Dodging Nationwide Censureship With Searchles...Let There Be Online Video

Everybody loves a good rebel, yes? We recently discovered we've been aiding and abetting a network of rebel online video viewers worldwide this past year. Nationwide blocking of YouTube seems to be about as hot a trend as global warming...so hot right now. Turkey...check, Iran...check, Thailand...check, Saudi Arabia...check, check. (Who's next...Moldova? Say it ain't so).

Attempts to open the sites are met with a page reading: "The requested page is forbidden." (Iran) or something of the like - edicts passed down from senior judiciary officials. The actual sites are blocked as well as videos embedded on other sites. Searchles, however, downloads and embeds the videos in a certain fashion so that these video outlaws can still be viewed in these countries. Users can save videos to Searchles so that their friends in Turkey, Iran, Thailand, or Saudi Arabia can, in fact, watch them. Searchles says "damn the man." (Here's to being under the radar!)

So video rebels, we salute you. Let us know what you want us to post to Searchles and we shall (though ix-nay on the orn-pay...how do you think YouTube got blocked to begin with?)

Searchles Seeks Videographer/Animator/Creative Person in General to Produce Explanatory/Viral Video

Good morning sunshines! We'd like to see if there's a videographer/animator/creative person in general out there to cleverly present site features and utility in a series of short explanatory videos for our site - targeted towards new users. We're open to different ideas regarding format.

If interested, please take the time to familiarize yourself with our site. The videos should cover the following super-sweet aspects of Searchles we'd like to highlight:

. Our Social Search - How we are a hybrid of a search engine
. Our Social Networking - How users connect based on common interests
. Our Social Bookmarking - How to post links/become an active user
. Our Searchles TV feature which allows users to mash up online videos from various sources (youtube, myspace, google, grouper, blip.tv, etc.) into one player and play them consecutively on our site
. Where we fit in the world of search and social bookmarking/networking relative to Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, digg, del.icio.us, etc.

We are hoping to produce four or five videos and present them in a Searchles TV channel format.

Please contact Elias Shams (caveman) at caveman [at] searchles.com if you or someone you know might be interested in this project of huge and exciting proportions.

#525! Searchles Keeps Climbing Up the Ladder in Moldova

Big news, kids. We had a look at our Alexa rankings today and turns out we are ranked #525 in Moldova. YOWZA. That's a pretty hot number. How did it come to this? Well, we're going to go ahead and credit our recent infrastructure upgrades to the Moldovan population actually being able to access our site and really dive into the wonders of Searchles. Regardless of the reasoning, we're just excited (jubilant, ecstatic, pumped, happy, hip hip hooray) to see the word of Searchles spreading far and wide in this crazy, crazy world.

Where do we take it from here, you might ask? How do we proceed? I think it's clear...Moldovan sabotage. We attack #524, 523...you get the picture. Establish boycotts, promote spamming, get Vice President Cheney behind us...he LOVES this stuff. So, fuflo.ru, maxdsl.md, puchela.com, pochta.ru - we're coming for you. You know after we take down pochta.ru, Yahoo is only a hop, skip, and a jump away. These are exciting times...stay tuned. As always, keep on posting! We love posts like Moldova loves Searchles.

Searchles Hearts David & Layla: Hilarious Indie Film about Muslim/Jewish Relations

We have a new user! Mr. Jay Jonroy, writer/producer/director of new indie film David & Layla, has put together a channel of trailers and clips on our site from this great film full of comedy, romance, and cultural/political commentary. More and more users from the entertainment community are coming to Searchles to put their content on display and we're all for it! Whether it be user Loidallen's Desktop Story videos or a full feature-length film, Searchles TV channels are quite the effective means to showcase your trailers, videos, interviews all in one viewer.

Back to David & Layla - David (David Moscow), the host of local cable show Sex and Happiness, becomes smitten with the mysterious and exotic Layla (Shiva Rose), a Kurdish Muslim refugee whose visa has expired. Unfulfilled in his relationship with a high-strung girlfriend (Callie Thorne), he desperately pursues Layla, despite the hysteria it causes in his Jewish family and the suspicions of her Islamic guardians. As the two lovers get to know each other better, the clash of cultures and religions raises its ugly — well, not ugly ... let's say — inconvenient head. (Jeff Meyers of Metro Times)

Once David and Layla begin to explore the obstacles in their respective cultures and beliefs, complex issues of identity, politics and history begin to show. We applaud Mr. Jonroy on his bold new film and we are excited to introduce it to our users! The film is currently playing in Washington, DC (Dupont Circle and Shirlington) and also in Florida and Ann Arbor, Michigan - so get out and see it if you're in the area!

Searchles Infrastructure Upgrade: Site Running Harder, Faster, Stronger than the Average Bear

First and foremost, we'd like to take a moment to apologize for the technical difficulties some of you had been experiencing with the site these past three weeks or so. We know it can be quite frustrating (at least it was to us) which is why we've taken steps this past week to upgrade our infrastructure in order to avoid these problems in the future. Servers, load balancer, bandwidth, anothertechnicalterm, you name it, BAM!...we kicked it up a notch. Better yet, the upgrades went quite smoothly! We toasted - not to our successes, but to the new-found ease and speed of your Searchles experience. The improved infrastructure will not only improve all users' day-to-day site activity, but will also greatly benefit ease of use for international users...or users shacking up at the newly-warmed North Pole. I wonder when all this global warming business will start to bring Santa Claus into the fray.

We're not necessarily stopping there, oh no. We're making site upgrades our number one priority and are going to be working on it until we're delivering you the fastest, smoothest-running site we possibly can. So put that in your pipe and smoke it. Thanks for all your patience and feedback - we appreciate the questions/comments/hopesanddreams you've been sending our way!

Searchles and Wikia Throw Down in Social Search Debate on AltSearchEngines.com

Searchles in one corner, Wikia in the other, the gods of social search watching...Highlights:

Searchles: Shampoo is better. It goes on first and cleans the hair.

Wikia: Conditioner is better. It makes the hair silky and smooth.

Searchles: It's like I don't even know you anymore.

Wikia: Your face.

Okay, so the cyber-gloves didn't exactly come off, but Charles Knight of AltSearchEngines.com hosted an excellent, in-depth discussion of the value of social search and how both Searchles and Wikia are defining their niche in the dynamic search community. We certainly respect what yet-to-be-launched Wikia is trying to do with their open-source search platform but (shockingly enough) we see our model of social search as more beneficial to the users.

Dumbfounder really cut to the chase when asked to state the primary objective of Searchles, "Our objective is to be the glue between people and content on the Internet using social search to deliver better collaboration and more precise, relevant results. It isn’t all about finding a piece of content and leaving, the biggest benefit of Searchles is that when you join groups and make friends with peers of similar interests, the content comes to you."

The community search that Searchles employs gives users ultimate control over their search experience and results. Not only does the combination of our search algorithms with a user's circle of friends, groups, and tags produce extremely relevant search results, but through a user's my!Searchles page - the highlighted relevant content really does come to you! This network also serves to decrease the visibility of the spam that the social search community seems to stress about.

So have a look at the "great debate." Feel free to share your thoughts and comment - be a part of the ongoing, evolving social search discussion and let us know what YOU think!

Searchles TV Success (Desktop) Stories: The Work-in-Progress

Review session: we've gone over using Searchles TV channels to make cultural statements, to support your candidate, to voice your opinion on sensitive issues, to create the baddest rock concert (or techno...we're equal opportunity), or to show off some stunning travel destination - and we loved Jo's beautiful and thought-provoking Searchles TV Contest winning channels.

Going back through channels users have put together over these past months (it's like our own Searchles TV "Baby's first years" scrapbook)- we were pretty blown away by what the user Loidallen was able to piece together using Searchles TV and the videos submitted to his website, DesktopStory. Check out the ongoing story in the channel
below:



What makes Searchles TV so useful in this instance is that whenever there is a new story/video to add, the channel is easily updated by using the "Add to Channel" option when submitting the new video to the site. You can add or delete videos from your channel at anytime and videos can also be reordered within the channel. Any updates you make are automatically syndicated across the web wherever your channel may be embedded! Easy as sending Hollywood Socialites to jail. Searchles TV can be a very effective tool for videobloggers with works-in-progress or any user who finds more videos to add or has a change o'mind. So do not hesitate because your Searchles TV channel vision has yet to reach artistic perfection - there is time for your channel to change and grow. Oh the possibilities...

Indecision '08 on Searchles: How will you make your opinions heard?

Things are continuing to heat up in the 2008 US Presidential Race (or Indecision '08 as the venerable Jon Stewart would say). It's already reached tabloid-worthy proportions and we're still over a year off. Case and point: Rudy Giuliani's 17 year-old daughter actively supporting Barack Obama on her facebook profile? All important campaign issues aside, this stuff is gold. So mini-Giuliani has clearly found her means of showing support, but what can you do here on Searchles? We've found campaign-related Searchles TV channels to be a pretty effective tool for spreading word and supporting our respective candidates. It's also easily embedded into your blog or myspace page and you can choose the videos from any video source (YouTube, mySpace, etc). Have a look at the Hillary Clinton channel one of our users created:



And speaking of campaigns and general indecision - we've noticed a certain cutting edge marketing campaign from our dear friends at Coors. There's a rocky mountain graphic on the new Coors Light bottles that turns blue when the bottle is, in fact, cold. Now I don't know about you, but I tend not to care whether or not a beer is cold until it's already in my greedy little hands, at which point I'm able to use my god-given sense of touch to determine the beer temp. I feel said blue rocky mountain visual is an utter and complete waste of time/money/life in general.

Dumbfounder, however, disagrees...and I quote, "If I see 2 beers, one 10 feet to the right of me, and one 10 feet to the left, and I know that one is cold and one is warm, I feel like this new invention is a lifesaver." Well way to suck the mystery right out of life, Dumbfounder. Regardless, there are the facts...we'll let you mull this one over with an ice cold (blue bottled) beer.

Red, White and Beckham

The buzz is about Beckham these days and we...are...excited. Not only
is there a shiny new supercouple gracing the pages of the trashy mags
(step off, Brangelina) here in the states but the prospect of MLS (or
football in general...honestly) finally gaining a serious US fan base
is also something we've always looked forward to. Forget
industrialization (who cares!) - in the football world, the US has
been behind for years -- David Beckham is welcomed with open arms.

Here at Searchles, we're doing our part to give you the news, the
buzz, and the videos. Check out our David Beckham group! One user
went ahead and created this channel with some highlights of his play
and interviews (with a few cameos from a certain Spicegirl and Ali
G...winning combo):



So feel free to join and contribute! We hope to see more video and
press coverage as his career with L.A. Galaxy progresses...of course
he went "west coast". More British imports! We'll trade you Paris
and Britney! Deal.