Wowd Blog

Who owns the social graph?

In a Search Engine Watch post today, I take John Battelle's question, "Who owns the social graph?", and use that to explore what it means to have API-based access to a social graph, and what this implies for graph ownership and control.

Using search to make product-purchase decisions

So we've now got reference search and real-time search, and we've also got at least a couple of flavors of question-asking sites out there.

How can you use these tools to make an intelligent decision regarding a product you might want to buy?

For some ideas, check out our most recent Search Engine Watch column, "Searching For the Perfect Purchase Process in Social Media, Real-Time Search".

A better approach to privacy

Back in February of 2010, we wrote up a short post in this blog about Wowd's approach to the management of private information (http://blog.wowd.com/wowd_blog/2010/02/forbes-on-wowd.html).

A person commented on that blog post and suggested that we explain how this works, in a bit more detail.

So we've finally written a Wowd white paper on privacy, called "A new approach to improving privacy on the web", and it's available here: http://wowd.com/publications/WowdPrivacy.pdf .

This white paper and all other Wowd white papers are available from the Wowd web site: http://www.wowd.com/white-papers.jsp .

Wowd covered on ABC News

Wowd was covered by ABC news recently.  Video available here: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/assignment_7&id=7502730 .

Search Engine Watch article on real social ranking

If you're interested in what's coming in "social search", check out our Search Engine Watch column, published today: http://searchenginewatch.com/3640756 .

How many pounds of carbon does a data center spew out each day?

When you use your computer, have you ever wondered how many pounds of carbon dioxide are generated by the data center that's servicing your requests?  It might surprise you just how many pounds of CO2 are produced by a server in a data center, and how many servers some companies have running.  It all really adds up.

Wowd takes a unique approach to building its computation “engine” by uniting the spare cycles of thousands or even millions of computers that are already turned on.  These computers are already consuming electrical power and are mostly sitting idle.

The Wowd distributed cloud architecture has many benefits, but one important result is that Wowd does not need to build out a large central data center.  The electricity savings from not running centralized servers is equivalent to taking many thousands of cars off the road every day.

Read more in this new Wowd white paper: http://wowd.com/publications/WowdGreen.pdf .

Wowd technology

Liz Gannes of GigaOm has written a great summary of Wowd's two new patents, and how the underlying technology is important in delivering high-quality, real-time discovery and search, and how this relates to social search (the social ranking of search results).

Full article here:

http://gigaom.com/2010/05/03/wowd-doubles-down-with-social-search-and-p2p-patents/

What's the job of a real-time search engine?

Is the job of a real-time search engine to deliver individual search results?  Or to provide an overview of what's happening around a specific topic, at a given moment in time?

Wowd offers discovery-powered search, which is a brand new way of exploring the real-time web.  Discovery-powered search delivers topic summaries for real-time topics, as you search.

Read more in our Search Engine Watch column: http://searchenginewatch.com/3640197

Integrating real-time results into traditional search

Think that Google has the answer when it comes to integrating "real-time results" into traditional search?

Boris Agapiev, our founder and CTO, doesn't think so.

Definitely a worth-while read!

http://distributedsearch.blogspot.com/2010/04/latest-google-real-time-search-updates.html

Forbes on Wowd

What a great title for an article: "Wowd: Searching The Darkness".  Taylor Buley and Quentin Hardy explore the origins and idea of Wowd in a Forbes article with that title, available today.

Only one comment... The article says that "... [people will] lend [Wowd] their computers and privacy for the purpose of searching the Web".  

In fact, I would argue that the approach that Wowd uses is much, much better for personal privacy than centralized approaches.

Let's say that you use a toolbar issued by a major search company.  Chances are, that toolbar is shipping back to some central location all the URLs that pass through your browser. 

After being captured in this manner, the centralized search provider has a decision to make for any given URL: should they have seen the URL, or should they not have seen it?  That is, your browser toolbar will be sending back URLs that are, in fact, quite private.  You're counting on the centralized authority to recognize its mistake, after the fact, and you're counting on them to keep the private URLs to themselves!  (Will the URLs be deleted?  Or just kept but not used, for ever?  If they're used, then how will they be used?  Who knows!)

With Wowd, a private URL is never, ever shared off your computer.  WIth Wowd, what happens is that when you visit a public web site, the URL for that site gets an anonymous vote, and then from some other point in the Wowd cloud of computers, the page pointed-to by that URL is retrieved and indexed.  The page is not retrieved from your computer.  There's no way to trace back from the retrieval of the page to the person who issued the nomination for the page.

No personal information is shared, no "fingerprints" are left in the system, and there's no way to trace back to any given user the pages that that user votes for in the system.  This is actually a much better approach than what most people put up with today.

So in no way can Wowd be considered "spyware".  Wowd protects individual identity much more effectively than centralized approaches ever could.  At Wowd, we take privacy seriously, and have designed our architecture from the ground up to put you in control of the information that describes what you do and where you go on the web.