redhex.hedir

I found the message url not found for my alexa redirects links. It seems that redirect.alexa.com is down not non-functional.

Any readers here with similar problem with alexa redirect? Alexa redirect  is useful to allow alexa to track your visits with Alexa even when your users does not have the Alexa Toolbar installed. And I did use them for several links that I place in comments and forums. Hopeful Alexa can resolve this redirect.alexa.com problem as soon as possible else my links will be ineffective and some serious clean up need to be done.

Any one else having the same problem with this?

Post your free classifieds at Ablewise.com. The people’s free online classifieds solution.

Mashable have a fantastic article that list a good number of People Powered Search.

It interested me simply because over here at Hedir.com, we are a human edited directory. Anyway, here is the summary of the list:

1. Mahalo
2. Wink
3. Cha Cha
4. Search Wikia
5. Jookster
6. Sproose
7. Gravee
8. Eurekster
9. Prefound
10. Yahoo MyWeb Search

So there we have it, 10 people powered search. Now, the issue is how useful are this search engines? Time will tell.

This post is sponsored by ablewise.com. The people’s free online classifieds solution.

Read this interesting article on nytimes.com, which discuss about the latest development in online marketing. The article focus on the concepts behind the latest cutomised advertiment technique made possible by the growth of the intenet.

The new science of online display advertising involves a potent mix of behavioral targeting, social networking algorithms, predictive economics, pricing optimization and other mathematical strategies.

What caught my fancy is the idea of a real time auction where the commodity are internet’s surfers’ eyeballs and attention.

Imagine that moments before you surf to a page, the page will fetcht the content, check information collected about your demographics data, and match this with the latest merchant offerings, before send the “best matching” advertisment to complement and garnish the page that the reader will be reading.

Sure sounds like a lot of science behind the whole thing. The artilcle quoted 200+ startups in this business and are funded. Surely Google have a lot of competitors… or a lot of opportunites to cherry pick the best company in this new “optimized marketing” industry.

This post is sponsored by ablewise.com. The people’s free online classifieds solution.

A interesting feature that AdLab at Microsoft provide is a keyword forecast system. It seems that it does capture previous search of the entered terms and it trys to forecast, by 3 months the trend of the search queries.

It makes for interesting read and discussion. I am not too sure if the results can be trusted but it sure gives me some grounds for base marketing research on for my boss. And of course, numbers and forecast always appeal to the inner geek in me.

Some screen shots for the search query “hedir”:

At the same time, it covers some stats on the gender and age grouping of the (potential) visitors. Seems to me that Hedir are most frequented by the young adults and are equally split at 50/50 for males and females.

Click for Bigger Image (link to image)

This feature is not a office feature of Microsoft as yet but is avaliable at Microsoft AdLabs.

Till then for more useful sites and features. This is redhex signing off.

BTW, this link was encounted while I was on programming duties at this Free Classifieds Portal.

A news highlight which I find to be really interesting and could have impact on the way search is done:

The Wikia project aims to develop a search engine, crawlers and other indexing tools through a collaborative, open-source process.

We are looking at a series of tools that helps to create a collaborative and open-source style of search for all.

The ultimate goal of the project is to bring “absolute transparency, collaboration and human intelligence to complement search algorithms.”

Not mentioned in the press release is the fact that Wikia is a for-profit venture. The complete business plan has yet to be worked out, but profits and revenue may be derived from advertising or services, Penchina said. The intellectual property behind Wikia, however, will be freely licensed under standard open-source mechanisms.

So there is no business plans as yet, just a hugh concept. But is will be really interesting. What I do like are the tools. It should level the playing field for smaller players (smaller search engine wannabe) to cater for niche markets.

One word, it should helps us all!

The news from cnn.

Recently stumbled onto this particular site:

compete.com and found it to be pretty useful. And even more interesting when it could appeal to the many members here at hedir.com and hence I will write something about it here.

In short, I will describe it as a competitor to alexa.com ranking. compete.com itself is powered by Yahoo and it gathers most of it background information from Yahoo.

The features from compete include a search engine. At the same time, it have a snapshot picture of the webpages that the search result might point to. Much like searchsight.com for those who might be familiar with that sight too.

But what interest me is the profiling compet.com have on the sites that are in its database.

First of all, there is this people visits feature which tells how manny people visited the site over the duration of the past one year. Here is a screen shot:

And there is this Rank feature which rank the sites. The ranking is based on the data that compete.com have. So once again a screen shot:

So there you see, the basic features of compete. Do drop by to see have a go at it. Btw, the link:
compete.com