Hi, and WOW, this is a very bizarre quest you have me on here, and I
have to say the answers are stranger than fiction.
First off, I didn't find a single write up on the company from an
outside source since, March 29, 2001. At that time OpinionWire in the
UK wrote up a small article and merely states that the company exists
and that they are up against IBM and Compuware with their product.
That's it... nothing more. Very odd for a Search Engine, especially a
search engine, because these companies get written up and judged by
just about everyone.
But it doesn't stop there. One of the things I read on the website was
that their special crawler called "bumblebee" is out there 24/7
looking at websites. I'm sure you read that too. I found several logs
which listed the bumblebee as having been there and I've posted below
some links to those logs so you can see what they look like. My real
reason for doing that was to show you a log, because I got curious.
See, I run several websites, and I have never heard of this robot. A
robot has a name and they identify themselves in the logs, and being a
webmaster, I check those logs to see who has been around.
On my personal server, for the last 12 months, not one entry shows
this bumblebee robot. Now, my websites (there are five on this server)
aren't especially important or even interesting to anyone not in the
"internet" business, so I looked at 14 of my customer's logs, checking
them for the last 3 months. Not a single hit. Not one. Some of those
websites are "relevant" sites, so perhaps this robot is only cruising
through the UK and Europe. That would not equal a "World of
Information".
The write-ups I did find on the website itself were all on the Flash
Design, nothing about the service. It's a good design, takes a bit to
get use to, and its hard to read on a larger screen, but that's the
only reason I've found anyone has paid the slightest attention to this
company since last year. Even these write-ups were small and hardly
worth mentioning.
Quoted Definition from Webopedia.com
Web Portal
A Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and
services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and on-line shopping
malls. The first Web portals were online services, such as AOL, that
provided access to the Web, but by now most of the traditional search
engines have transformed themselves into Web portals to attract and
keep a larger audience.
A Web portal is commonly referred to as simply a portal.
http://www.pcwebopaedia.com/TERM/W/Web_portal.html
That's a good definition of what Internet types think of when using
the term Portal. Relevare is apparently going one step past this and
creating a web portal that is specifically for your business or needs
created from information that is on the Internet. An "AOL for You"
kind of thing. Sounds like a good idea and there is nothing out there,
right now, that is in the same box. IBM's Portal deals with your
company's documentation and databases. Excel files, Word Documents,
etc., all get logged into this software Portal which then tries to
make some sense of it all for you, and allows you to find information
quickly when your company documents start looking as wide in breath as
the Internet does. This is completely different. Compuware is the same
thing.
On the other side of the spectrum you have web portal websites.
BlackWebPortal, and SemanticWeb.org are good examples of these.
Portals like these are websites which focus on a particular interest
and hunt down on the information they can find for that subject.
Sometimes they miss depending on their methods, but most of the time
they hit and do a good job. MSN.com and AOL.com, and even Yahoo.com
can be put into this category as well.
Another rather odd feature or lack of feature actually, is that there
is no demo for the Relevare system. I can't find one. Normally a web
service like this would have a demo, since they are obviously running
the bumblebee somewhere (not the US or Canada, but somewhere). So they
have some type of criteria set for the robot and it's presumably
bringing back "relevant" information for that criteria. So, why no
demo? This could explain the lack of write-ups, since no one really
has anything to judge their accuracy or relevancy by.
If they had a demo I could then search the internet using the same
criteria and check to see how "relevant" they are, since I do this
kind of work all the time, a spot check of a few "search strings"
could see what they are getting and what they are leaving behind.
Then, I could write something up and give you more information. But,
no demo.
Personal Thoughts.
davidsar-ga had a good point with using Google-Answers. I'll put that
here and leave it alone. He's written out a good description of how
you could use us and we would love to have you.
"Soup-To-Nuts" type solutions rarely are. There were several hundred
of these types of "Complete Solutions to Information on the Web"
companies started up in the late 1990's and none of them survived.
That doesn't mean that this one wouldn't. One of my favorite sayings
is "Everyday someone is doing something that someone else said was
impossible" but the resources involved with keeping a service like
this running are huge. Not to mention your company's needs changing
periodically. What happens then? More over, what happens if they can't
change with you?
Most robots hit my servers about once a month, sometimes a little
sooner, most are once a month, so if you change criteria with one of
these, its not going to show up until next month. This type of service
would have to be out there everyday. Everyday, to get you "new"
websites that are meeting your criteria. Santa Claus does it in a
night, but I don't know many others that can.
As a webmaster, if I was getting scanned by the same robot everyday, I
would block that robot from my site. I know several other webmasters
who would do the same thing and most of the big news sites would as
well (my opinion). That type of action is considered "rude" by
internet folks. So if you are getting your information from a
particular website and they block this ill-behaved robot, where does
that leave you? They could of course change the name of their robot,
which is done by the more "rude" people that own them, but eventually
they are not going to be welcome, and poof, they're gone.
Advice :
I know you didn't ask for it, but I'm going to put it in here anyway.
I would, if I was going to pay for something like this, want to see it
work for a month. I'm not sure what they are charging for the service,
that's not on the website either, but I would ask to see it in action,
and perhaps let one of us go through it as well. If not a month, at
least some type of demo? And set it up for someone, if not a Google
Researcher, someone who knows how to search the web.
A real let down is to find out that the pages you are being served are
not in fact pages that match a criteria, but pages that have paid to
match your criteria. So that you are being fed information that is not
really "relevant" but profitable. For them I mean.
Spiders.com -- No outside write-ups.
Bots.com -- Didn't find a write-up here either from an outside source.
Web Trawlers -- Here's something to try, do a search on Google using
this term. +"Web Trawlers" and you'll get a listing of hits that back
up my "Opinion" earlier. Most webmasters don't like these things, we
like them if they are well behaved, but the ones that aren't ... well,
they are a fly in the ointment. I couldn't even find these guys on the
web as a service at webtrawlers.com, so I'm not sure why you mentioned
them.
The rest appear to be obscure as well.
IBM's Portal
http://www-3.ibm.com/pvc/products/portal_server/index.shtml
Compuware
http://www.compuware.com/
BlackWebPortal.com
http://www.blackwebportal.com/
SemanticWeb.org
http://www.semanticweb.org/
relevare
http://www.relevare.com/site/
Links of Interest
OpinionWire: Iconic Vortals
http://www.serverworldmagazine.com/opinionw/2001/03/29_vortals.shtml
List of Access Logs With Bumblebee Entries.
chobhamvillage.org.uk
http://www.chobhamvillage.org.uk/logs/cho_hosting_access_log
etonvillage.org.uk
http://www.etonvillage.org.uk/logs/eto_hosting_access_log
key-property.co.uk
http://www.etonvillage.org.uk/logs/eto_hosting_access_log
Query Schema
+relevare
+relevare +review
+relevare +opinion
+bumblebee
+bumblebee +review
+relevare +portal
+IBM +portal
+Compuware +portal
much much more...
Thanks for the question and good luck,
webadept-ga |
