January, 2006 Archives | Homepage
Instant Search With Windows Vista
Microsoft's Windows Vista website describes a desktop search feature called Instant Search. Instant Search looks more visually pleasing than the old Windows search. From Microsoft's description it sounds like the performance is also much improved over the Windows XP desktop search.
Windows Vista introduces Instant Search: enhanced desktop search and organization that helps you locate files and e-mail messages on your PC. If you remember anything about a file—the type of file, when it was created, or even what it contains-Windows Vista can quickly find it for you.Windows Vista just arrived in stores today. Here are some links to resources about the new operating system:
With Instant Search, you are never more than a few keystrokes away from whatever you're looking for. This feature, which is available almost anywhere you are in Windows Vista, enables you to search for a file name, a property, or even text contained within a file, and it returns pinpointed results. It's fast and easy. Instant Search is also contextual, optimizing its results based on your current activity-whether it's searching Control Panel applets, looking for music files in Windows Media Player, or looking over all your files and applications on the Start menu.
Posted on January 30, 2007
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ZonTube Mashes Amazon and YouTube
ZonTube is a handy website that mashes results from Amazon.com's music store with videos on YouTube.com. Search for an artist and then select an album from that artist and ZonTube will show you a list of songs from the album. Each song that has YouTube videos available will have a link next to it that shows you the videos from YouTube. Some of the videos on youTube are made by fans and some of them are the official videos for the song. Lifehacker explains how you would find music videos for the songs from Norah Jones' latest album.
Say you're looking for the new Norah Jones album and would like to see if there's a music video out yet for any of the songs. You can use ZonTube to instantly find out if Norah indeed has released any music vids for every song on her album, and watch them right there within ZonTube. ZonTube is organized into categories from Alternative Rock to Soundtracks (with sub-categories for each); you can also click on the frequently updated New Releases to find out what's up and coming.Some of the more popular artists have more videos on YouTube. For example, Britney Spears' Oops!... I Did It Again album has YouTube videos for pratically every song on the album. You can see the ZonTube page for this album here.
Posted on January 23, 2007
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Search Online Map Mashups with Mapshark
Mapshark is a search engine designed to let people search great online map websites (mashups). The site includes mashups for online map tools like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and MSN Earth. Currently, Mapshark searches online maps in over 600 websites. Mapshark creator Andrew Mitton from Anchorage, Alaska credits sites like Google Maps Mania and ProgrammableWeb for helping him find great online map mashups. (via Google Blogoscoped)Posted on January 18, 2007
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Cranky Search Engine Aimed at Seniors
CNN reports that a new search engine located at Cranky.com is targeting the 50-plus demographic.
Eons, the media company behind Cranky.com, said that the new search engine will yield fewer search results and rank them based on their relevancy to older Web users.You can see some of the most popular search terms used on the website here. Cranky is made by the same company that started the Eons social network for the 50+ crowd.
Eons was started by Jeff Taylor, the founder and former chairman of online job site Monster.com, which is owned by Monster Worldwide.
Taylor said in a written statement that the company teamed up with online consumer research firm Compete to find the 5000 most popular Web sites among a group of 500,000 Web users aged 45 and older and rated each site in order to create Cranky.com.
According to the Cranky.com Web site, the top requested searches for Web users over the age of 50 last year show some similarities to the most popular searches on sites like Google and Yahoo - searches about blogs and making new friends were among the top ten searches on Cranky.com-rated sites, for example.
But there were also several key differences between what's interesting to younger Web users and the older ones that Cranky.com is targeting. While Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were top celebrity searches on Yahoo and Google, author Stephen King was the most searched celebrity according to Cranky.com. Other popular searches on Cranky.com were for information about brain builder mental exercises and jobs after retirement.
Posted on January 17, 2007
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Yahoo Local Gets Social
Search Engine Watch reports that Yahoo is adding user generated content (UCG) to its local search tools. The feature is called Consumer Submit and it allows consumer to add notes to business listings on Yahoo Local.
Last month, Yahoo added another user-generated content feature to Local, Consumer Submit. That feature allows users to add or edit a business listing, updating contact information, store hours, or identifying businesses that are no longer open. The modifications do not change the listing permanently, but appear as notes that can be reviewed by others, who can agree or disagree and build a consensus on the accuracy of the information.LocalMN Blog provides another explanation of Consumer Submit including a graphic showing how it works. It should help make listing on Yahoo Local more useful. Yahoo's Local blog has more information about the new feature. You can also find more blog posts about the new feature here, here, here and here.
User-generated content has always been at the core of some other local search products, as well as social networking/directory hybrids such as InsiderPages, Judysbook and Yelp. IAC's Citysearch has long featured ratings and reviews, and added more social search features last year. That content is now featured more prominently in Ask.com's search results and in its new AskCity local search product.
Yahoo views these features as "social utilities" that harness the always-present offline word-of-mouth that friends and neighbors use to find a contractor, pick a restaurant, or choose a mechanic, Miller said.
Posted on January 11, 2007
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LinkedIn Launches Answer Service for Business Advice
LinkedIn has launched a new answer service called LinkedIn Answers. The service will not compete directly with the leading answering services like Yahoo Answers. Instead the service will focus on the business niche and offer business advice from experts. Pronet Advertising is impressed with LinkedIn's new service.
LinkedIn has launched its new Answers service, which allows LinkedIn users to both ask questions and answer them. The service is very similar to Yahoo Answers except for the fact that it only covers a small niche whereas Yahoo Answers covers topics for anything. This actually gives them an advantage because they aren't in competition with other questions & answers sites.Social Degree is also impressed and calls LinkedIn Answers extremely useful. More discussion can be found at 606tech, WebConnoissuer and AppScout.
I am really impressed with LinkedIn Answers and think the service is a great fit for their site and is also beneficial to the LinkedIn community. Even though Google recently threw in the towel for its answers service I really think LinkedIn Answers is going to be hot, it seems to really make sense
Posted on January 8, 2007
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Polar Rose Combines Image Search and Facial Recognition
A website called PolarRose.com is planning to launch an image search website that combines people's photographs with "face recognition algorithms." This may make it easy to search for a person's name and have the search engine return a bunch of photographs containing that person. Search Engine Watch blogs that the site will also rely on the help of its users to tag names on people.
Using what Tim O'Reilly calls 'bionic software', "Polar Rose relies on a combination of our unique face recognition algorithms and the collective intelligence of our users.Obviously, there are some major privacy concerns here for people who do not want to be found or do not want all their photographs discovered. There could also be concerns if the search engine were to incorrectly label a photograph as being person X when it fact it was not person X. There are also concerns that a search engine like PolarRose.com could one day be expaned and used to identify people using images and video from various public cameras. Polar Rose also offers a blog that will keep you informed of the latest developments with the innovate image search tool.
The face recognition technology used was originally developed by CTO Jan Erik Solem during his M.Sc and Ph.D. stints at the universities of Lund and Malmö in southern Sweden. It's unique in that we are able to extract 3D information from regular 2D images, an approach that radically improves the short-comings of existing face recognition approaches.
However, we don't and can't rely exclusively on face recognition, but also harness the collective intelligence of our users who help train our software and tag names on people we haven't seen before" according to their website.
Posted on January 4, 2007
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Top Search Stories of 2006
10e20 has a post listing the 101 top search-related web stories of 2006. On the list are obscure stories like Ms. Dewey, Yahoo's Bix.com acquisition and the KinderStart Google lawsuit. The big stories are there as well including Yahoo's video site launch, the Wikipedia founder's search engine plans, Netscape's Digg competitor, AOL's data leak, Widgets and Yahoo reorganization. The #1 story on the list is hard to argue with -- it's the Google YouTube acquisition.Posted on January 2, 2007
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