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| About Solara... |
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Solara primarily focuses on providing custom search solutions for clients that generally have
unique content requirements. learn more »
From Oracle Consulting to Web Crawling
Although Solara has been little more than a splash page on a domain name for a quite a while, it's been
an on-going project for several years. It was one of those inhouse projects that started out as concept
over lunch but only got any attention between our "real" consulting projects.
For many years, our main revenue stream came from Oracle database consulting. In 2000, the consulting focus
shifted from Oracle to search technology. Not because of any great insights on our part, it just
seemed to become an increasingly greater aspect of the various database projects.
The Old Days - MetaCrawling & Pay-Per-Click
Our first formal venture into search was the creation of a small metacrawler site. The
site itself was not a big revenue producer but it quickly gave us a platform from which to offer search
related consulting services. Initially, we bought some simple metasearch scripts to power the site
but later developed our own industrial strength metasearch applications which later licensed
in excess of $25,000. This software proved very attractive to high traffic pay-per-click sites looking to
pull feeds from companies like Overture, Findwhat, Kanoodle, Search123, etc. Some of the largest
pay-per-click metasearch sites on the net continue to be powered by our software.
Present Day - Organic Custom Search Technology
Eventually, the excitement of metasearch wained so we decided to pursue the building of our own
inhouse web crawler and full-text indexer. However, there always seemed some past client needing
some help. In the fall of 2005, we finally cleared the table of customer projects
and made the Solara project our primary focus.
Although R&D is our daily frame of mind, these days we have a very mature
set of tools to help clients build custom search solutions. Our high speed multi-threaded
crawler can easily fetch several hundred pages per second while our indexers can parse
& index well in excess of 10 million pages per day on a single machine.
A Little Bit of History...
- January 2007 - Solara Acquired - We are pleased to announce that Solara has been
acquired by Findology Interactive Media, a leader in the online
advertising industry. We look forward to the upcoming transition and using Solara search technology to
create even more innovative search solutions.
- May 2006 - A More Public Image - although Solara has been an on-going project for some time,
we've never put too much of a public face on things. Outside of a few long term clients, there's been
no real public discussion on the project or our services, only a static splash page with a login link.
We've still got a number of projects in the mix but we've decided to open the doors a little bit...
- January 2006 - In-house Server Room - for the last 5+ years we've had our servers housed
with a colocation provider. When our agreement was up this past December we tried something different.
Using an empty office in our new digs, we now have our own in-house server room complete with
cabinets and a dedicated 100Mbit fiber connection from Cogent. Talk about convenience...
- May 2005 - New Offices - Although the sell of Searchwho.com to Internext Media was supposed to
free up more time to work on Solara, we ended up taking on a few large projects that just monopolized
all our time. However, in the summer of 2005 a decision was made to put the focus back into the Solara
project. Thus, we acquired new and certainly nicer office space.
- January 2005 - Trademark Award - U.S. Patent & Trademark Office officially recognizes Solara as
our trademark, registration #2920787. Our formal classification
is "Computer services, namely, providing search engines for searching, compiling, indexing and organizing
information on a global computer network."
- November 2004 - Internext Media Corp. Acquires Searchwho.com -
Looking to get away from metasearch along with Searchwho taking up much of our time, we decide to sell the
site to one of our long time clients, Internext Media Corp. (aka ABCSearch.com).
- February 2003 - NewsDigger.com - experimenting with some of the early Solara project code
we launch Newsdigger.com. Using one of our early multi-threaded crawlers and Solara's ability to handle large query strings
we build a simple news headline site. Several other demo sites are also launched around this time.
- June 2002, Related Keywords Server (RKS) - First public release of our Related Keywords Server. This product is primarily targeted at other search engines that would like to have a list of related keywords displayed on their current search result pages.
- September 2001, Solara Project - although not a high priority, work begins on the Solara project.
Up til this point, most of our projects have involved metacrawler technology and custom Oracle application work. Solara is slated to be
a fully functional web crawler with its own indexing tools.
- August 2001, Searchwho.com - Our metacrawler site, searchwho.com gets a nice mention by SearchEngineWatch and is the
focus of a 20+ page project in a popular .NET book:
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