Surf-Hint news of web 2.0 web site and hint of web site that worth to be visited

AOL (NYSE: TWX) is in the process of acquiring New York/Israel-based ad targeting provider Quigo for $300 million, according to Haaretz, an Israeli daily newspaper. The rumors were first reported last week by AllThingsD here.

The purchase is designed to help the Time Warner unit better compete against the stepped up online ad initiatives from Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Yahoo. Quigo's two main ad serving products include AdSonar, which is similar to AdSense in terms of providing targeted placements on websites and through searches, and FeedPoint, a search engine marketing tool. Quigo has raised $45 million since opening its doors in 2000. The bulk of the investments, about $30 million, has been secured over the past year from existing backers, including Steamboat Ventures (Disney), Highland Capital, Leon Recanati's Glenrock Ventures, IVP and Meritech Capital Partners.

As we've noted, Time Inc. signed an exclusive agreement with the contextual ad search company in June. The deal gave Time Inc.'s 15 web titles a custom version of Quigo's pay-per-click ad service, allowing the online magazines to be sold as a single network. Time Inc. executives estimated that the Quigo deal will bring in $100 million in revenue over the next three years. Similarly, at the end of October, Quigo signed a multi-year contract with TheStreet.com (NSDQ: TSCM) to develop a custom version of AdSonar for the financial news site. (Release)

CastTV wants to give you the best way to find all your online videos, from movies to TV shows to the latest celebrity, sports, news, and viral videos. We’ll take you to those videos, wherever they are. Our service is currently an invitation-only beta service. We will be adding more users shortly so please request an invite!

NosyJoe is a social search engine that relies on you to sniff for and submit the web’s interesting content and offers basically meaningful search results in the form of readable complete sentences and smart tags. NosyJoe is built upon the fundamental belief people are better than robots in finding the interesting, important and quality content around Web. The project is currently in private beta.

Cuill (pronounced [kool]) is a startup company that is pioneering a new approach to Search. The company was founded by Anna, Russell, and Tom. Our offices are located on a quiet street in Menlo Park, CA. If you’d like to learn more about Cuill or the people behind it, please get in touch.

Makidi. Wouldn’t it be great if there was one simple way to find anyone for any purpose? Surprisingly enough, you can leave your email here and we will call you up for the beta.

NeXplore’s Search Beta is an innovative Web 2.0 social search engine that makes finding information on the Internet more personal, more efficient, and worlds more fun. Discover a visually engaging, user-friendly, multi-media interface that makes navigation effortless and drill down obsolete. All NeXplore Search Beta invitees will receive a free pass to the yet-to-be-released NeXploreWorld™ a secure, universally accessible, 5-gigabytes of personal online media space for storing music, videos, photos, searches and any other digital jewels. NeXplore Search Beta invitations are limited. Request an invitation now!

[true knowledge] is an Internet technology company based in Cambridge, England. Our main product is a technology that can directly answer questions put to it on any topic and dramatically improves the quality and accuracy of results compared to any existing search technology. Our product represents facts within a broad knowledge-base that computers can understand and process. The web interface accepts questions phrased in natural language and infers the solutions from its database of facts to produce direct, perfect answers, plus links to further information. More will be announced very shortly. To be kept informed about the company and its products, sign up to be put on our announcements mailing list. We are currently testing a website based on this technology and will be opening this process up to external beta testers imminently. If you would like to be considered for this please register here. Users who already have an account can log in here.

SurfCanyon, using next-generation semantic personalization technology, is developing Queryless Discovery™ to enable post-query disambiguation in Internet search. The site is currently undergoing private Beta testing. You may visit our blog or, if you have a user name and password, log in below. Enjoy and please let us know what you think

Powerset/Powerlabs is a Silicon Valley company building a transformative consumer search engine based on natural language processing. Our unique innovations in search are rooted in breakthrough technologies that take advantage of the structure and nuances of natural language. Using these advanced techniques, Powerset is building a large-scale search engine that breaks the confines of keyword search. By making search more natural and intuitive, Powerset is fundamentally changing how we search the web, and delivering higher quality results. Sign up for Powerset Labs below to help build Powerset’s next-generation search engine. As of today, we’ve begun to let people into our Labs to sample applications built on our semantic index.

Zumende Shhhhh!

Digger is a free search tool provided by TextDigger. Digger analyzes all the possible meanings of the words in your query, in order to find more relevant documents. Digger also shows you how it interpreted your words and allows you to quickly correct any misunderstandings. Compared to keyword search engines, Digger gives you much more control over the semantics of your search. During our private beta, you will need an invitation code in order to create a free Digger account. To request one, just click the appropriate link on the Digger.com home page.

Foxmarks is turning web search upside down. Creating a better way to search that is community inspired and people powered. Getting you to the content you really want – faster and easier. Our first product – Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer – is just the start. Stay tuned for more. And more. And more.

iPrecis is a custom search application that allows users, communities, businesses, associations, and other affinity groups to search sites that meet their own criteria. The always has the ability to select topics of interest and/or add their own trusted sites to their search. The user can also compare search results produced iPrecis versus the top 100 (10 pages) results returned by Google. The system also has community functions that allow users to find other users with similar tags and topical interests. This is your opportunity select individual sites or entire groups of topics that are of interest to individual users as opposed to having search engines tell us what we should “check out” or “buy”. We look forward to your feedback during this closed Alpha.

Mobot connects the real world to the digital world on the mobile phone. Consumers use the camera in their phone to indicate their interest — in a brand advertisement, an editorial page in a magazine, or even a product in a catalog — and Mobot visual matching technology identifies their picture and connects them directly to relevant information. Fast and easy for consumers, it’s a powerful new tool for any media company or marketer.

Polar Rose’s Beta test is underway. The Polar Rose browser plugin for Firefox (Internet Explorer coming soon) lets you discover who’s in any public photo. The browser plugin is currently in private beta and we are letting in new explorers in every day. Sign up to be notified when we have an invitation ready for you.

Zitgist (pronounced “zeitgeist”) is an industry standards compliant Semantic Web Query Service. Its goal is to help Web users locate data, information, and knowledge on the Web. Zitgist is based on a new search paradigm: users describe characteristics of their search target, instead of relying entirely on content keywords.

Palore is still in closed beta. Please enter your name and email address, and we’ll contact you as soon as we’re ready to add new users.

CareerMesh’s corporate website is now live. The website is setup to provide interested parties more information on CareerMesh before the full development goes live. We want to make sure we can provide everybody a general overview of CareerMesh, and also provide updates of our progress. If you want to get a monthly newsletter, get emailed with our latest blog entries, or be notified when we start looking for beta testers, make sure to sign up!

Searchme delivers more meaningful and targeted search results to its users. Searchme’s intuitive category suggest technology provides users with a dynamic and rewarding search experience by delivering relevant results that are tailored specifically to their unique areas of interest. Searchme was co-founded by Randy Adams, CEO, and John Holland, CMO. The Company received initial funding from Sequoia Capital.

Gloofi is the first Web 3.0 Search Engine currently in existence. gloofi contains human and Semantic search capability, tag/keyword translation, personalized search, and user generated content. With all the new functionalities, and powerful capabilities of Gloofi, you may never again feel good about using the old search engines. Gloofi is currently in its Alpha release, but even in this stage, points will be rewarded for entering and approving content. We appreciate the efforts and input from the Internet community when adding and approving relevant content.

Superlogos World. This site is currently populating and will be live soon. Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at any time: Email: info@superlogosworld.com

View a demo of the site.

Songza is a free music search engine & jukebox. Our launch party is taking place on November 8th from 5:30-9ish p.m. at the Elephant & Castle on N. Wabash (Chicago, IL). Get down and groove to tunes! Vote for the songs you want to listen to. Be one of the first people ever to try out this exciting and free way to listen to your favorite songs! RSVP here.

SearchSpark is a semantic search startup with a passion for organizing information to facilitate how people discover and filter information to make better decisions. The vertical categories we are targeting are the largest e-commerce categories and our complementary semantic search approach will assist both consumers find products that best meet their needs and branded and tail advertisers to market themselves more effectively. To achieve this, we are developing a tailored ontology for each category to enable us to extract and map the attributes of the products and a user experience to help us understand consumers’ meaning when they search for those products. Our first consumer application is delivering personalized travel search for family, romance, and pet-friendly travel; we welcome your feedback.

Viewdle is a facial recognition powered digital media platform for easily indexing, searching & monetizing video assets. Be the first to pilot Viewdle’s revolutionary facial-recognition powered products. Sign-up for our invitation-only beta launch…coming soon.


Globrix is a new type of property search website. It covers virtually every property for sale or rent in the UK and it allows you to search by a huge range of criteria such as price, region, outside space, parking or period.

Whozat? works like a one-stop-shop aggregator that allows users to find other people in social networks, blogs, photo and video sites and on the WWW. A blind evaluation of the relevance of people search results for Whozat?, Google, Yahoo, Ask, and three other people search engines threw the following preliminary but statistically significant results for a list of ordinary people compiled by a third party: Whozat? beat every other search engine, yielding the most relevant results, as evaluated by the searcher, almost three times as often as all generic search engines and more than five times as often as any other people search engine.

Just Added:

Find out more information about this amazing web & mobile based super search engine! What’s Open is for Alpha testers in the U.S. and China, public Beta launches late 2007. Search engine algorithms, including web and mobile, are patented with the USPTO.

We’ve been waiting all day for Google’s OpenSocial site to start working, and it has finally happened.

The site contains the official OpenSocial API documents, developers blog, featured community gadgets, and featured videos. Unless you’re a developer dying to see the inner workings of the APIs, there isn’t really much new information up there; everything’s been extensively covered here at Mashable.

The list of partners mentioned seemed to have grown a bit: Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. Yes, that’s MySpace there in the list; Facebook is, unsurprisingly, nowhere to be seen.

Although we can’t see it yet, Google’s OpenSocial API is already available to some parnters - Orkut, Ning, Plaxo, XING, hi5, Friendster - and they have been hard at work to implement it as soon as possible.

Plaxo, online calendar and address book, has the honor of being the first to implement OpenSocial into a service and go live with it. It’s implemented in Plaxo Pulse, a service that lets you see social networking activities of people in your address book, like changes in their profiles, new Flickr photos they’ve added, etc.

What does this mean in practice for Plaxo Pulse users? Well, users can now add gadgets to their Pulse profiles, each of which gets a full canvas page inside Pulse. Gadget preferences are stored, and gadgets can create activity streams which will show up in Pulse. Just like with normal Pulse feed items, you can comment on each activity generated by the gadgets. Profile and contact info for the profile and friends-list APIs is also supported. Also, Pulse users know you can have several personal profiles; professional, personal, family, etc. If you add gadgets to any of those profiles, they will also be shown separately.

Of course, bear in mind that OpenSocial is obviously not finished yet; the folks at Plaxo say that the APIs are at version 0.5 and are changing daily. Therefore, expect bugs. Furthermore, only specific apps from some known developers are currently white listed to work with Plaxo Pulse.

All this is just an incredibly small piece of what can be done with OpenSocial. Still, if this enthusiasm by Plaxo to be the first to implement OpenSocial API is any indication, OpenSocial will be a huge success. Let’s face it: every company that ever felt threatened by Facebook (and in the social networking world, that’s all of them) will probably leap head over heels to turn OpenSocial to their advantage. Interesting times are ahead in the land of social networking, no doubt.

Peer39, a NYC-based ad exchange, has raised an $8.2 million second round from Canaan Partners, with participation from JPMorgan, according to VentureBeat. It has now raised $11.2 million, including $3 million earlier this year. The company is trying to apply natural language/semantic web technology to advertising, in hopes of delivering more relevant ads and better ROI. There's little available info on the company, which is still in stealth mode.

Revver has just launched its latest website, version 2.0 . The new site has a few new features, of course. One of which improves search functionality. Oh so important with video-sharing networks!

There are now several new, navigable categories for easy browsing. This is also a hat tip to advertisers, who can now better align their marketing campaigns with site content. And as Revver has one of the most recognized ad rev-share programs for video-sharing networks, this is important for all parties involved.

Other new features encourage more site interactivity and user engagement, with Video Response, which lets users make video comments, and the improvement of the Dashboard, which offers custom contact lists for managing video feed subscriptions. These feeds are updated in real-time. Additionally, private messaging tools have been included for more communication options.

There are a couple other ways that advertisers are also being brought into the mix. With more creative ways in which to reach out to users, Revver is granting additional opportunities for brands to take advantage of its network There are now options for advertisers to sponsor certain video collections, like “Most Watched” on the home page, and ad space can be purchased for category landing pages, which ties in with Revver’s new cataloging system.

The aim is to achieve all of this without becoming a cluttered site. I can’t comment on the new ad placements just yet, because I haven’t seen any with the new categories section. But we’ll keep an eye out to see how th continually evolving face of advertising on video-sharing networks pans out for Revver. In other news, Revver recently added a Wordpress plug-in.

Mashable reader Mike sends us the first sighting of what looks to be Facebook’s SocialAds in the wild. Earlier in October, we picked up on reports that invitations were going out to companies invited to the launch event scheduled for November 6. Industry insiders say that the information about Facebook users’ relationships, under the SocialAds framework, could be used to target those users both on and off the site, similar to AdWords, but likely with behavioral marketing overtones.

According to Mike, the ads were spotted “on the left column of one of the group pages on Facebook.” He sent us establishing screenshots as well as source code proving these came from Facebook. The color scheme in the source matches, and a close examination of the HTML source code appears to match the design conventions of Facebook.

He also said that in the context of the site, the ads seemed unobtrusively placed, though one has to wonder at either what sort of group page Mike visited, or at the quality of the pattern matching algorithms in play behind the scenes. These particular ads seem very run of the mill spam style advertisements.

Time magazine calls Apple’s iPhone the invention of the year, and it’s hard to beat that call. In fact, Apple could also be the company of the year…

This makes it official, it’s November 1st and we’re going to be deluged by 1,000,001 such lists between now and early January, 2008.

Of course, the one that might be a non-debate is who is the company of the year? We asked that question as early as April 23rd when I ran down 13 companies who stood out from 1994 to 2006 and asked who 2007’s pick would be.

Since you can still vote:

I won’t say who I am leaning towards, but I will say that as of April 23rd, both Pete Cashmore of Mashable and Om Malik of GigaOm agreed with me… time will tell if any one of us have changed minds.

Previous winners include:
1994: AOL.com
1995: Netscape
1996: Altavista
1997: eBay
1998: Yahoo!
1999: Amazon.com
2000: Lycos
2001: Napster
2002: Google
2003: Cisco
2004: Skype
2005: MySpace
2006: YouTube
2007: ?

The list has many companies that started with a bang and seemingly will end it with a whimper. Then it has others who started off slowly and ended strongly.

The leaders, invariably, are Facebook, who despite MySpace’s continued dominance in social networking and Google’s continued dominance in all things search, Facebook kicked it up a notch or two… this all culminated with an investment of $240M by MSFT that valued them at $15B… when you consider that just last year Mark Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo!’s $1.6B deal and YouTube got acquired for $1.65B, you can’t help but be amazed.

So, who do you think is the company of 2007 if not Facebook? I think aQuantive’s $6B sale to MSFT gives them a lot of votes… and of course, Google will always remain a perennial candidate. But what about MSFT? It’s going to do nearly $60B in annual sales and is really well positioned online with Live.com/MSN.com, aQuantive and of course, its deal with Facebook.

As well, we’re going to do a repeat of 2006’s Top 10 Storylines in Tech and Web soon, and have another yet-to-be named special feature coming soon. Now vote for this year’s company of the year: