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Top Sites for Free eBooks

Steven Finch — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:21:06 +0000

eBooks are becoming more and more popular these days and Crenk just wanted to let you know the best places on the web to find eBooks.

eBook Search Engines

www.pdfgeni.com
www.pdf-search-engine.com
www.data-sheet.net

Scribd.com

Scribd is basically the YouTube of documents. They have a great library of free ebooks to choose from.

Free Ebooks For Your iPod, PDA, Smartphone, Blackberry etc.

www.gutenberg.org
www.manybooks.net
www.feedbooks.com
www.booksinmyphone.com

Free Tech eBooks

www.freecomputerbooks.com
www.freetechbooks.com

ScreenTunes: Free Music Search Tool to Find Music in Films and TV Shows

Steven Finch — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:08:59 +0000

ScreenTunes is a free search tool that helps users find where a song has been played in any piece of professionally-produced video content. You just type in the name of the song and it tells you all the films and TV shows in which it’s appeared. You can then listen to the track right from the results (using Grooveshark), or purchase the track on iTunes or Amazon’s online stores.

Along with acting as a search tool for individual songs, ScreenTunes can be used to look up a track by its lyrics. This also works on entire movie titles, so you can type the name to get a quick track list.

ScreenTunes is a very hit and miss service at the moment and I noticed it takes a lot time to actually load the Grooveshark section at times. Additionally, I noticed there are still lots of searches that yield zero results, I guess they will build their catalogue size over time. Clearly you get better results if it’s a mainstream track, but it’s surprising to see how many places any one song can end up.

Yahoo! and Bing Still Rivals

Dean Sherwin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:07:28 +0000

When Bing and Yahoo! decided recently that they would work together in an effort to stage an offensive against the internet giant that is Google, I though competition between the two had come to an untimely end. I was wrong.

As it happens, although the two search engines will work together to defeat Google they will still compete for glory. Perhaps we will see a kind of WW2 cooperation just like the bitter Allies united to defeat the Nazis…not that Google is a Nazi.

A senior vice president of Yahoo! said “We are Yahoo and that will continue…We collaborate on the back-end but we are competitors on the front-end,”

I guess this makes sense. I mean, what were we all expecting? Yahoo! and Bing to come together like two lost lovers? Nonsense. This is a recession and both companies will by going full steam ahead to stay afloat. They will share advertising revenue with both search engines using the Bing ad model. The deal is due to come into affect next year and will last for ten years. By the end of that time will Google have been defeated? And will Yahoo! be left needing Bing more than Bing needs Yahoo?

IsoHunt Improve Search and Indexing

Steven Finch — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:45:35 +0000

Last week isoHunt updated its indexing code and performed a thorough re-crawl of the indexed sites, resulting in an increase from 1.65 million to 3.49 million torrents. This week the team tackled another problem, namely, how to find the right torrent more effectively.

isoHunt’s founder Gary Fung mentioned that they made several changes to the search algorithms resulting in a superior quality of the search results. The changes should make it easier for the site’s users to find what they are looking for.

Aside from the improved results, the team also added option to narrow down the results to a specific source, Gary explained on Facebook.

isoHunt is currently the third largest torrent site ranked by the number of daily users.

Yahoo and Microsoft Search – Possible Collaboration

Dean — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 11:13:41 +0000

A whopping 67% of us ‘Google’ things. If we want to know something we simply ’Google it’, as it has become known. Like any good online company, their name is also a verb. Just like Twitter with Tweet. They have a hug share of the market – undoubtedly. Now however, they may have their first real competitor in years.

Anyone remember last year when Microsoft was trying to buy Yahoo! for almost 50 Billion dollars? It went down in flames. But the inter-company relationship didn’t end. Now, they’re discussing a possible collaboration between the two search engines –Bing (Microsoft) and Yahoo!.

If this were to go ahead then it would offer a chunk of healthy competition to the dominant Google. The news storyalone would send thousands flocking, to give it a whirl – but Yahoo and Microsoft better be careful.

People like their search engine. For me, its been Yahoo! imply because I like a bit of news before I search and also because it was the first search engine I ever used so I just kind of stuck with it. People don’t like change – and when they do change they don’t want to be insulted by too many sponsored results like over at Ask.com or search results that make them want to ‘Google’ .

It’s impossible to tell what the end result would be from this mutation of search engines. Would it be Yahoo!, powered by Bing or the other way around? They do have a plan to split the revenue between them but what about the work load such as PR, development and staffing the site. Now might not be a good time to invest in any search engine as there’s going to be a war, with casualties. I’ll wait until the final few blows before I put my money on one of them.

Tune In Gets $500,000 to Amp Up Their Site

Dean — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:02:26 +0000

I’m starting to see a pattern here, readers. Every single day I find myself typing one post about having been tweeting from another Twitter App or a new Twitter service of some sort – if it keeps going at this rate, I’ll go insane and start making fifteen posts per day about Twitter. But I can understand why – Twitter rules. Blogs were so 2007.

This time it’s the turn of TuneIn to really jump on the Twitter bandwagon. The have just secured a massive investment of no less than half a million dollars from True Ventures to build upon their existing site which was launched just a few short weeks ago.

At this current point in time they offer the basic tweeting service but that is where the similarities end, full stop. They describe themselves as a highly visual media dashboard that will transform your Twitter experience. They organize other tweets from your network of followers and those you’re following into categories of the most active/popular amongst the users. It will also let you keep an eye on media and sites that are linked to your network.

According to TuneIn, this is but the tip of the iceberg. As a result of getting such a massive amount of money from True Ventures, there is certainly a lot more heading our way said Adam Hertz, the founder of InTune.

File Snatcher: Search File Sharing Sites like Rapidshare, Badongo, Mediafire for Free

Steven Finch — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:05:56 +0000

There are so many little search engine out there that help users search multiple sites in one simple search box. Here is a new search engine called File Snatcher. File Snatcher lets users search fiel sharing sites like Rapidshare, Badongo, Mediafire all for free. The search engine run through all of these sites and search for Mp3’s, videos, softare, movies, documents and photos.

The search engine itself isnt very accurate and they dont seem to have too much indexed, but it is a nice way to search for the files you are looking for very quickly. I like how at the bottom of the search engine they specifically says “this search engine is in no way intended for illegal downloads”. Now seriously im sure they are aware of why exactly this search engine is used!

Microsoft Has Launched Bing

Steven Finch — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 09:37:48 +0000

Bing is the new search engine by Microsoft which was due to launch on the 3rd of June, but for some reason it has launched today!

After using the service for the last ten minutes or so there seems to be do real major difference between Live.com and Bing.com. Search results are still terrible and it is really only the interface that has improved and only slightly.

I cant see Bing in its current form taking any search share from Google. In fact I think in its current form it is probably going to do the opposite and give Google more share of the market. Im amazed that Microsoft cant get a good search algorhythm and that Google are just so far ahead in actually providing quality results.

Microsoft really seems to just lack originality when it comes to search and the majority of their online products. MSN has never really done too much, Windows media player is completely outdated and hotmail needs a revamp but never seems to change much, now bing is the search engine that couldnt.

It would be great to hear your thoughts on the new Bing search engine. The best example of the results is that I searched ‘Crenk’ and the our own website came up 9th! Terrible!

Torrents.to: Search Various Torrent Search Engines in One Place

Steven Finch — Mon, 11 May 2009 09:39:31 +0000

This morning I came across another great torrent search engine that allows users to simply and easily search for torrents on various leading torrent sites. The site I’m talking about is Torrents.to.

Torrents.to allows users to search for torrents on various leading torrent search engines, such as Mininova, The Pirate Bay, Isohunt, BTJunkie and over 150 others.

Additionally, Torrents.to also allows you to search specific torrent sites for specific mediums, such as Jamendo for Music, GamesTorrents for games and software.

Torrents.to runs as a search toolbar at the top of the page and when you are searching for a specific item you can then view the torrent page below and also click easily between torrent sites.

Torrents.to is a great search tool to help you find your torrents quicker and easier on various leading torrent search engines. For easy of use I think that Torrents.to is a much better product than competitors such as Sumotorrent.

TorrentZen: The Live Bittorrent Search Engine

Steven Finch — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:46:13 +0000

Have you ever struggled to find the torrents you are looking for? This means that you have to travel to 10 different sites until you find something that vaguely looks like the right torrent! TorrentZen aims to come to your rescue. TorrentZen is a live bittorrent search engine that brings the results of some of your favourite bittorrent search engines.

TorrentZen works in the same way as other torrent tracks but instead of actually hosting pages with the results, they provide a link to those pages on other search engines. Therefore TorrentZen functions in the same basic way as a meta search engine.

26 New And Awesome Web Apps You Probably Don’t Know About

Keshav Khera — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:25:53 +0000

Ten years ago, who would have thought that most of our work would depend on the internet? The internet allows us to have easy access to our files, anywhere, anytime. We chat face to face with friends, meet clients virtually, process payments in a flash and much more. The internet is huge and you can’t get enough of it. It has no end.

While on the topic of the internet, you can call the current scenario, the Web 2.0 revolution, the next dot com boom. Web apps are torrenting the internet with their numbers and new ones pop-up everyday.

Today, I will talk about the latest additions to the pool, of course; the ones you probably don’t know about.

So, without further ado…

TinyChat

With TinyChat you can create your own chatroom and invite people through one simple link. Chat rooms are disposable and can be created within seconds.

KeepHD

With KeepHD, you can download the high defintion version of youtube videos and also fetch the FLVs and 3GPs for your mobiles.

Prezi

With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.

Wix

With Wix, you can create stunning flash websites for free, all from your internet browser! It offers you a simple powerful online platform to make flash websites, MySpace layouts and more. No downloads or programming needed.

Nice Translator

NiceTranslator is a fast, easy to use online translator designed with simplicity and functionality in mind. It is ajax powered, so you get the translations on the fly!

Task Five

A to-do list with a twist. It streamlines tasks in an elegant calendar view

Pizap

Pizap is a fun free photo editor that lets people easily create wacky images with their digital pictures. You get a very easy to use photo editor that lets you add photo effects, custom text or speech bubbles and much more.

whspr!

Need to receive a message by email, but can’t (or don’t want to) give out your email address? whspr! gives you a URL to share instead.

WobZip

WobZip is an online tool which lets you uncompress compressed files online. It supports many formats including the major ones as Zip, RAR, 7Z, Gzip, TAR, ISO etc…

Anyvite

Create an invitation in seconds, add entries from mobile, twitter, email, iCal, gCal or Outlooks. And of course, send them with ease from withing the app.

Fliggo

Fliggo is an out-of-the-box, all-in-one, solution for creating your own video website. It can be a video blog, a YouTube-like community or a private site for your company or family.

Yidio

Yidio combines over 200 million videos and offers one of the largest video search engines on the Web.

SlideRocket

SlideRocket is an online, flash based tool for creating slides and presentations. It brings together a complete package of online slide making with features such as an intuitive interface, themes, flickr integration and much more

Ziddu

Ziddu is a new free file hosting solution with features such as unlimited storage space, fast uploads and downloads, file management, a sharing community a referral program and the ability to earn money with your downloads.

Mufin

Mufin is your music discovery engine, that will let you easily discover new music among millions of tracks. With the sound that you dig!

YouTube Reloaded

YoutubeReloaded creates an embeddable playlist of YouTube videos that can be added to any website. Simply choose a playlist type to create your free youtube playlist.

FriendPaste

FriendPaste is a an online tool where you can paste code snippets of many different languages to share with friends. It sports and intuitive interface with support for syntax highlighting.

Survs

Survs is a collaborative tool that allows you to build, deploy and analyze online surveys. With a great user interface, Survs is currently in private beta, though a single request fetched us an invitation.

SendPhotos

With SendPhotos Mobile, Web and PC you can upload photos, edit them, create photos albums and share them online with whoever you want. Also available for Android, iPhone and BlackBerry.

BackupURL

BackupURL creates instant cached copies of web pages. The content of a web page stays the same while you share the link provided. The cached page can also be used for referencing or even mirroring data. The cached page will always be online (html,css,images) no matter whether the original site is up or down.

RapidStack

Rapidstack is a realtime Rapidshare link searcher. It scans the links before they are displayed as results and only working links are displayed.

CC:Betty

CC Betty organizes your message and its contents – photos, addresses, documents, links – and create a mailspace where everyone can track replies, view and add content. You just CC your messages to her!

Sigpad

Make your emails pop with signatures that reflect your personality and change with every email you send! Create signatures with your twitter status, flickr photos, blog entries, youtube stream and much more, all realtime.

FeedWeaver

Create your own RSS feed by combiningRSS feeds from your favorite websites, and use filters to choose what you want in it!

Twe2

Twe2 is a service which sends you your twitter replies, direct messages and custom searches that you specify free to your mobile as SMS. Available in more than 230 countries.

Markkit

Markkit is a web2.0 text highlighter. Drag’n’Drop the markkit yellow pen into your browser toolbar. Whenever you want to highlight text in a web page, click on the markkit bookmarklet.

So which ones are your favorites? Discuss in the comments, and dont forget to give it a digg

(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.

OneRiot: Search Results That Have Real Time Popularity

Steven Finch — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 03:32:56 +0000

Alternative search engines seem to be popping up everywhere lately. Oneriot is yet another alt search engine but this one seems to actually provide some useful results. Like most other search engines Oneriot provides basic search results in a basic format. However, unlike other search engines, they prioritise their information based on its current popularity within their community. Popular results are a great idea, cause on Google I’m sick of seeing search results that are sold old they are now just obsolete.

Oneriot pushes our revelant, fresh, friendly and search results with real time energy. When using Oneriot you might notice that there is a search result above the others and this is because of their pulsing service. Pulsing is what they define as a search results that is getting buzz right now. The more real time buzz you get the higher on search results those articles will be and thus more traffic for your site.

Oneriot is a clean and very user friendly search engine that I expect to be hearing more about in the coming years. Im just a little worried about their current revenue model, cause there doesn’t seem to be one.

ErrorKey: The Alt Search Engine for Error Messages

Steven Finch — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 03:41:40 +0000

There are so many alternative search engines in the market today. I came across a new alternative search engine that might be work bookmarking, ErrorKey. ErrorKey is a new search engine dedicated to provide results for any error you encounter. Developed in a way that it crawls across the web to search for information associated to various errors plus builds itself up from contribution by users and other developers alike, it just requires you to type in an error and get information about it. It also has pre-defined tags that contain search results associated to various devices, programs etc (HTTP to Cars). It’s neat and pretty useful if you are looking for errors alone.

Source: Startupmeme

Hulu Content is Removed from Boxee. Will This Affect Their Offering and Growth?

Steven Finch — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:04:30 +0000

Boxee has just sent out an email to bloggers alerting them that as of this Friday, they will be removing Hulu from their channel lineup. This comes at the request of Hulu. Apparently Boxee has been working to try to keep Hulu in their lineup for two weeks.

From the Boxee blog post:

we love Hulu. they have built a great product and brand (including one the best Superbowl ads this year)… the response has been amazing. people love watching many of their favorite shows on Hulu via boxee. last week we generated more than 100,000 streams for them…

two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it.

Hulu has also posted on the Boxee removal:

Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes…Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites…For those Boxee users reading this post, we understand and appreciate that you’re likely to tell us that we’re nuts. Please know that we do share the same interests and won’t stop innovating in support of the bigger mission.

Boxee only just release onto Mac and Ubuntu on the 8th of January and now they have lost one of their major sources of content. The Boxee service is a very simple one, they provide movies, tv shows and music all in one simple location.

Top 5 Multi-Search Tools for Find The Best Torrents

Steven Finch — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 09:00:12 +0000

Previously here on Crenk we have talked about the top torrent trackers on the web and this time I want to outline the top 5 multi-search torrent tools.

NowTorrents. Searches up to twelve sites at once. I like the file type tabs and health indicator, and they offer a Firefox and IE compatible search plugin.

uSniff. I wrote about uSniff before, and I use it quite often. I don’t really search a lot of different sites, usually just Pirate Bay and IsoHunt, and they’re both supported (along with six others). The interface is clean and responds quickly – the search box throws some people off, though. I don’t understand why, it’s giant, orange, and says “search” on it. They also have a search plugin for IE and Firefox.

ScrapeTorrent. Offers a nice preference page and searches nine sites at once. Piratebay, IsoHunt, Mininova, and Demonoid are included, and they’re my go-to sites anyways. I approve!

Speckly. I hate the way it displays results: gobs and gobs of text, Google style, and all on one page. There aren’t any sorting options, though you can at least view by file type.

Torrentz. Technically it searches multiple sites, but you’ll get a general results page first. Clicking one of the results will take you to a listing of all the individual torrents. I find it an annoying process, and don’t use Torrentz as a result.

Google Pagerank Predictors Havent Been Working For Long Times, Maybe Business Opportunity!

Steven Finch — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 11:57:49 +0000

Probably more than six months ago now I noticed that iWebTool’s Google Pagerank predictor stopped working correctly. I know that no one has really reported about this issue but it just a well known fact that it no longer works. However, it really makes me wonder why no one has actually contacted Google and tried to get this service back up and running. Google Pagerank is know for providing a basic authority ranking for their search engine, these days it probably has not as much affect on search results as it previously had, but it is still very important. Can someone get this back up and working!!

Just Hear It: New Music Streaming Search Engine That Claims To Be Legal

Steven Finch — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:23:42 +0000

In the last week or so we have been really taking a keen focus on music streaming service and even posted a specific review about MixTurtle. Today we have come across yet another music streaming service that might be worth a look. This new streaming service is called Just Hear It. Just Hear It has been created by two college students Nicolae Ivanescu and Cosmin Panait.

Just Hear It is very similar to MixTurtle, Seeqpod and Songza. It lets the user search for tracks that are online and add them to a playlist. Just Hear It claims to be completely legal, following DMCA guidelines, and paying royalties to all of the major performing-rights organizations, like ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. In the future, Just Hear It aims to negotiate licenses to share revenue with labels.

After playing around with the site it still seems to have the same issues as Seeqpod and Songza, every now and then you will find the track that you want to listen to, but it simply wont play or the file is corrupted or incomplete. Im not really too sure if there is anything more annoying than setting up your playlist and half the songs playing.

However, because Just Hear It claims to be completely legal, I’m very curious to see how this business develops. They need to have a very strong business model and I’m guessing that will be based on advertising revenues.

The World’s Top 10 Free Music Streaming Services

Steven Finch — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:25:50 +0000

Im spending a lot of time in the office recently and I’m one of those people who cant work without music playing really loud in the background. I’m sure its not just me who thinks better when music is playing loud, so I thought I would put together a quick list of the top 10 free music streaming service that are currently available. Some of these services can only be used in specific countries, but I’m sure this will change in 2009.

Pandora – Pandora is now just a USA based service. However, Pandora is a great service for those in the USA and im surprised if most people in the USA don’t already use it. Pandora is basically a music radio service which lets you listen to customised radio stations.

Last.fm – I have never really understood Last.fm myself, but they have a great service in which will let you stream music from certain artists. Some have full tracks for free to stream, but others have videos or some nothing at all.

Seeqpod – Seeqpod is basically Google for music. Seepqod is a search engine that allows users to find whatever music they want to listen too. Seeqpod can only find music that can easily be downloaded on the net, so it can be limited with some artists, plus sometimes the tracks might be corrupted and not completely work. However, it is great for making playlists.

Spotify – Spotify is a new music service that has launched out of Sweden. I have been using Spotify for several months now, even though it is in private beta testing. Though the music is streamed, it is played instantly and is partly supported by the famous P2P technology. Currently the service is only available in Finland, France, Norway, Spain, Sweden and UK. Spotify has to be the best music streaming service I have used in 2008.

Myspace Music – Myspace is of course the worlds largest social network and Myspace Music is just an add-on of this social network. With Myspace Music users can search for pretty much any artist in the world and stream the music they have on their profiles. Remember it is limited to only the music the artist wants you to hear.

Rhapsody – Rhapsody has a nice “listen FREE” search option at the top of its homepage, an excellent way to entice people to sign up for its premium service. Once you find the artist you are looking for then you can play any of the songs in their catalogue for free. However, then I realised streaming is only for the USA.

Imeem – Imeem is a mixture between music streaming service and social network. On Imeem to stream music all you need to do is to search for the artist you want to listen to and then the majority of the time they will already have an Imeem account.

Deezer - Deezer is a mixture between Seeqpod and Imeem. Deezer has some social networking aspects but mainly it is just a great music streaming service that is very easy to find the music you are looking for. All music on there is legal and free and artists actually get royalties from your streams.

Skreemr - Skreemr is very similar to Seepqod and it is just basically a search engine for music online. Skreemr is a free service that picks up free music from across the internet and allows you to play it easily. However, unlike Seeqpod they don’t allow users to make playlists.

Lala – Lala is one of the new music streaming services on the block. Lala provides free streaming to only USA users. There is a limit on how many times you can listen to a track for free, but you also have the option of purchasing that stream for $0.10 so then you have can unlimited plays. Additionally, if you want to take the tracks off the site then there is an option of $0.79 for the download.

Twingly: The Blog Search Engine That Is Actually Moving In The Right Direction

matt — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:20:40 +0000

When you have an urge (we all get it), or a task that requires you to go sifting through blogs, what is the first place that comes to mind? Technorati of course. It is an established player in a fairly open market which has seen their superiority fairly untroubled. Until now?

Enter, stage left, Twingly.com, a Swedish blog search engine founded by Martin Källström.

According to Twingly.com’s ‘about‘ section, the philosophy behind their search system is to produce “a blog search engine featuring a spam-free, faceted, social search for the global blogosphere”. Nice, but aren’t Technorati and URLFan doing the same thing? Twingly uses relationships, ie how well linked each blog and article is, to work out how relevant to your search they are. Key to the service is a blog’s ‘approval’. If a blog is not approved by the Twingly team (meet them here), it could potentially be spam. If you are the owner of a blog that comes up as not being approved, you can of course resolve that little issue by sending the Twingly team a swift e-mail.

You can express your opinion on the blogs Twingly finds via a fluorescent green ‘links/likes’ tab. This shows you how many people are linking to the page and it allows you, once you’ve signed up to the service, to vote on if the post is relevant or useful – it’s the equivalent of Technorati Favourites.

Where it gets really interesting though is the blog profile page. With some nifty “research”, we can compare Crenk’s ranking on Twingly, Technorati and URLFan.

Crenk is ranked 3/10 (10 being the highest) with 43 blogs registering as being linked to various articles on Twingly. Technorati claims 80 and URLFan says 45, with 199 other mentions. These are vastly differing numbers, and you have to wonder if Technorati is brilliantly accurate or if it’s not omitting that nasty spam.

Some other nice touches from Twingly include the ability to search within a certain timeframe, as mentioned you can search by one of the 12 supported languages, and you can also look for blogs that have been officially approved, thus weeding out any other possible spam.

Twingly have also released their top 100 blogs by ranking, and if you are proud of where your blog sits in their 1-10 scale, you can of course throw on that all important badge to show it off. One rather large omission however, is the Huffington Post.

With this in mind it is safe to say that Twingly isn’t the most accurate blog search engine, yet. However, the layout is simple and practical, and although the ‘likes/links’ updating isn’t instantaneous (it took about ten minutes to register), the future looks very bright for the Twingly team who are currently overseeing about 25 million searches per month.

Twingly has the potential to be a very good blog search engine. It looks good, is quick when pulling together results and the blog profiles, in relation to each other, are very useful; it even has some pleasant widgets to pop alongside your page ranking.

They are very much into their feedback in Sweden, and you can vote for your most wanted features at the Twingly Tech Plan page.

Try Twingly.com out for yourself and let us know what you think.

YouTube Off Site Video Players Now Have Search Option. Plus New Google Image Search Tool

Steven Finch — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:07:50 +0000

Youtube seems to have added a very interesting feature to their off site video players. I’m really not too sure if anyone has already reported about this, but Youtube video players which are hosted off the Youtube site now have their own drop down search tool. I have added the video below so you can have a look:

This is a great idea! Now any Youtube off site video player is pretty much as useful as being on the Youtube site itself. Any video can be played in the one player. I admit because the player can be quite small at times, the search results don’t show too many results at once, so you have to be pretty specific to find the exact video you want. However this is a great addition from Youtube!

Additionally, when searching for an image to use I came across this,

When using Google image search instead of searching then finding an image then if that isn’t the right image, then you have to go back and keep doing the same process. Thus getting a little annoying. However, now you can search straight in Google image search while still looking at a page. I know, not big news but just thought someone actually might be interested in this.

Technorati Media Launches Their AdEngage Product. Just a Poor Advertising Network

Steven Finch — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:52:25 +0000

Technorati Media has finally launched their Engage (advertising marketplace product) live. Previously this new tool was in Alpha stage and only certain people could use the product. This all happened because Technorati purchased AdEngage.

Since purchasing AdEngage and launching Technorati Media I think Technorati has really lost sight of what their core business model is!

Technorati was a blog search engine that doesnt currently have really market share and presence and their product offering seems to be going down hill by the day. To compensate for this they purchased AdEngage and launched Technorati Media, which is just an ad network.

Looking at the current results from this ad network which has been in operation for several months, seem to be very poor. They are selling advertising for blogs such as The Inquisitr and Profy. The results seem to be as follows, for CPM advertising they are offering a decent CPM rate in between $1.00 – $2.00, but ads are currently only for the USA market and even then their fill rates arent 100%. For all other countries they suggest to use Google Adsense, which is fine, but unless you have a huge amount of USA traffic then this isnt really worth the effort, because what you make on USA revenues you lose on Google revenues elsewhere. In terms of selling sponsorships they also seem to be terrible, with The Inquisitr having 2 125×125 ad slots in the sidebar in which they havent even been able to sell 1 for a few months.

This is all about Technorati realising they dont have a search engine product that is any good, so they are looking for additional revenues streams which will help them eventually sell the company. Is that the way it is or am I wrong?

How Do I Get Listed In The DMOZ Directory? What Do I Need To Do?

Steven Finch — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:41:28 +0000

For a long time now we have been producing what I believe is great content here on Crenk. That being said we are still missing from a lot of major site databases on the internet and Im wondering why!

DMOZ.org is the Open Directory Project. The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

Dmoz is owned by Netscape which now is owned by AOL. So that all being said Im finding it strange that Crenk is still missing from this directory. Is Dmoz still in operation? Do people actually use this service? Additionally, I know how to get listed in Dmoz, but doesnt matter how many times I apply nothing happens.

Crenk How Has Site Links Within Google Search

Steven Finch — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:16:14 +0000

Here at Crenk we have been making a lot of strides in the last few months. Today is no exception, I just received an email from one of our readers confirming that we now have sitelinks within Google. Woohoo!

Cuil – The Google Killer?

Mike Panic — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 14:08:29 +0000

Searching is big business. Those listings on the right side of any Google search are there because someone paid money to advertise there. Same goes with the top 2 or 3 links. Google makes a lot of money off of these paid placements, which are there based on their dynamic search technology. Google has also come under fire for the way in which it ranks sites, called Page Rank, it is a top secret way they calculate what search results should be at the top for any given term, based on their algorithm that, some have suggested, is based on the number of in-bound and out-bound links from other sites.

Google is the killer app of this decade, no one is doubting that. It is so popular it has become a verb, people just say, “Can you Google this for me?” which is almost impossible to do with anything anymore. So what if a new search engine comes along and tries to flatten the playing field?

That is exactly what Cuil (pronounced Cool) is trying to do. They claim to index three times the number of sites Google does and display them in a three-across pattern. That alone is kind of unique for searches, as they have always gone vertically. They have also implemented tab searches, a kind of, well maybe if you were looking for camera you might also want to look for digital camera. The search engine works, that really isn’t a question, but why should I use it?

Google does so many things now, like simple and complex math problems, fast weather look-up, package tracking from UPS and other services, all the way to stock quotes and word definitions. For me, it has eliminated the need to go to specialized sites if I can just put a special query in the Google search bar in Firefox. Cuil is also missing an image search function, something even Microsoft and Yahoo have worked into their site.

Cuil has some cool features, like roll overs, drill-down menu’s and the tabbed feature mentioned earlier. They are taking on the proverbial 800 pound gorilla by going after Google too. My two cents say that Cuil will have a small cult following for a while but ultimately, this will only make Google stronger.

ChaCha: Human Powered Mobile Answers

Steven Finch — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:32:33 +0000

Chacha is a mobile service that is trying to enter the competitive market of mobile search. Mobile search is currently thought of as an online product, so Google or Yahoo search for example, but mobile search can also mean that you get the answers without having to go online. How does that work? Well in the case of Chacha all you have to do is send them a text message with a question and they response seconds later with the answer.

Simply text your question to 242242™ (spells ‘ChaCha’) or call 1-800-2ChaCha™ (800-224-2242) from your mobile phone to ask any question and you will receive the answer as a text message. If you have a web browser on your phone, just click on the short website link that’s also included with your answer to see a reference website with more information. Since ChaCha uses human guides, you can easily reply with follow-on questions as if you are exchanging messages with a friend.