Month: January 2005

In short, Manber and co. (urged on by Jeff Bezos, who Manber says was “very involved”) strapped GPS-enabled digital video camera-cum-terabyte server rigs to the top of a bunch of SUVs, then drove them around the commercial areas of major US metropolitan areas, recording what then became composite still pictures of entire cities, one address at a time. A9 took more than 20 million images of 14 million+ businesses across ten cities (more are coming soon), then created a local search application they call Block View.

UPDATE: Here’s the actual story I wrote….

Now I know that Google was criticized a while back regarding the staleness of their images and that an upgrade was promised but I’d yet to see anything official announced. Over the past two weeks the traffic being driven to my site from Google’s Image Search has continued to grow and (if you combine their various international sites) Google Image Search has now become my top referring entity to thomashawk.com……

…If I do a search for “rain” under large images, my photo titled “San Francisco Rain” (see below) is on the first page of over 270,000 large images of “rain.” Wow, how did I get so lucky? Is it because the picture is actually pretty good as I’d like to believe? Is someone manually reviewing and ranking images at Google? Or is it because I publish using blogger or that I upload my photos to the internet using Hello Picasa (both Google properties)?

However, I did find it in Yahoo’s cache.

And here is even more – including a discourse on Google’s benefits, and an overview of a Google party at last week’s sales conference in SF. Highlights:

Thanks for the tip, Steve.

Coverage here.

BTW, Yahoo Video Search beta is now on the home page. I am sure this had nothing to do with the Google news….

AdMarketplace is the company behind eBay’s ad market, a background which serves as both an endorsement and a limitation, when it debuted last year, reviews were mixed. Jim Walton of adMarketplace tells me that it is his intention to quickly grow his network, and he hopes to implement a self service sign up a la AdSense shortly. More when I actually find the time to grok the system, probably later in Feb.

PS – In Davos now, jetlagged but happy to be in the snow…