Yahoo! is not the default search engine for Firefox browser in the United States but they have specially coded their page to help users change their preference. When you first visit Yahoo.com a small box appears to help you switch from Google search to Yahoo! (as pictured above). Pretty smart! I’m surprised the other search engines bundled with Firefox such as Amazon and eBay have not done the same thing for their power users even if they cannot be a replacement for all things search. Tags: firefox…
Category Archives: Search
The story of PriceGrabber part 1: Grabware
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…
Yahoo! Podcasts adds vidcasts
Yahoo! Podcasts now supports feeds with video content, or vidcasts. You can add a video series to your personal subscriptions, tag a vidcast, as well as rate and review vidcasts. Videos can be played inside your browser window using either Windows Media 9, RealPlayer 10, or QuickTime 7 players configured through a Yahoo! cookie. Eric Rice’s videoblog is one example listing. Even though the site now supports video all of the text and images on the site seemed focused on audio content. Audio content from the Yahoo! Podcast directory could be integrated with Yahoo! Music and hopefully vidcasts will make…
TailRank API for blogosphere snapshots
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…
Emerging video trends podcast
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…
Google at CES
Google co-founder Larry Page is a keynote speaker at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. The Los Angeles Times reports that Google has been in talks with large retail stores such as Wal-Mart to carry a computing device called the “Google Cube” running a Google customized operating system and applications. Page was a late addition to the keynote roster, so Google might actually be ready to announce something. This week will be full of announcements for sure. Update 1/03: News.com reports both Google and Wal-Mart denied the rumor. Google issued a statement saying “we see no need to…
Marissa Mayer on OneBox
John Battelle had conversation with Google’s Marissa Mayer this morning about the affect of the deal between Google and AOL on Google’s search results. John posted a loose transcript of the conversation, but what interested me most was the discussion around OneBox results on Google’s search result pages. What we normally do on the OneBox, like on our stocks page or travel, where we have links to a few providers, we look at Media Metrix or PageRank data, and generally they agree and corroborate themselves (as to) who are the top three or five providers. And those are who we…
Exclusive: Google to offer feed API
Google plans to offer a feed reader API to allow third-party developers to build new views of feed data on top of Google’s backend. The new APIs will include synchronization, feed-level and item-level tagging, per-item read and unread status, as well as rich media enclosure and metadata handling. Google Reader PM Jason Shellen and engineer Chris Wetherell both confirmed Google’s plans after I posted my reverse-engineering analysis of the Google Reader backend. The new APIs will allow aggregator developers to build new views and interactions on top of Google’s data. Google currently has at least two additional Google Reader views…
Google Reader API
Documentation of the unreleased Google Reader API for feed syndication proxies and account access.
How Google search works
Matt Cutts wrote a quick primer explaining Google search to librarians. He walks readers through how Google discovers pages, indexes, and later analyzes a user’s query across a network of analytics servers. For each search that someone types in, over 500 computers may work together to find the best documents, and it all happens in under half a second….