Flaptor

Web apps are a lot like TV shows. In particular those that are supported by ads, because their source of revenue is the same and the viewer/user is not really the customer but the product. These days it seems that everyone has some advice for Twitter about possible business models. I really don’t think the […]

When I think of a successful web application, I picture one that has millions of users and runs smoothly (it works fast and it does not crash). Of course, very few are like this. Perhaps the first example that comes to mind is something like Google Search. In the following chart, Google Search is in […]

We just released a fun tool called Twist. If you are familiar with Google Trends, it should be obvious what it does. It allows you to track trends on Twitter over the past week, with a granularity of a couple of hours. While testing the tool we saw spikes in the charts whenever an interesting […]

Wordpress just launched a blog search service for the almost 3M blogs they host on the site. It’s powered by Hounder, the open-source search engine we have been developing at Flaptor over the past few years. We’ve been working on this for a few months so it’s great to see it live! It’s been […]

We just released a WordPress plugin for our automatic tagger. It’s called TagMahal and it’s available here: tagger.flaptor.com/tagmahal. If you have a blog powered by WordPress, it will suggest tags for a post as you write it. Try it, it’s fun!

Here is a six-minute video about the Semantic Web. The idea is explained in a very simple and concise manner.

I think it’s a neat concept that would become popular if it could be made easy for authors to annotate their content as they go. One problem is that most people can’t even be bothered to […]

At Flaptor we believe in the open source philosophy. This is why we have decided to release our most widely used projects as open source. We have created Flaptor Open Source, an initiative for projects related to information retrieval.
We think this decision will be beneficial to the open source community as well as to our […]

A few months ago Steve Newcomb from Powerset asked a question on LinkedIn: if you could build the perfect search engine for you, what would it do?

I was reading all the answers again and started wondering about what a “perfect” search engine would do in the true sense of the word. To me, a perfect […]

In this article, John C. Dvorak talks about search neutrality. He points out that the task of indexing the web is so daunting that only a few very large companies (Google, Yahoo, MSN) can afford to do it. So far, search results are neutral. But what about tomorrow, he asks; when does corruption sneak into […]

Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia just announced his intention to create a search engine combining Nutch and human editors. Color me a skeptic, but although Wikipedia is great this has a neon Vaporware sign painted all over it. Here are some reasons why I’m not sure it’s a good idea:
1) It’s been done before. Yahoo began […]