Hosted wordpress search service

June 24, 2007

Going through SOLR putting together my presentation, I’ve restarted thinking of my hosted SOLR service I was considering some time ago.  I was thinking last night that a hosted blog search - wordpress, to start with - would be a great service, and pretty easy to set up.  Wordpress “search”  functionality is something that seems to be moderately high on the ‘wanted’ list.  My primary concern is how to offer this and perhaps make a bit of money off of it.  Should the service be locked down by IP?  Or user/pass/key?  The akismet service sounds like a good model, except that it’d probably require even more horsepower than akismet because that is only run once per comment posted.  This functionality might be run multiple times per visitor to a blog.  Perhaps it’s free for the first 200 entries or something like that.  Many small blogs only have a few entries and comments, so offering it to free for them would get some traction.  Some payment per month for larger accounts might make sense.  Or perhaps the results page could be hosted, and offer ads on that?  That’d probably upset people, although hosted Google search probably does that already.

Posted in Blogging, Ideas, SOLR, Search, Software, Web