Malaysian student creates web search engine
My friend and co-founder of Cara com my Media, Wan Kasim Wan Kadir is currently studying Political Sciences in International Islamic University of Malaysia or also known as IIUM. He far from being an IT major, but somehow he has managed to create a great search engine, which I will soon call my default homepage.
He refers to it as a meta-search engine, which is in essence a search engine of search engines. I?m proud of him and his accomplishment, though no one else seems to share this pride. I really don?t know why.
As you head on over to Cara you will be greeted with a simple yet sleek web 2.0 frontpage and yet doesn?t share any similarities with the frontpages of other major search engines.
Type what you want to search just like on any other search engine (because Cara will search other search engines) and be greeted to a super quick pages of search results. Now, here?s where the cool features of the search engine show.
Firstly, each search result has a percentage next to it, identifying it?s relevance to the search term used.
Secondly, certain search results will have a yellow star(s) next to them, the more the amount of stars, the more recommended it is by Cara. Kasim explained to me that this feature works by calculating how many times the particular search result is identified from the compilation of results. The more times the search result is identified by the various search engines Cara uses to search with, the more recommended the search result! This is different from relevance percentage as relevance is calculated by the positions of the search results and not by number of times the search result appears.
Another cool feature which I?m really suprised to see done by my friend and a fellow Malaysian, is the grouping or what some other search engines might call clustering of search results. Apparently, Kasim pulled this off by gathering the most common terms from the collected search results and placing them in order.
Fourthly, Kasim uses Snap preview technology to allow his search engine to have the same benefit as Snap does - which is to allow users to preview a search result without leaving the search results page. This he says could be a great advantage to his web search engine.
Lastly, Kasim told me that he plans to keep the Cara Search engine 100% totally Ad free. Meaning there would not be any image ads or text ads, although he did hint that Cara will make revenue from another business model which he is currently unable to mention about.
Although Kasim didn?t indicate whether he?s planning to add in image and/or news search soon, I will be bugging him to do so as most major search engines include news search and image search as default.So there you have it, a super clean, quick & fast, proper web search engine developed by a Malaysian - and even better than that, there?s no ads! I guess Kasim is trying to add value by taking away ads from his search results, as he says that they are misleading and out-control at times and may lead to a bad user experience.
Source : http://loudtalk.net/2006/12/14/malaysian-student-creates-web-search-engine/