The solution was simple; empower the person generating the link to curate the results set. The goal was to enhance flexibility of the service, while maintaining a focus on the core features. Here’s how the new curation package works.

Harvesting a Greater Yield

Just like any good farmer, a larger crop equates to more options at market. The service was updated to attempt to gather more than the top 10 results. If additional results are available, these are set as reserve options for the user generating the link.

Pruning the Field

In results sets that include reserve options, a pencil edit icon appears in the primary link box. By toggling this button, reserve results will appear under the results set for that query. Active results are indicated by transparent borders and include a minus icon, while reserve results are rendered with black borders and a plus icon. To curate the set a user simply clicks the minus icon on active results they wish to remove from consideration or the plus icon on reserve results they wish to activate. Only active results are cycled to the audience and measured for goodness of fit.

As a non-gardener, I consider every plant hardy until I manage to personally kill it. Still, it’s hard not to appreciate someone with a green thumb. With the new curation package, we can all embrace our inner, digital gardener.

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I was tired, life was hectic. It would have been so easy to accept the shifting sands of my Search API struggle and shutter the effort. I needed to burn something. Time was running out. My wife was in the throes of graduate school clocking insane hours studying away in the hidden corners or our house. I was left alone with my computer, burnt out from a day job at my family business and hap hazardously applying new designs and features to my old workhorse project. As a self-described realist, it occurred to me the curtain was drawing on my efforts. Guilt I thought, there’s the ticket. I called a local IP lawyer to kick off the patent application process. With the average patent costing between $8 – $15k, what more of a motivator would I need than to spend a boat load of a money on a dream? Imagine a little voice in your head repeating, “Did you really waste that much money on a pipe dream?”

The process itself was a bear. Tedious hours poring over written description of the invention. Nightly research digging through the patent index for similar concepts. Production of visual aids and screenshots to supplement explanations. Hours and dollars spent interfacing with lawyers. My local firm, Laconia Law, guided me through the effort and helped package up and craft the application. The patent was submitted and shortly after, my API woes came crashing back to earth with the shuttering of the third search API I had ported into the Beta service. What a letdown.

On August 29th, 2017 after completely abandoning the project for over 2 years, I received a notice from the patent office that they had granted the patent. The application made it through with only a minor clarification returned to the examiner in the first round of review. My lawyers noted this was a rare occurrence and generally supported the perceived novelty of the invention. I had watched the ships smolder into the raging sea. The hunger had set in. It was time to march inland and find an alternate search API to breathe life into the project. If not for the patent application, the shores of possibility would have receded beyond the horizon long ago. Good thing we burned the boat.

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Alternate power, time to hitch a ride on the conveyor belt and get busy with some explosive shells. Seriously though, love that scene, best action movie EVER (segue). This path had led from Google to Bing back to Google and finally on to Yahoo. Strangely, despite common negative press, Yahoo had offered a respectable mix of usability and flexible terms. That was until the Boss Search API was discontinued…bummer. As the available search engines faded into the distance, our team (me, myself and I) began to lose hope. Life is busy and who needs a dream anyways.

I had made the decision to file a patent before the bells had tolled on my search API issue. While the general merits of this decision are up for debate in the software world, the response from the patent office offered a glimmer of light and a challenge to continue the struggle. I began to scour the internet for Alternate Search API options. Gigablast Search API crossed my path. It wasn’t run by Silicon Valley giants and it had a cowboy edge to it. While the search results quality was a stretch at times, it was easy to migrate my service to their structure and the terms of use were simple, simple, simple. There was another Skywalker, albeit completely stripped down and hidden in a dusty corner of the internet. Just what we needed to keeps the dream alive and lay waste to that T1000 serendipitously standing over the blast furnace of molten metal. Now where’s my shotgun?

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Imagine a world where the internet, that wonderful god of technology that we all bow our heads to, could help shape its own destiny. While I might be going off the rails into Lawn Mower Man territory, the concept of mutating hyperlinks is much, much simpler. You, the content producer, determine a subject you would like to share. You enter the subject in the form of a search term and the service goes out to the web, harvests relevant results and generates a single hyperlink to share with your audience in whichever manner you see fit.

Sounds pretty straight-forward so far. As your audience navigates to the link you shared, the service cycles through a different result for each new viewer, measuring their interaction with the resource. If the resource is highly relevant to your audience or the content in which you embedded it, then it is likely they will spend more time interacting with that particular result. Push comes to shove, all the results duke it out in an algorithmic battle of the fittest and voilà the service permanently redirects the link to the winning result. Ideally, this result strengthens your content and resonates with your core audience by turning passive consumers of content into active content producers.

Back in San Francisco, during my SEO days, the concept of mutating links seemed just interesting enough to propel me over the precipice of creation. Who knew how difficult the process could be? Patents, databases, APIs, whatever? As a 30 minute-a-night, after work side project, it didn’t seem too daunting to my ignorant brain. Fortunately, a healthy case of Howard Hughesian OCD can go a long way toward compelling someone to finish or at least launch something they smoked up oh so many years ago. And here we are, pushing away from the dock in a crazy contraption that might not even float. But the ride should be interesting and maybe we’ll spot a yeti along the way.

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