Category Archives: Search

RSS: Not Surfing, Not Searching but Subscribing

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The Moonwatcher blog has a great, simple explanation of the business benefits of RSS (don’t be put of if you aren’t the corporate type). The gist of it is that RSS enables you to find key information not be surfing around your favorite web sites, not for manually searching for key words, but by subscribing to content feeds you decide to monitor.

I would emphasize that there remains plenty of room for serendipitous discovery. People whose sites I subscribe to are always recommending interesting items online and scanning my feed reader inbox can lead to some pretty unpredictable places via their suggestions. Likewise subscribing to a search need not lead to a silo or a walled garden. Searches can be as specific or as general as you wish, and so too can your search feeds. Here are some examples:

  • I subscribe to an Icerocket search of blogs for the word “podcasters.” As you can imagine, that creates a huge channel of information that only occasionally do I read a lot of. But items regularly appear when I read the newest items of all my feeds at once. Via that search feed I’ve (a) found a client (b) kept up with the industry news with a wide angle view and (c) gotten perspective into the day-to-day workings of the podcasting culture, as random podcasters’ blogs have passed my eyes on their way down my RSS stream.
  • I subscribe to several searches for my own blog’s URL and my name. Manual vanity searches are ineffective and may do serious damage to your psyche! Now that I’m subscribed to those searches, I have the results delivered to me automatically every day. Even my little blog here gets at least one inbound link just about every day. I am able to participate in those discussions all the more when I know by whom and where I’m being linked to. Plus, if anyone says anything nasty about me online – I’ll know right away.
  • I also subscribe to searches that never or rarely find any results. My favorite example is the search I’ve subscribed to for audio from the Blogher conference. When the conference happened I wanted to hear audio of the discussions there. I searched Podscope and Blinkx.com but didn’t find much at the time. So I subscribed to the RSS feed for the search in Blinkx, and now I have an audio channel feeding into my agregator inbox of new audio about the Blogher conference whenever it becomes available online. I’m certainly not out searching for it on a regular basis, or ever again!

Yes RSS is a really incredible technology, and this is only the beginning. My RSS reader is my personal news desk, bringing the information I need to me from hundreds of different sources into one accessible place. I’ll be writing more and more about RSS related issues in the coming weeks, it’s one of the primary things I’m excited about right now.

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Nerd Community Assistance Needed

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Spammers can be a frightening bunch sometimes, not just an annoyance. The good folks over at Pingoat have taken a firm stand against their service being used to spread spam, and now they are paying the price. If there is anyone with the skills and resources to help them, they sure deserve some help. Here’s their blog where they describe the problem.

What is going on, you ask? Whenever anyone creates new online content (like blog posts) you want to ping the major search engines and other interested parties to say “hey, come look at what I just put up, you should re-index my site now!” Spammers, unfortunately, end up flooding ping services with rapid fire notifications of new content that’s really just crap intended to get you to look at ads. It’s usually all automated. For example, Ryan King of Technorati and the Super.c.ilio.us satire blog told me awhile ago that some spammers fill their blogs by having Google News alerts emailed to a Blogger post-by-email address. Then they run Adsense around it. Yuck!

How important is pinging? Well, Dave Winer just a few months ago sold one of the oldest ping services, weblogs.com for $2 million. That’s not a lot of money by some standards, but it really is a lot of money.

So Pingoat has been trying a variety of ways to exclude spammers from their service. It’s been a messy but valiant effort. Now it appears that some one is unhappy with what they’ve been doing and has attacked their computers. Possibly with an army of zombified computers sending continual messages to them and inserting malicious code into their servers. I don’t really know the specifics, but if it’s something you think you might be able to help with then you should check it out. They appear to need resources more than advice.

I only use Pingoat as a back up or for pinging for someone else one ping at a time. I use Feedburner’s Pingshot service to automate my own pinging. It works great and is one more reason to use Feedburner for all your RSS and other needs.

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Googling for Creative Commons & Open Access Content

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Interested in information and images that you can reuse for your own purposes with no fear of looking like a thief? Google has just added a function to its Advanced Search page that allows you to effectively search only items online that have been posted under a or licence. This is very cool, and an important nod to the paradigm of information sharing.

Found via the awesome group blog LifeHacker.

Speaking of Creative Commons, you might be inspired by these short films about the phenomenon:



That reminds me, I’d better add a Creative Commons badge to my site!

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Technorati Tips

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I had the pleasure to talk to Ryan King of Technorati at Tag Camp this weekend and our conversation included a couple of things I thought I’d share with readers here.

  • Spam Blogs I saw Alex personally zapping splogs by hand from Technorati search results while we were talking! Apparently they have a variety of algorithms to do this automatically as well, but it was nice to see him care enough to clean things up when he had a minute. He also told me about having conversations with some of the big search engines about how to deal with this problem. So contrary to Dave Winer’s bizarre statement in conversation this weekend that RSS feeds for search were worthless because of the spam – I have faith that the problem is being mitigated as we speak. One way or the other, the last thing I’m going to do is give up on search-to-RSS! It’s absolutely invaluable, even if I have to take some extra time to construct less spammy queries. Unfortunately Winer was just one of several older men who were so full of themselves they had a hard time communicating with anyone around them. They didn’t contribute much either. To step back from that, I found several people who agreed with me that results are amongst the most filled with spam.
  • Indexing I’ve been conversing with several people who are having trouble getting their Typepad sites indexed by Technorati, and thus are not seeing their tags show up in tag searches there. Alex showed me the header tag that could be changed to reflect the Feedburner RSS feeds people are using. I’ll work on that and hopefully the problem will be solved.
  • Tagging Turns out that when they say they are indexing everything with rel=”tag” in the link code, they mean it. I asked what sorts of things this made possible and Kevin showed me how instead of just putting his Technorati Tags at the end of blog posts, he sometimes adds the rel=”tag” after the a href=”” in links mid-post. For example, when he linked to a definition in Wikipedia he made that link a tag as well. Try it out, I’m going to with this post.
  • Satire A side project Kevin is doing is Supr.c.ilio.us and the Supr.c.ilio.us blog. Mea Culpa: Kevin is collaborating on these projects with Eran Globen. It seems to be all about mocking the most absurd tendencies of the Web2.0 inner circle and related hype. It’s pretty funny, sometimes. If you’re looking for stuff like that, check it out.
  • Vertical Search If you go to Technorati proper (not tag search) you’ll see that they are not offering vertical search, or search within a subject. The categories don’t seem very differentiated and the results appear limited, but it looks like a good idea and one I’m sure they will improve. I used it just a minute ago to search for blog posts about Looksmart’s product Furl without getting results filled with random blogs that happen to use Furl for archiving. I liked that I could search inside blogs about the Web, about the Internet and about Technology (?). Unfortunately, I didn’t get many results. So we’ll see. It does seem like a helpful step towards improving blog search results. And that’s important.

So that’s one conversation I had at Tag Camp, I’ll be discussing more over the next few days. For now I have to finish up here in S.F. and get back home.

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Google Foil Sold on eBay

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One of my favorite search engines, Jux2.com, was just sold on eBay for the modest but comfortable sum of $110,100. Check out the auction here, it’s pretty interesting!

Jux2 performs an invaluable service by demonstrating what search results Google misses and Yahoo! or Ask.com find. You can also use it to find the “best results” those found by all three big search engines. This is great for several reasons. First, many people use Google exclusively for their web searches. Jux2 can help fill in the gaps so you don’t miss important information. Really, go try out some sample searches – Google misses some important stuff!

Second, Jux2 is good because people need to know that Google isn’t omniscient (whether it’s benevolent is another question.) Before we become so awestruck by the power of the most succesful search engine in the world and hand over every data finding function of our lives to it – it’s good to know it’s limitations. If only in a spiritual sense!

Thanks to Sid Yadiv at Rev2.org whose write up on this alerted me to the sale last night. His site is another one readers here may enjoy giving a look. He and I have been reading each others’ blogs for some time now.

Related: People interested in advancing their search capabilities may also find Soople and Xtra-Google of interest.

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How to be Found by Technorati

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Several people have been asking me why their blog posts are not appearing in Technorati search results, even after they use the Technorati Tag bookmarklet I wrote about earlier this week. (Clarification: I didn’t create it, I found it on an old web site that has since gone offline, but I had it archived in Furl.net.) Here’s what’s going on….

When you write a blog post, it has to be indexed by search engines in order for it to show up in the search engine’s results. Google goes nuts and crawls all over the web indexing like crazy – but that doesn’t mean that Google or anybody else is guaranteed to find what you’ve written. Even if you link to someone’s page, that doesn’t mean they’ll discover that until someone travels that connection – be it an indexing robot or a visitor who leaves tracks through your traffic monitoring program. (Technorati tags are really just a particular way to link to Technorati, but they still have to index the link.)

The way to get indexed quickly is to do something called pinging. You can set up (or I can set up for you) your blog to automatically tell the blog search engines (like Technorati) “Hey, look over here, I have new content for you to index!” Pinging is big business but it doesn’t have to be complicated for bloggers.

The best solution right now: use Feedburner.com for your RSS feed (a great idea for many reasons) and use their Pingshot service to automatically ping the top blog search engines. This will include Technorati and shebang – you’re Technorati Tagged posts should show up very soon after you post them in Technorati Tag Searches. Update: This post is appearing in Technorati 10 minutes after first posted.

There are alternatives, like Pingoat, but now that Feedburner offers this service it’s a not an issue. Depending on how quickly you find this post, Technorati may not have indexed it yet. But I wrote the previous one just this morning and if you click on its tags you’ll see that Technorati found it within 2 hours.

Let me know if I can help you with this or if it’s still confusing. Also, let me know if you would like to hire me to get your blog all souped up for maximum traction with all these new tools. There are many things that can be set up once and that you’ll be able to enjoy the fruits of without thinking about it in the future. My blog optimization rates are reasonable and you’ll be very glad we did it.

For now, I’m going to go back and link to this article from the original post about the bookmarklet. I should have told readers, “don’t forget to ping!” Once all your ducks are in a row you’ll see that this stuff is easy and powerful to use.

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Meet the Sploggers

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Any time a new medium emerges with a low barrier to entry, people are going to try to make easy money off it. Online that means spam. Spam doesn’t just mean email, though. There’s Tag Spam, blog comment and trackback spam and Splogs, or spam blogs. Splogs show up all the time in the RSS feeds I set up for searches. It really bums me out. The splogs appear to have valuable information about whatever search term you’re looking for, but they are really just worthless attempts to get you to click on ads or click through to another site or to raise the inbound link profile of another site. It’s wretched, and there are so many of them! Since Blogger in particular is free and easy to use, many people are just filling the blogosphere with crap. I have my ideas on how to deal with it, but I’m writing today to point you over to an interesting article titled “Meet the Sploggers”. It’s a description of the goals and tactics of just a few current sploggers out there. It’s a pretty interesting read, I think.

For the record, I think that one way to deal with splogs is to find ways to integrate attention data into filters for our search results. For example, I could say “show me only those resulting pages that have been flagged as spam by less than 5 unique readers.” or “show me only sites that people from more than 2 continents have spent at least 30 minutes on in the last 3 days” or some variation of that. There are ways to game systems like that too, but it becomes more of a burden to do so as these obstacles are built up.

Finally, check out social-recommendation enabled search engines like Wink.com. Tools like this, and social bookmarking, will allow you to just search inside the validated worlds of your trusted friends. Obviously limitations exist here, and you’d want to wander out into the wilderness in many circumstances, but for the cleanest search results…you may want to look to a “walled garden.”

Ultimately, I believe that search to RSS is one of the most powerful tools in the Web2.0 sphere. It automates the rapid discovery and delivery of key information. It is a powerful means of getting and staying on top of your field.

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