Vividence search engine report

Vividence has a semi-annual report on the search industry. PDF link to report. In its May report Google received top rank for customer experience and satisfaction, and last for ad activity. Customer experience and satisfaction rankings:
  1. Google
  2. Yahoo!
  3. Ask Jeeves
  4. Lycos
  5. MSN
Ask Jeeves and MSN had a similar pre-search brand image, but MSN did not deliver the same post-search experience. 75% of users say they have one primary search engine. “Although actual search results returned by the leading five search engines do not differ substantially by some measures, Google users reported a higher perceived rate of success and satisfaction with search results.”

Mojave Airport space launch center

Space.com: “The Federal Aviation Administration’s Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation (FAA/AST) is expected next month to certify that the Mojave Airport Civilian Flight Test Center as a non-federal spaceport to handle horizontal launches of reusable spacecraft.”

Atom + FOAF = great things

Kendall Grant Clark, faculty research associate in the University of Maryland’s semantic web lab, wrote an interesting XML.com article about the courtship of Atom and who’s courting whom.

FOAF plus Atom (or FOAF plus your favorite RSS flavor) is to the Semantic Web what home pages were to the Web. A machine-readable description of a person, plus a machine-readable version of that person’s web space, is enough Semantic Web for us to do really great things, whether or not the hard KR stuff ever amounts to anything at all.

This idea is exactly what I was trying to get Technorati to understand last night.

RSS, Web Services and Online Content in Cocoa Apps

Next month’s Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference features a bird of a feather meeting on RSS, Web Services and Online Content in Cocoa Apps. I do not have a conference pass, but I will try to attend the exhibits and this BoF.

This BoF discussion delves into recent developments in desktop applications that integrate with content and services on the Internet. Such applications include RSS readers like Shrook and NetNewsWire and weblog editing tools like Ecto and Xjournal. Come get answers and share ideas about rich network client design and implementation.

Technorati Developer’s Salon

I attended the Technorati Developers Salon tonight in San Francisco. I arrived at a non-descript side entrance and rang an unlabeled call box. Kevin Marks answered the door, and I knew I was in the right place. After an hour of mingling, pizza, salad, and Anchor Steam, the group of about 40 people headed downstairs. Sputnik wireless access covered the entire two story office space. The office space is very large, considering Technorati employs only 8 people. They should be able to expand to 50 people at least in this office space. Dave Sifry started things off. Technorati picks up, on average, a new weblog every 7 seconds. They watch over 2.4 million weblogs and see about 200,000 updates a day. 8.2% of all the weblogs Technorati tracks update daily. 80% of weblogs ping Technorati. Kevin Marks presented observed trends in Technorati data. Graphs were posted on Kevin’s .Mac site and he has since removed the data. The top sites based on inbound sources were media companies such as New York Times. The graph Kevin showed looked very different than the Technorati 100. Ian Kallen showed an implementation of the Technorati API to show the current cosmos for the San Francisco Giants. Of course the question and answer period yielded some of the more interesting information of the night. Dave defined Technorati as a “user facing Internet service.” He is very intent on sticking to that vision and creating the best Internet service without getting distracted by other things. Technorati plans to make money from text advertising and subscription services. When asked to expand on advertising using Technorati, Dave did not have a concrete answer. If Technorati indexes a site with both a RSS and Atom feed they will use the Atom feed. Technorati will follow every entry’s link in order to gather the full HTML of your post. Atom defines whether the item description is the full post or a summary and is therefore easier for Technorati’s parser to digest. Technorati has link archives to 2002 and post archives since January. There are currently no plans to expire any of this data. The Developer wiki contains a full list of issues raised at the Developers Salon.

New Technorati APIs and SDK

Technorati released a new version of its APIs tonight. Details are available on the Technorati developers wiki. Use apibeta.technorati.com for now but, if there are no major issues, beta will end in about a week. Technorati will now return your query as RSS if you specify your format parameter. Data are returned in UTF-8 format. The new API has better error handling, including appropriate HTTP responses for bad data or no data. Outbound links are sorted by dates and duplicate links stripped. The new API also allows you to limit the number of returned items.