What’s an alt search engine like Iterend on its own?

Written on 30th September 2008                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

“Seriously, who’s still satisfied with Google here?”, Charles Leadbeater asked the audience of Picnic last week. The former advisor of Tony Blair told the crowd he was absolutely ecstatic when he first discovered Google in the nineties, but recently the search engine did nothing but disappoint him. One of the reasons he mentioned was the lack of context.

Had the team of Iterend been present at this presentation, they would have probably smiled since they’re developing a blog search engine which lets you search within certain time frames and categories. Isolated from each other, it’s not that interesting, but the combination leads to good results. Search in the category “Politician” and Iterend will return all articles mentioning a politician. You can then narrow down your search by clicking on the search tags left. There’s also the option to view related articles.

The idea of Iterend is good, but not original. The visual searching (tag clouds) are well executed by Quintura, Google Blogsearch uses the time aspect as well, and Technorati lets you search in related articles. Yet if you take the general function of an alternative search engine into account, Iterend does a good job with combining them and leading the way like a true pioneer.

But something tells me that the Luxembourg-based team wants to be more than just a bunch of pioneers. From their offices at the Technoport incubator in Esch s/Alzette, they probably want to build the next big search engine. I doubt whether they’ll succeed, simply because there are hundreds of developers trying to do the same. Together they’re showing Google the way, but on their own, their influence is limited.

Iterend is in private beta, so their index is not fully up to date yet, but there are still some invites left on the homepage.

google, Google Blogsearch, iterend, Luxembourg, Quintura, technorati

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Rebtel no longer blocked by O2, noisy approach payed off

Written on 4th September 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

About a week ago, I reported about Rebtel, a Luxembourg and Sweden-based start-up that provides cheap international mobile calls, had been blocked in Germany by operator O2. It didn’t look like it was going to be an easy fight for O2, as Rebtel blogger Alexander Drewniak wrote a post in which he promised Rebtel would fight back as hard as they could. Of course Alexander asked for help from the crowd, in the form of complaining by the operator. The crowd did so, and.., victory is Rebtel’s:

Without your personal support, blogging, Tweets, Diggs, Facebook status messages, emails to O2’s CEO and phone calls to their support staff we could never have made our voice loud enough for O2 to hear us. With the Rebtel community being able to come to terms with O2 on this matter we have proved that together we are strong. We held our ground and the persistency surely paid off.

So guess what, in these times, it sure pays off to make a lot of noise via the web and email. You’ll even get a giant like O2 on its knees.

[Via the redesigned ArtcicStartup]

blog, facebook, germany, Luxembourg, mobile phone, O2, rebtel, Telefónica Europe

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