Category Archives: Search

Want a custom Web 2.0 search engine? Here’s one!

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I’d never used Google Co-op before today. Thanks to a twitter reply by Josh Bancroft in response to one of my questions, I just did. (Turns out it was Rollyo I was looking for, but I don’t like it as much so far.) If you’d like the ability to do a Google search inside the following leading web 2.0 sites – see the tool below.

“When, magic 8 ball, has my search term been used on…”

LifeHacker StartupSquad TechCrunch GigaOm Mashable PaidContent ArsTechnica CenterNetworks FranticIndustries ReadWriteWeb NewTeeVee and what the heck – http://marshallk.com !

Just drag this link to Marshall’s Magic Search to your browser toolbar or add it to your favorites and kapow! you’re searching some big blogs for company names, concepts, whatever! I regularly search TechCrunch for past posts on things I’m writing about, just by dragging the URL for a google search for site:http://techcrunch.com to my toolbar. Now I can do so much more.

Try it out:





Google Custom Search

Rootly Relaunches – Looks Awesome

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One of my consulting clients, a news search engine called Rootly, relaunched this afternoon and I’m so proud of them!

Rootly founder Mark Daher and I worked together to improve the aesthetics, functionality and differentiation of the service. It’s been some time since I sent him my final recommendations and today the site looks totally unlike it did at the time.

The service provides highly customizable, RSS powered vertical news search based on about 1k preselected sources, plus any sources you add by feed. When a source is added by a sufficient number of users it gains trusted status and enters the general index. The search result feeds are good, there’s really easy internal bookmarking, commenting and friends. The best part of it: Rootly accepts OpenID! I can’t take any credit for that, but thank goodness! Who wants to create a new account for every service you want to try out? Not me. (I use MyOpenID, personally. It’s great and local to Portland.)

In the near term future the site will allow OPML import – which has a whole lot of implications – and a customizable widget for personal startpages.

For more information about the relaunch, see the review at CenterNetworks and more details on the Rootly blog.

Ask goes nuts on local search – again

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Ask.com announced an upgrade today to their already impressive local search tool. Now you can draw a shape on the map with a drawing tool and limit your search to inside that shape. They do so many impressive things over there, yet they are so far behind in market share. Is it too complex? Like the blogsearch tool, I don’t even use it myself but it’s so smart! They filter out blogs that don’t have at least a small number of subscribers in Bloglines. Goodbye blog spam in search results! I should start using them more myself.

Now You Can Search YouTube Audio with Podzinger

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I just wrote a review over at SplashCast of speech-to-text search engine Podzinger‘s new feature to search YouTube. It’s very impressive and wanted to make sure readers here knew about it too.

Results are different from searching YouTube metadata, so subscribing to feeds for both searches would probably be a good idea. There are a number of ways to do that, including Vixy’s YouTube RSS generator or through the official capacity with an URL like this: www.youtube.com/rss/tag/monkey.rss That’s of course most useful if you want to subscribe to YouTube videos tagged “monkey.”

How many people are going to want to subscribe to searches for words used in YouTube? A whole lot, I think.

Goog sells Baidu shares

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Google sold their 5% pre-IPO shares of Chinese search giant Baidu, it was reported today. I guess that means no buy-out and moves instead to increase Google share in China. Or maybe they’ll just give up on total world domination and work on dominating search everywhere else. For what it’s worth, the shares were bought for $5 mill and were worth $63 mill at the end of May when the sale actually went through. That’s a whole lot of AdWords clicks that don’t have to happen, I suppose. Just a quick note in case it’s of interest; I find anything about non-US web giants of interest.

Google may listen to your TV, but not too closely

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Google Research on “Social- and Interactive-Television Applications Based on Real-Time Ambient-Audio Identification”

The Google Research team at last week’s Euro ITV (the interactive television conference) won the best paper award for research just posted to the Google Research blog. Their topic? Personalized experiences synchronous with mass-media consumption. That means a system where your computer listens to the TV in your living room, compresses the sound for comparison to a Google sized audio database and then offers you services online related to whatever you are watching.

This does not appear to be functional yet, but the paper also seems to assure readers that it does not require much new technology either.

Google TVAdvertising? Wasn’t discussed. The examples the Google scientists provided fell into the following four categories:

  • personalized information layers
  • ad hoc social peer communities
  • real-time popularity ratings
  • TV- based bookmarks

Of course advertising can be contextual to any of those, as is shown in the hypothetical screenshot above from the Google paper. There will also be the option of selecting Two Minutes Hate worth of advertising in exchange for access to premium content. Just kidding about that part. The rest of this is real, though.

“If friends of the viewer were watching the same episode of ‘Seinfeld’ at the same time,” the paper says, “the social- application server could automatically create an on- line ad hoc community of these ‘buddies’.”

The paper assures skeptics that the privacy will be technically ensured.

The viewer’s acoustic privacy is maintained by the irreversibility of the mapping from audio to summary statistics. Unlike the speech-enabled
proactive agent by Hong et al. (2001), our approach will not “overhear” conversations. Furthermore, no one receiving (or intercepting) these statistics is able to eavesdrop, on such conversations, since the original audio does not leave the viewer’s computer and the summary statistics are insufficient for reconstruction. Further, the system can easily be
designed to use an explicit ‘mute/un-mute’ button, to give the viewer full control of when acoustic statistics are collected for transmission.input-data rates. This is especially important since we process the raw data on the client’s machine (for privacy reasons), and would like to keep computation requirements at a minimum.

There’s no mention of localized versions for China, for example. Can the US government be trusted not to demand access to this kind of data? No. I can imagine the privacy concerns here are going to be huge. People may go for it though. I am open to the idea, but I don’t think I like it. GMail’s contextual advertising doesn’t scare me though.

This seems like a recipe for nothing but shopping and superficial interaction. I suppose I could debate with people in my “snobby snobs” group about the veracity of a History Channel show. So maybe I’m wrong.

One way or the other, this seems like a pretty viable vision of the future.

Associated Press partners with Technorati

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Here’s some big news, the 440 news outlets around the country that use the AP’s news module will now include a list of the most blogged about news items of the day on their sites and display inbound links to each individual article as discovered by Technorati. I wrote about it over on Social Software – and it will be interesting to see what other people think. I think it’s great – especially for local-issue bloggers. The barrier between traditional and new media is being broken down more every day.

Here’s some free advice: nonprofit organizations wanting to do issue-based outreach with their blogs would be well served to subscribe to the feeds of organizations like the AP, either for search terms or through a filter. For high-priority items, if you’ve got a fast blogger on your team, set up an RSS to IM/SMS alert system for selected filtered feeds. That way your blog will be amongst the first to cover AP stories of interest. That’s how I wrote about the Technorati/AP partnership announcement before any other blogs did.

Interesting note: when this type of alert system sets me to write a particular post and I’m looking to cover the news first, I ping the key ping servers manually with Pingoat to come and index my new post instead of relying on automated pinging systems. Google Blogsearch has found my post about this partnership in its search results, but despite pinging Technorati specifically, Technorati has yet to discover the post I wrote linking to its own blog. Hmmm…

Another note, this on Memeorandum: the Technorati blog post I covered is on the top of the page, this blog – which does not link to the Technorati post but to the Social Software post that does – is second in the conversation, and the Social Software post I made is third. Interesting. A number of conclusions could be drawn from that.