Google-Viacom Suit Gets Interesting
The ruling yesterday on the merits of Viacom's data requests is worthy of review. Ars has more here. I am preparing for a vacation and can't elaborate, but trust me on this one……
The ruling yesterday on the merits of Viacom's data requests is worthy of review. Ars has more here. I am preparing for a vacation and can't elaborate, but trust me on this one……
I am thinking hard about the impact of open search – the idea that a major search index becomes totally open to developers, an open API, etc. that allows search to become a true platform that people can develop on top of. I'd love your thoughts on this….writing this…
I’d love your thoughts on this….writing this soon….I’ll update here with more thoughts but wanted to leave this as bread on the waters for the early risers…I know, I know, spam, but that can be routed around with business models and contracts…I’ve been noodling this for a long time and am close to saying SOMETHING….more background here (on Yahoo’s search monkey) and here (when Amazon did it and no one seemed to notice…)…
This is a Big Deal. Now, I want to know: how will Flash files be ranked? Any ideas? Adobe is a major competitor to Microsoft in this front. How will Microsoft make Silverlight searchable? And will Google index all both equally? (My take: Oh yes it will. If it…
I will admit, I was entirely biased upon reading this story from Nick Carr, who has a knack for writing pieces that get a lot of attention by baiting his hook with contrarian link chum. Heck, he's really good at it, and I have a lot of respect for…

His piece starts by conjuring HAL, the famous AI which manipulates humans, then makes his case by citing his own “feeling” that Google has changed his attention span to somehow prove that search and web browsing in general is making us stupid.
Balderdash. What Carr is really saying is this: People are not reading long narrative anymore, and that makes me and my pals sad. So let’s blame the Internet!
Read MoreDanny and I have contracted with Thomson Reuters, a sponsor of Searchblog, to write a series of posts on the future of search. They've given us no guidance, just asked us to ponder the topic. This is my first post, "A search is not just a search," longtime readers…

In the past few years, a significant new feature has crept into the results portion of this otherwise predictable interface. Called “universal search,” the idea is to incorporate more than simple HTML pages into the results. A search for “London restaurants”, for example, might bring up maps and local results, as well as videos, images, organized reviews, and of course web pages. Every major search engine, from Google to Ask, has incorporated some kind of universality into its search results.
But while universal search points the way toward a new approach to getting you the answers you seek, it’s a half step at best. The results change, somewhat, but the process is pretty much the same. You enter a query, you get a set of results. Not particularly new.
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