There’s quite a lot of stuff going on in searchland these days, and since I’m kind of really interested in that, I’ll do a write-up on the major things that have occured. First of all there’s Virtual Earth 3D, the upgrade of Live Maps – part of Live Search. What’s special about this release is that, as I’ve predicted in May when Microsoft’s acquired Massive, there’s now advertising in the virtual world, somewhat like the sort you have in Second Life, but this time for actual companies in real life. The maps aren’t a sim, they’re real and for now there’s already 15 cities that have been virtually digitized. In these cities you can see clickable billboards which open a new browser window and load the site of the advertiser. I’m not quite sure if there are rules to follow, but I imagine you can’t have a clickable billboard for 7/11 above a Wall-Mart location. Common sense will be regulated I think. It sounds logical that business owners should be able to advertise in the near surroundings of their business, most likely floating above the business location. What I do wonder about is the fact that you cruise the cities (streetlevel view) and most likely will see the existing billboards that have been photographed as well. It would be cool if Microsoft could cash out on that and have their own ads featuring on those locations, or block out that free and uncontroled advertising to master the essential part, namely those ads they approve of. Here’s an example image of a floating billboard for Zip Realty in Boston. (courtesy of AdverLab)
- Nice review on AdverLab
- Read more on C|Net
- Read more on Clickz
- Hat tip: ‘Cross The Breeze
Next:
Like.com Visual Search. What exactly is it? Like allows users to find products by appearance. That means as much as: if you see a picture with an object in it you fancy, the like engine is able to render ’similar’ things for you. Check out how that works with, for instance, Brad Pitt. Like scores some celeb pics, defines the ‘hot zones’ that feature accessories and then turns those items into shopable content. There seems to be a co-operation with Getty images, because practically all celeb images have a (c) Getty under them. What’s pretty neat is that when you’ve clicked on a celeb pick to start a search, a lot of items are being retrieved which can then be customized by the user. With a color picker you can set the right color, with a slidebar you can set a price range and eventually you can select a brand, a specific site and a few more options to narrow down your search. Pretty clever stuff for online shoppers. It seems that, for now, the search is limited to jewelry, shoes, handbags and watches, but normally that should be extended as soon as Riya upgrades Like to Beta instead of Alpha. If you’re a manufacturer of products, you can add those through the form, so they’ll be included in the search results. Stay tuned for this one.
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