On one end of the search spectrum lie the Big 3 (or 4, depending on who you Ask), and they do take up most of the room. But that doesn’t mean the littler guys down at the far end aren’t up to anything cool. For instance:

Grand re-opening for open source engine Threadwatch, getting uncharacteristically verbose, tells the tale of the MozDex “open search” engine, now under new management – and on fresh, fast servers. Built on Sun’s Nutch technology, the MozDex philosophy is that search transparency “allows us to openly discover and communicate new methods and algorithms that give a better view and representation that is less fallible to cheaters.”

Among other things, MozDex has dumped AdSense and Searchfeed; instead, they’ve developed their own pay-per-click system. Bucking a trend, MozDex will augment its index with a paid directory featuring “enhanced ‘content page’ listings.” And in the near future, they’d also like to make the information they’ve collected open source; things like “search terms” and “trends over time” would be made available for “commercial or research purposes.”

Now, from our “Just in the Nick of Time” correspondent What if there was a travel vertical that tracked airfares over time from various cities, and let you know when you were about to be fleeced by a ticket designed to make up a revenue shortfall? Well, there isn’t…yet. But later this year, Farecast will begin a quest in private beta to eventually fill that void.

Although John Battelle swore off reviews a couple weeks back, he does give a pretty good, er, explanation of the upcoming product (“this is not a review of Farecast,” he writes, “as much as I wish I had time for that”). Using an airline industry feed, Farecast tries to determine the best time to buy an airline ticket that won’t break the bank – “In short, it’s a rip off detector for flights.” Battelle hopes this is part of a trend hearkening back to a time on the web when consumers had the upper hand, and the “power of information.” He’s also got about 150 invites to the Farecast private beta test, so get’em while they’re hot.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Search: News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.