Quixey Search Engine Targets Social Media Apps

By Rob Scott
August 9, 2011

• Quixey is an app-specialized search engine funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
• The service hopes to make it simpler for social media users (developers and consumers) to find applications and widgets for social networks.
• Last week, Quixey got closer to that goal when it added Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Foursquare integration.
• The engine also indexes and categorizes tools and apps based on social chatter, blog posts, reviews and other third-party descriptions of their function. The search technology bypasses the clutter by efficiently mining data and app-related keywords.
• Quixey co-founder Tomer Kagan explains: “A lot of apps on Facebook [for example] don’t even have a description attached — just a name. From a search perspective, if all you have to work with is like three words, it’s extremely difficult.”
• The Mountain View, CA startup has raised $400,000 in seed money from Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors.

Dragon Go! provides Targeted Voice-Powered Search Results

By Rob Scott
July 15, 2011

• Dragon Go! — a new voice-powered search app from Nuance Communications — is looking to join Google and Bing as a top search engine for mobile devices. (Nuance also offers the popular Dragon Dictation transcription program and a more generic voice search app called Dragon Search.)
• Although not the first voice-activated search service available, Dragon Go is unique in that it identifies which ideal application to use for each query. For example, if “Play R.E.M.” is searched, Dragon Go will open Pandora — but if movie tickets are searched for, Fandango will open.
• Nuance developed an open architecture geared toward including all types of vertical queries. It presently supports more than 180 services such as Yelp, Wikipedia, Pandora, IMDb, Fandango, OpenTable and Google.
• The free app is currently available via Apple’s App Store and works on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.