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.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Traveling Network News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.