Project Phoenix is something I've been working on for well over a year in my spare time. It is the rebirth of my active participation in contributing to the evolution of search engine technology. My interest in search began in 1995 when I created the first Internet directory and search engine in Canada, Maple Square. By the time I sold Maple Square in November of 2003 I was already working on several other non-search related projects.
Last year I decided I wanted to get back into search. So I started looking at the playing field to see who was doing what, what was needed and where my interests lay. Vertical search was already a buzz word which puzzled me as I'd been several years earlier that's where the future of search is. Based on my research I decided I would start working on a new vertical search platform. Rather than start from scratch I decided to use some code I had previously written on top of some open source code.
At this point I'm not prepared to go into much detail on what I've been doing other than to say that I've started to assembled a small team of programmers and started to test our crawlers. We are also about to deploy our next generation search cluster and expect to see some positive results. The project is moving slowly due to limited resources right now but I'm confident by Q3 or Q4 we'll have our first beta vertical search available to the public.