123 posts filed under this category, page 1 of 5.
Open Graph protocol is a set of HTML+RDF markup elements used to summarize webpages on the public Internet when those pages are shared on Facebook, Google+, mixi, LinkedIn, and more. In this post I will summarize Open Graph protocol markup for easy inclusion in your site templates.
Microsoft has extended the OpenSearch protocol with a new search suggestions data formats expressed XML or JSON. The new format will display real-time search results, summaries, images, and even search result classifications inside the browser chrome for any site owner supplying the appropriate format. In this post I'll teach you how to add search suggestions to your OpenSearch description document for instant search suggestions in IE8.
Ask.com's local search product AskCity launched new tools last night that allow searchers to define the scope of a search by drawing on a map. Ask has always been focused on liberal search queries you might ask a concierge and this new search feature again puts the user in charge while abstracting some complexities of local search. In my example search above I searched for coffee near The Palace Hotel, a popular web conference spot. A search for the hotel put a marker in the middle of Market Street, but it didn't matter in the case of my search. I…
New search startups come and go, but the ever-present meme seems to be the "zero switching cost" between an established competitor and a newcomer. In the old days this was certainly true, as any user could simply update your browser bookmarks or homepage, replacing WebCrawler with Excite or AltaVista. As the web grew search became an integrated component of large websites, networks, and the desktop software powering the entire experience. Google is spending billions to integrate its search products into the Apple operating system, new Dell PCs, MySpace, Firefox, and more. Google commands about a 50% share of the U.S….
Wikia will release a new search engine early next year according to an interview with Jimmy Wales in today's Times of London. The new Wikia search engine project is named Wikiasari and will apply wisdom of the crowds features to search engine results, letting individual users rank sources of information and their relevancy to a particular query. Of course the article takes a "gunning for Google" angle, citing the PageRank algorithm used since Google's was founded in 1998. Search engines grow over time, and incorporate multiple ranking factors beyond the math of inbound links and source authority. Google (synonym…
Web feed syndication is made up of two base vocabularies: RSS 2.0 and the Atom Syndication Format. These base vocabularies are extended using namespaces to create a common set of expressions for your web feed data. In this post I'll walk through some best practices for publishers syndicating their data via web feeds. Should I use RSS or Atom? The RSS 2.0 syndication format has been around for about four years and over that time it has been used by web publishers large and small to represent their data for syndication. The New York Times publishes its top stories via…
Web authors may declare alternate versions of a single web page, exposing additional languages available or various file formats. HTML documents express these relationships using the link element in the document header. Alternate language A single Wikipedia article about "search" might have alternate representations and translations, such as "buscar" in Spanish, "suche" in German, "rechercher" in French, etc. A search engine or web browser software can discover the availability of these alternate document versions if declared by the publisher. The example markup above advertises an alternate version of example.com available in Arabic…
Blogs and other social media tools have changed the publishing landscape over the past few years, making it easier than ever to share information with the world. The ease of use and focused attention of the medium has also helped create new opportunities for spammers to automatically generate content, buy links, and get noticed by search engines and other points of aggregation. In this post I will break down the operations of one spam network utilizing social media technologies such as WordPress, Digg, del.icio.us, and more to climb the search results and generate revenue through ads and affiliate programs. Last…
I spent the last few days among webmasters at the PubCon conference, where most conversations were focused on marketing yourself online to humans and search engines. The 2000 attendees focused on ranking themselves as high as possible in search engine result pages and driving site traffic. Methods of achieving these goals cover a full spectrum of white hat to black. Social networking and crowdsourcing sites are new focuses of the search engine marketing sector, taking advantage of loose editing and account creation restrictions to boost a site's visibility. Social networking and e-commerce Should every item in your product catalog have…
I'll be in Las Vegas early next week speaking at PubCon on feed syndication best practices. The session takes place from 10:15-11:30 a.m. on Tuesday if you are attending the search conference. I have not been to Las Vegas in a few years so I'll be checking out new pieces of grandeur at the Wynn, new Caesars Palace, Treasure Island, etc. Hopefully there will be lots of search geeks in attendance leading to interesting conversations….
The ability to save a URL has been around since Mosaic 0.2 but is currently experiencing a transformation as we learn more about the pages and content behind the pointers and share our findings with others through social networks. Hotlists, bookmarks, and favorites are changing and this month's SF Tech Sessions next Monday will take a look at a few new companies changing the way we think about sharing bookmarks. Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid The inspiration for this month's SF Tech Sessions came out of a conversation with Jeff Weiner and Joshua Schachter of Yahoo! earlier this…
When I lived in L.A. it seemed like everyone wanted to be a movie star. The Starbucks barista waiting to be discovered as he pronounced "Frappuccino," friends scheming to be placed on a reality show and win a trip to a tropical island, and the many writers trying to get their latest script into the hands of Steven Spielberg. The recent boom in online video and its associated capture hardware has created a new class of stars. The next American Idol might submit a cover song to YouTube and video of a child's first steps are uploading to the Web…
Online audio is definitely on an upswing, fueled by the iPod revolution, improved online playback, and broadband penetration. Audio search is keeping up with demand for new content, thanks in part to national security spending in the Cold War and beyond. In this post I will outline the current state of audio search, and how machines make sense of spoken word, progressing from easy to difficult. First, let's define the space. I'm interested how a search engine might index content with non-professionally produced metadata. The President's weekly radio address contains a full transcript. Music catalogs are available for purchase from…
A picture is worth a thousand words, especially to search engines trying to match a brief search query to a set of appropriate visual results. How can a web search engine collect enough data about a particular image to provide a user with relevant results? In this post I will outline image search concepts, the current state of the art, and outline some of the challenges with still image search. Image on your website You might recognize the depiction above as Yoda, a popular character the Star Wars movie series. More specifically this is a picture of a Yoda statue…
Search industry pundit Danny Sullivan is leaving his popular Search Engine Watch website and Search Engine Strategies conferences at the end of this year. Danny is viewed by the community as synonymous with both brands, and an independent expert in all things search since he's been following the industry for over 10 years. I'm sure lots of search companies are contacting Danny right now to apply his specialized knowledge within their walls. I hope he does his own thing and takes full ownership stakes, but I have a feeling a big company might snatch him up. Yahoo! took Danny to…
DeWitt Clinton changed the way you search through your browser in the past few years. The OpenSearch format powers search in Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 and helps you discover new sources of information with easy to aggregate data whether you're looking for a CPAN library or searching my weblog. DeWitt is stepping down as software development lead for Amazon's A9 search engine today to pursue new projects. One new project in the works is the completion of the OpenSearch 1.1 spec and launching a new independent community-oriented home for OpenSearch on the web. I've been a beta tester…
I'll be at the Search Engines Strategy conference next week including speaking on a blogger panel on Wednesday from 11 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Google CEO Eric Schmidt kindly agreed to be our opening act, warming up the crowd for 45 minutes as they recover from a night of drinking (but not much dancing) at the Googleplex. If you're at the conference or one of the evening parties say hello and let's talk about search. I'm still hoping Yahoo! will rent out Great America on Thursday night so I can ride Top Gun over and over again….
DeWitt and I were chatting over breakfast yesterday about the future of search. What will be the big changes in search over the next 5 years? What are the growth markets in terms of index size, users, repeat visits, and new interfaces? The first thing that popped to mind was the international landscape of the Internet and the always-on world wide web taking hold in developing nations. According to comScore numbers from May, 14% of the world's total population age 15 or older are online. Bump that number up a bit if you include Internet cafes and mobile phones, a…
Search engine Ask.com now displays the last three feed items at the top of the search result page for strong title matches. A search for "BoingBoing" displays the popular blog's last three posts complete with a link to the individual item, a 98-character summary, and the publication date. There are a few bits of polish missing from the implementation. I'd like to be able to directly access the source feed and subscribe right away. It would also be cool if every feed title from my subscription list was part of my own personal smart answers, increasing the personal relevancy…
Yahoo! and Microsoft's instant messaging networks are now able to exchange messages between users. A Windows Live Messenger user can IM with their Yahoo! buddies within the Windows Live application and without having a Yahoo! account. Same thing in reverse for Yahoo! users. These initial features are just the beginning of planned interoperability between Yahoo! and Microsoft's networks. The interoperability should be especially popular in east Asia, where Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger are extremely popular. Desktop clients based on open-source libraries such as Gaim currently provide a single client for text-messaging access to multiple networks today, and the…
The Japanese government is subsidizing a new search engine effort by 30 Japanese companies including Hitachi, Fujitsu, and NTT. Yahoo! currently dominates the Japanese market through its partnership with Softbank. Yahoo's search engine was powered by NTT's goo from 1998 until 2001 but Yahoo has been using its own search technology in Japan since October of last year. The new Japanese search engine will feature better interactions on TV screens and through multimodal inputs such as voice. The domestic research institute for new search technologies opens this Friday. (via Search Engine Watch)…
Some infighting at PubSub is driving the company into the ground. PubSub founder and CTO Bob Wyman has posted a note on his blog letting us know the company will be in bankruptcy within days. The company is struggling to keep its head above the water and has recently seen a merger and a financing round fall through. Bob's blog is a bit too accusatory for a man looking to make sure his 39% stake of PubSub is worth something in a week. It's possible employee shareholder agreements are tying up new funding or acquisitions, but now is the…
Think Partnership's planned acquisition of IceRocket has fallen through at the due diligence stage. Andy Beal reports the letter of intent has expired and interim CEO Scott Mitchell announced he will not move forward with the deal according to reporting by Andy Beal. (via Search Engine Watch) Tags: icerocket…
Ask.com unveiled its blogs and feeds search offering tonight using index data captured from Bloglines subscriptions. Users can search for feeds (good for subscription suggestions) or individual posts sorted by relevance, recency, or popularity and scoped anywhere from the last hour to the first time a user added the feed to Bloglines. The new offering is most similar to Yahoo's feed search based on the My Yahoo! feed index. Ask's relevance search is based on the ExpertRank algorithm and a few other pieces of proprietary secret sauce. Most recent is a reverse chronological sort for the search term. Popularity…
Last night Om and I sat down with Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of open-source blogging software WordPress and a recent founder of Automattic to record our latest PodSession. Automattic is a software services company centered around the WordPress blogging platform. We chatted about how to successfully scale a new web application. WordPress.com currently hosts about 200,000 blogs with mirrored hosting in San Diego and Dallas. Matt and I agreed that it's best not to over-optimize at the beginning but instead sit back and watch the actual usage of your web application to fine-tune. Check out Cal Henderson's new book,…