Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

As of today, RegisterFly has officially lost its accreditation as a domain name registrar. Godaddy (the world’s largest domain name registrar with more than 20 million domain names already in its portfolio before this move) has luckily come to the rescue. 

GoDaddy has agreed to take over and manage more than 850,000 domain names belonging to customers of a troubled rival.

What I find perplexing is that at the time of writing this post, registerfly is still accepting new domain registration!

for more info read this Yahoo! news story and this press release.

New GoDaddy.com customers with questions can call a 24-hour dedicated hot line at 480-366-3500. They can also get more information and answers at http://www.godaddy.com/welcomeregisterfly

I’ve recently (two days ago) started experimenting with building my own search engine.  The inspiration came from my experimenting with Google’s Co-op Custom Search Engine contraption.

The software I’m using to build my very own Google is Nutch which is an open source web-search software. 

Nutch builds on Lucene Java, adding web-specifics, such as a crawler, a link-graph database, parsers for HTML and other document formats.

The tutorial I used to build my search engine (and its a great tutorial) can be found here. It basically guides you through the whole process of building the search engine including setting up the environment for Nutch (basically Java and Tomcat on an Apache server), installing Nutch, crawling and indexing your first site, searching your site and even using Regex URL Filters to tell the search engine to select which URLs on a page to crawl and which to will ignore.

I’ve yet to be successful at crawling my site (or any site for that matter) but will keep you posted on further developments.

In the meantime and for more information about Nutch, please see the Nutch wiki. 

Did you know that you can now use Google’s search technology to add custom search to your site? 

Google has launched its Google Custom Search (Co-op Beta) which allows you to “Harness the power of Google search technology to create a free Google Powered Custom Search Engine that reflects your knowledge and interests - and make money from the resulting traffic.”

 I’ve already started using it to build an internal search engine for one of my sites and I must say, I’m very impressed with the results (pun intended).

In order to maximise the benefits of having the Google Custom search engine as your default internal search engine, Google should have indexed your entire site (even if some of the results are in the supplemental listings.)

You can also “let users integrate your information or services into their Google search results with Subscribed Links.”

The Google Co-op tool also allows you to “use your expertise to help improve Google web search for specific subjects by labeling the best sites with topics.”

I think its great that Google is allowing webmasters from all over the world to use its search technology to create specialised search engines.  Its also great for Google because it allows them to extend their reach and maintain their dominance in the search market (some might say thats a bad thing, not me)

I’ll be posting more about my experiences with this great tool, stay tuned…

Welcome to my Blog.

My name is Omar Kattan and this is my first blog.   Funny really since I work in search and I probably should have had one of these niftty things a long long time ago! Well, better late than never I say. 

Anyway… The reason I started this blog was because I recently bought my own name’s domain name (omarkattan.com) and wanted to use it for something so I thought.. maybe a blog would be a good idea!  And so here we are…

Its actually 3:19 in the morning now and I couldn’t sleep so I figured I’ll stay up and start posting my first entry,  so here it is…

What will this blog be about?  Well mostly about search (as in digital search) and my work and experiences with it (5 years so far) including the sites I’ve built and the experiences I’ve had/will have in working with search engines (both paid and organic).

I will also attempt to keep this blog updated with the latest search news including the latest technologies, trends and fast moving developments in the fascinating world of search.

I hope you find my posts both informative as well as insightful.  If they are,  please do post comments and feel free to ask questions.

Until another sleepless night…