We have recently written here about the
ongoing transformation of Web Sites into Web Services. In that post we noted that
with the rise of APIs, scraping technologies and RSS, web sites are really turning into
data services and collectively the web is becoming one gargantuan database. As such, the
web is quickly becoming a platform or foundation that powers new kinds of applications
that remix information in ways not possible before. The web is also becoming much more
connected, not not just on the level of links - but at a much more fundamental, semantic
level.
The big picture is always exciting and important, but the mechanics matter too. How exactly do we unlock and correlate information from separate web sites? Ideally, we'd like for all web sites to offer simple and elegant APIs - like Amazon, del.icio.us and Flickr do today. Alas, this is not feasible today and it isn't clear that something like this can be done quickly at all, on a Web scale. So in the meantime, solutions like Dapper that help you process unstructured information from HTML, clean it, transform it and re-emit as structured XML - these types of solutions are worth serious consideration. So in this post we take a close look at all aspects of Dapper: how it works, what can be done with it, the company's business model and legal implications of this service.
The announcement last night of iGoogle (the new name for Google Personalized
Homepage), Gadget Maker and other
localization features, shows that Google is ramping up its personalization efforts once
again. Google Blogoscoped has excellent coverage
from the Google Personalization Workshop, held yesterday at Mountain View for a select
group of local bloggers. In this post we analyze these new features and compare them to
Google's competition in both search and personalized homepages.
As Read/WriteWeb noted in February and in our recent interview with Google's Matt Cutts, Google has been experimenting with personalization a lot this year. In regards to its personalized homepage, Google has always had far more gadgets available on its platform than live.com, Netvibes or Pageflakes. Currently there are over 25,000 different Google gadgets that you can put on your iGoogle page. Also according to Jessica Ewing at yesterday's event, product manager of the Google Personalized Homepage program, iGoogle was the fastest growing product at Google in 2006. iGoogle will now be available in 40 countries and 26 languages.
This is the best list of Alternative Search Engines I have ever done. It has to be. With each monthly update, several things happen that serve to improve the list. One, I have spent a month - since the March update - scouring the World Wide Web for any brand new Search Engines (see Querycat) or ones that might have been missed (see Accoona). Two, several alternative search engines have been added directly from readers' comments to the last list (see younanimous; more on that later). And several readers suggested a new category: Charity Search Engines; so that category has been added and I placed a charitable search engine on this month's list (see SearchKindly). I am also preparing an article that looks at many of the Charity search engines that have recently sprung up. Finally, another source of new alts comes from those leaving their alpha or "stealth" phase and entering a Beta phase - or even fully launching; see the new Cydral (note: instructions are in French).
In total, there are 12 new search engines this month (and 12, sadly, went "down to the minors"). From the first List in January through to this one, there have been 160 Alternative Search Engines in total!
