Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category

Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social

Sunday, November 13th, 2011

In the last two years, the concept of “social” inputs to web search has been heavily promoted. We show that social inputs to search encourage spamming to the point that search quality degrades. These attempts to pollute search are filling the “social” world with junk. An entire ecosystem has come into being to assist with search engine social spamming. Fighting this ecosystem is possible, but not easy.

Full paper: “Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social”.

Outage – March 8, 2011

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

Sitetruth.com was inaccessible due to a denial of service attack on our hosting provider’s routing servers from 0624 PST to 1155 PST today. The system is now functioning normally.

SiteTruth search plug-in

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

We now offer a Firefox/Internet Explorer search plug-in for SiteTruth. This plug-in makes SiteTruth search easily available in your browser toolbar.

Install the SiteTruth search plug-in.

Press coverage of web spam and Google

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

Web search spam is now a public issue. Coverage has moved from Search Engine Watch to TechDirt to the New York Observer to the Atlantic to the New York Times. Google’s decline in search quality is now widely recognized. The popular press has difficulty pinpointing the problem. The unhappiness of users, even if not clearly expressed, comes through clearly.

We, of course, can fix this. That’s what SiteTruth is all about. Find the business behind the web site, use automated due diligence to rate that business based on hard information about the business, and use that rating to move the less legitimate businesses down in search results. We use information obtained from reliable sources such as corporate registrations, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Dun and Bradstreet, and the Better Business Bureau. Those sources are difficult to spam. That’s our patented technology.

Our position is clear: if a web site is selling something, which includes sites with advertising, the legitimacy of the business behind the web site matters.

SiteTruth maps of business locations

Sunday, September 12th, 2010

When SiteTruth locates a business, it now maps its location. This feature is experimental, and feedback would be appreciated.

We’ve also added one-click access to Securities and Exchange Commission filings for a business.

SiteTruth now accessing U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission data

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

SiteTruth is now using data from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to help identify companies. We are now able to provide a valid business address for larger companies that may not be listed in “Yellow Pages” type directories.  We now provide some basic financial data for some companies. This gives web users an idea of the size of the company they’re dealing with.

SiteTruth updates

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

We’ve made some minor updates, in preparation for major ones. Big changes are in the works.

In this round, the main SiteTruth.com page was redesigned, we have a new color scheme, and some server upgrades were made. We had several brief outages during upgrading, but are now back up.

Meanwhile, as a digression, we offer SiteTruth Classic, our search engine in a steampunk format.

AdRater 1.1 released.

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

AdRater 1.1 has been released and approved as an official Firefox extension. This update to our AdRater plug-in, which rates Google ads as they appear on web pages, will now work on versions of Firefox from 2.0 to 3.6.

SiteTruth technology now patented

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

The technology behind SiteTruth is  covered by U.S. Patent #7,693,833, issued today, and another pending patent.

SiteTruth outage

Monday, March 15th, 2010

SiteTruth.com was down for two hours this morning due to a power outage at Codero’s Phoenix, AZ data center. According to Codero:

At approximately 8:00AM Central Time, utility power to our Phoenix data center and the surrounding area was cut. The City of Phoenix has not yet informed us of what caused this issue. Upon failure of utility power, backup generator fired-up as designed but the switching gear failed to transfer load to the backup power. Codero staff immediately contacted all of our power vendors as well as building maintenance since the transfer gear and generator are not owned by Codero and are out of our physical control. Unfortunately, the electrical group which could manually transfer the load did not arrive before our UPS and battery loads diminished, and electrical service shutdown.

Upon arriving, faulty breakers had to be replaced before they were able to transfer the load to the backup power source. Shortly after this transfer, utility power was restored, and the PHX data center is currently back on utility power.