Category: Of Note in Search Biz

Microsoft is taking its homegrown engine outta beta and going live today, adding a few neat bells and whistles along the way. I was under embargo till 9 pm tonight, but come on, the NYT is reporting it already.

I can’t offer a reasonable review of the site out of the box, but a list of the new features is at least a start:

– Even more focus on “answers” via Encarta Premium content, which is now free (well, for first use anyway. The engine has added more Encarta content in general).

– Support for RSS search feeds.

– New design, and incorporation into all of MSN, the Messenger IM client, and the MSN Toolbar.

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So asks Craig Silverstein, my favorite JAM* quotemiester, in this FT article.

“It’s clear that a list of links, though very useful, doesn’t match the way people give information to each other,” says Mr Silverstein. The question that he says Google – like others – is now trying to address is: “How can the computer become more like your friend when answering your questions?”

That means giving direct answers to questions, extracting data from online sources rather than giving links to web pages. It also means doing a better job of divining what the searcher is looking for, tailoring results more closely to what, based on past experience, appear to be the user’s particular interests.

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Thanks to Ross Mayfield for pointing this one out to me – a meta directory search engine.

Man. Traveling for 28 hours straight, then staying up two nights in a row for a best friend’s 40th can certainly get in the way of work. But I’m back, and much to report.

I’ll be chewing through old news over the next day or so, but honestly, won’t report much of it, as my book is due very shortly and I have another, final chapter to finish. However, a few things to note.

Cnet reports from a Harvard conference. Quote: ” “Google led the way in clarity in advertising,” said Mark Kroese, general manager of information services at Microsoft’s MSN. “We weren’t separating results (from ads) a year and a half ago, and since we’ve begun doing so, the response from both users and advertisers has been huge. Google proved that if you have clarity, people respond.””

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Details here and here. More when I get back.

Interesting – search for business professionals…Here’s my search. I had no idea.

A9 has debuted a neat new local search product today, which I am covering for Business 2.0 (the actual story will post shortly, this link is to a blog entry about the story on B 2’s blog). This is a big deal for A9, and for Amazon – a blending of search and commerce models that has some interesting implications. Excerpt:

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….

Thomas Hawk wonders.

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)?

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