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Archive for the ‘Search’ Category

Sphere Blog Search

02 May 2006

Sphere Blog Search just went ‘officially’ live at 7 AM this morning. The new v1.5 release (after the original beta) includes following updates:

  • custom range histogram;
  • sphere it bookmarklet that makes it easy to find blog posts that relate to what you’re reading on the Web;
  • top queries this hour/ this week;
  • RSS for search results;
  • community feedback buttons throughout the site;
  • expanded related media verticals including podcasts (Yahoo! API), books (Amazon API), and photos (CNET Webshots API);
  • expanded related news articles coverage (over 50 mainstream news sites such as CNN, NYT, ESPN, Fox, USA Today to name a few);
  • expanded profiles;
  • featured blogs for 12,000+ keyword search terms covering over 500 broad topics including baseball, anime, food, web 2.0, tech news, knitting, culture, etc.;
  • a brand new back end that scales.

I’ve had my beta invite since somewhere in November and I must say, it grew fast and I’m quite impressed with the end result. I think I’m going to use Sphere a lot more often. Sure there were some small problems in the beginning, but those are all gone now. You really should check this out !

Sphere

Most important are the featured blogs for over 12K keywords. That’s really impressive. The other thing I like a lot is the fact you can subscribe to RSS feeds of any search result and that podcasts and other media are immediately included and linked to your search query. This is about the most complete niche search ever. If they should start a ranking system, I bet they could easily leave Technorati behind.

Try Sphere

 
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Posted in 2.0 +, Blogs, Search, Tools

 

Yahoo TV Launched

26 Apr 2006

So, I’m waiting for Google to come after this but in the meanwhile Yahoo kicked off their Go-TV and from the first reviews I’ve read I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that it really opens up a lot of opportunities. Not only for advertisers, but also for consumers.

From the Unofficial Yahoo Blog:

Instead of huddling around your 17″ monitor and cluttered desk to view your Y! Photo album of the latest family gathering, you can show them from the comfort of your TV viewing room. You can also see pictures from on-the-fly Flickr searches. You can also play DVD’s or saved video files on your computer and watch them on your TV! Kind of eliminates the need for the ol’ DVD-player don’t it? And there’s a lot of Yahoo! Premium content in audio and video form that is easily accessible through Yahoo! Go – TV.
There’s more features to discover at the Y! Go – TV site.

 
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Posted in Corporate News, Search, Technology

 

10 Years of Search Journalism

21 Apr 2006

For the past 10 years, Danny Sullivan has been writing about search engines. He is widely regarded as one of the leading experts in this field. On SearchEngineWatch, he posted an overview filled with highlights and tips & tricks. Here are some tips to help a page appear more relevant:

  • Have text on your home page
  • Pick your keywords
  • Have links to inside pages
  • Forget Spamming
  • Network
  • Relax

In this post, Danny also looks back and lists the most remarkable moments in search. Starting in 1997, he lines up what happened and describes the turning points in the evolution of search engines. And interesting historical review.

Read it on SearchEngineWatch

 
1 Comment

Posted in Search

 

MSN Search Spoof

30 Mar 2006

MSN Search celebrates April Fool’s with the return of Spoof, the parody tool that uses fake (but hilariously accurate) search results to gently mock friends, bosses, or people who just need to be teased.
All you have to do is supply a name for your victim and choose a joke method. You can change the jokes that have been generated, then use the URL to trick your friends or send it by mail.
Very funny.

MSN Spoof

Try MSN Spoof | Thanx, Kris

 
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Posted in Geek, Humor, Search

 

Google 3.0

28 Mar 2006

Wim L. sent me this future-Google screenshot which I find incredibly amusing. It’s funny, because it’s true.

Google 3.0

Created by modified_dangler | via ObnoxiousFumes

 
16 Comments

Posted in Geek, Humor, Search

 

Riya Photo Search

22 Mar 2006

Gert told me Riya is open for signups. Riya will be unstable, s..l..o..w, buggy, inaccurate, and could lose some (or all) of your tags. It may also be unavailable from time to time and may slow down your machine while uploading your photos (they recommend you upload overnight). Riya is in beta phase, which means that they are all about learning from you to get better. Riya needs you to give them loads of feedback and give it often so they can improve over time. Riya is a Photo search engine that is best used on personal photos of friends and family, not on public pictures you got from the internet somewhere.

Riya

Warning: Riya will only work if you

• Have high resolution JPEG’s with date and time from your camera
• Use digital photos of your family and friends not celebrity or web images
• Have many photos of the most common people in your photoset
• Don’t give it scanned photos, photos with bad lighting, or profile shots of faces
• They recommend you upload at least 1000 photos w/ full albums

Riya will take about a day to upload 4000 photos.

Requirements:

  • 512 MB RAM
  • Windows XP (Home/Professional/Media Center)
  • Administrator Privileges
  • Broadband Connection
  • Pentium 4/Athlon/Centrino
  • Internet Explorer 6 or Firefox 1.0.5+

Learn more about Riya
Read the Riya Blog

Use the backdoor signup and skip the invite-only. | also on InsideGoogle

 
1 Comment

Posted in 2.0 +, Corporate News, Interactive, Search, Tools

 

Google No Longer in Dutch

10 Mar 2006

My girlfriend’s little brother pointed me to the google.be and said there was something weird going on. He was right. I use the .com all the time so I’d never have noticed, but indeed, there’s a problem. Everything is in English. The same goes for the google.nl site. Weird.

Dutch?

Thanx, PJ

UPDATE: it was only temporarily, so it seems. The problem only lasted a few hours.

 
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Posted in Corporate News, Search

 

Paper About Blog Search

24 Feb 2006

Gary Price posted about a new academic paper that offers a review of weblog searching. The paper will be presented at the 28th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR’06) 2006 in April and is titled ‘A Study of Blog Search.’ It was written by Gilad Mishne and Maarten de Rijke from the University of Amsterdam.(13 pages, 287kb, .PDF). Here is the abstract;

We present an analysis of a large blog search engine query log, exploring a number of angles such as query intent, query topics, and user sessions. Our results show that blog searches have different intents than general web searches, suggesting that the primary targets of blog searchers are tracking references to named entities, and locating blogs by theme. In terms of interest areas, blog searchers are, on average, more engaged in technology, entertainment, and politics than web searchers, with a particular interest in current events. The user behavior observed is similar to that in general web search: short sessions with an interest in the first few results only.

Download this paper – via [SearchEngineWatch]

 
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Posted in Blogging, Search

 
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