123 posts filed under this category.
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,…
Hitwise just published rankings and market share for top portals in search, mail, news, finance, and maps. While Google dominates in search, Yahoo! is the clear aggregate leader across these top categories with an almost 10% lead over the search leader. SearchE-mailNewsFinanceMapsTotal Market7.39.33.40.60.521.04 Google47.42.51.90.37.53.80 Yahoo!16.042.46.334.920.55.62 MSN11.522.913.44.33.07 Other8.56 While Google Maps is an often-cited example of the Web 2.0 world Mapquest has 7x the market share according to these numbers….
Google is a bit upset to find it is not the default search engine in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 browser and is starting to talk antitrust. Safari, Firefox, Camino, and Opera all have Google built-in as default and sometimes the only search option. “The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services,” said Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search products at Google. “We don’t think it’s right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose.” Want to change your default search…
Think Partnership is acquiring IceRocket, a search engine focused on emerging media such as feeds, cell phone pictures, and the latest news. Think Partnership is a group of companies based out of Chicago in the dating, real estate, and SEO industries. Think Partnership raised $26.5 million last week in a private placement of preferred stock and they are redefining the company through acquisitions. No word yet on the purchase price of IceRocket. The deal is in the due diligence stage. Tags: icerocket…
Om and I received a variety of feedback last week as podcast listeners stood up against research reports about podcasts and their audiences. Some people thought a 20-minute discussion of hot tech news was just right and others wanted even shorter, more digestible chunks. This week Om and I recorded two 10-minute podcasts to try something new and introduce a little variety. It was also tough to pick just one topic this week since both Apple and Google had big announcements last Wednesday. You’re being watched Your cellular carrier knows where you are at all times. Pinpointing your location helps…
Search company Ask is dropping the Teoma brand name in a further move to roll all of its brands into one. Jeeves, longtime mascot and search butler, was dropped from the site earlier this month. The Teoma team has been a part of Ask Search Technology since Teoma’s September 2001 acquisition. Paul Gardi, formerly VP of search for Ask Jeeves and Teoma, is now leading IAC’s Advertising Solutions business. Teoma has powered Ask’s backend search since 2001 but the Teoma.com front-end always provided more advanced features than Ask. Teoma features have now been rolled into the Ask engine. I’m…
In this week’s episode of Om and Niall PodSessions we discussed the current state of online privacy and the options presented to users with their choice of product and features. Do users pay any attention to EULAs? Does anyone realize what data is being stored about them online and shared with advertisers and potentially governments? This week’s podsession, Online privacy: who’s watching you?, is 29 minutes long and a 13 MB download. Tags: privacyonlineprivacy…
I’ve been digging into a few new areas of interest over the past few months I feel still need improvement in search, discovery and tracking. I’ve spoken about most of these topics in my podcast series with Om, but it’s worth mentioning again in text. I’m interested in continuing my work in these areas and perhaps helping to solve some existing problems. Feeds We have RSS 2.0, and Atom 1.0, the world is starting to understand how syndicated content makes sense, but I don’t see a lot of future thinking for handling multiple locations, personas, and personalized content. Advertising is…
I spent a little time today playing with Ma.gnolia, a new social bookmarking site currently in beta. Ma.gnolia was built in San Francisco by Larry Halff using Ruby on Rails and some design help from Jeffrey Zeldman and Happy Cog Studios. Ma.gnolia includes standard bookmarking features such as a title, a description, and some tags but the application does a good job of connecting those bookmarks to other groups of users with similar interest. You can browse groups to find like-minded users and subscribe to a group pool of interesting links. Groups allow members to stay involved even if…
On this week’s episode of Om and Niall PodSessions Om and I discuss changes in the search industry over the past week and their implications for future business development around the world. This week’s session is titled search around the world as we cover the changing landscape in the United States, Europe, and Asia in about 20 minutes. The DOJ paid Google a visit this week after the company refused to hand over search logs and information for its hundreds of millions of users. The long list of requested data made online users realize just how much personal information is…
This post is part 2 of a series about the early days of shopping comparison site PriceGrabber.com. You may want to read part 1 before continuing. PriceGrabber was created in 1999, at the height of the Internet boom, with only about $1.5 million in seed money. The company was able to raise a sizable amount of capital using the tools it had created for the general Internet marketplace of expert users and enthusiasts. By tracking exceptional deals from merchant crawls performed multiple times a day PriceGrabber was able to turn bubble-worthy goofs of other companies into seed money for a…
Successful companies can be formed out of the failure of a dream and a side project created for friends and family growing into much more. This is the story of the birth of PriceGrabber.com, a shopping comparison search company that grew from a side project into a half-billion dollar sale in about five years. Grabware was envisioned as a software distribution company providing on-demand distribution of software through store kiosks. A buyer would approach the terminal, choose a few shareware titles or full versions of the software, and an in-store fulfillment service would burn a CD and print a user…
Blog zeitgeist tool TailRank is opening up its parsed feed update stream to third-party developers through a new feed delta API. Developers can request the latest 100 posts discovered and parsed by TailRank’s spiders. The API is a good way to capture a snapshot of the most active and highly linked blogs written in English at any one time. Past research and development projects have seeded their data sets from Weblogs.com and perhaps TailRank can be a new source of information for newcomers to analyze the blogosphere in different ways. API keys will be available at no cost for non-profits…
Om and I sat down this week to discuss the current and future state of video creation and distribution technologies. We both expect many video-related announcements from this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that will bring a wider variety of video consumption products into the living room. We also talked about new ways for amateurs to create and share videos online and using specialized portable hardware such as the iPod video. I don’t think any search company currently is doing a good job indexing video content. Even audio content has been a big challenge. Closed-captioning provides a bridge…
Popular blogger Jason Kottke recently posted an entry criticizing blog search companies for the incompleteness of their results compared to his internal search tool powered by Movable Type. I happen to know both Movable Type and blog search pretty well, so I decided to dig into the data and see where search engines might have missed the mark in the interest of improving quality. I found that Jason’s criticisms where a bit unfounded yet still may alter the perceptions of many people who are heavily influenced by what they read on his blog. Jason found more results searching his installation…
As more and more companies create business models around “consumer generated media” individual publishers are beginning to wonder when they might see a slice of the revenue. I believe there are opportunities for bloggers to be paid for their content without compromising editorial integrity and also rewarding the tool builders. Profiting from consumer generated media is not a new thing. Shopping sites such as Amazon.com or PriceGrabber have been doing it for years, asking an author to turn over the rights to their content in exchange for the author’s work being featured alongside a product. At PriceGrabber we paid anywhere…
FeedBurner just published a report on the current state of RSS and Atom syndication formats across a variety of publisher types with varying goals. The graphic above helps illustrate the difference between feed search and blog search. While the two used to be almost one and the same, blog search focuses on just blogs and podcasts and not commercial publishers, web services, watchlists, and other peer-produced content. I think the report was a bit light on monetizing subscribers, so I hope FeedBurner addresses advertising in syndication feeds as its next market report topic. Tags: atom, rss…
I sat down with Om Malik tonight to record the latest of our weekly podcasts. We sat across the table from each other in a quiet room instead of using Gizmo Project and you can tell the difference in the quality of the audio file. This week’s podcast is 8.9 MB in size and 19 minutes and 15 seconds in length. We spent most of the podcast talking about startup companies in the Bay Area. Last week Om and I became well aware of the new bubble forming in the valley. I shook my head as I saw two new…
I just came across Podzinger, a podcast search engine developed by BBN Technologies. BBN Technologies is the same company that developed the first Internet router, sent the first e-mail, pioneered voice over IP, and the TCP, to name a few. They have been working in acoustics and voice recognition for decades, funded by the government’s need to listen to broadcasts from all over the world and transcribe the results. Podzinger is powered BBN’s AVOKE STX speech recognition technology which adds speaker recognition and confidence level detection to its speech-to-text technologies. The site’s database currently contains a little over 10,000 podcasts…
Advertising networks are becoming web hosts in an attempt to provide a fulfillment destination for click advertising. Bringing more businesses online provides a destination for online advertisements from small businesses such as plumbers and restaurants creating new destinations for local searches. Microsoft and Yahoo! already offer free hosting for businesses and other advertising dependent businesses such as Google, Amazon, or eBay are likely not far behind. What if every pizzeria in town had a website? Local searches suddenly become more interesting, with multiple pizzerias competing for your next purchase with a text advertisement on large search networks. Yahoo! offers a…
Del.icio.us now offers keyword search for its database of annotated bookmarks. Every search result page includes a list of related tags, providing an interesting snapshot of how the universe of del.icio.us users classifies you and your work. Top related tags for “Niall Kennedy”: rss blogs technorati blog blogging Tags: delicious, folksonomy…
Matt Mullenweg recently posted his views on VeriSign moving into the blog space with its acquisition of Weblogs.com. Matt is a lead developer of WordPress, an open source blogging tool, and one of the developers of Ping-o-Matic, a ping relay service that currently forwards a blog update ping to over 20 destinations. Matt has some first-hand experience with the team at VeriSign. We should have been better prepared for this. Earlier in the year Verisign had the Boston Consulting Group calling people in the space trying to pick their brains, while at the same time refusing to reveal who they…
According to OneStat over the last 8 months Google’s share of the search engine market has decreased 0.3% while MSN’s share of the same market increased 0.3%. Yahoo!’s market share remained stable. Could Google be losing a significant amount of search customers to MSN? Tags: google, msn, onestat…
When writing help pages and other documentation aimed at informing a user there are choices to be made about how much information is too much information and what exactly is the correct information to note. Dave Winer feels a bit slighted by not being recognized for his contributions to the community allowing blog and RSS services such as Technorati to index data in a more timely manner. I wrote Dave an e-mail about six months ago thanking him for his contributions and detailing some of the ways Technorati uses technologies he has dedicated time, effort, and money to produce, but…
Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal features an article on the world of blog search and how companies such as Technorati, BlogPulse, IceRocket, and Feedster are providing users with access to information as it happens. It is a pretty good overview of the industry and the various search services that will introduce people to the concept of searching for information as it happens. The failure to mention Ask Jeeves and its purchase of Bloglines seems like a big omission given the comparisons made between smaller search startups and bigger search players such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. I will have to flip…
I recently received a couple inquiries from people interested in the shopping comparison industry for academic studies as well as new business development. I decided to make the answers to some questions and the discussion around the industry an open conversation not constrained to e-mail. I hope you find the information below useful insight into the shopping comparison industry. The text in blockquotes contains questions sent to me via e-mail from a MBA student at the University of Maryland regarding large shopping comparison sites Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, and NexTag and the industry as a whole. Competitive advantage: My observation is, to…
Eurekster, a social and personalized search company located in San Francisco, just launched their SearchPublisher platform that provides site publishers with web search unique to their site or group of cites and personalized for each user. Site publishers receive a revenue share for any advertisements selected by its users. SearchPublisher provides sample searches based on recent search activity in your defined activity. If you are too small to create an interesting search sample you can join a SearchParty and receive results from other groups such as the Blogs SearchParty. It’s the first interesting search engine I know of with revenue…
BlogPulse profiles are now online as a beta feature. The new tool from Intelliseek displays various information Intelliseek collects about a the top 10,000 blog URLs such as people linking to the blog, sites linked by the blog, most recent blog posts, and common keywords. They also provide a list of 10 blogs that cite similar links and text. My favorite feature is the common keywords identified in recent posts. It would be fun to take a group of keywords and guess the blogger. Tags: blogpulse…
I often receive questions from people about how search engines gather and distribute subscribed search results such as the results provided by Technorati, Feedster, Blogpulse, PubSub, and MSN or Yahoo! Search. It’s worth a brief explanation. Caveat lector, I work for Technorati but I will try to deliver an impartial view of the world of ping and search while keeping the post relatively brief. All of the aforementioned sites output search results in the RSS 2.0 feed format. Your feed results will differ between services based on what is indexed, how frequently it is indexed, and what content is made…
eBay has agreed to acquire shopping comparison site Shopping.com for $21 a share in cash, or about $620 million. Shopping.com just went public in October. Bill Cobb, president of eBay North America, told the Wall Street Journal eBay became interested in the comparison shopping sector after they noticed sellers listing on both shopping comparison sites and eBay. I am not sure this acquisition will cause other players such as Yahoo! or Google to acquire a shopping comparison site such as PriceGrabber or NexTag. Epinions was not mentioned in the press release but I am sure eBay would like to provide…
Is it just a coincidence that Google scheduled its “Factory Tour” for press and analysts at the exact same time as Yahoo!’s shareholder meeting? Definitely a strategic PR move. I wonder if anyone will stop covering Yahoo! for the day to attend….
Jim Winstead just announced blo.gs has been sold to an undisclosed buyer and the site will change hands on or after June 13. The new owner will “continue providing the same features that exist now, and will be working on making blo.gs even better.” Blo.gs is a pretty large ping beacon, second only to weblogs.com in its level of integration into all the different weblog tools available. My guess is a company wanting to move into the space purchased blo.gs for its ping beacon and its database of posts. There is a small chance the acquirer cares about the site’s…
Announcing hReview, a microformat for distributed review authorship and indexing.
On Tuesday, April 12, I attended BayCHI’s monthly meeting at PARC Laboratories in Palo Alto.
Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott of Nature Publishing Group contributed a long a detailed look at social bookmarking tools in the April 2005 issue of D-Lib Magazine.
Eyebeam has kicked off the first contagious media showdown to track the hottest meme online between May 19 and June 9.
Ask Jeeves announced a new version of their MyJeeves personalization portal today.
According to tonight’s Simpsons episode Homer knows his search engines. Marge confronts Homer about his work habits such as Googling his name until lunch and Homer made a note on his Flintstones fun map to use Ask Jeeves to find out more information about Dino.
The New York Times reports that InterActiveCorp is close to an agreement to purchase Ask Jeeves for about $1.9 million: $1.2 billion in cash and $600 million in stock.
James Lamberti, Vice President of Search Solutions at comscore Networks, presented today at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York. comScore * 18% of searches come from toolbars * 58% of searchers have not installed toolbars * 12% of searchers have uninstalled the toolbar * 20% of the search users constitute 68% of the search volume.
Tomorrow’s Web Spam Squashing Summit will not be broadcast to the outside world. No IRC, no audio, and no video stream will be published of the event.
I have been busy this week organizing a Web Spam Squashing Summit to bring together key players involved in publishing and indexing content on the world wide web.
Ask Jeeves officially purchased Bloglines. Mark Fletcher and his team will move to the Ask Jeeves remote office in Los Gatos where Mark will be GM of Bloglines. Teoma will power Bloglines search. Bloglines will gather and monetize users’ attention data for contextual advertising. Bloglines launched 18 months ago in June 2003 Official Announcements Ask Jeeves. “Ask Jeeves plans to leverage these technologies across its search and portal brands, and as of today, Bloglines’ Web search capability will be powered by Ask Jeeves’ search technology.” Ask Jeeves Weblog. “There will be no short-term changes to Bloglines that weren’t already…
Mary Hodder reports Ask Jeeves is buying Bloglines and Mark Fletcher will be a Jeeves employee on Monday. Is this true? Mark Fletcher is presenting a 20-minute case study this Tuesday on RSS syndication, ad splicing, and blogging at the Media Center event. Perhaps the announcement is meant to coincide with the conference and Mark will use this time to talk about the new Bloglines. Update: Bloglines acquisition is official. Supposedly announced on Friday with an embargo of midnight tonight….
Ask Jeeves launched a new weblog powered by TypePad. Bloglines is featured in the sidebar as top blogs and most popular blog links….
Findory added a Findory Neighbors to help visualize the relationships between weblogs. I did an ego search and the results are interesting….
Amazon’s A9 search engine added a business directory today with images of the business storefront alongside the address and a clickable telephone number. A search for Starbucks returns Starbucks locations within five miles of your Amazon.com default shipping address by default with thumbnail images for the business location and an overlay of a MapQuest map. You can even browse up or down the block to see surrounding storefronts. Very cool technology! In my sample searches I found Starbucks location in a mall or office park setting had an address that did not match the picture on the listing. Business owners…
The world of feed aggregators has been compared to the HTML Internet of 1994 by Scott Rosenberg and others.. We are starting to consume and make sense of this new data, but there are currently no well-defined methods or implementations of selective consumption. If I publish content it is instantly available to feed aggregators and search companies with no restraints on its usage regardless of licensing and robot preferences. If a Major League Baseball launched a weblog for the private, non-commercial use of their audience there is nothing stopping companies from adding or supplementing the content without the consent of…
PubSub created an events page for the Golden Globe Awards as an extension of their provided sample subscriptions. (via Gary Price) PubSub also has a slick Flash demo of its services linked from the home page. The demo provides usage cases and execution using PubSub’s services….
Last week Starbucks announced a new drinkable chocloate beverage called Chantico. Beginning last Saturday consumers could purchase a six-fluid ounce cup, creating many conversations across the blogosphere involving the new drink and the newly formed category of “drinkable chocolate.” This new product also provides a perfect opportunity to play the role of the marketing department of a Fortune 500 company tracking the reaction to a new product introduction. How should we measure the reaction to a product that has been on the market only four days? With live search companies of course! I will use search engines Technorati, Feedster, and…
MSN Search beta returns your search results as RSS
Charles Ferguson has a lengthy analysis of Google and Microsoft in the January edition of MIT Technology Review and how the search wars might play out over the next few years. Will Microsoft crush Google like it crushed Netscape? Ferguson bets on open standards and APIs as Google’s saving grace, creating a lock-in of tools and services. Winning architectures are proprietary and difficult to clone, but they are also externally “open”—that is, they provide publicly accessible interfaces upon which a wide variety of applications can be constructed by independent vendors and users. In this way, an architecture reaches all markets,…
PubSub has had LinkRanks for a while, but yesterday BoingBoing linked to a detail page not listed in the PubSub site links. PubSub displays a line chart of incoming links to the specified domain over the last thirty days and inbound links in the past ten days. Only one double listing in my results, a TypePad weblog with a separate domain. The chart is presented in Flash, making copy and pasting much more difficult. PubSub should learn from Alexa and make their images easy to add to other content. Think PowerPoint slides. PubSub is experimenting with NewsML for entry tracking…
Charlene Li authored a new paper on search engine user loyalty and posted a summary on her weblog. The $50 six-page paper cites extensive customer survey data. Some interesting findings: MSN gained substantial share as the default browser home page. (Internet Explorer no doubt) MSN has a slight lead in toolbar users. (related to Messenger installs?) Almost half of all toolbar users also use another toolbar. Charlene concludes that customers are becoming more sophisticated and specialized search companies will take away market share from Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Feedster is mentioned as a player in the RSS specialty….
Which company is the number one player in live search in terms of total traffic and user share? The above chart plots total market share Feedster, Technorati, and PubSub over the past month compared to all sites as calculated by Hitwise. Feedster and Technorati jostle for the top position while PubSub is way below. I expected to see a clear winner and was surprised at the results….
Vauhini Vara of the Wall Street Journal writes about how marketers increasingly turn to weblogs for marketing data. The article mentions Volkswagen utilizing reporting tools from Techdirt to keep informed of “items that appear on blogs and message boards, as well as in mainstream news outlets.” Sony hired Intelliseek to find out how its customers compared its new digital Walkman to Apple’s iPod. Karen Rizzo, director of marketing for Kryptonite, mentions how rapidly their product’s reputation fell apart online when a message in an online bicycle forum spread across the online world. I expect to see more automated reporting tools…
Tonight I was thinking about the importance of the number of indexed weblogs when choosing a search service. PubSub claims to track 6.6 million sources, Technorati claims to track 4.7 million weblogs, and Feedster claims to track 1.1 million feeds. What can the target audience of these services do with this information? I decided to do some comparative research from the point of view of a marketing department tracking the buzz around their new advertising campaign. Kevin Kringle is a digital word-of-mouth marketing campaign created by Best Buy and SMG Reverb. The marketing campaign is officially under a month old…
I just finished watching The Charlie Rose Show from Wednesday, November 16. John Doerr, Bill Joy, and Jeff Taylor participated in a panel discussion at a TechNet summit at Google HQ. Below is my attempt to transcribe the first question by Charlie Rose and the second part of Bill Joy’s response. Charlie Rose: What’s going to transform the Internet the most in the next 10 years? Bill Joy: We go out to this sea of information and in some sense we go fishing. Google is the best fishing rod. But in fact our lives are overwhelmed with information that’s coming…
Kinley Levack profiled Nick Denton’s Kinja.com in the October issue of EContent Magazine. Product Manager Matt Hamer provides some behind-the-scenes insights into Kinja. Because many of Kinja’s users are getting their feet wet in the blogging world, they neither need, nor are expected to have, any knowledge of the behind-the-scenes how-tos. Users add new sites using the regular URL, at which point, “it is queued for parsing.” Hamer says. “We don’t require our users to find, understand, or enter the URL of the Weblog’s feed, if it is available at all. Our crawler respects the robots exclusion protocol, so if…
ScanZoom has a software package for mobile phones that allows you to take a picture of a bar code and receive pricing information from PriceGrabber.com and Amazon. $20 gets you a macro lens and the application. (via Engadget)…
After my last posting I started to wonder how the weblog search market is carved up at the moment. Who are the players in the weblog-specific search space? comScore Media Metrix is not giving out any freebies these days, so I headed over to Alexa to check out their traffic rankings. DomainTraffic RankBloglines2635Technorati8995Feedster11232Ice Rocket14093DayPop23349…
Search engine Ice Rocket now has a weblog specific search feature. I am receiving better keyword results than Technorati. A search on Ice Rocket for “Bush wired” (no quotes in the search) returns 164 results from the last seven days (October 1-8). The same search on Technorati returns 86 posts. Technorati is using a phrase search and Ice Rocket is looking for a post with both the words “Bush” and “wired.”…
Amazon introduces new features to its A9.com search engine tonight. The New York Times reports A9.com will offer users the ability to edit and store bookmarks, keep track of visited links, and take notes on Web pages….
There is some interesting work going on at Camp Foo this weekend. A peering network for weblog or site update notifications as well as a method for pulling down new entries from a server instead of the entire feed….
Internet Retailer has an article about Blabble, a weblog search company that incorporates natural language processing when parsing weblogs. Blabble just entered its public beta stage on Monday. Take a look at a report for Bourne Supremacy for a better idea of what Blabble is offering that is different than Feedster or Technorati. The software can search the database for relevant words, phrases, and even within defined time frames to gauge how often bloggers referred to a product by hour, day, week and more. It also can search for the same idea as expressed by phrases composed of different language….
Feedster has partnered with The Washington Post to help readers nominate weblogs for the Best Blogs awards. “Categories include Best Rant, Democratic Party Coverage, Republican Party Coverage, Campaign Dirt, Inside the Beltway, Outside the Beltway, International, Class Clown, Most Original and Most Likely to Last beyond Election Day.”…
The official Web site of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games has a hyperlink policy they would like all Web sites to adhere to. “Use the term Athens 2004 only, and no other term as the text referent.”Send a request letter to the Internet Department with a description of your site, reason for linking, the unique URL containing, the link, and your e-mail contact. How odd. Such policies never work, and might serve as a nice way to aggregate news coverage. I am sure the official site of the Olympics does not need the PageRank help….
Feedster plans to incorporate contextual advertising from Kanoodle in its RSS search subscriptions. Feedster will also sell its own sponsorships for some of the RSS feeds. There will be one advertisement every sixth headline and users can pay $10 a year for a feed without advertisements. The ad-free feed will be licensed under Creative Commons for non-commercial use. The eWeek article mentions the dispute regarding advertising in RSS feeds. I have no issue with advertising in RSS feeds and realize that it is bound to happen just as e-mail carries advertising messages as a trade-off for the costs of production….
When I reworked my site last week I was unhappy with the persistent search features of Feedster and I could not get the results I was after using Technorati. Feedster did not have a full index of my site. Technorati accepts URL or keyword, but not both. So I created my own solution. Using Movable Type’s search template I crafted a RSS 2.0 file as my search result. It validates, but is served as text/html. If you would like to subscribe to any search result on my weblog you may edit this link, replacing *term* with the search term of…
In an interview with the Guardian, Ashley Highfield of the BBC mentions their new push into search as alternative to U.S. based companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. “[A]s the market came to be dominated by US sites – the most popular of which is Google – there was value in investing licence fee payers’ money in a UK-centric search engine.” The BBC’s current search offering uses Inktomi but optimizes results for a UK audience….
John Gruber of Daring Fireball takes a closer look at Spotlight and Dominic Giampaolo’s modifications to HFS+ which enable the rich desktop search. Some interesting issues. [T]he new Tiger version of Mail stores each message as a separate file that allows Spotlight to effectively return individual mail messages as search results. No other major mail client uses a one-message-per-file storage format. Importers are fired on every file the moment it is created, saved, changed, or moved, including when files are made available through a newly mounted drive….
“Imagination Environment,” created by David Ayman Shamma and Kristian J. Hammond of Northwestern University, reads a television stream’s closed caption feed and displays related images and other media to complement the television feed. Matthew Mirapaul profiles “Imagination Environment” in The New York Times….
LookSmart will develop a branded search property for Cal Athletics available at CalBears.com, CalBearsSearch.com and via a toolbar application. “Each time users click on a paid listing, a portion of the revenue will go to support Cal Athletics.” It would be nice if they had a Grub promotion to help utilize all those idle computers and open bandwidth. If all search engines provide a similar impression of a result to their users, the move towards cobrand benefits could be big. Think of iWon.com of years ago….
Ask Jeeves acquired Tukaroo Inc., a San Jose-based desktop search technology company founded in 2003. Tukaroo was founded in 2003 and launched their first product January 20, 2004. Tukaroo’s desktop and local network search bar includes a preview window for photographs and all documents. Advertisements are integrated into the local search window….
Sam Williams of Salon writes about the emergence of intelligent agents crawling pages and inserting content in weblogs and wikis. “[B]ot writers and copiers find that there are enough newbie operators out there to serve as unwilling page-rank boosters.”…
The Atom entry link structure detailed by Mark Pilgrim has some interesting search applications. What if the rel started to carry more meaning? You could then semantically track trends and soruces with less parsing, enabling new applications….
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: GoogleYahoo!Ask JeevesLycosMSN 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.”…
Medicare.gov has a new comparison shopping search engine for prescription drugs. Search by zip code for prices for persons with or without Medicare benefits. Robert Pear and Milt Freudenheim of the New York Times profiled the new site today….
Amazon’s search engine, A9, launched in beta. Also includes yet another toolbar. Pages are cached and you can view Alexa data directly from the results page. You can log on using your Amazon account and view search history as well. “You can take notes on any web page, and reference them whenever you visit that page, on any computer that you use. Your entries are automatically saved whenever you stop typing or when you go to another page.”…
I added a link for each post to its Tecnhorati cosmos. I followed the howto detailed by Dave Sifry. You want to change the ampersands to XHTML compliant of course. Why is there a blank rank parameter? Omitting this parameter seems to work fine, so I took it out. Most links will probably lead to “Ouch! No results found.” but it is still a good thing to have and more powerful than a TrackBack….
Wired News : “Scirus is a search engine for scientists that allows them to dig through not just scientific journals, but also unpublished research, university websites, corporate Internet sites, conference agendas and minutes, discussion groups and mailing-list archives.”…
Rick Skrenta’s latest blog entry comments on the scalability of Google’s service offerings. “[T]he story is about seemingly incremental features that are actually massively expensive for others to match, and the platform that Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else.”…
Stefanie Olsen of News.com interviewed Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, MSN Information Services & Merchant Platform. We think the sun has not set on even the first day of the search opportunity. In all our research, one out of every two people searching for something do not even get an answer. MSN Messenger is just effectively a couple of simple tweaks away from becoming a social network, because you have all your buddies and your buddies know who their buddies are. This is the ability to actually connect the two, and it’s very, very close….
Obviously an April Fool’s joke, but Google is hiring for their new lunar center. Lengthy for a prank. “The Googlunaplex will house 35 engineers, 27,000 low cost web servers, 2 massage therapists and a sushi chef formerly employed by the pop group Hanson.” “What happens to PageRank in the proximity of a black hole? Is there distortion that might result in link relevancy reduction or popularity warping? Could this somehow be harnessed to generate more dates for engineers?”…
“imgSeek is a photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features. The query is expressed either as a rough sketch painted by the user or as another image you supply (or an image in your collection). The searching algorithm makes use of multiresolution wavelet decomposition of the query and database images.” You draw a rough sketch of what you want to find and imgSeek returns thumbnail views of the best matches. Written in Python….
Google Labs has released its latest project: personalized search. I created a profile, selecting things like California, rock music, and soccer. When I search for “Dublin” my top results are now Dublin, California and not Dublin, Ireland….
Michael Kanellos of News.com profiles Language Weaver and MetaCarta, two search companies funded by CIA venture capital fund In-Q-Tel. Language Weaver provides functional translations of Internet articles or video clips on the fly. MetaCarta allows you to determine geographical location based on text descriptions. “There are 44 cities and towns called Paris and 69 called Al-Hamra around the world. Most places on the globe also have more than one name, which further complicates searches, he added. Filtering out irrelevant results remains a huge task.”…
Eric Schimdt talked about Google’s social networking service, Orkut, at PC Forum today. News.com covers the speech. He noted that most products at Google stay in beta for about a year. Google hopes to help provide better searches for people through social networking software. “We believe that these social networks will have a tremendous amount of information.” Three engineers are currently working on the service….
KartOO is a search engine aggregator that focuses on the relationships between your search results. Graphical representations are shown in Flash. (via Scoble)…
Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search is a database of all 3150 Calvin and Hobbes strips published with complete references to the books and pages they’re published on. All searchable by keyword. Very cool!…
Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post writes about the features of the search engines of tomorrow and what role, if any, Google may play….
On the front page of today’s Washington Post is an article by Yuki Noguchi about Google’s proficiency at locating confidential documents that may have publicly revealed themselves for only a brief moment in time….
Scoble might be taking a break from his weblog, but Andy Beal of Search Engine Guide posted an interview with him today. The article focuses on WinFS and some specific issues such as metadata for photographs and contacts….
Sunday’s New York Times took a look at the upcoming search war between Microsoft and Google. There is no doubt in my mind that Internet search will be built-in to Longhorn. Google will offer their deskbar, and you may even be able to choose your default search technology similar to your media player, instant message client, browser, etc. today. Google will change once it enters the public market. Employee perks will be scrutinized, and there might be some employee shuffle. Google and Yahoo! are the first names techies think of when it comes to search, and MSN Search will have…
Bruce Clay has a search engine relationship chart graphically illustrating (Flash) the relationships between many manjor search engines….
Eurekster is a new search engine, currently in beta, that uses your defined social network to rank search results from Overture based on the search history of you and your network of friends. The social networking technology comes from RealContacts and the personalization technology is provided by SLI Systems….
Spidering Hacks is now available for pre-order around the world. $20 adds these 100 tips and hacks to your library. 400 pages. Currently ranked 432,937 at Barnes & Noble. ISBN is 0-596-00577-6. UPC is 636920-00577-3. ASIN is 0596005776. As previously mentioned, I wrote a hack using Java to gather traffic statistics from Alexa. It will most likely come out in November, not October, but it’s still cool to see it hit the virtual shelves as a pre-order….
I have been busy over the past week writing for a new O’Reilly book. Look for me in chapter 4 a to be released book named Spidering Hacks, part of the O’Reilly Hack Series. Interestingly enough I was the only person to author to use Java. I have a feeling this is going to be a book full of a lot of Perl. There is only one Python example. I wrote a hack that gathers data about Alexa toolbar users traffic to your Web property on a daily basis. Alexa collects subdomain information as well as property rankings, and I…
Amazon.com has filed patent 6,564,213 for search query autocompletion strings. A search term is “preferably biased to favor the database items that are currently the most popular.” The idea seems similar to Google’s spelling correction but with partial strings. If I am on Amazon’s wireless site I can see the advantage of typing “Pearl” in the music category for a Pearl Jam CD, but the implications for not discovering Janis Joplin’s CD could make the whole thing dangerous….