Uber42 Blog

Searching for search engine on Google doesn't return Google!? See this article.

Google still can't produce standards-compliant output: validation errors

What gives?

Google has completely lost sight of the "do no evil days"

Seems like Google's motto of "Don't be Evil" has thoroughly fallen by the wayside: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_213176.html

And more:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/11/google_adsense_suit_redux/

Google has increasingly used (and abused) it's power to dominate the internet. This trend has partly inspired the work here at Uber42. We aim to offer an open, collaborative search engine for the internet.

Perhaps our motto should be "Do no evil, no really"!

Microsoft has decided to call their new search engine "Bing"

What were they thinking?

Isn't there anyone at Microsoft who's heard of Monty Python?

I'm speechless!

Guess this proves (again) that you can't make a quality product by just paying for it. Microsoft management have time and again demonstrated that they just don't "get" it.

As we've all known for a while now, there are many sites (aka MFA sites) that exist solely to harvest ad revenue by ranking highly in search results.

I seems that the people behind these sites are finding more effective ways as time goes by: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/04/20/google-set-to-change-ranking-algorithm

This brings me to a fundamental belief that we at uber42 hold: humans will always be able to outsmart algorithms.

Well at least until a true artificial intelligence is developed

This is why uber42 will rely on human feedback, annotation and rankings of results.

Uber42 is a new search engine, designed to harness the power of users. Despite the success of a certain algorithm, time has shown that any algorithm can be outsmarted by crafty humans. Instead we will rely on users to moderate, comment on and describe sites for our search results.

Uber42 will borrow ideas from social news sites (slashdot, digg), allow online user answers to questions (borrowing from Wikipedia) and will provide a richer, Web 2.0 interface to search results.

Uber42 will strive to be as open and accessible as possible:

1. Uber42 will use the content of web sites and users' votes to produce rankings.
2. Uber42 will never blacklist sites without giving a reason
3. Uber42 will never allow financial considerations to affect rankings (e.g. no permissive attitude to MFA-type sites).
4. Snapshots of search data will be made available under open licenses
5. Search results will be dated, with historical versions of pages available
6. Live search APIs will be provided (free for low-volume, at a reasonable cost for volume)

Uber42 is still under development but look for beta versions to appear in the next few months.