I have successfully added another 160,000 resources, mostly restaurants with a few banks and golf courses. I am well on my way towards 1,000,000 attractions by the end of 2009. At this rate, I will get there by the end of next month.

If only I had more server power! But servers cost money. At least the stock market jumped today. Cha-ching!

An important part of having a plethora of traveling data is being able to find what you are looking for in this data, quickly. If I am looking for a Quizno’s near my Comfort Inn hotel, I want to be able to quickly find one. It goes without saying that this is no easy task.

On the home page, you will see a beta version of the travel attraction search tool that I am building. It is rather basic on the front-end and the back-end, featuring four input boxes. One for a keyword, such as “pizza”, the other for the type of attraction you are searching for, the next is a state drop down, and the fourth is the city in which you are looking. When you click submit, it uses some fancy functions that I wrote back in my “search engine” days. I wrote an algorithm for a search engine, and after indexing seven million web pages, I realized that I was going to need significant investment capital to make a run at it. Either way, I can start to use some of that here!

My electricity bill was ginormous last month, I bet it is going to be even bigger this month. I have two computers running day and night parsing, organizing, optimizing, and inserting data. Ubuntu really is a fascinating operating system. I am a MAC guy myself, but I really enjoy the simplicity, but yet at the same time, the power of this operating system. I run it on all of my personal servers. I opt for a more robust operating system when deploying anything where security is a much larger concern.

Getting back to my search engine talk, I always considered major search engines like Google and Yahoo to be bloated. But don’t get me wrong, they have to be. What I mean by that is, on the whole, every person who visits Google or Yahoo is treated relatively the same. That means that me, as a “techie” may be served the same results as an iron worker. Even though we typed in the same term, let us say “computer certification”, I am probably looking for advanced certifications and the iron worker is probably looking for basic office certifications, or an equivalent. My point is that technology is coming to a point where it can know certain things about a searcher. It may be able to adjust the listings based on who the searcher is. Technology like this exists with plugins and services, but you have to set these up.

So what I am saying is, because I have a limited data set here at Traveling Network, that being Traveling Resources, I can cater to better results assuming I have the proper data and the person doing the searching is looking for that data. If you are a tourist looking for a deli in New York City, I have exactly what you need.

Arguably, Google is so talented that even with its seven billion plus pages, it can still provide more accurate results than I can, just shows you how talented Google is. But on the average, a powerful search feature on a niche market, statistically speaking, will always prevail.

I have been working tirelessly on compiling points of interest for TravelingNetwork.com.

I currently have over 300,000 restaurants that have been added to the Traveling Network staging database. Once I verify the integrity, the data will be pushed to production.

I expect my electricity bill will be astronomical because I have two servers running 24/7 processing and inserting the data into my staging database. My air conditioner has been running non stop. It doesn’t help that I live near Miami either.

I am well on my way of accomplishing the goal of posting over 1,000,000 resources to the database by the end of 2009.

My next hurdle will be allowing these resources to be available to all of my visitors without any negative affect on the performance of the website. How does one make 1,000,000 resources able to be searched by any string and report back accurate results in milliseconds? This problem becomes exponential. Imagine if I had 20,000,000 points of interest.

I have also just posted a link to some traveling websites that I use frequently. It was important not only for me to make these public for you, but for me personally as well. Before I had to visit Delicious to access all of my bookmarks. Since I am on my website 24/7, I figured it would be beneficial to my visitors and myself to post the links here.

I have also continued work on my popularity index. This is essentially a large ranking system that takes everything, and I mean everything, into consideration. I have extensive experience in the past with visitor rating systems and I am utilizing everything I have learned from that into Traveling Network. When you search for hotels in new york, or restaurants in grand rapids, the order in which the listings show up will be due to this popularity index.

The beauty of this index is as the site grows, the index becomes more accurate. With spam protection and rating coefficient adjustments, the index will maintain its integrity and become a reliable source for decision making. The true beauty is in the automatic nature of the index. But I won’t get into that here!

Oh and did I mention I will be posting tens of thousands of Golf Courses by the end of next month? I love to golf.

-Mr. Travel