My good friends at ACS have finally begun to divulge information about their upcoming web service, Serph. I have used Serph since its infancy and can tell you it’s a powerful service. What kind of service you ask? I’d better leave that up to them.
When you type a query into Serph, it goes out and searches online social media sites to find the latest buzz. After it gathers the results, they are sorted and organized so the most recent buzz appears first. Serph gathers these results from blog search engines, social media websites, social news websites and social bookmarking websites. These include Technorati, Flickr, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, Digg, and Delicious just to name a few.
However, for me the great part about Serph is the feature that allows you to subscribe to dynamic RSS feeds for particular searches. For example, if I was an egomaniac, and that’s a big if, I could subscribe to the Serph feed for the “Paul Stamatiou” query and always know who’s talking about me. In a nutshell, Serph is a buzz tracker and Technorati killer in the making. As Michael Arrington has pointed out, Technorati is on the decline after many rounds of venture capital funding that had almost no improvement on their traffic.
As I noted in the title, Serph is now in a public beta so it’s actually possible that you’ll be granted an account.
Disclosure: ACS is a current advertiser (for CrazyEgg) on this website and they bought me dinner a while back.
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Bah, its suffering. I cant get the page to load anymore. I was halfway through signing up as well.
Nightmare.
I think u may have blogged them too soon!!!
ooo and I like the OpenDNS button. I put one on my blog yesterday
that site is definitely down…
Nogg3r5, Mike we are back up right now and trying to figure out what happened while we were all sleeping ;)
Sounds like a big thing. I’ve sent them my mail, just to test the thing.
Sorry for the downtime guys, everything is up and running for the time being.
Paul, I did search your name on serph and was amused to find two of my posts at the top of the list. Of course when I search my name I find “zero hits”. Oh well, such is life. ;-)
Not only is Technorati on the decline, but being the first result for the first entry on their top search terms will only send less than 40 hits your way.
http://engtech.wordpress.com/2007/01/26/does-technorati-matter-searching-for-violent-acres/
This looks good, and that’s a lot coming from me considering that I’m usually very pessimistic about web services. Just from the preview it seems like they’ve covered all the bases. I’m wondering though, will the final version require user accounts? Seems like they ought to have the search engine be open to all visitors…
Montoya, The final version will probably be open to all visitors, and user accounts will be optional and will include additional features. We are always looking for feedback about Serph, if anyone has any, please let us know.