David Hardtke's Blog

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Media Contact:  David Hardtke

david@stinkyteddy.com or (510) 823-8982 

New Search Engine Based on Real-time Gossip

Stinky Teddy listens to world's conversations to build better universal search engine.

Oakland, California – December 14, 2009

Stinky Teddy today launched a search engine based on the premise that the people, places, things, concepts and events that people are actively talking about are also often what people want in their search results.  The address is http://www.stinkyteddy.com.

Traditional web search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, rank results based on historical data and historical user behavior.  Recently, both Bing and Google began including updates from the real-time web (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Blogs, and other social media sites) on their search result pages.

Stinky Teddy founder David Hardtke, who until recently worked as a research scientist in particle astrophysics at UC Berkeley, felt that content from the real-time web would be more beneficial to a search engine if utilized differently. Explains Hardtke,

    "A single 140 character tweet from someone you don't know is generally not useful to you.  It is often the case, however, that multiple people are tweeting and posting on the same topics that you might research with Google.  This is no coincidence.  The real-time web is the new office water cooler, the place to share the juicy gossip.  The idea behind Stinky Teddy is to use all these recent tweets, status updates, and posts to figure out why you might be coming to a search engine, and give you a better answer or more timely content.  It's wisdom of the crowds meets web search."

Behind the scenes, Stinky Teddy is a metasearch engine that polls multiple primary search engines for each user query.  Current partners include Bing, Yahoo! Boss, and Videosurf.   Additionally, each user query is submitted to multiple real-time search engines, including Twitter, Oneriot, and Collecta.   The content from the real-time search feeds is analyzed using a proprietary algorithm that figures out the up-to-the-minute meaning of the search query.  Based on this knowledge, a universal search page (web, news, images, video, and real-time status updates) is constructed.  Hardtke elaborates,

"Our search results page differs fundamentally from others.  Compared to a regular search engine (Google or Bing), our web, news, image, and video content is more focused on what people are actively talking about and less on the historical meaning of that search query.  For instance, is anyone typing 'Tiger' into Google today interested in tigerdirect.com or facts about the animal?  We suspect not. Compared to a real-time search engine, we don't focus on the links that people are sharing, but instead focus on the language people use to describe contemporary concepts, people and events.  Depending on the level of buzz, we will behave differently, more like a regular search engine (low buzz) or tabloid magazine (high buzz)."

The unusual name comes from a stuffed animal that has been a lifelong companion of Hardtke's daughter.  The web domain was first created as an homage to this particular teddy bear, and later appropriated by the search engine.  Hardtke adds, "I assumed that the name was only temporary, but everyone with whom I spoke responded with either, 'I love the name' or 'I hate the name but won't forget it'."

Stinky Teddy is privately funded and based in Oakland, California.    

For more information contact David Hardtke at david@stinkyteddy.com or call +1 (510) 823-8982.