Interview with YurNet: a Meta Search Project with Geek Appeal
I think of YurNet as a swiss army knife of meta search. Click the dropdown bar and you can choose from Comparison Engine, Internet Toolbox, Metasearch and Specialty Search.

Chris, is a network engineer with a fortune 500 company in the IP Telephony sector. YurNet is the evolution of a project that started for him back in 2003.

I typically advise folks to move away from an "everything to everyone" approach to search creation, especially if they're going it solo. "Hyper-niche yourself," I preach. YurNet's creator, Chris, tells me his aspiration's to become the web's "metasource." I'm not familiar enough with the meta search space to know if that's possible, but he succeeded in convincing me that a "swiss army knife" approach makes sense for him at this point.

I say his project has geek appeal because of the internet toolbox, which enables users to dig in with Alexa, whois lookup and DNS lookup from one spot. Plus he's been largely creating it with his geek buddies in mind ;)

I enjoyed emailing and IMing with him - his passion for the project is evident, and he has strong aspirations: becoming the web's "metasource."

Enjoy!

How did you create YurNet?
I wrote a javascript that compared SEs back in 2003 called Yurweb.com (it was mentioned by searchenginewatch at that time and grew to have a loyal following), which is basically the comparison engine of YurNet. Instead of a multisearch page, I wanted to do a metasearch, so YurNet was born. Yurnet metasearch is done in Perl, readily tweaked as I go. I bought a caching software/app to help with the backend a bit (speed things up) as well. I have compiled all the criticisms possible to produce a better search engine.

I do have plans to keep expanding/upgrading my little engine. For example, I will probably add even more engines to the comparison engine and I would also like to expand on what a visitor can do with the queried results on the metasearch engine like save them...maybe for the next time they search etc.

Who do you consider to be your competitors?
My competitors would be ixquick, mamma, dogpile, jux2 etcs of the world even though I am doing this by myself. I do not make any money from YurNet at the moment. Traffic has picked up quite a bit for me over the past month since I have gotten some press...The great thing is that I keep getting return visitors, so I know that some people find my site useful.

Who did you design this site for?
YurNet was designed for the internet public as a research/resource tool so that they don't have to search many single search engines to get quality results. Instead, they find everything from 1 search interface, YurNet.

How many hours have you put into the code?
I don't actually know how long I have spent on this little project, but I have been tinkering with various parts of this engine for the past 4-5 months.

Has anyone else been involved in the project on the code side?
Not with the coding, but I had purchased an engine caching program to help with the backend of the engine a bit.

How many searches per month do you have?
I don't know about the past month, but I have had 20,000 searches in the past 2.5 wks.

How many toolbar downloads per month do you have?
My toolbar has been in existance a little over a week and it has 20 downloads.

How are your results ranked?
My results are ranked according to how many engines find the same top ranked result in common between the majority of the engines my engine queries. I also have a link to each source engine so that a visitor can see where that serp actually resides from the source engine's DB.

Which is the most used search function per month?
Comparison engine...without a doubt...there are search engines out there that do compare results but not up to 3 panes side-by-side and with as many search options. The other search engines are much more limited on the resources (engines) they provide.

How and why did you create the various functions your site provides?
The metasearch engine, Internet toolbox, and specialty searches are done in Perl. The comparison search was coded in javascript.

Who did you design the Internet Toolbox for?
For geeks liks myself...I thought it would be handy for techy people to have this type of search as an option (there is still a bit more development I would like to put into this one...meaning more options). There is a really great site called DNSstuff.com, but it only has the internet toolbox options of what my site provides...it is not a complete search engine. I want my site to be an all inclusive searching experience. I have created it through my eyes and the input of what people have suggested to me, being my friends...more geeks etc.

Why does a search for car on the metasearch bring back 89 results?
I have the search timeout/cache settings configured to query the various engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, altavista, WiseNut, and ODP) cranked to less than a second for maximum searching speed. As well, each search engine is configured to bring in 18 results. Depending on how much is queried in that time will be what is displayed. Based on this one, it appears that 89 unique results were found out of the 108 queried results gathered in the subsecond time alotted for your search.

Do you have advertising?
I do not advertise right now, but if more people like the site and make it worth while for people to want to advertise there, I have some things in mind...like sponsored links etc.

What are your overall goals for the engine?
I would like to grow the engine to become a useful tool based on constructive visitor feedback, professional feedback (such as yours), and my own personal creative visions for it. My search engine is a learning
experience for me as well. I have learned a lot about Perl and Javascript programming. 1 major goal for the future is to develop a cluster search for my engine.

If you had to pick one of your search functions and just focus on that for the site which would it be?
I would never just concentrate on one search option for my site because I feel this is the creative factor of my little engine. There are comparison engines and there are metasearch engines and there are single site engines of course on the internet, but there are not very many that are as multifunctional as mine. I like what Tara Calishain said about my engine...it is a 'metasource'. In fact, I don't think there are any engines
with the full functionality that my site offers at least I have not surfed across any and I am constantly reading about search engines (for the past 6 yrs) from sites like yours, searchenginewatch, searchengineguide,
researchbuzz, about.com, and pandia to name a few.

previous YurNet press:
Yurnet Metasource Search Engine For Your Toolbox
Metacrawlers and Metasearch Engines
Yurnet updated

a suggestion for YurNet:
Provide a better explanation for what each type of search is on your site. It's hard to tell from first glance that you have so many different options for searching, and once I found out I had trouble understanding right away what each section did. Have you experimented with tabs rather than a drop down menu?

If you have thoughts or suggestions for YurNet please comment them - Chris is very receptive.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |