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….
