I saw a write up of TrueKnowledge earlier on ReadWriteWeb, and must say that if this company can deliver what they are saying, they really could give Google a run for their money.

Some might say, “big deal. Ask.com did that already with answers years ago”. Not so. TrueKnowledge seems to take things a step further by being able to translate multiple complex queries and make sense of data found in their internal knowledgebase, as well as harvest external information. The video shows a practical application of this when they ask the system to find the current time at the GooglePlex.

Still, AskJeeves is still fresh in some people’s minds. This story speaks of the demise of Jeeves:

The decision to drop Jeeves was a necessary step in an important re-branding process, said Crisp. When the site launched in 1997, “we had a team of editors looking at the top queries on AskJeeves and surfing the web on their own to pull together search results. This was good for popular questions, but it didn’t scale. Suddenly you needed more editors for more queries, which were becoming more diverse and specific. We were over-promising and under-delivering.”

Undoubtedly, there will be similar concerns of scale for TrueKnowledge. However, their approach appears to be different. For instance, if you type in a question that the system doesn’t know the answer to, you as the user have the ability to add and verify facts…rather Wikipedia-esque.

TrueKnowledge’s API information sounds promising, as does their architecture. Everyone likes architecture diagrams. And they should: such tools are a great way to explain a quick summary of system flow to both technical and non-technical crowds alike:

Some of their features a very interesting to be revealed for a search engine.

Take the recent history, for instance (click for larger view):

Their video is a must see. It even has a great British voice over by TrueKnowledge founder William Tunstall-Pedoe, to which some think sound uncannily like the guy that does those Dyson vacuum commercials (props: Tanner). Accent or not, this looks to be a very promising solution. Granted, watching a staged demo doesn’t speak to all the challenges and pitfalls of maintaining such a system on a global scale, but they appear to be setting things up in the right direction.

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GoDaddy is having a domain sale ending today: .com domain names are $6.95. To get the deal use code gdm0606c in the shopping cart.

These deals come out periodically, but I thought that this was an especially good one for people that don’t have bulk registrar accounts (you’re basically getting the same deal here). GoDaddy is a great registrar, and has one of the best customer service operations I’ve ever seen. I also like that they don’t have an 800 number - few companies of this size go with this strategy - so that they aren’t even passing this expense back to the users!

Anyone that had major domain name issues in their RegisterFly account also greatly appreciates GoDaddy:

“On May 29, 2007 Go Daddy, a competing registrar, announced that through an agreement with ICANN, it was taking over the entire portfolio of more than 850,000 generic top-level domain (gTLD) names held by RegisterFly. The names would move to newly created accounts at GoDaddy and they would notify Registerfly customers by email. GoDaddy and ICANN will not release terms of the agreement but have said that GoDaddy is not buying Registerfly. Go Daddy Press release May 29, 2007^[16] ICANN plans to continue legal action agains Registerfly for it’s continued noncompliance of the court ordered injunction.^[17]“

(source: Wikipedia Article on Registerfly)

We’ve been pretty busy getting several sites up these days. The latest is Psycall.com, a for-hire Psychology agency that assists school districts for as needed services (i.e. when they do not have people on staff for budgetary reasons) and special consulting.

Check them out at www.psycall.com! Congrats, Nancy!

I’m pleased to announce that the complete redesign of Louisvilleexecutives.com is now live!

The Louisville Executive Resource Network (otherwise known as LERN) provides

We’ve done a complete overhaul on the site - new design and back end. Also created CMS functionality with an integrated electronic payment system through PayPal for members to sign up (free resource for businesses).

Don’t believe me? here’s the old site.

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