November 12, 2005
eBay Unveils Service With New and Historical Info About Popular Search Terms
Search engine marketers might be interested to learn about a new service from eBay that launched yesterday. It allows subscribers (three different payment plans are available) to access a ton of business intelligence from the eBay database including top keyword searches by category or related keywords.
The most costly plan ($24.99/month) offers some additional features including the ability to see searches by site or country and includes 90 days of historical data. More about what search metrics are available in this FAQ. Additional info about the service in general is available from Beta News and the IDG News Service.
Posted by Gary Price on November 12, 2005, 11:06 PM | Permalink
Your Life, Your Database: MyLifeBits Developer Gordon Bell Profiled in New Article
Total Recall, an article in the November issue of IEEE's Spectrum magazine offers a five page profile of Gordon Bell and his MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research.
His project, MyLifeBits, is the digital distillation of, almost literally, his every waking minute. It started out as an offhand experiment, but today its goal is nothing short of changing the way we use computers, and by extension, the way we live. At its heart, MyLifeBits is a big database on a personal computer, into which go the correspondence, keyboard-based chores, and even the sights and sounds of everyday life. It automatically swallows up and indexes e-mails, keystrokes, recorded phone calls, images, video, and every Web page that graces its user's computer's screen.
Like many articles about MyLifeBits, this one includes a mention of the 1945 Vannevar Bush article, "As We May Think." In fact, the project's page on the MS Research site calls MyLifeBits, the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks." If you've never read Bush's paper, by all means, do so.
Posted by Gary Price on November 12, 2005, 10:33 PM | Permalink
Bloglines Expands "Universal Inbox" Initiative with Job Listings
Two job search aggregators, Indeed.com and SimplyHired have always offered keyword-based RSS and e-mail alerts to notify users of new job postings. However, users first have to know about both of these excellent services. Today, I noticed that Bloglines is allowing their users to create new job alerts from both databases as part of their growing "universal inbox" intiative.
Posted by Gary Price on November 12, 2005, 11:28 AM | Permalink
