My Good Friend Sahar Sarid, announced on his blog that the project he and his team have been working on for three years has gone live

The Assista search engine is question based and is a very exciting to the internet and the domain community. It’s proof positive that domainers are developers as well.

Please check Assista.com out. They are looking for all valuable feedback to improve the engine.

We wish Sahar and his team the best of luck and look for this project to be wildly successful

A reprint of the release article appears below:

Over three years in the making we’re finally releasing Assista (if you are not sure what Assista is, see this link). This release is not of a finished product (will it ever be?) but of what we have done so far. Our main objectives for this release are three-folds:

1. Results Speed: When searching for keywords, topics we wanted to be able to show results in less than five seconds. Google, Yahoo, MSN set user’s expectations high when it comes to speed and if we are going to make it, speed must be addressed.

2. Question Expansion Results Speed: Same as above. Speed is an important issue, we struggled with it for over a year, not so because we didn’t know what to do but because unlike the big search engines, we do not have their budgets, infrastructure.

3. Design: After many tries we decided to stick with basics. Design is not our forte so we rather focus on navigation, ease of use.

Assista currently has over 120 million questions. By end of 2008 we expect to have over a billion questions in the database.

To get you started, here are some interesting Assista queries:

1. Human Trafficking

2. Domain Parking

3. Future Search

4. Myrtle Beach

5. Sepsis, Acne (Note: As you are soon to find out, Assista does extremely well with medical queries)

6. Abraham Lincoln

7. World War II

8. Intellectual Property

9. New Year Resolution

10. Gifted Child

We still have allot to do, things like adding privacy policy, about us page, clearing some issues on front page (for example, some links in “recent searches” are to non existing results), fixing the sub-topics results, and more. We’re aware of it, we’ll work on it. At the moment we set a goal to go live before end of year and even though we can delay it (that’s the easiest thing to do in life) we rather put it out, get some real feedback, and improve as we go along.