October 8, 2004
Search and Cluster the CIA WMD Report with Clusty
The folks over at Clusty (aka Vivisimo) have just released a search/cluster version of the CIA WMD report that was released on Wednesday.
In July, Vivisimo made a search and cluster version of the 9/11 Commission Final Report available.
Posted by Gary Price on October 8, 2004, 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Publisher Reactions To Google Print; What About Authors?
New Google Service May Strain Old Ties in Bookselling from the New York Times today has some nice quotes on how publishers are reacting to the expansion of the Google Print service.
Here's something I haven't yet seen (if you have, tell me). How are authors going to react? After all, publishers are now set to earn revenue off AdSense ads that appear in these books. But the books are the works for the respective authors. Shouldn't they get a share? Do contracts cover this? Will they have to going forward?
Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 8, 2004, 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
E-Mail Alerts at Feedster, RSS Feeds at Yahoo
+ Scott Johnson has let everyone know that Feedster's E-Mail search alerts are finally working correctly. He even thanks me for the motivation to fix the problem. You're MORE than welcome Scott and thanks for listening.
+ Earlier this week I mentioned that Yahoo News would soon be adding an XML button on all news search results pages that allows you to add an RSS search results feed to ANY aggregator. As of today, this service is working. Of course, you can also add the feed to your My Yahoo page with just one click. Previously, you had to use the tool on Jeremy Zawdony's site (it remains available) to create a Yahoo News RSS feeds.
Btw, Speaking of Yahoo and RSS...
Dan Rosenweig, Yahoo's COO, said yesterday that the company will introduce advertising into RSS feeds. You can learn more about it in the eWeek article: Yahoo Readies Ads for RSS.
Posted by Gary Price on October 8, 2004, 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Web 2.0 Search Wrap-Up
O'Reilly's put out its official wrap-up of various things discussed that were search-related at its Web 2.0 conference: Search: The Current and Next Big Thing. As a recap, here is other search coverage from the show we've blogged about:
- Google Demos Word Clustering
- Search as a Platform: The Panel
- Google Board Member Says Browser Not Going to Happen
- Snap To It: New Search Engine Launches
- Social Networking Meets the Yellow Pages
Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 8, 2004, 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Where's The Privacy Freak Out Over Search Personalization?
Alan Chapell raises a good question in his Amazon.com's A9 Adventure article. Why haven't privacy advocates freaked out loudly and in large numbers about a9 and its personal search features? Only a few months ago, privacy concerns over Google's Gmail made headlines.
I agree with one of his Chapell's main arguments, that Amazon's built a reputation of trust with many of its users for handling personal information well (though Amazon subsidary Alexa did agree to settle a privacy dispute back in 2001).
Perhaps part of the reason the a9 launch (and other personal search features debuting since then from Ask Jeeves and Yahoo) haven't raised more ire is because search privacy was raised as an issue last year.
Perhaps. I think the real answer is that people still aren't largely thinking much about search privacy. Gmail wasn't a search privacy issue. It was an email privacy one. I think people know inherently that there are private things sent via email. The idea that that email is going to be analyzed to show ads -- even through an automated process -- sounds scary.
Another reason may be that Amazon's a9 simply isn't used by that many people. In contrast, Google is by various metrics still the most popular search engine. What it does in terms of search impacts many more people.
In fact, that's one reason why Google got singled out for privacy concerns back in 2002 and 2003 relating directly to search. It was so big that privacy advocates figured it deserved the most attention.
In contrast, I think search is seen largely as a transient thing to many people. They really don't stop to think much about the very personal things they look up. They've also had no real experience with this information actively being recorded in a way they can use, unlike with email.
Last year, I looked at search privacy issues in my Search Privacy At Google & Other Search Engines article. I explained then how search was largely ignored as a privacy concern compared to things like cookies because search features themselves had no "memory" to them. Now that search memory tools have arrived big time, I'm sure we'll see search privacy concerns grow as such tools become used.
Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 8, 2004, 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
New Travel Search: Take a Trip with Kayak
Kayak, a new travel search meta site that I've mentioned several times on the SEW Blog, has just launched a beta version.
Kayak, simultaneously searches more than 60 site for air fares, hotels, and car rental pricing info.
Competitors in this section of the travel search space include Fare Chase (from Yahoo), Mobissimo, and SideStep.
One feature I like about Kayak is how simple narrowing a results set it. Several refinements can be made by simply by moving 'sliders' (change flight times, price range, etc.)
This is very similar to the Smart Sort technology that Yahoo makes available for several product categories. Here, you can use sliders to help select the best product based on what's more or less important to you.
Kayak offers both HTML and Flash search interfaces.
Former executives from Orbitz, Travelocity, and Intuit are all part of the Kayak management team.
Here's the Kayak beta release announcement.
Also, Pamela Parker takes a look at Kayak in the Clickz article: Travel Vets Launch Beta of 'Google for Travel'.
Posted by Gary Price on October 8, 2004, 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
FindWhat To Carry Verizon SuperPages Paid Listings
Local paid listings from Verizon's SuperPages program are now to be distributed though FindWhat's distribution network. More details from the FindWhat press release.
Last year, Verizon licensed technology from FindWhat to build the SuperPages.com Pay Per Click program that launched in May.
Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 8, 2004, 8:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Top Coders Say Google Is Tops
TopCoder.com polled its 44,000 members worldwide about their favorite search engine. A much smaller number actually voted, 450, and they really like Google. It gained 92 percent of the vote, followed by Yahoo at 3 percent.
Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 8, 2004, 7:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Google Demos Word Clustering
Andy Beal has a nice write-up of Google showing off its word clustering tools at the recent Web 2.0 conference: Web 2.0 - Exclusive Demonstration of Clustering from Google. Jason Calacanis also has an MP3 audio file of the presentation you can listen to.
We've had some hints at such technology before. Google Sets, which was released in 2002, lets you enter some terms and see other terms that may be related to it.
Related Searches came-and-went quickly with Google AdWords and have occasionally popped up in the past on a very small sample of Google users (see an example here).
Neither Google Sets or Related Searches provide clustering as was demonstrated or as can be seen via Vivisimo (or Vivisimo's recently launched consumer site Clusty). But some of the underlying clustering technology may be used for these.
Also interesting is mention of Google excluding "noisy" data to focus on the key part of a page. It's common that search engines may ignore "stop words" such as "the" when indexing or searching. However, Google's "named entities" would go beyond that to focus on the core content of a page.
Both clustering and named entities have interesting applications to searchers and search marketing. By understanding clusters of search results, it may be easier for Google (and other search engines) to determine pages that don't seem to belong somehow on a particular topic -- in particular, spam pages that given their often artificial nature might stand out more.
Similarly, understanding the key concepts of a page and first ranking pages based on a concept match, then following on an actual word match, might help eliminate some false poor matches.
Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 8, 2004, 7:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
