YCombinator-funded WebMynd, which launched in 2008 and was most recently responsible for the browser addon Search Smarter, is today announcing that it is the recipient of one of our heralded 2010 TechFellows Awards, from none other than Paul Graham himself. WebMynd will be using the 100K in financing to develop a new product, the WebMynd Addon Developer Platform. → Read More
Not wanting to be left completely behind, Yahoo will soon launch their own real time search engine too. But unlike Microsoft and Google, they won’t be partnering with Twitter and Facebook directly for the data (perhaps memories of their ill-fated blog search engine from 2005 linger). Instead, we’ve heard, they’ll work with one of the existing real time search engines. If our source is correct, that partner is OneRiot, and the product will launch very soon.
There isn’t much more to say about this right now. We’ve reached out to both Yahoo and OneRiot for comment and await their reply. The look of the Yahoo search results may look similar to the OneRiot/WebMynd Firefox plugin that adds real time results to the side of normal Google search results – it certainly makes sense to keep the results separated. See image below.
OneRiot has raised $27 million to date in venture capital. → Read More
There’s no question about it: Google is great at search, and its huge lead over competitors is well deserved. But the site’s spartan design can sometimes leave something to be desired — sure, the company gradually makes tweaks to it, but we haven’t seen many radical changes in a very long time. Now WebMynd, a Y Combinator startup that launched back in early 2008, is looking to help spur the search giant to make itself a little better, or at least give it a few ideas to help. Tonight, WebMynd is launching a contest appropriately called RedesignGoogle.com that invites designers from around the world to give Google a makeover.
WebMynd has posted all the details details on its blog, but here’s the gist of it: designers are invited to revamp Google using any CSS modifications they’d like. The contest starts accepting submissions today, and will run through November 1. Then, a number of judges (which include Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, the WebMynd team and — full disclosure — myself) will pick the best designs. The winners will take home a brand new MacBook Air. → Read More
WebMynd, a Y Combinator company that launched early last year, has released a new plugin that is looking to streamline the way you search. The plugin, which is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, enhances the search results on most popular search engines by inserting a handy sidebar with related search results from a variety of other sites. You can test out a web-based version of the feature here, or download the plugin on the site’s homepage.
WebMynd isn’t the first browser plugin to offer complementary results from other sites, but what it lacks in originally it makes up for with its polished execution. After installing the plugin, users simply visit one of the supported search engines (which include Google, Yahoo, and Live Search), and search for a query as usual. The plugin inserts a handful of small widgets at the right hand of the screen, each of which includes the first few matches of the same query from sites like Twitter, Amazon, or Digg. Users can choose from over 25 different search sites that they’d like to include in their results. The inserted widgets take some getting used to, but in practice they’re surprisingly useful. → Read More
A new YCombinator startup called WebMynd launched today. It’s a Firefox add-on that records every website you visit and saves a virtual copy on your hard drive. The service doesn’t save just an image of the page or the URL, but the full text site. That means you can also search those virtual pages later when you are looking for something. Users can turn off recording at any time, and can delete saved pages that they don’t want to have around for any reason. To see saved pages, you click on an icon at the top of the browser and the local saved copies pop up, along with a search bar. The idea is that, like Gmail, good search means you don’t have to spend a lot of time bookmarking and tagging websites to find them later. WebMynd records everything in the background, and a quick search will locate the page. One thing I’d love to see added is a text box somewhere on the browser where you can type in tags to describe any page you are on, and to have that data saved along with the virtual page. The result could make searching easier down the road. The basic add-on is free and keeps pages for a week. Users pay $10 for six months of history or $20 for a full year. After testing this I can tell it’s a service I’ll continue to use to quickly find sites I visited. Simple service, basic business model, and useful. Classic YCombinator stuff. CrunchBase Information WebMynd Y Combinator Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
