaPost analyzes Wowd -- and gets Wowed

Rob Garner put together a very insightful analysis of Wowd, in his Search Insider column at MediaPost.  

He has some excellent observations about search and discovery in the real-time web.  A recommended read!

(And he provides an invitation token so that you can try Wowd for yourself, during our private beta phase.)

Wowd podcast interview leading up to the Web 2.0 Summit

Joshua-Michéle Ross of O'Reilly Radar conducted a podcast interview with Mark Drummond as a lead-up to the Web 2.0 Summit. 

Have a listen and hear about Wowd's unique approach to real-time discovery, search, and the real-time web.

Wowd screencast demo

Relevancy in real-time search

Here's a short article that asks a question about how to determe relevancy in real-time search.

Our response to the article got trimmed in the comments section, so we reproduce it here...

Great article, good observation about relevancy. The problem with most so-called real-time search is that it's not search at all... it's just filtering a stream of information. So older material is just thrown away. True search involves finding the *best* information from a comprehensive index. You have no chance of building a comprehensive index when you're throwing away perfectly good information that happens to be outside your filtering window. At Wowd, we offer the user two options in doing true search and real ranking: find the most Popular material, or find the Freshest material. Doing this right involves solving two different optimization problems, taking different factors into account. We feel that the user knows what they want (top-quality reference results, or freshest results), and we put them in control to get what they want. More info at our blog (http://blog.wowd.com) and in one of our white papers (http://blog.wowd.com/wowd_blog/2009/08/wowd-whitepaper-on-realtime-search.html).

Interesting discussion about Wowd -- on Flickr!

Steve Jurvetson (Wowd board member & investor) posted an access token for Wowd on his Flickr page.  He's got some very thoughtful and excellently analytical friends there, and managed to create a good discussion about the entire Wowd approach.  Recommended reading.

John Battelle's take on Caffeine

John Battelle engages in an interesting analysis of real-time search, the real-time web, indexing, and what this might all mean for Google's Caffeine.  Definitely worth a read.