Tag Tuesday is back! If you are in the San Francisco area come out to Varnish Fine Art this Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. Scott Golder from HP Labs will talk about his recent research paper on collaborative tagging and Kevin Marks of Technorati will talk about the design and implementation of Blog Finder. Tag Tuesday is a developer-centered event. If you are working with tags or related methods of user classification and would like to present, let me know. Tags: hp, blogfinder, tags, tagtuesday…
Category Archives: Search
Visit to Google
Today I visited Google to talk about web spam. I had never been on the Google campus so although I was busy I did make a point to note many details. Just about every meeting room I saw was video enabled. The spam summit met in a medium-sized room with array microphones hanging from the ceiling tiles, three video cameras in the back of the room, and one video camera in the front of the room for crowd shots. Smaller meeting rooms had phones with eye-level cameras. Lunch was really good. I had a chicken breast pesto panini with roasted…
Google Blog Search infrastructure thoughts
I have been reading through some of the posts about Google Blog Search and have some new thoughts on possible infrastructure although nothing has been officially stated by Google. I’ve read about how fast Google’s results come back. I would hope so, their entire index covers only about 90 days. Powered by Google Fusion? We already know that Google Blog Search is indexing only feeds, and the index does appear to separate from the main Google index. We also know that Google’s feed search index only contains posts since June 2005. We also know that Google plans to add a…
Giving Dave Winer credit for infrastructure
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…
Google Blog Search is live
Google Blog Search is now live. I spent some time clicking around and searching for terms and phrases where I expected a certain result. Some early thoughts: Query time is very fast, at around half a second for most queries. The database only goes back two months, so a quick response is to be expected. The related blogs search for “George Bush” suggests “George Bush doesn’t care about ugly hoes” which cracks me up. No advertisements. Is this another “mistake” like Google claimed for Google News? I don’t think so. Google exposes results as RSS and Atom feeds in…
Google launching feed search tonight
Google is launching a feed-specific search interface tonight for both all feed producers as well as a search interface specific to Blogger. It’s important to note that from what I have read on Search Engine Watch and others Google is specifically restricting its search to feeds, and not using the HTML of the blog. Why? Googlebot is designed to swallow a page whole and not break the page up into individual entries or items. Feeds come prepackaged as individual items or entries allowing for easy digestion by parsers and indexers. Google would need to overhaul its indexer or design a…
Running a reliable blog tool and ping service
Most people do not realize how ping notification services (“ping beacons”) can negatively affect user experience for a blog tool vendor. Blog authors usually welcome the publicity but are not sure who to blame when something goes wrong, if the user even knows what went wrong and where. Let’s start with some background on the process of a ping notification (“ping”). The blog author hits the “Post” button, publishing his or her blog entry to a publicly available website. The blog tool retrieves a listing of specified services that are either platform-defined defaults or user-specified preferences. The blog tool attempts…
Vint Cerf joins Google
Vint Cerf will join Google starting October 3 as their Chief Internet Evangelist. Vint already posted to the Google blog to let us know he is “committed to the vision of Google’s criticality to the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people.” Vint Cerf is currently working on the Interplanetary Protocol and may be working with Google to create the first Earth node at the top of the often rumored Google space elevator. :) Tags: vintcerf…
Mitsui invests in Feedster
Japanese business conglomerate Mitsui has invested an undisclosed amount of money in Feedster. Mitsui has 723 subsidiaries ranging from steel production to medical spas. Update: It looks like Scott Rafer, former CEO of Feedster, has left the company perhaps as a contingency of the Mitsui deal or of his own will….
Wall Street Journal on blog search
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…