View Blog

Finally the development team have re-started building the Search functionality on the website, which got de-prioritised around about a month ago, when we moved to our new servers and UK data centre. As a Global Open Address Book we are supposed to be able to allow people to find people and be found by other people - but we are only properly offering half of that service at the moment as the main People Search facility has not yet been completed. The current Search is pretty basic and only returns WikiWorldBook results and general web results.

 

So what will the forthcoming People Search allow you to do? It will allow you to search for a name externally across the major social networks and the web generally - as well as internally across our site. Obviously for the next year or so we are going to be relying heavily on the external search, but hopefully with time, this reliance will be reduced.

 

At the moment, people who register can be found via a Google search (although, being a new site, it takes a week or so for Google to update their records). This means that you can be found on a Google Search on your name and then contacted by an unregistered person - most likely an old friend who has lost your contact details and wants to get in touch again. Most other traditional social networking sites allow you to find people but then require you to register if you want to contact them. We, on the other hand, are an address book with social networking functionality.

 

For the past few weeks, we have been tidying up the site, getting the ads working, fixing snags that have arisen from the server move and also making the site more Search Engine friendly (otherwise known as SEO, Search Engine Optimisation). As one user correctly pointed out, our urls for peoples' profiles (the address that appears in the browser) were terrible - they are now much better as of mid last week. Its important to put these in a form that are more friendly for search engines to use otherwise you are downgraded in their search results - not so good when the service you are providing is a find and be found service (but hey, we're only just getting going!). Next up for SEO treatment is blogs, group talk and then directory.

 

The website has been built on an open source platform called Joomla. This has allowed us to launch much much quicker than doing all the coding from scratch (although sometimes I have wondered), but the code has had to be heavily modified in places, whole new applications have had to be developed and then everything has had to be made consistent to provide a uniform finish. At least that was the plan! We will be accrediting all the open source input into the site shortly - hats off to these developers, they have done a fantastic job for no other reason than their own satisfaction at building a great product. Over the following years, we hope to be able to do our bit to support the open source movement. You can find out more about it at http://www.opensource.org/  and at http://www.joomla.org/.

 

So when will our new search facility be completed? A very good question, and one I have been pestering the software supremo Ben with for a while. Probably end of June, perhaps earlier. Watch this space....