New search engine delivers better links, faster!

I am very glad to announce that we have now deployed a completely new search engine on Netvouz. This new technology has been developed during the past 2-3 months and a week ago we began migrating the existing database onto the new improved design (a design which will also allow us to roll out a number of new features which will improve the social aspects of Netvouz). So after several days, weeks, months of hard work it was finally time to make the switch.

This new search engine technology is capable of delivering the best and most relevant results from the links on Netvouz for each subject. Regardless if you search on tag (i.e. browsing by tags) or perform a free-text search using the search field it will return relevant content, free from spam and nonsense links. This is a huge improvement over the old search engine which always came back with lots of spam and irrelevant links, pretty much regardless of what you searched for.

But improved link quality is not all. The new engine is also a lot faster. And because it is also highly tunable we will constantly tune it to deliver better and better results, faster and faster.

For an example of what the new engine delivers, let's shoot a few queries. Let's say we're interested in web design and especially CSS. Netvouz then suggests we take a look at A list apart, css Zen Garden, and HTML Goodies, web sites which all deal with web design, HTML coding and CSS in particular. Good choices, and we could learn a lot from visiting these sites. OK, so now we want to go shopping and what could be a better place to start than by finding the best prices at Price Watch, Priceline, or PriceGrabber. Now let's try to see what Netvouz suggest on another popular topic, cooking diet food. I haven't visited these sites myself but their names sound promising; The World's Healthiest Foods and Over 100 Quick and Easy Healthy Foods.

I hope you all appreciate the much improved search results!

//Henrik

P.S. I recently googled for a radio controlled helicopter, the Lama v4, and much to my surprise Google turns up my own Netvouz bookmarks as hit #4! It must be a sign, so I have now bought one of these as well!

Netvouz becomes a GrabPERF monitoring agent

I've been a long time user of GrabPERF (hey - I've even sponsored the site because it was so useful to me!) and when GrabPERF needed more monitoring agents, I decided to help out. So now I am hosting a GrabPERF monitoring agent on a dedicated Linux box in my apartment in Gothenburg, Sweden. This has nothing to do with Netvouz really (the GrabPERF agent and Netvouz servers are not in the same location), but I have always used GrabPERF to keep an eye on the Netvouz performance.


In addition to that I have also done some DNS changes to Netvouz and these have also improved the responsiveness of Netvouz. Here's what the GrabPERF top 20 list looked today - Netvouz has climbed to 3rd place for the homepage (a new measurement) and about 10th place for the tag search. These figures vary as site response times vary, but it's nice to see that the DNS change clearly made a difference.


I also have some other performance improvements on my to do list which I will implement and roll out as soon as possible. And the neat thing is that these will also have side effects which will improve the quality of the bookmarks and the value Netvouz brings to our users.

//Henrik