NowRelevant.com

According to the promotion, Now Relevant (curiously not "relevant now") is a search engine with a difference, allowing you to confine your search to the last couple of weeks, and choose a specific number of days to search within that timeframe. To ensure that you realize it's a search engine, the logo comes in blue, red, yellow and green lettering, though to establish that it's not borrowing the idea, it has advanced the concept to include two completely different shades of blue. Testing the search using "giants", since the San Francisco team won a world series game today and the news is burning up the fibre-optic cables worldwide, the engine returned several relevant links, but from blogs I'd never heard of. You can imagine the returns I got for the keyword "uggs". And the returns on the front page weren't even in date order. I would have expected to see the major news networks represented here, or at the very least, the home sites of the teams involved. In fact, there wasn't a single mainstream site on the first page and as we all know, nobody ever looks beyond that. This is a significant point, because search engine returns are not just about relevance to a key phrase. If it were that simple, Google and the others wouldn't have teams of engineers constantly trying to outclass each others' complex search algorithms. Search users have priorities. They want and expect to see the latest news and opinions from trusted and established sources, first, and maybe only. They may also be interested to see what Joe Soap thinks in his blog, but as dessert, not for the main course. This is a marketing project, aimed at encouraging advertisers to use the site's pay-per-click engine. Which, they believe, is better than others because you can guarantee your advertising will not be associated with millions of older links that people aren't interested in seeing anyway. The database being used for this project is called the "internet time machine", of which there is a lengthy explanation at the site. Beyond my understanding, but anyway it begins thus: "Enter The Internet Time Machine. The Internet Time Machine is a series of high powered cloud computer networks that linked together, study internet keyword trends. It was a project that started 8 years ago cost over $125,000 to put together. Why only two years? It was taken that long to gather the data we need to spot million dollar market movers." The rest and more is here: http://www.nowrelevant.com/nrbeta/index.php/main/about_us I went straight over to take a look at the internet time machine website, which turned out to be no more, as far as I could see, than a bunch of oh-God-please-not-again marketing ideas featuring "Quinoa Is Here - Acai is so 2008!" and "Cell Phone Radiation - HUGE GROWING NICHE!" I think Eric, Sergey and Larry can relax. Nothing to see here.