…i followed up hjalli gislason (spurl.net founder) after hearing about the furl acquisition last week…you might recall that i also interviewed hjalli (compared spurl and furl)…since he’s an expert in this area of research software and tools, i thought that his feedback might be of interest - he has agreed to let me reprint the email which he sent over a few days ago:

“Hi David, Yes - I actually heard about this a couple of weeks ago. Rumors fly fast in the world of Social Bookmarking :

I think it is a good development and I’m really happy for Mike and the gang. This will only make Spurl.net’s opportunity more real and immediate. It is very natural for the search companies to be looking in this direction - in an interview with SearchEngineWatch they even say:

“Looksmart also plans to leverage Furl users’ behavior to create new types of relevance algorithms for web search. “We will use the information that we’re gleaning from people’s furling activities to create a new ranking methodology,” said Kevin Krim, vice president of Web properties for LookSmart. This new approach will be similar to Google’s PageRank, but rather than using the link structure of the web to determine the importance of the document, searcher behavior will be paramount.”

…just like I predicted in the interview with PassingNotes.

AskJeeves and A9 are also moving closer, although I don’t think Ask’s approach is going to work. There you have to do everything from their search results (Save this result) and that’s simply not the way people go about.

Yahoo is without doubt planning something (rumor has it they were bidding against LookSmart), although I don’t know the status of things there.

Don’t know what MSFT is doing, but they seem to be leaning more towards the desktop with “Stuff That I’ve Seen” (think BlinkX). I don’t know how much of that will make it into their new engine in early 2005.

Google is still a wildcard, but you can bet your hat on that “the labs” have something cooking.

Interesting times - nice to be at the forefront of something like this.
Best,
-hjalmar

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