Category: Of Note in Search Biz

Way Cool Music Search

I found Grandaddy by using Amazon's collaborative filtering technology – when I bought a Flaming Lips album on the advice of a friend, the Amazon filter said "folks who bought 'Yoshimi…' also bought…" I bit, and am glad I did. Now, take this idea to search, at least in a…

I found Grandaddy by using Amazon’s collaborative filtering technology – when I bought a Flaming Lips album on the advice of a friend, the Amazon filter said “folks who bought ‘Yoshimi…’ also bought…” I bit, and am glad I did. Now, take this idea to search, at least in a way. Thanks to Scoble for this gem: MusicPlasma. More proof of what can be done on top of a search platform. This takes a Grokker-like interface to show how your musical tastes relate. Type in one band you love and it will show you others you’d like. You can drill down in sort of a Venn diagram-driven search – say “Radiohead” then “The Shins”. As far as I can tell, this is built on the Amazon API (perhaps someone more astute than I can figure this out?). This is why, as I will say again, Yahoo and Google should really rev up their API programs.

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SEO/SEM Market Turns Sights Toward Inktomi

Until now, organic search was a one-horse race – Google. But with Yahoo coming online soon with its own search technology, based largely on Inktomi, the optimizers and marketers are focusing on Inktomi with the kind of ardor once reserved for Google. Will be interesting to watch how the…


Until now, organic search was a one-horse race – Google. But with Yahoo coming online soon with its own search technology, based largely on Inktomi, the optimizers and marketers are focusing on Inktomi with the kind of ardor once reserved for Google. Will be interesting to watch how the two compare in the judgment of this world, once Yahoo takes off the wraps.

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Highbeam

A newly named "intermediate" research service from Hoover's founder Patrick Spain, integrating eLibrary, Researchville, Alacritude, and encyclopedia.com. The idea is interesting – to target the individual info-seeker who wants more than Google can offer, but does not want to pay the enterprise pricing of Factiva or Lexis/Nexis. Rafta Ali's PaidContent…

A newly named “intermediate” research service from Hoover’s founder Patrick Spain, integrating eLibrary, Researchville, Alacritude, and encyclopedia.com. The idea is interesting – to target the individual info-seeker who wants more than Google can offer, but does not want to pay the enterprise pricing of Factiva or Lexis/Nexis. Rafta Ali’s PaidContent has posted an interview with Spain.

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BannanaSlug

You know that sense of vague hope which comes from entering a query into Google that will mostly likley return tens of thousands of results? And that vague sense of hopelessness that comes when those results turn up, and there's literally nothing that matches what you are looking for? In…

You know that sense of vague hope which comes from entering a query into Google that will mostly likley return tens of thousands of results? And that vague sense of hopelessness that comes when those results turn up, and there’s literally nothing that matches what you are looking for?

In such a case, have you ever scrolled down to the bottom of the page, where the Goooooooooooooooogle is, and randomly hit, say result page #21, just to see if that might help? Yeah, me too. Steve Nelson knows our pain. A while back, he hacked up a Google API-based application called BannanaSlug that adds a bit of whimsical serendipity to your searches. It takes your search and adds a random word to it, just to see what happens. It’s kind of fun to check out…

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Google Alert – Pointing Toward Search As A Platform

This application, built on the (rather limited) Google API, gives an inkling of the services and innovations which might prosper on the web should Google decide to become a true platform for developers. (To learn more on Google Alert, read SEW's write up here). In the FAQ, for example, the…

This application, built on the (rather limited) Google API, gives an inkling of the services and innovations which might prosper on the web should Google decide to become a true platform for developers. (To learn more on Google Alert, read SEW’s write up here). In the FAQ, for example, the developers of Google Alert note that “Google Alert is a free service but bandwidth and CPU time cost money. Google’s API terms prohibit commercial use so you can’t even pay Google Alert for more results. In the future, Google Alert hopes to launch a premium commercial service with much greater capacity. Negotiations are currently under way with Google to arrange a license for this. “

My guess is that a quick witted developer over at Yahoo might just decide to open up their API for this kind of service, and the thousands of others which might flourish if they put a couple of big brains and some developer evangelizing behind it.

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Paid Search Trademark Case Settled

A major case threatening to rain on the paid search party has been settled out of court by the parties – AOL/Netscape and Playboy. Terms were not disclosed. This takes some air out of the issue, but Google still has action pending….

A major case threatening to rain on the paid search party has been settled out of court by the parties – AOL/Netscape and Playboy. Terms were not disclosed. This takes some air out of the issue, but Google still has action pending.

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NYT on Google Vanity

Man, someone at the Times is agog over Google stories. This one is on folks buying their own name as pay-per-click keywords. Anecdotal, but fun….

Man, someone at the Times is agog over Google stories. This one is on folks buying their own name as pay-per-click keywords. Anecdotal, but fun.

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Man, With All These Shoes Dropping…

Google has launched a Friendster killer. Or, perhaps it's best to say, Google, in its inimitable style (one passionate engineer working one day a week on a side project – I am starting to think this is a bit disingenuous) has launched a beta social networking site – Orkut.com. You…

i_orkut.gifGoogle has launched a Friendster killer. Or, perhaps it’s best to say, Google, in its inimitable style (one passionate engineer working one day a week on a side project – I am starting to think this is a bit disingenuous) has launched a beta social networking site – Orkut.com. You will recall rumour had it that Google tried to buy Friendster a while back and F’ster took a better offer from Benchmark and KP. Now Google lets this cat out of the bag. Hmmmm.

The site is named after the engineer who started it (apparently he has been obsessed with this stuff for a while, including starting social networking projects for Stanford alumni), and is not officially part of Google’s product portfolio yet, according to Google spokesfolk, though Google owns the technology.

One Google employee comments on it here.
News.com piece.

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