"Large companies always start small. We asked venture capitalists to predict which small business start-ups will make it big in the future. Their predictions: Zoom Systems, Zynga, Hello Wallet, Wowd and Groupon."

"Mark Drummond, chief executive of Wowd, a unique search engine company we profiled in the magazine earlier this year, explains why understanding JavaScript is a very deep, very hard, and very classic computer science problem."

"Imagine searching the Internet and discovering what is hot right at that second. That is just what one Silicon Valley company in doing and they are hoping users will be wowed by it."
[Video]

"Wowd is perhaps one of the most interesting search companies that you have never heard of, at least, yet. Wowd is a search company but without the giant datacenters."

"So while I'm a big fan of Twitter-style trending topics, I'm an even bigger fan of trending topics in the context of specific things that are of interest to me, right now, such as Facebook privacy and Times Square."

"The real time search sector has a number of vendors fighting for traffic. Wowd is a useful service."

"Mark describes the age-old trade-off between space and time, where if all you're going to do is index a small number of websites it can be done quickly, whereas if you want to index the entire Web, including the deep Web, which is Wowd's objective, making that a fast process is very challenging."
[Video]

"Those who use search engines and social sites daily know the importance of finding information in real time. Perhaps the search industry needs to do a better job at demonstrating the relevance and the important of real-time search, especially in time-sensitive situations."

"Marketers have the ability to rank and connect online content in a social graph that ties together people and interests in aggregate. The idea describes a patent for EdgeRank, a ranking search algorithm, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded Wowd."

"Wowd's patent (#7,716,205) covers a method of ranking web pages based on the way people use them. Wowd calls this EdgeRank, after Google's PageRank, and says it gives a search engine the ability to weigh anonymized information about where users click to go next from a web page."

"Wowd's powerful approach let's people engage with the real-time web. We call it "discovery-powered search." By discovering what's hot based on my search results, users can swing off in a new direction with a single click."

"Wowd's mission from Day One has been to enhance the real-time discovery experience so that consumers can know what's going on around the world, literally as it happens"
[Video]

"Wowd is a new player in the search space that promises to search the Deep Internet where others cannot tread, with a different cloud model, and performance that defies explanation."

"I believe the real-time web is more appropriately defined as web-accessible material that people are interested in, right now."

"When you have your own web site, and you talk about things that are current, it is your job to stay in the know about the latest news. We have gathered 20 of the best news sources out there online today."

"So was I "wowed?" by WOWD? Let's say that I was very pleased to discover some great search engine news, so I think you should give it a try also for your queries."

"In version 2 of the Wowd search engine, real-time results are streamed with more emphasis on discoverability, and it has a quality privacy advocates will love"

"What freaked me out more than anything is how good Wowd is with its search results! Forget about the streaming aspect of things for a minute and simply consider using it like we might generally use Google. While not great to use if you are looking for hotels, it is fantastic to use for staying in tune with the latest events as they unfold. Clearly, Wowd is better at real-time news than Google, no question about it"

The real-time Web has been thought of as a dumping ground for all information, but some analysts believe this next phase of search will unlock some of the most innovative ideas people have seen in years. "There is a lot of information that people can't necessarily express in documents," Reynolds says. "This information gets trapped inside people's heads, but social search has begun to uncork the ideas."

"But while many of its real-time competitors are simply aggregating Twitter tweets, or content from a handful of sites Wowd is focused on relevant content people signal they are interested in across the Web."

"These features highlight the best aspect of Wowd's real-time search: fortuitous discovery," said Mark Drummond, CEO, Wowd Inc.
"Wowd doesn't solely rely on tweets for real-time information. Our results are based on what the majority of people are interested in across the entire Web, at any given moment."

Borislav Agapiev has $50,000 in computer hardware, 25 engineers in his native Serbia and a firm belief that millions of people will lend him their computers and privacy for the purpose of searching the Web. That's enough to take on Google.

"Not only will we be very fresh, but we'll also be very high quality," says the founder of Wowd, a search company in Palo Alto, Calif. Unlike Google's millions of computer processors performing the searches, with Wowd, explains Agapiev, "it's real people doing the clicking." Wowd draws on two tech trends to make something new: a service that delivers a picture of what the Internet looks like right now and an index of what users are most interested in.

"Real-time search ... is a step towards giving users the ability to access highly relevant and fresh information, delivered in real time from across the Web."

"What's interesting about search engine Wowd is that users become the content spiders: As people visit various pages on the Web, their anonymyzed activities become part of the search index."

"If you want the scoop on what just happened, the place to look isn't Google... The place to look is goofy-named start-ups like Wowd..."

"...The Attention Frontier can be used to help people have a much better experience finding things on the web." "Wowd uses the Attention Frontier of real human beings to discover content."

"Wowd provides a new approach to search that handles the global, high velocity real-time web."
[Video]

"A radically different architecture is required to break through the limitations in crawler-based search. Wowd, a new real-time search engine, employs a distributed system powered by the users themselves to create search with significant advantages."

"Wowd aims to differential itself from other search engines such as Google by identifying the most popular sites from both a social search and a real-time search perspective."

"Wowd focuses on red-hot, real-time discovery."

"Google's and Microsoft's entry into real-time search represents a shift in the marketplace from these startups and their technology being a geek's plaything to being a new way to direct user attention and serve powerfully relevant advertising."

"The idea that a new form of search could outdo Google, the most important online innovation yet, has attracted some of the technology world's smartest players. In that tradition, now comes a new entrant called Wowd, which could actually be the biggest threat so far."

"An explanation of Wowd and how it works"
[Video]

"Wowd takes a very ambitious approach to search in that it is a peer-to-peer search engine..." "What makes Wowd a realtime search engine is that ranks sites based on how often and recently the Wowd community has visited that site."

"As always, Web 2.0 will be filled with startups trying to make their way Wowd, a customizable real-time search engine..."

"Wowd's founder, Boris Agapiev, observes 'Wowd puts the user back in control by transferring the power to individuals, not data centers.'"

"Wowd doesn't simply report on what its users are doing in real time, as some Twitter search engines do, for example. Instead it uses its own algorithms that balance a page's freshness against its apparent popularity. When searching in Wowd, a user can choose to see results ranked by popularity or by freshness."

"I set up a quick test with a colleague in the office. I pulled up the results screen, and in the interest of true science, I covered up the logo on the monitor with Post-it notes. Then my colleague looked at the results, and I simply described what it did ("real time search results set produced by a community of users"). And then the results shifted in real time. His unsolicited first response? 'Wow.'"

"Right now in search, there's heaps of innovation happening. Take a look at Wowd for example. The startup's shift-on-the-fly results could revolutionize real-time search."

"Unlike others in the business of RTS, Wowd knows what sites, news items, or media is the "hottest". It delivers results that might have otherwise remained buried in a sea of spam, because real people visit pages they find interesting, not bots. In this way, the Wowd index is continuously being updated."

"Here's the gist of what it does: Instead of calculating the rank of Web content based on who links to who, Wowd weights content based on what gets clicked on. Wowd, to simplify, ranks results not based on what Internet users say, but on what they do."

"The cloud architecture - that is, the distribution of processing power and bandwidth needed to power real-time indexing across all user desktops - allows Wowd to achieve a monumental feat core to their value proposition: Real-time indexing of the entire web, not just a handful of sites and not just pages linked to from real-time social sites."

[Video]

"Yesterday I spent an illuminating hour with the folks behind Wowd, a still-private-beta search upstart that is taking a new approach to, well, just about everything in search as we traditionally understand it."

[Video]

"Wowd is a search engine without a data center. It puts the heavy lifting on the computers of the engine's users. With Wowd, you are the data center."

[Video]