The RSS Naming Party: Chunky or Smooth?

Clearly Searchblog's most popular post of all time (OK, so we're only a month old) is this one, in which we attempted to take Scott Rosenberg up on his challenge for a better name for RSS. There is even a contest happening over at another site, and I am…


Clearly Searchblog’s most popular post of all time (OK, so we’re only a month old) is this one, in which we attempted to take Scott Rosenberg up on his challenge for a better name for RSS. There is even a contest happening over at another site, and I am sure this meme will evolve for some time to come. So far the conversation has included names as far fetched as “chunkyweb” (the web was plain, RSS makes it chunky), Feedcast (which I rather like), Flow (which prompted some interesting comments about gushing loins), Readster (more of a product name), and a thought that perhaps what we are really looking for is a better name for the Semantic Web. I say, keep on talking. It’s fun to whiteboard ideas this way.

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Cnet Gets Some Good News

An interesting coup for Cnet: MediaPost reports it topped all other search engines, by a rather wide margin, in a recent WebSideStory study which compared vertical shopping engines on a key metric: whether visitors from the engine who clicked through to a commerce site actually convert into buyers. Cnet's…


An interesting coup for Cnet: MediaPost reports it topped all other search engines, by a rather wide margin, in a recent WebSideStory study which compared vertical shopping engines on a key metric: whether visitors from the engine who clicked through to a commerce site actually convert into buyers. Cnet’s conversion rate of 1.64% was better than AOL, the #2 engine, by 28%.
I’d like to know why this is. I’ve sent a note to folks at Cnet, and I congratulate them – it’s been a rough few years for them as they weathered the tech nuclear winter, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the company – it launched roughly at the same time as Wired, and has really seen it all.

Order Conversion Rates: Searches To Gift/Electronics Sites

Conversion Ratio
CNET 1.64%
AOL 1.28%
Overture 1.25%
iWon 1.15%
LookSmart 1.14%
MSN 1.04%
Yahoo 1.01%
Netscape 0.93%
Lycos 0.92%
Google 0.85%

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Spookle

Google has landed a deal with the CIA for its enterprise search solution, Government Computer News reports via IESDB. I hope this doesn't meant the CIA will next set its sights on Google's version of the Database of Intentions…….


Google has landed a deal with the CIA for its enterprise search solution, Government Computer News reports via IESDB. I hope this doesn’t meant the CIA will next set its sights on Google’s version of the Database of Intentions….

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Blocking Paid Search Ads

. EWeek reports that a new software application is now available that blocks paid search ads on most popular search engines. I wonder if this will take off, or is ephemeral? It depends on how consumers react to the next wave of search engines – how Yahoo and MSN do…

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EWeek reports that a new software application is now available that blocks paid search ads on most popular search engines. I wonder if this will take off, or is ephemeral? It depends on how consumers react to the next wave of search engines – how Yahoo and MSN do their next implementations, for example. I don’t think anyone really objects to how Google does ads right now, in fact, I think most feel the ads are even useful. I’d be curious to know if any readers are using this product and if so, if it in fact is useful. For more on Intermute, the company making this software, here’s their site.

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The Search Papers: Bray on Search

Tim Bray has a series called On Search over at his Ongoing blog, and I find it worthy of a read'n'muse. He starts with this backgrounder on himself and search issues as he sees them, and has a ton of entries on any number of subjects, too numerous to go…

Tim Bray has a series called On Search over at his Ongoing blog, and I find it worthy of a read’n’muse. He starts with this backgrounder on himself and search issues as he sees them, and has a ton of entries on any number of subjects, too numerous to go into here. Highlights: he writes on interface issues (warning, not for the faint of geek), how best to search XML (answer: we don’t know yet, recall he was a co-author of same), and on result rankings, with a quick refresher on why PageRank works, and good advice on paying attention to your own logs. Also worthy: his primer on how search works, and his discussion of the technical search terms precision and recall (with an interesting note on the absence of top companies in the research community – see my post on this here), and lastly (whew), his mini-rant on intelligent search, and why it’s a long way off. An excerpt:
“If we want better search (and we do), we’d better not count on AI voodoo or linguistic juju or semantic mojo. We need to work with good sound statistical techniques, and be clever about generating and using metadata, and we need to get our APIs right. All of these things are hard, and there is good work being done in all of them.”

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The Search Papers: Challenges in Web Search Engines (A Google Paper, 2002)

This paper "presents a high-level discussion of some problems in information retrieval that are unique to web search engines," according to its abstract in the ACM library. (A reminder as to what this whole "Search Papers" thing is about: read this.) "The goal is to raise awareness and stimulate research…

This paper “presents a high-level discussion of some problems in information retrieval that are unique to web search engines,” according to its abstract in the ACM library. (A reminder as to what this whole “Search Papers” thing is about: read this.) “The goal is to raise awareness and stimulate research in these areas,” it continues. How might such a lofty incitement be backed up? Well, it’s written by two senior employees of Google, Monika R. Henzinger and Craig Silverstein (I’ve met with Craig, he was employee #1 after Larry and Sergey, and a nice guy to boot), as well as Rajeev Motwani, a professor at Stanford (Craig was his graduate student).

The paper is dated September, 2002, so it does not rank as a missive from the early, more geeky phase of Google’s life, but rather a more corporate product – the two Google authors knew they bore the weight of “being Google” when they wrote this paper, and it’s worth keeping that in mind when reading through it.

This is particularly clear in the paper’s scope and focus. It lays out six challenges for search engines – and they read like a laundry list of Google’s headaches. The paper then goes on to offer suggested paths for more research on the topics, which I could imagine might read either as genuine or a tiny bit patronizing, depending on who you are. (The paper does not tackle a range of other issues it says are already the subject of abundant research – natural language queries, image/audio search, improving text-based retrieval, language issues, or interface/clustering, for example.)
(more in the extended entry, click link below)

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Blogging For Dollars

A recent Blog Search Engine survey written up in Marketing Wonk shows that 13% of bloggers run ads, 9% have been "approached by companies to blog about their products" and 7% blog for money. While Marketing Wonk spun these as low numbers, I disagree, I think they are quite…


A recent Blog Search Engine survey written up in Marketing Wonk shows that 13% of bloggers run ads, 9% have been “approached by companies to blog about their products” and 7% blog for money. While Marketing Wonk spun these as low numbers, I disagree, I think they are quite high, given the early nature of the form. In particular, the 13% who run ads sounds way too high – I doubt 13% of websites ran ads in 1995, for example.
A quick review of the methodology, such that it is, shows that it’s a survey of 610 bloggers who have submitted their sites to the Blog Search Engine and “other blog owners contacted through different channels.” Come on, we can do better that this! I think these kind of stats are fascinating, and would even be useful if they were in any way defensible as statistically significant.

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A Morning with Brewster

I spent much of yesterday morning talking with Brewster Kahle, of WAIS, Alexa, and Internet Archive fame. Brewster is a very fun mind, and he's working on about ten Really Interesting Things at once. First, it's easy to forget how important the Internet Archive's work truly is. The public…


I spent much of yesterday morning talking with Brewster Kahle, of WAIS, Alexa, and Internet Archive fame. Brewster is a very fun mind, and he’s working on about ten Really Interesting Things at once. First, it’s easy to forget how important the Internet Archive’s work truly is. The public sphere is diminishing as more and more data (in particular log data) becomes owned by corporations, and the archive is one of the few institutions, outside of our often scleortic library system, dedicated to preserving our digital record on a massive scale. (Good quote: “The original purpose of libraries was preservation and access” to society’s information, but they’ve somehow become about “selection and categorization.”) He’s archiving 20 global television channels as well (see the Television Archive for more.) He’s setting up a broadband distributed wireless LAN across San Francisco, and is still cranking out books via the Internet Bookmobile.
Brewster showed me the Archive’s new “recall” search features, which have been worked up by Anna Patterson of Stanford. Now this is some cool stuff. It searches over 11 billion documents – nearly 4 times that of Google (and they’ve indexed about 1/3 of what they have). Check it out, and play with the various knobs and graphs. It points to some interesting new concepts in search.

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RSS Pushed One Step Closer to the Limelight

Funny how am idea gathers momentum. As I was penning my Implications of RSS For Business column for 2.0 (awaiting publication in dead tree form in three weeks), Scott Rosenberg was writing a pean as well, published in Salon this morning. He suggests we need a name for what…


Funny how am idea gathers momentum. As I was penning my Implications of RSS For Business column for 2.0 (awaiting publication in dead tree form in three weeks), Scott Rosenberg was writing a pean as well, published in Salon this morning. He suggests we need a name for what RSS represents, just as the Web became the mainstream’s understanding of HTML, we need a name for RSS. He reminds us we’ve been here before (remember Push? I was a reluctant contributor to this 1996 article, which began as an email thread in the Wired offices…)

In any case, I agree with Scott, we need a name. All the businesses in this space are still in the pre-market phase. RSS allows us to connect more efficiently, to grok information as we like it, when we like it – but what do we call it? I like to say my reader and blogs/news sources is my personal ecology – is there an idea in there somewhere? In any case, it’s exciting to see the idea start to take popular flight. Watch for the NYT treatment soon.

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