Nusearch v2 launches

Many search engines get launched, and most get ignored. This is understandable given that most of them aren't backed up by their own proper index of pages – they are simply rehashes of information available elsewhere on the web. There are surprisingly few genuine, spider-based search engines around, and very few offer anything to tempt users away from the big names.

Nusearch (www.nusearch.com), based in Bristol, claims to be the UK's first serious global search player. A big claim, to be sure, but their technology is impressive. They have a distributed network of computers powering high capacity spidering. They produce high quality, spam-free results (a big improvement on the previous version, it has to be said). They also have user oriented features that are pretty unique in the search space: instant preview, instant bookmarking (no registration required) and search within domains all with a slick, AJAX driven user interface.

What really makes Nusearch stand apart however, is their approach to advertising. Firstly, let's get this in context – Internet advertising is Big Business, and growing fast. Specifically, search engine powered, keyword based advertising is great for driving targeted users to your website, with folk like Google and MSN charging upwards of a dollar per clickthru. But then they have Big Overheads too.

Nusearch's Chief Software Architect, Giles Chanot, explains: “Google's whole search system relies on having the entire searchable web held in memory. Memory costs $100/GB and there's about 750,000GB of textual content on the web, conservatively – you do the maths. Our software is a thousand times more resource efficient. We pass on that saving to our advertisers.”

And they do: clickthrus at Nusearch have a flat rate cost of 10 cents. And then there's the Active Search programme – anyone with a website or blog can put a search box on their home page and random web visitors get converted - for free - into targeted users. This is a totally unique proposition and is leading to the democratisation of keyword advertising.

Expect to hear a lot more about Nusearch in the coming months. Next up, they plan to open up their search results to any developer who wants to integrate them into their own website, with no limits and no cost. You saw it here first.