We are glad to announce that we have released the first beta version of our new university search feature. We are still in the process of indexing large amounts of presentations from around the university world, why many of the universities may currently show a small number of presentations.

The idea here is that presentations posted on university websites will often contain high quality content. This is not to be confused with good quality presentations, but none the less, its actual content should be reliable and interesting. We are today indexing presentations from well over 500 universities world-wide in eleven countries. This will further increase during the spring of 2010 to include about 40 countries and 4000 universities.

There are currently two ways of using this new feature; you can either browse the actual university by country and university, or you could do a simple search and add site:harvard.edu for example to find presentations coming from Harvard University.

If anyone feels like promoting their country or their university then please let us know.

Wow, I guess I should be used with the time it takes to deploy an application. Seems like π is still a very important factor in all time estimates. Feels like we are working on those 10% that take 90% of the time right now. Anyhow, I believe we are indeed closing in on a release. By the end of this week we should have a fully functional PowerPoint 2007 Add-in that enebles you to search the web for PowerPoint slides from within PowerPoint itself.

Searching for Microsoft PowerPoint presentations using traditional search engines can be a tedious and frustrating trial-and-error effort, leaving the user with a list of links to PowerPoint files that are less than optimal. The user is left to the struggle of opening and sifting through each individual file before finding the right PowerPoint presentation. SlideFinder, on the other hand, treats the individual slide as the smallest entity of the presentation, rendering the users search results they are looking for, instead of dreary file listings.

Stockholm, Sweden (SlideFinder) June 17, 2009 – The new SlideFinder search engine, aimed specifically at PowerPoint presentations, allows users to search for presentations in a way that hasn’t been possible with traditional search engines.

Imagine if instead of showing the exact URL of a search result, a search engine would only name the site where the result was to be found. To find the page, the searcher would have to visit the site and look for the specific page of interest. As primitive as it sounds, this is how traditional search engines like Google, Yahoo, and the rest treat presentations.

SlideFinder views the presentation in the same light as other search engines view the site. Instead of viewing the presentation just as a large file, SlideFinder’s search renders the individual slides using thumbnails. Breaking down the search result to single slides enables the search engine to display a visual search result page. Users can see exactly what each slide looks like without leaving the browser. In addition, while hovering a specific slide the users are able to read the speaker notes that the presenter has written for that slide.

The SlideFinder search engine currently has four million indexed slides coming from roughly 120 000 presentations. These numbers are growing every day. The SlideFinder search engine can be found at http://www.SlideFinder.net.

About Slidefinder:

SlideFinder is a newly started company located in Stockholm, Sweden. The company is licensing the search engine and presentation management system from Novatrox AB http://www.novatrox.com. The company aims at simplifying searches for presentations and slides on the Internet.