The geeks over on the Live.com team are busy updating that service. The Live.com blog has a post that says they’ve improved the search experience on Live.com. It certainly is faster!
Mark Cuban warns us against building the American Idol of Search
December 23, 2005 By
Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and the IceRocket blog search engine asks “The better question is - “will objective search remain the people’s choice in search engines?” In other words, is there such a thing as a best answer for most questions and is that what a significant number of search users want?”
There is bias in every system, whether algorithmic or human-based. The algorithmic is just a bit more predictable.
Speaking of human based, have any of you been watching digg spy? That shows you — in live time — what Digg’s members are adding to it. That’s cool. Not sure how useful it is, but I just found this digg about a site that is advocating using the Firefox/IE RSS icon.
Blinkx.tv announces “to go” service
December 19, 2005 By
Download videos for your portable video device with just a single click. I’ve been using Blinkx.tv for a few hours now and there’s a ton of cool stuff there. Gary Price over on Search Engine Watch has the details.
I love their “rollover video menu.” Visit the home page of Blinkx.tv and you get a Flash app that you can roll over and see previews of the latest videos on their service.
New blog of the day…Phil Sim
December 15, 2005 By
I love it when people tell me about a blogger who has very few readers, just started blogging, and is writing interesting stuff. Phil Sim’s blog just got emailed to me today and I liked it. Love his tag line too:
Please stop here for a Web 2.0 reality check.
Heheh. I don’t agree with him about structured blogging. The trick there is to make the tools do it. WordPress, for instance, lets me easily choose categories. Now, what if I could select “review” or put in a map position or URL to match it with.
But, his post on needing a longer tail in blogging is interesting. The tail is growing. It’s just really hard to find new bloggers right now. Why? Cause our search engines aren’t all that great at finding new things. Google/MSN/Yahoo are great at finding existing blogs that have gotten noticed. Stick “Web 2.0″ into any of those and you’ll find interesting blogs. But, go to Technorati/Feedster/IceRocket and stick “Web 2.0″ into those and you’ll get dreck. Ugh.
Memeorandum is cool, but only covers two communities today. What about if you’re looking for a scrapbooking blogger? A model blogger? A trucker who blogs? Sorry, no way.
Is search done? No way! Quick, find Phil in a search engine.
Advertisers must hate “accidense”
November 28, 2005 By
TDavid wins the “come up with a cool new word of the week” award for noticing “accidense.” What’s that? That’s what happens when people accidentally click on Google Adsense ads (he noticed that some Google ads have more clickable whitespace than others, which increases the chance they’ll receive “accidense.”)
Oh, I’ve seen people accidentally click on ads. I wonder if Google is able to discern how much of this goes on? Usually it’s accompanied by a very fast click on the “Back” button.
Shel and I are seeing a very similar behavior. Turns out if you search Google for “Naked” our Naked Conversation site is the 14th item on that list and it’s #3 on MSN Search. Almost every single one of those visits is a short term visit and people very rarely stick around.
This is an example of when picking a popular keyword isn’t exactly going to bring you the best results. I wonder how many commercial sites track their advertising effectiveness by how long the browser sticks around?
Webmastering fun from Wales
November 27, 2005 By
Well Cardiff was delightful. Visited the castle there. Will post pictures soon. We’ve had a wonderful weekend with Maryam’s brother’s family. Tonight his webmaster came over. John Chinery, managing director of Amicore eBusiness. He does IT and Websites for microbusinesses. We had a great chat about search engines. Turns out my brother’s site is #5 on Google if you search for People’s Poet but is about 23 down on MSN Search (he’s known in town as “bard of the busses” or “the people’s poet.” He’s been linked to from a BBC site and from me, so looks like MSN still isn’t counting blog links as highly as Google is. This demonstrates just how difficult it’ll be to be seen as better than Google. Webmasters are the ones who are authoritative on search engine quality and they are seeing their sites and blogs ranked higher on Google than on Yahoo or MSN. So, of course they recommend Google to their customers. Oh, and John tells me he’s doing blogs for his customers now too since they recognize that blogs do better on search engines than static sites like the one he did for Maryam’s brother.
Oh, I noticed that Keyvan’s title tag is mispelled. He used “peoples” instead of “people’s.” Google didn’t penalize him for that, but MSN did. On Google if you search the way he mispelled it he has the #1 link. On MSN Search he has the #3 link for that term. Which shows just how important having a good title tag matters (the tag that puts the name on the top of the browser). Choose the wrong name and you won’t be found at all. It’s amazing how many bloggers have lame title tags, by the way. It’s like they don’t want to be found at all.
