Category Archives: Websites

The Global Search continues for a great Local Search

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Techcrunch reports that Insider Pages, a local search, has been aquired, probably for just a little more than it’s initial investments of something like 8.5 million.

For about 2 years now there’s been a huge amount of talk about how important local search will be to the search landscape, yet no local search really stands out as a great tool. Even Google’s local search leaves much to be desired and I think was recently listed as a Google project that has failed to live up to early expectations.

Perhaps part of the problem is that local information best rests in the hearts and minds and “word of mouth” of locals. It’s not clear to me that a critical mass of local “voices” is available yet to tell the local story, which is often more nuanced than, for example, the type of descriptive information that is easy to find.

For example it’s easy to map Chinese restaurants in Chicago, but hard to determine which one has the best Kung Pao chicken, let alone which of these restaurants are the best. For that, ideally, you’d be able to interact with locals who frequent Chinese restaurants in Chicago.

Yelp is having some success in Bay Area but I’m not convinced their “virtual+real social networking” model is scalable to the whole country.

So, the search for great local search continues.

Powerset or Power Hype?

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Powerset is one of the few new search offerings that actually may threaten the status quo, where Google picks up the lion’s share of internet searches (and internet search revenues) simply because they are the best of the mediocre. I’m not knocking Google’s brilliance here, but people are not realizing how great search would be if you could, for example, carry on a conversation with the computer rather than try to constrain the dialog in ways that meet the needs of the search algorithms. Powerset probably won’t be a conversation with the machine, but if they can crack the nut of natural language search even Google may tremble, as they are currently weak in that regard and it appears they have not been spending the time and money in that direction.

TechCrunch and VentureBeat on Powerset potential.

Natural language search is basically the idea that you’ll tell the computer exactly what you need, and probably refine the query as you would if you were speaking to a person. This may not do much for advanced “power users” who know how to use boolean expressions and advanced query refinements to get at the info they want, but it could be a wondrous thing for the other 99% of searchers out there who struggle every day trying to get Google Yahoo, or MSN to deliver the great specific results they need.

I still predict that eventually it’ll be Artificial Intelligence applications that bring us “near perfect” results as they’ll be able to screen spam and process good stuff at light speed, but great AI search is probably at least a decade away.

The search game has just begun and it’ll be fun to see how Powerset fits in.

Yahoo: Piping hot content to websites near you. Brilliant.

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Yahoo Pipes (site may be down at the moment – I think they didn’t anticipate the instant global attention) is a perfect example of why I’m so bullish on Yahoo’s prospects as a company. Yahoo Pipes is a premier mashup enabling application coming along at a very opportune time.

Yahoo’s developer team is second to none, and in my opinion has a remarkable understanding of “Web 2.0” sensibilities. Pipes will simplify the process of connecting content, websites, and applications.

In an ideal world, innovation is constrained only by the human imagination, not by the limitations of technology. Yahoo pipes is a profound step in that direction.

More about Yahoo Pipes:

Jeremy Zawodny

Tim O’Reilly (is this guy ever *wrong* about stuff? I don’t think so. )
… enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.

Matt Cutts

Anil Dash 

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Disclaimer: I  have some Yahoo stock and as of Monday some short term Yahoo calls.

PodTech Bloghaus with Robert and Maryam = glimpse into future of reporting = very cool

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Although Apple’s release of the iPhone at MacWorld sort of stole the show away from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, I think PodTech / Scoble’s brilliant idea of setting up a “Bloghaus” at CES is one of the neatest conference ideas to come out in a long time.

Unlike some of the other early bloggers, Robert Scoble has been a strong advocate for the powers of blogging as cornerstone of commerce. His book with Shel Israel, “Naked Conversations”, was an excellent introduction for corporate suit people to blogging’s significance and also to blogging’s importance to a smart corporate strategy.

Many of the suits are still fretting about this and failing to grasp the obvious, but Robert’s new gig, PodTech, is proving a leader in innovative blogging, and I think the CES Bloghaus has set a new standard in the effectiveness of alternative reporting approaches and frankly what a “cheap date” good bloggers will prove to be. One prominent blogger wrote down there that he was heading over to bloghaus because he was running low on cash. “Feed me”, he begged. So for the price of a few beers and Pizza bloghaus gets a good writer and a good plug. And that’s good! I’d sure like to see a bloghaus at the next conference I attend. Sure, you can blog from anywhere at the conference with your laptop and WIFI, but wouldn’t it be more fun to be hangin’ at the ‘haus?

I’d like to compare some of the professional reporting coming out of CES with the blog reports. In other venues blogging generally wins, offering personal insight and expertise rather than a superficial skim of the topic. Also, bloggers tend to speak more frankly so you avoid the sort of “legally / commercially sanitized” fluff that sometimes constrains are reporter’s ability to tell the real story.

Bravo Podtech! Bravo Robert and Maryam and your team down there at CES. I only wish I could have been writing this … from there!

Technology failing? Hey, it’s time to SUE!

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I simply don’t know if this lawsuit against Google, SONY, and other big players suggesting a previous right to digital distrubition has merit or not because I don’t understand the legal issues well.

However it’s another good example of a tactic increasingly used by tech firms that are not doing very well with their technologies – work the legal angles hoping to hit a big payday via settlement with a deep pocket like Google or even hit a home run with a court decision in their favor.

I’m not objecting to these lawsuits though – I think the big players have tended to give great liberties with content distribution and have taken great liberties as well. Youtube’s empire was built largely via illegal content distribution. These complex deals with gigantic stakes probably should be settled by objective legal means.

When you are raking in billions it’s easy to be generous and I predict that the real “tipping point” for Google’s fall from grace will be the shift from them getting sued to them suing other firms, especially small ones. Maybe they won’t have to sue which would bode very well for Google’s long term prospects and claim to the high ground.

GoogleGuy and upcoming Google Rival WikiaSari

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A couple interesting TechMemes for today:

Matt’s got a great post noting how page view metrics are breaking down with AJAX implementations. Notable from his mini-rant is this:

* If you’re doing a start-up and want impressive page view metrics, stay the hell away from AJAX.
*If you would even *for one second* consider staying away from AJAX for the sake of impressive metrics, you’re running your start-up ass-backwards.

Next, in the “Could be Good as Google” department we have Jimmy Wales of Wikimedia and founder of the superbly excellent Wikipedia project announcing today that WikiaSaria WikiSaria Article from UK  will be a community based search engine to rival Google’s search. This is really provocative news as Google appears comitted to the mechanistic, machine driven approach to search, believing it’s the best and most scalable way to deal with spam and the growing complexity of organizing the world’s info. An alternative vision is Yahoo’s approach which includes more human interaction and editing than Yahoo but still relies heavily on the algorithm. It appears the new search will focus mostly on human input from the exploding community of onliners.

Wales: “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results,” he said.

Spammers and commercial ventures are also learning how to manipulate Google’s computer-based search, he added.

Mr Wales believes that Google’s computer-based algorithmic search program is no match for the editorial judgment of humans.

Also note the many misquotes about Amazon as a participant.

Wales: Reporters and bloggers note: Amazon has nothing to do with this project. They are a valued investor in Wikia, but people are realllllly speculating beyond the facts. This has nothing to do with A9, Amazon, etc. Help me out, spread the word. I am looking for a community of people to continue the development of wikiasari and so on. Discuss here. Join the mailing list. —-Jimbo Wales 23:24, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

More on this huge story from these blogs:

Niall Kennedy: Wikiasari: Wikipedia success applied to social search?
Michael Arrington: Wikipedia to Launch Search Engine: Exclusive Screenshot

Adam Turner : Wikipedia founder plans search engine to rival Google

 

 

Pete Cashmore: Wikiasari – Wikipedia Founder Launching a Google Rival

More Tech Memes

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James Kim Search Discussion – Click here

Yikes – I leave town for a few days and can hardly keep up with all the interesting tech news items. In addition to the fun Jeremy v. Matt copycat debate we’ve got:

Jason on Digg Rigging This is just a tiny part of the HUGE number of upcoming stories which will showcase how complex the relationships are between SEO, social networking sites, and …. money.   I actually contacted the Digger Jason is effectively accusing of abuse and it does not appear to me he’s taken any money at any time.   Here’s a great summary of that “Digg Ban” case.   But his innocence does not suggest to me that there is not a huge and growing issue with Social media SEO uses and abuses.  At PubCon many were discussing how powerfully social networking can help with organic optimization as well as straight traffic generation to a site that gets “dugg” or creates a compelling (including stupid but popular) YouTube video.

Jim at Microsoft apologizing in a very web 2.0 way. Scoble would be proud of this “naked conversations” approach to corporate blogging. Too bad Microsoft didn’t see how making Robert the semi-official corporate blogmeister with the huge salary increase he deserved for “getting Web 2.0” before the suits did (most MS suits don’t even get it now) would have returned 100x on the investment.

… and speaking of “getting Web 2.0”. Yahoo does but can’t seem to get the mileage they deserve for retooling the corporation as a community internet extravaganza. This set of leaked Yahoo internal documents about the potential Facebook aquisition provides a fascinating glimpse into how big deals are analyzed. As a Yahoo shareholder I think they should save the billion and just get their stupid ass in gear with the excellent social network stuff they already own like Flickr (which should be the template for other social applications, Del.icio.us (OVERHAUL the INTERFACE and yes, you can rename this URL monstrosity! ), Yahoo Video, Yahoo 360, Answers, groups, etc, etc. As I’ve noted before Yahoo suffers from giving people so many options they tire of the decision making and go to Google’s simple interfaces, search, and simpler suite of choices. Google expects us to act like the sheep we are. Yahoo expects us to do too much mental work choosing how we relate to the internet.

Going Techno Postal?

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James Kim Search Discussion – Click here

OK, I’ve really missed ranting about technology things for the past few weeks so I’m going to take a look at what’s going on over at TechMeme.

Jeremy over at Yahoo is always very honest about Yahoo’s shortcomings so it’s good to see him get to take a shot at Google even though the transgression is not exactly earth-shaking, more just a funny oddness that gets internet people all worked up. Google copied Yahoo‘s IE7 pitch page. (It was changed to this today or last night). Here’s a great graphic which shows the smoking gun evidence: http://chir.ag/stuff/yahoo-to-google.gif

Matt Cutts is a totally stand up guy and this is not his department but he’s Google’s ambassador to the blogging masses so it fell to him to address this. Now, you don’t dis Google or Matt may go Inigo Montoya on you. Matt’s lackluster “apology” sounded more like an attack on Yahoo’s own copycat behavior even though he noted that it was Robert Scoble‘s excellent advice – which was totally not taken – that led him to post about this. Robert suggested the Google peeples take out the Yahoo peeple for a fancy lunch in a limo, which would have been a neat PR gimmick.

This is superficially trivial but actually has deeper significance as a measure of the overall online sentiment about Google. Google is still in the driver’s seat with respect to most things internet but I’d suggest that we are now seeing a tendency for the knowlegeable users to reevaluate their relationships with Google, Yahoo, and even Ask and MSN. This reminds me in some ways of the days when Yahoo was totally in the online driver’s seat and Google – with clearly superior search – started to eat Yahoo’s lunch but still had only a tiny market share. Had Yahoo bought Google back then, rather than just using their search algorithm and helping to make Google the online behemoth it is today, the online landscape would sure look different. I’m glad they didn’t though because Google’s new approaches and “techno centric” business models have arguably done more to change the way we all do business than any other recent global business developments.

Ironically in this little debate is the fact that when Yahoo FINALLY figures out how to effectively copy the gist of Google’s contextual ad matching systems (adwords and adsense) we could see a huge change in the online search game as publishers would have more choice in who they align with.

Disclaimer: I’ve got some Yahoo Stock so I root for them to succeed even though I try to post honest comments about what’s up.