Searsia at DIR 2017

We presented Searsia at the 16th Annual Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop DIR 2017 which was hosted today by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. DIR 2017 aims to serve as an international platform (with a special focus on the Netherlands and Belgium) for exchange and discussions on research &... [Read More]
Tags: random

Affiliate marketing as ethical advertising

by Djoerd Hiemstra

Internet advertising is a completely messed-up, multi-trillion euro business that is controlled by a few big players, most notably Google and Facebook. Their business models are based on figuring out as much information about people as possible, and then using people’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities to persuade them to click on... [Read More]
Tags: advertisements, privacy

Privacy implications of federated search

by Djoerd Hiemstra

What does “federated” mean in federated search? Like the European Union is a federation of independent countries, so is a Searsia engine a federation of independent search engines. When Searsia receives a query, it does not perform a lot of searching itself: Searsia forwards the query to a limited number... [Read More]
Tags: advertisements, privacy

Dr Sheet Music, A New Search Engine in Town

There’s a new search engine in town: Dr. Sheet Music is a search engine dedicated solely to sheet music. It retrieves results from more than 50 sites that provide sheet music; both sites that provide copyright-free sheets as sites from which you can buy sheet music of the latest popular... [Read More]
Tags: advertisements

Some thoughts on search advertising

by Djoerd Hiemstra

In many respects, advertisements drive the web. The biggest web companies today — yes, Google and Facebook — get most of their revenue from advertisements, but also many small web sites can exist because of advertising. So, as we work at Searsia to provide developers with open source tools to... [Read More]
Tags: advertisements