Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
Earlier this week Emre wrote a very
informative and comprehensive overview of
the Search space. Each of the profiled search engines has a unique approach. They deploy
a range of sophisticated heuristics, clustering and machine techniques. In this article
we look at ChaCha, a search engine which brings a
fundamentally different kind of intelligence to the problem - human brain power.
The current implementation of ChaCha offers a combination of automation and people-powered search. The results can be organized by a vertical, like images or news. Also it has a set of related searches. But by far the most interesting and unusual aspect of ChaCha is its people-powered search.
ChaCha employs people to help users sift through the results. This is cleverly done using a familiar chat interface. When you first come to the site, you are presented with a standard search box. Type in a query and you get back a traditional list of matches. In the testing we did, we found both the performance and quality of the results to be quite good.
But here's the kicker - if for some reason you are not happy with the quality of the results, you can request a chat session with a (human) Search Guide to help you find what you're looking for. The Guides get paid for this service - the one I spoke to told me she gets paid $5 per search hour, which is the level for Guides after they reach "pro level". She also said there are about 10,000 Guides in total, working from home.
This post is a short extract from the book Mobile Web 2.0, by Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish.
This week we're focusing in on Mobile 2.0, which is basically the Mobile Web circa 2006. I'm much less familiar with the mobile world than the PC Web one, so I thought it'd be a good idea to tap the mind of an expert in this space - fellow Web 2.0 Workgroup member Ajit Jaokar. Ajit and his colleague Tony Fish published a book this year called Mobile Web 2.0, which I received a free copy of and have been flicking through in recent weeks. The following is a short extract from that book (adapted for this blog), which I hope explains a little about the context of mobile content - and how it is becoming more and more important on the Web. This particular extract is also very in tune with the read/write, two-way Web philosophy (which is why I chose it). Take it away Ajit and Tony...
For the most part, we are consumers of content. In our daily lives, we consume professionally created, produced and edited content from traditional and new media providers on our “six screens of life”. These “six screens of life” are divided into two broad categories, big screens and small screens, each with three sub groups.
While we're on the subject of mobile
2.0 this week, one of my favorite web startups Sharpcast has just announced a new version of their
Sharpcast Photos Mobile Edition. Sharpcast is a data sync service for consumers, allowing
users to sync their data across PC, Web, mobile and other devices. Right now their
flagship product is Sharpcast Photos. But coming soon is a more complete data sync
service, called Project
Hummingbird, which will include documents, music, and video. See Read/WriteWeb's previous posts about
Sharpcast for background.
For now the mobile edition of Sharpcast Photos enables users to view photo collections on their mobile phones, as well as share desktop PC and web photos, and sync camera-phone photos automatically to a user’s PC and the web. Basically photos can now be synced up for a single user across mobile phones, wireless PDA, all of a user's PCs, and their web presence with Sharpcast. This includes backing up the photos, organizing them into albums and keeping everything in sync across devices.
Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus
You may feel relatively satisfied with the current search offerings of Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN. Search today is undoubtedly much better than what it was in the second half of the 1990's. But Internet search is still in its infancy and there's much room for improvement. Moreover, the super high valuation of Google on NASDAQ pushes investors and researchers to find better search solutions - to be The Next Big Thing. And these wannabes are not only working on discovering better indexing techniques, they're exploring new horizons like vertical engines, meaning-based search, intent-driven search, new clustering methods, and much more. In this post, we look into latest trends in the search industry.
We have positioned the latest search trends into 3 main categories:
Snap promises a better
interface for search, using the latest advancements in browsers and AJAX technology.
Although there were earlier, similar implementations, preview powered search is
perhaps the biggest innovation of Snap. With Snap's preview powered search, you don't
necessarily need to visit the site to see if it satisfies your needs - you can see a
dynamically loaded screenshot in the right side of your window.
According to a Microsoft study, users spend 11 minutes on a typical search - so potentially Snap can radically shorten this time. Another benefit is that it allows you browse the search results with a few key strokes, which is another big usability enhancement. However it's worth noting that Snap is slow to process searches as a result, because there's too much Javascript and it's too heavy for most modern browsers and hardware. Also, from a technology point of view, Snap doesn't have much to offer - it uses Ask's existing technology. However they have introduced a power of masses approach with options for "This page is Junk" and "This page is Perfect".
Last week I was briefed
about a new product just released by Gotuit, called
SceneMaker. It enables
people to cut up and tag videos from platforms like YouTube or Metacafe. SceneMaker
essentially allows users to embed e.g. a YouTube video in a Gotuit page, then add
metadata around it.
I was impressed with the
usablity of SceneMaker, but one question I had was how the likes of YouTube and Metacafe
will react to having their user-generated content manipulated on another site - which
they may view as a competitor? The Gotuit folks didn't seem concerned about this, saying
that the hosting of the videos always remains with the likes of YouTube - Gotuit simply
provides a platform to add metadata to those videos.
Techcrunch has more details about SceneMaker's features.
Essentially this is another bit of progress in what I recently described as the holy grail of online video, searching within videos. In that post I described another web app, called Coull.tv - which allows users to search for specific moments within videos, as well as click on and interact with "moving objects". It was noted in the comments to that post, by regular R/WW commenter "old school developer", that Coull.tv is currently Microsoft Windows technology only and the ability to manipulate or interact with objects inside video is an MPEG-4 feature.
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
We wrote
recently about
the renewed web browser war between Microsoft and Mozilla (and some other, smaller,
usually very innovative players). Our theory is that in 2006 a lot of the ground work for
a major battle was laid out. Microsoft launched a
significant upgrade to Internet Explorer for the first time in about 5 years (IE7), while
the Firefox team spent time polishing up their
open source browser. But it is the latest developments which make it clear that Firefox
thinks it's showtime. The first development was the Firefox ad
on Google's home page. The second one was the annoucement
that Firefox is going to advertise on television (curiously our post on this didn't seem
to get much reaction, but we thought it was big news). So in terms of the browser wars
Part II, the coding part is done and it is now all about the marketing.
As a follow-up to our previous post covering the top Web Trends of 2006, we'd like to get your vote for Best Internet Bigco of 2006. Long-time R/WW readers will know that at the end of each year we write a post noting our top Web companies of the year. In 2005 the best bigco was Yahoo, while in 2004 it was Google. Who will it be in 2006? Well this is where you can influence the decision ;-) I'll reserve the final editorial judgment for our 2006 Best Of post, but I'm keen to know what you all think!
It's December already and so it's about that time to reflect on what has happened in Web Technology during 2006 - and ponder what 2007 may bring. Over the next few weeks Read/WriteWeb is going to publish some in-depth posts analyzing the trends and new products we've seen in 2006, as well as musing on some specific things we'll probably see in 2007.
To kick this series off, here is an overview of some high level trends from 2006. In our next post, we'll make predictions for 2007. We're also looking for YOUR feedback, to ensure that what we cover over the next few weeks is complete.
I have to thank kiwi journalist Mark Evans for the inspiration for this series. Mark recently had an article published in Management Magazine that outlined Web trends for 2006 and 2007. Mark interviewed me for that article and so this post (and the next) will utilize much of the thinking I did to contribute to Mark's article. Here goes...
- Undoubtedly 2006 has been the year of the social network. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook have been the three outstanding success stories - but also impressive was Bebo (in the UK particularly) and there was strong growth in existing web 2.0 networks like Flickr and del.icio.us. The zenith of this social networking craze was probably Google buying YouTube for $1.65 B.
- RSS continues to inch towards the mainstream - Yahoo integrated it into Y! Mail Beta, Microsoft is utilizing it more (e.g. integrated into IE7), Google came out with Google Base and the GData format (which is based on the RSS variant, ATOM). While 2006 can't be seen as the breakthrough year for RSS in the mainstream, we will probably see RSS bloom in 2007 as a result of the groundwork done in '06 by the big Internet companies. Note that there have been recent murmurs that Yahoo is scaling back RSS, but I think this is a short-term trend only.
Later today Firefox will begin broadcasting, for the
first time, four "fan-produced" commercials on prime time television. Initially the ads
will only run in the San Francisco and Boston regions, but this will be expanded over
time. The 4 video ads are a sampling of approximately 300 clips which were submitted to
Mozilla's Firefox Flicks program. The theme
of the ads is that Firefox is "the safest, fastest and most enjoyable way to experience
the Web." The ads are also partly sponsored by Firefox fans - and Mozilla will
insert the names of those sponsors at the end of each commercial.
I spoke to Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, at the end of last week in anticipation of the TV advertising launch. I'd previously spoken to Chris Beard (Mozilla's vice president of products) in October when Firefox 2.0 launched. At that time Chris had mentioned the tv ads were coming, so it was great to catch up with Asa last week to get the full skinny.
Written by Rudy De Waele of m-trends.org and edited by Richard MacManus. This kicks off a mini-series of posts on the topic of Mobile 2.0, which we will explore on R/WW this week.
On the eve of Le Web 3 in Paris - and one month after the Web 2.0 Summit concluded - it seems like an appropriate
time to explore the world of the mobile Web, a.k.a. mobile 2.0. There has been a lot of
discussion lately on this topic, a good deal of it inspired by the mobile 2.0 event - a one-day event held on 6
November 2006, organized by Daniel Appelquist and
Mike Rowehl.
In the closing session
about carriers and operators at the Under The Radar:
Mobility Conference on 16 November 2006, I heard an Executive Director from Verizon
Wireless using the term "Mobile 2.0". Also Orange (France Telecom) is sponsoring one of
the biggest web 2.0 related conferences in Europe, Le Web
3 in Paris. The fact that carriers/operators are now linking their brand name to web
2.0/mobile 2.0 related content and conferences, shows that progress is being made. Web
2.0 inspired projects going mobile and/or mobile 2.0 projects have been considered as
things to avoid for carriers/operators up till now, since they are disruptive to their
current business models.
So does this mean, with the carriers/operators entering the space now, that mobile 2.0 is finally taking off?
