Last Friday we posted about
weird search
engines. We got some good comments and found some new weird search engines to add to
our list. Note that we mean weird in a good way - as in something a bit different.
To remind you, here are the original 'weird' search engines:
In the comments, we got these new ones:
In yesterday's
interview with Matt Cutts from Google, on the topic of next-generation
search, we touched on how Google is tackling the issue of indexing (and advertising
around) online video. Matt implied that Google is looking for an equivalent to PageRank
for online video:
"...in the Web we have this notion of reputation - which is PageRank, it's how many
people link to your site and it's also the quality of that incoming set of links. So
it's fun to think about things like reputation in video search - whether it be for Google
Video or YouTube - because you don't have links necessarily. You might have things
that are somewhat similar to links, but you look at the quality of the users, the quality
of the ratings. I think in lots of ways it gives Google good practice to think about the
power of people, and the power of trust - and how to apply that in a lot of different
areas."
(emphasis mine)
One word which Matt didn't use, but which probably sums up what Google is trying to achieve with online video indexing, is relevancy. Google wants to find ways to rank video, so that the most relevant results display first. Also relevancy is key for contextual advertising. While all this sounds obvious, for video relevancy is a largely unsolved problem right now.
According to Matt, the key values for online video search are: reputation, power of people and trust indicators. The problem though is how to measure those values in video. With textual content, Google found the winning formula back in the mid-to-late 90's with PageRank - which uses links as the main measure of relevancy. But so far no company, not even Google, has found the equivalent of PageRank for video.
Yahoo! launched its Personal Finance site earlier this year, on January 19, 2007. In this piece, we will analyze the site based on my Web 3.0 framework.
Yahoo Personal Finance is a part of Yahoo! Finance and has nine sub-categories. The site provides financial information, tools, and advice on personal financial management. The sub-categories of Yahoo Personal Finance are:
Yahoo! Personal Finance provides sub-categories under the broad categories.
For example Retirement has been further broken down into four categories:
The Open Data Workshop 2007
took place yesterday in New York City. The gathering was organized by AttentionTrust and sponsored by Reuters. The workshop brought together over sixty influencers from
startups, web giants, financial firms, venture capitalists and journalists interested in
the attention space. It was a very refreshing, open and candid dialog about the different
issues and faces of open data.
Open Data in the context of the workshop referred to three different things:
Probably the hottest topic revolved around
tracking users behavior. Websites (and even ISPs!) these days
routinely track peoples behavior without, letting them know in an obvious way. Often
there are disclaimers and fine print, but people are not warned upfront in plain English
about the fact that their data is being captured. Is this reasonable?
The group voiced various opinions supporting both sides of this argument, splitting nearly 50-50. Some people thought that consumers have to be informed in big bold letters about what is going on. Others argued that businesses need targeted advertising to make money, so it is fair game.
People with opt-in experience explained that it is rather tough to make money this way, since only 10% of users sign up. So collecting data by default, with a somewhat obscure opt-out, is basically the only sure way to monetize attention today. Personally, I voted for the opt-in camp, since I think that consumers get angry when they find out their data is being collected without sufficient warning.
This is the final post from SXSW, by Sean Ammirati of mSpoke. I'd like to thank Sean for the excellent coverage of SXSW! Also, a disclaimer for this post: FM Publishing is the main topic in the post and Read/WriteWeb is a part of this advertising network.
Yesterday I attended a panel which I've
been thinking about constantly, ever since the panel ended. The panel was entitled "Why
Marketers Need To Work With People Media" and it had a set of rock star panelists (in
the SXSW interactive, not music, sense of the word!). The participants
were:
While the panel referred to it as 'people media', it could also be described as 'social media,' 'read/write media', 'conversational media' (as John Battelle has been describing it lately) or even 'user generated content' [Ed: that last term is beginning to get unpopular]. Regardless of what you choose to call it - and I'll use the term 'People Media' in this post because of the panel title - these sites are a significant part of online traffic and so delivering high-value advertising is key. Note that John Battelle covered most of the material from the panel in a recent post.
Spanning Sync v1.0, an application that provides
two-way synchronization between Google Calendar and Apple iCal, has launched after seven
months of development - including a four-month beta period. As The
Unofficial Apple Weblog noted, Spanning Sync also syncs between multiple Macs and Google Calendar accounts,
with iSync-compatible devices like iPods and mobile phones (iPhone too when it's
released), and with Google Apps for Your Domain (Google's hosting service).
It is an Apple-only application, so many people (myself included) can't use it. But it's an excellent example of two trends which we're tracking closely here on R/WW:
1) offline/online sync functionality
Spanning Sync founder Charlie Wood told me:
"I believe in a hybrid future where desktop/mobile applications serve as front-ends to hosted applications and work even when a network connection or the hosted application itself is unavailable. Such hybrid applications will be powered by transparent synchronization, which is a hard but not impossible problem."
It'll be interesting to see whether the big companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, et al) will offer more sync functionality over time. At the moment it's innovative startups like Spanning Sync, Morfik and Sharpcast - and some big companies too, like Adobe - which are leading the way.
2) Integration between web companies, in this case two biggies - Google and Apple
In Read/WriteWeb's
interview with Matt Cutts of Google today, on the topic of next-generation search,
the very last question I asked him was how Google is going about indexing video. It's a
big question, because with YouTube and other online video sites seemingly taking over the
Web (as far as consumer content goes), video search is a key issue going forward. blinkx, which in its press release claims to be "the
largest video search engine on the Web", today released a set of Video SEO (search engine
optimization) guidelines and a community wiki. blinkx’s goal is to
provide a forum for discussions around best practices, via the wiki, as well as
recommendations on how advertisers and content owners can maximize their results for
video content.
blinkx's whitepaper covers the following topics:
There is certainly a lot of useful info here on how blinkx and other search engines rank video content. I especially liked this high level view of the video search industry:
Last week I had the pleasure
of interviewing the head of Google's Webspam team, Matt Cutts. The topic of our conversation was
Next-Generation Search. In my pitch to get an interview with someone at Google, I
explained how Read/WriteWeb has
been
covering Next-Gen search a lot and so it
would (obviously) be great to get Google's views on this topic!
Matt Cutts is a well-known Google identity, who apparently gets mobbed by fans at SEO conferences. His Wikipedia page states that he co-invented one of the most well-known patent filings from Google, involving search engines and web spam. One note about the following interview: Google has a policy of not discussing competitors, so a few of my original questions had to be dropped or re-phrased.
Richard: When we write about 'next-generation search' on Read/WriteWeb, a lot of times we position it as: how can a startup become the next Google? But obviously Google is also hard at work with next-generation search technologies. Can you give us an overview of what Google is working on in regards to next-gen search - e.g. personalized search, AI, etc.
Matt: I think personalization has a very high chance of being able to improve search for the average user. One of the great things about it is, you don't really have to do a lot of work. Once you decide this is something you're interested in, Google can take care of a lot of the details. I recently saw a post online where somebody was complaining about metadata and having to make metadata - and the nice thing about personalization is that it's free for the user. So as far as the next generation of search, I think that is something that is very exciting.
Richard: Can you give us a couple of examples of how Google is implementing personalization?
Matt: I think of localization as a type of personalization. If you type in a query like "football", that will give you different results in the US versus the UK. And a query like "bank" done on Google - in New Zealand it will get New Zealand banks, in Australia it will get Australian banks. And it makes a big difference to know those sorts of things. So that's just personalization at a country level, but it already shows the sort of potential that you can reach.
Matt Cutts flanked by two fans; Photo by Chris
Pirillo, inspired by Jim Boykin.
Richard: Also recently Google implemented personalization with Google Accounts, so I believe personalization can happen out of that, via the main Google search?
The mashups of our Top Alternative Search Engines list continue! Charles Knight spotted a great post by the Search The Web 2.0 blog, which took the top 100 and attempted to rank them by market share. The reason for this ambitious undertaking was a comment that Charles made when we first published the list:
"...people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order)."
Well it turns out the figure is closer to 95.45%, and that's counting AOL too! :-) Check out the actual blog post for the full table, with market share for each of the 100 alt search engines and more. But I especially liked these two summary graphs:
The above graph (large version here) shows the long tail of search engines, which is so small because Google, Yahoo et al are so dominant.
Online community, or for that matter any community, is built upon the shared experiences of its participants. In the real world, people in a community typically interact with each other by gathering at same physical location, at the same time. In online communities, it is easy for users to interact with each other without any geographical or temporal limitations. But in return for the benefits that the Internet (or even the telephone to a lesser degree) provides in terms of ease of communication, there is less richness, texture and context in the conversations. A number of startups are trying to address this problem with online communities and in this post we review some of them.
MyBlogLog started off with the aim of providing blog
analytics. MyBlogLog Communities was launched mid last year, to enable readers of blogs
to join communities and share their experiences with other like-minded groups of readers.
The idea was that if readers like the same content, they probably have plenty else in
common. MyBlogLog built a platform where readers could trade messages with others and see
what other sites they visit.
MyBlogLog hit the jackpot with the 'Recent Readers' facewalls, which provided a visual way to connect readers and writers of blogs. By just giving a static visual cue in the form of a picture, MyBlogLog provided an important visual context for online community conversations. The result: MyBlogLog's usage took off and is now at over 50K users. In the meantime, they also got acquired by Yahoo! for about $10M.
