Rushmore Drive: An Ethnic Targeted Search Engine

April 15, 2008 at 8:06 am · Filed under: community culture relevance Rushmore Drive search Search Engines targeting

Corvida wrote an interesting post on a new ethnically targeted search engine called Rushmore Drive. She talks about it not being right to differentiate search based on skin colour. When put in that context it is hard to disagree with her thoughts. I commented there on her post but I wanted to expand on it here further.

Theoretically the idea is sound though if looked at in a different context - different cultures like (or search for) different things. That’s why they have different cultures, how bland it would be if we all wanted the same things! It’s natural that someone with a certain culture would use a search engine that is tailored to them - not because of their skin colour but because it finds them the results they want. Of course, it is a bit chicken and egg.. the service was designed for a certain community which you might be able to differentiate by skin colour, and yet it meets that community’s requirements. It may not be ethically a good thing differentiating software on skin colour but African-Americans (in this case) would be happier I bet to use a search engine which finds them what they want rather than have to search through Google.

That was the reason I left Altavista for Google in the first place.

I think over time though this specific search engine is irrelevent - Google (and the other major search players out there) will highly likely introduce profiles that tailor it’s results based on you (equally I would hope you could switch this off if you did not want Google to know that much about you).

a week goes by..

January 14, 2008 at 8:40 am · Filed under: ces email fast google microsoft newsgator search xobni yahoo

A rapid fire post on the past week having been away from it all in Atlanta.

FAST is being bought by Microsoft - Dylan Fuller, formerly of FAST has a good run down on it. I do think it is interesting that Microsoft bought it rather than Google - it’s an obvious fit for Microsoft in the enterprise search space where it is strong but I thought Google wanted more of this space - is it that they think they can do it themselves? or does it not fit with their “everything in the cloud” philosophy?

Xobni launched its beta. Scott Voigt saved me the trouble of installing it right now by giving me a preview. It looks nice enough and gives you some interesting information about your inbox but it doesn’t aid your productivity. It will be interesting to see if this can evolve into a “Email 2.0″ plugin for Outlook, creating a social network through which it prioritises your email. Very early days right now though.

CES happened, the only highlights I heard about were Yahoo Life (integration of the various Yahoo services to give a better user experience - more in a later post); great looking TVs (very thin, bigger..) and Bill Gate’s disappointing keynote looking more at what we know Microsoft is doing rather than anything new. Still it was his last one..

Finally.. Newsgator went free. Finally. The question is whether it is too little too late for them.