FyberSearch - About Us

We were founded November 1st, 2003 by 18 year old Nathan Enns. We registered the domain name fybersearch.com on December 31st, 2003.

On September 24th, 2004 we filed an application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to register FyberSearch as our servicemark. They approved our application on November 22, 2005, granting us the exclusive right to use FyberSearch in conjunction with search engine services.

On April 22nd, 2005 we changed our government registration from a sole proprietorship to a limited liability company thereby making our individuality official.

Our Achievements

A Fast Start: In April 2004 (just 5 months after we began), we had our first advertiser. In August 2004 (only 9 months into our existence) we were featured on the cable news channel CNBC as Google's latest threat for a story they were doing about Google's upcoming initial public offering.

Survival: As of this writing, we are one of the few remaining real competitors in the search industry. Many search engines have shut down, others are just using their competitor's search results without any real technology of their own and still others are thinly veiled spam sites using the disguise of being a search engine to gain credibility when they not only haven't earned it but are actually hurting the reputation of real search engines.

Uniqueness: To our knowledge we are also one of the only search engines that has a unique system for ranking web pages. As far as we can tell most of the other real search engines out there use link popularity as the primary factor they consider in their ranking system.

Our Technology

We built it from scratch. No third party code, no third party search results. Our technology was initially written in the programming language PHP. In September 2008 we re-wrote our core search engine code in the programming language Python.

Some of the basic components are:

1. Our web crawler called FyberSpider that finds, visits and downloads web pages.

2. Our indexing system that analyzes the downloaded web pages to figure out what phrases they relate to and saves that information into indexes.

3. Our search result serving program that takes the phrases people type into our search box, retrieves the index of websites for that phrase and formats it into a human-readable search results page.

4. Our ranking algorithm that determines how to order web pages, the goal being to show the most relevant ones higher in the search results and the less relevant ones lower in the search results.

Our Philosophy

In philosophy the meaning of words and the nature of reality is especially important. In fact, there may not be much philosophy left if you were to remove the quest for the meaning of existence. Let's look at some established views on what a search engine is, see if any are true and then we will share our philosophy of search.

1. Some believe that a search engine is there to help people make decisions. While this would certainly be a useful tool it would not be a "search engine", it would an "advice engine". People would use it to find the steps required to make a specific decision as well as the pros and cons to actually deciding it.

2. Similar to #1 is the idea that the ideal search engine would make people's decisions for them as per their instruction. This could be useful as well albeit a little too close to infringing on free will (another interesting area of philosophy). However, this would not be a so much a "search engine" as an "assistant engine" or "freedom removal engine", depending on how it was implemented. Best case, it would just do what you tell it to, thereby filling the assistant role. Worst case, it would make the decisions for you, thereby filling the freedom removal role.

3. Others believe that the perfect search engine would understand exactly what people mean and give them back exactly what they want. Again, this would be useful but is not a "search engine", it would be a "mind reading answer engine". People wouldn't be using this tool to search for anything because they would already have the answer. Finding is the intended destination of searching.

Which brings us to our philosophy of search in which the ideal search engine would: take a search query and refer people to the web pages that have the most high quality information about that search query.

Unlike the above 3 philosophies of search ours fits with the definitions of "search" (the process of investigating various people, places and objects with the intention of finding a previously defined concept) and "engine" (a tool to covert energy into a useful motion). Therefore, a "search engine" is defined as: a tool to convert the energy of intending to find a previously defined concept into the motion of investigating various people, places and objects.

Our Place In The Search Industry

We know that search technology has yet to reach perfection. Just because a few big corporations have billions (or trillions?) of web pages ranked by popularity does not mean people are seeing the most relevant results. The fact that many of these search engines have confused relevancy with popularity is an example of the existing imperfections.

It can be easy to believe that significant improvement is impossible when there are a lack of alternatives to compare to what people already have. Combined with the fact that a lot of popular web pages are also fairly relevant, why would anyone think that results could be better? Especially results that are good enough to be worth the effort and cost of running a search engine.

Even though we have close to no resources available (especially compared to the competition) we know that relevancy is worth achieving, even if we can't quite afford the price tag yet. This is one of the reasons why our search technology does not use link popularity as a factor when ranking web pages. Although our results may not be relevant enough in many cases, at least they are heading in that direction. Everyone else seems to have been sidetracked to a false destination.