Marissa Mayer of Google spoke at PARC on Tuesday night. Marissa is product manager for Google.com and formerly the technical lead for the user-interface team. Alan Williamson provides a good summary of the event. Some interesting bits of information: The Google copyright statement was added to the bottom of the home page as an end of page marker after users expected more page content to load. If at least 20% of people use a feature Google will include it in the full site. At least 5% of users need to use an advanced feature before it is included in Google’s…
Category Archives: Search
PubSub events page
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….
Developer contest referral traffic
I have more referral traffic this week from the Technorati Developer’s Contest page than domestic Google and Yahoo! combined! Ranchero has about a third as many referrals as Technorati. Technorati released some new features this week but holding off on the announcement draws more attention to my work. Thanks!…
Live search comparison
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…
Technorati site search
Technorati now supports site search as a beta feature. Pass the “from” parameter in your URL string with your desired base URL and you can restrict your search to just those references. Technorati also has a searchlet for home page integration. As an example you can search my weblog for the keyword “technorati.”…
Technorati tags?
Just spotted on Adam Hertz’s blog links to Technorati tag URLs. The syntax is http://www.technorati.com/tag/ + keyword. Adam added a Technorati tag and a contest tag for a recent entry. A sign of things to come from Technorati? Could be a decentralized del.icio.us. Adam is Technorati’s VP of Engineering. A Technorati cosmos search for the base URL shows Adam is the only known source using the tag links. Kevin is playing along too, this time with a subdomain….
MSN Search beta returns results as RSS
MSN Search beta returns your search results as RSS. On the search results page view source. Right after the copyright statement you will notice <div id=”rss_feed” class=”clear”> and a link to the RSS feed for your search. Use the parameter q for your keywords (properly escaped of course) and the format parameter should be rss. http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=Feedster&format=rss http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=Technorati&format=rss Very interesting. Yes, Feedster and Technorati will still have a fresher index, but they now have to make a stronger business case. You can add {frsh-100} to your query string to give fresher results a higher weighting but the search results are not…
23 Years of Usenet on Google
Google has an archive of Usenet postings since 1981. Google has a page full of memorable moments from twenty years of postings. First mention of the term “search engine” was in March 1988. Linus Torvalds’ Linux announcement First post from an AOL account was in May 1992, almost three years after the first mention of AOL. Yahoo! and Lycos mentioned in December 1994. Altavista announced in December 1995. Lots of interesting reading and a reminder I have not yet been to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I plan to attend the Steve Case and Walt Mossberg event on…
Technorati cosmos within NetNewsWire
I wrote an AppleScript for NetNewsWire that allows a user to subscribe to the Technorati cosmos for any individual item within NetNewsWire. Users now have a quick and easy way of staying informed about the latest information related to items of interest from the convenience of NetNewsWire. You do not even have to be online to subscribe to the cosmos! This code is the second AppleScript I have ever written — the first was to export my feeds as OPML and FTP the to my server. I almost did not submit it to the Technorati developers’ contest but I won…
Attention.xml export for NetNewsWire
Attention.xml is an open standard to track attention metadata such as what you read and what you would like to learn more about. So far there has been a lot of talk around the idea and what it could mean for synchronization, resource discovery, and social networking. Technorati and Steve Gillmor have talked about the idea but there has been no implementation to show how you could use this open format with existing applications such as web browsers and feed aggregators to make sense out of your daily activity. Until now. I wrote an AppleScript that exports all of your…