This last week has been quite a thrilling week on the search engines market with the announcement of Jerry Yang, the CEO of Yahoo!, leaving the company after just one year. For those who don’t remember, Jerry Yang has co-founded Yahoo! back in the mid-nineties and has left after earning quite a lot of money. But last year when things started to go awry for Yahoo! he was called back to the rescue. So this is quite tough news for Yahoo! which since didn’t really recover. Let’s hope they well make it, as I personally like Yahoo!’s philosophy and think that the Internet should be serving different search engines so people still have the choice. Without at least a few big search engines like Yahoo! and MSN Live, we could have the feeling that Google is exercising some kind of monopoly. All this to say that I wish a long life to Yahoo! even if they get bought by Microsoft one day.

Back to TooT now, we were quite active last week and managed to get the core features of TooT up and running correctly including a very first version of the TooT front-end with its respective design. The crawler has also been further optimized and the URL fetching process is now much faster. There is still one step of crawling which isn’t as fast as we would like it to be. This step the so called generate step which includes the generation of a new fresh segment for the crawling so we are still working on it. As I am writing this article, there are 279′399 pages indexed in our test database.

In addition, the language issue with the special characters used in French and German have been solved and they can now be used correctly in any kind of search queries. In my last post I forgot to mention that actually one part of Switzerland speaks Italian. Although it is a very small part of Switzerland situated in the South at the border with Italy which uses this language, we ought to support Italian. We want everybody in Switzerland being able to use our search engine without discrimination of any kind. In order to achieve this we will try to find someone as soon as possible who can translate the main functionality of TooT in that charming language.

Let’s hope this week will be as productive as last week in order to bring you again some good news about our progress…