I am pleased to announce that I have added some extra features in to my search engine [www.topicala.com](http://www.topicala.com).
The two services are currently in Beta, and I encourage everyone to join in.
Firstly, Topicala Popular! is designed to help you discover what is popular on the Internet right now. Its kind of like [www.digg.com](http://www.digg.com) and [www.delicious.com](http://www.delicious.com) but slightly different. To be listed on Topicala Popular, we need to able to track some of the visitors to your site, we do this by asking you to include an image (<img src="http://www.topicala.com/imageRefer/YOURSITEURL/topicala.png">) on your site that is hosted by Topicala, then when ever anyone downloads this image we can tell that it came from your site.
Secondly, Topicala People! is designed to help you find people on the Internet. It acheives this by looking at information on your page stored in Microformats, more specifically hCards.
There are several ways that you can get your information on to Topicala, all of them are automatic so you have to do as little as possible.
- Wrap your information and anyone you link to in the hCard format (See hCard Authoring). You can easily create hCard contact information by using the hCard Creator
- Either:
- Include the Topicala image from our servers (paste the following HTML into your page: <img src="http://www.topicala.com/imageRefer/YOURSITEURL/topicala.png"> - replacing YOURSITEURL with your domain name (this is optional, you can just use <img src="http://www.topicala.com/imageRefer/topicala.png">)
- Or Ping our servers at the following URL: [http://www.topicala.com/ping](http://www.topicala.com/ping) using your blogging software
Over the coming days these results will be integrated directly into Topicala so that when you search for a topic, you will find all the people associated with what you are searching for.
Topicala People will be great for indexing company information too, it will be like an automatic Yellow Pages that is not controlled by Topicala, but rather by you the user.
Anyway, I encourage you to get your sites on to Topicala and use the site and let me know what you like, dislike and would like to see changed.
Cheers!