Nouveau by Zaw Thet - Interesting New Stuff

What do people search for online?

Rick Skrenta wrote a great little tool that pulls back what people were searching for online using AOL. As he pointed out, when AOL first accidentally released this data there was a huge fuss. There are some really disturbing searches that people do...

My favorite set of searches from a user session (didn't want to post the really salacious ones):
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disney

disney desktops

jamicia

npic state.gov

passport photo

jamicia

passport photo

passport photo where to go

passport photo where to go in ny

ohot for a passport in ny

photo for a passport in ny

passport ny

photo for a passport in ny

passport ny

photo for a passport in ny

photo for a passport in syr ny

pbskids

y94fm

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Look how many different ways this person is looking for a photo passport...makes one think: search still has a ways to go. Maybe Yahoo! Answers for the web and our Answers not Links philosophy for mobile is the way to go after all.

Goo-Tube uncovered

I was down at the Digital Hollywood conference speaking last week and all anyone could talk about was the Google-YouTube deal. I have to admit it got a little sickening after a while. Most of the talk was all garbage, but this post that Mark Cuban re-posted on his blog (can do you that?) is pretty interesting: http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/10/30/some-intimate-details-on-the-google-youtube-deal/

Some of the more interesting points/theories:

• Of the $1.65B over $500M is being kept in escrow to fight legal battles
• The music studios all took equity stakes in YouTube just prior to the deal in leiu of getting cash from Google/YouTube so they wouldn't have to pay royalties
• Google asked the studios and labels to put the pressure on other smaller video sites so they could get a bigger share of the market (that smells like anti-trust or something nasty to me)

Yahoo! testing new home page

I guess it's public now: http://www.flickr.com/photos/msgraph/96729329/

This is a HUGE improvement. I use Yahoo! for mail and news, but have never used the homepage. This is a lot cleaner and might make me switch over from Google.

Google Ads in Print

My good friend Saar forwarded me this link today:
http://services.google.com/marketing/links/aw-print-pub-ads/

Looks like Google has finally launched its long awaited move into the print advertising space. They have a pretty interesting list of publications signed up for the test. One problem that I saw, there is no way to know how much to bid for each magazine...so this isn't going to help non-traditional advertisers in any way. Also, I'm not sure there is enough demand for the auction model to work here.

Your comments are appreciated as always.

Sphere Beta: New Blog Search Engine

I got an email announcing that Sphere launched in beta today. It turned up some interesting results that technorati didn't have. I especially like the ability to set the search window and to sort by relevance. This is a crowded space though, so I'm not sure what the real differentiators are since they are so late to the game. According to their about us section, Sphere:

• delivers the most relevant, timely and authoritative posts and blogs on any topic;
• indexes and searches the full text of each post, not just the feed contents or the home page;
• allows you to search by relevance and time;
• uses content analysis to blend related mainstream media with blog results for a complete picture

They must have paid a pretty penny for the domain name as well.

Sample search results for a "4info" search on Sphere below:

Yahoo! Desktop Search Is Available

http://desktop.yahoo.com/ - the consumer version of X1. I'm glad I didn't buy X1, I was about to until they announced that Yahoo! was licensing the technology and distributing it for free.

Looks like the same great functionality as X1, but with an awesome new UI. Well done Yahoo!

   

The formal press release is here.

Microsoft Search using Google Index?

Interesting piece on how Microsoft may be using the Google Index to improve it's index of sites. Apparently the new MSN bot has been hitting urls's that don't appear in it's own index (many of which are dead links), so they must be getting a list of url's from somewhere. Google and Yahoo are likely candidates. Read more.

A preview of microsoft's new search: http://beta.search.msn.com/

I'm also a big fan of Amazon's new search tool A9: http://www.a9.com/

Google Launches Email

USATODAY.com - Google sets up e-mail make that, Gmail

Well it seems I'm writing about Google a lot, but the primary reason for this is the dramatic amount of recent changes that the company has made.

After keeping most of the products under the hood for such a long period of time, Google has in the past 3 months fully launched:
- Froogle (now prominently displayed on the front page)
- Google Local (direct competition to Yahoo local search)
- Google Personal
- And now GMail (Google's free email service)

The theory running around Silicon Valley was that Google was dead in the water, had grown too fast to innovate quickly enough, and was suffering severe internal strife. This blitz of public launches of new products is either aimed at proving detractors wrong to gear up for an IPO or aimed at making sure competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft have to spend serious dollars to acquire users.

The one worry I have is that Google will start to become too much of a portal property and will change the simple clean UI that has gotten them to where they are today.

Topix.net - News organized by topic and location

Topix.net - News organized by topic and location

Check it out...it's an interesting model for local based search and advertising.

Yahoo drops Google

Yahoo and MSN Prove Competition for Google

Let the search engine wars begin...from what I've seen Yahoo is consistently providing better and more recent results than Google. This could be temporary of course as I'm sure they just updated their index in preparation for this new launch.

Visual Search Engine - Grokker

Lately I've been playing with a new search engine technology called Grokker. We've all had our problems with Google and every other search engine out there...and the next year or so will be an interesting time as new search engines start to come to market.

Why should you care? Everyone searches for some sort of information everyday. Whether trying to remember where you left your car keys or the name of your 2nd grade teacher...you are conducting mental searches for information all the time. In fact, your brain is one of the most amazing search engines there is. Searching on the web is a different story. People have been searching for the holy grail of search since the early days of the internet. The one service that was fast, reliable, and scalable. Now that the Internet has grown to tens of billions of static web pages and 10X more information retrievable through dyanmic searches (like the US Census website), finding a way to efficiently manage and find answers in this information maelstrom is becoming more and more important.

Google was supposed to be the holy grail. It quickly became the undisputed leader in search (using pure hits as the metric) after it launched in 1998. However the quality of Google's search results has started to significantly decrease over the course of the past year. Ever a darwinian process, spammers and internet marketers have been able develop ways around Google's algorithms and now many search results pull up useless or cluttered information.

Try searching for “Dell Computer” on Google. It has changed over the course of the past day, but you’ll notice that in the top 5 links at least 1-2 of them are way off. I got results that landed me on the webpage of a German firm. This indicates to me (and to many others in the search community) that Google is having some real problems stabilizing their service.

So what's next? This is the first in a series of posts examining new search engine companies like Grokker. Grokker has been around for almost a year, but its latest release (Grokker 2.0) is what has generated buzz.

On the Grokker site they claim that you will "never wade through unorganized lists of search results again. Grokker analyzes each of your results and groups them visually so that you can understand and manage information easily." The picture gives you a pretty good idea of what it looks like when you search.

Pros:
- Breaks searching down into visual topical categories
- Allows you to save searches (called saved maps)
- Also searches your computer for documents and files
- Filter searches by domain or source
- Navigation is done via the program and not by clicking on webpage links

Cons:
- Search time is 5-10X greater than any regular text-based search engine
- The categories are not specific enough and the information requires too much time to process
- Doesn’t have a toolbar and thus is not integrated into my regular web usage
- Requires start-up as a separate program (again not part of my regular usage)
- The interface if confusing and non-trivial

Grokker was built for the serious internet enthusiast, not your everyday web searcher. I use Google 50-100 times a day and there is absolutely no way I want to start-up Grokker every time I’m doing a search. Also, call me old-fashioned, but I’d much rather see 10 quick text links that I can quickly skim rather than a large map of circles and squares.

I think Grokker is an example of a great idea that won’t be able to turn into a great opportunity. Sure they will be able to get early adopters to try the service, but I wouldn’t bet on them converting more than 10% of these early adopters to paid subscribers. Since there is no advertising on Grokker their current business model will never work while free search engines still exist.

One possibility is that they use the algorithms they have developed (which do a great job of building topical categories instead of keyword categories) to build a text-based search engine with the traditional syndicated search and advertising revenue model.

You can download a free version of Grokker here.

My next post (coming soon!) will be on another visual search company called Kartoo.