New People Search Called Spock in Development

Spock, a start-up that wants to make it easier to find personal information about people on the web, has launched its private beta.

Type in a name, and Spock says it can serve up a picture, address, occupation, interests and other information. Conversely, you can type in an occupation and location ("Rodeo Clown, Lubbock") and it will spit up people that fit that category.

Here’s an example of how it works: If you type in "actress," Spock returns results like Google — with listings down a page. In this case, the first entry is Felicity Huffman, who Spock’s engine finds as the most relevant for "actress." (Now, if you type in “actress” into Google, you'll see why Spock has a chance; there are few actresses in the results, except for the annoying site ActressArchives at the top). Moreover, as both Spock and LinkedIn make their profiles more popular, these will rank higher in Google’s results anyway.

Continuing with our "actress" example, you first get a photo of Huffman, but you also get a bunch of tags underneath telling you how she is relevant. For example, there's tag for "Oscar nominee for best actress," and "Desperate Housewives," for which she is well known. There's a "Wikipedia" tag. If you click on these tags, Spock will take you its relevant results for that tag. This gives users a way of searching for information related to the Huffman.

The tag font size gets smaller if Spock's engine detects the tag isn't relevant for the person. So if users create a "sexy" tag for Huffman, the tag may get larger or smaller, depending on how many people agree. Spock gives users an option of clicking on the tag and selecting "yes" or "no." If they select no, Spock factors this into its database. Then, if you type in "sexy actress," Huffman will have fallen slightly in the ranking. Spock has built ways to keep people from gaming the system. If you want to add tags, for example, you have register - one way for Spock to monitor usage.

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Ask.com to Power Lycos

Ask.com will provide Web search, image search, and zoom search for the Lycos Network in a new deal between the two companies. Search Engine Watch has the press release which lists what Ask.com is providing for Lycos.

Web Search: Delivers highly relevant search results through its ExpertRank proprietary algorithmic search technology, which ranks results based on popularity within topic communities on the Web, rather than mere link popularity.

Image Search: Combines Ask.com's proprietary index of pictures with ExpertRank and patent-pending image search technologies to deliver dramatically improved relevance and quality of search results. Ask.com Image Search has been touted by some as best of class for searching the Image Web.

Zoom Related Search: Offers conceptually-related suggestions to narrow or expand a search query. Zoom related search is placed on the right side of the search results page where most search engines place advertisements. No other search engine has the ability to offer conceptually-related suggestions.

Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL) Search Advertising: Provides highly relevant keyword-targeted, pay-per-click advertising. Advertisers bid for placement through Ask.com’s automated open-auction system that also allows marketers to manage and optimize campaigns on Ask.com and its publisher network. ASL sources more than 5 billion queries each month, and supports over 10,000 advertisers bidding on more than 10 million keywords. About Ask.com

Ask.com will power Lycos.com's web and image search technology and provide some pay-per-click advertising. Ask.com is a great search engine and one of the most underrated.

Posted on November 15, 2006
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President Bush Uses "The Google"

President Bush said he uses "the Google" in a recent interview on CNBC. Think Progress has a video and a transcript of the President's exact words.

HOST: I'm curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google?

BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps. It's very interesting to see - I've forgot the name of the program - but you get the satellite, and you can - like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.

This Bushism is going to be as popular as his comment during the 2004 debates about "The Internets."

Posted on October 27, 2006
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Searchbots Return

Searchbots has returned after a three year absence. When the site was active 30,000 search bots were created.

Searchbots was originally launched in 1999 by Morse Media as a way of showcasing Macromedia's Flash Generator and over 30,000 personalised Searchbots were built. The project proved to be unsustainable and has been under redevelopment for the last three years as a research project.

The website says that in May that the "new Searchbots prototype was launched today at the Webstock Conference in Wellington, New Zealand. The website is still under development but you can build your own Searchbot and do a colour or tag search." It is cool that the personal searchbots have returned.

Posted on October 13, 2006
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Secretive Search Engine to Take on Google

VentureBeat has a article about Powerset, a search company currently operating in stealth mode. Powerset is working on what it calls "natural language" search.

Powerset is trying to solve the natural language problem, by making its core engine understand concepts of time, place, sentiment and other intent. But Pell and Newcomb stop short of going into the details of their computational linguistics approach, saying it is sensitive. They are also giving no dates about when it will be released.

They insist, however, that it is a radical improvement. So when Craig Silverstein, first employee of Google said it will take many years to get a computer to a point to understand exactly what people are searching for, Powerset thinks differently: "It is not a long way away," says Pell. "This is not a change of some technology out on the periphery," adds Newcomb, "we're changing the core of the engine."

He says such a transformation hasn't happened in eight years, since Google invented "page rank," a concept that ranks a page higher in relevance depending on how many people are linking to it. So while Google has bought companies like Applied Semantics to help find "themes" on web pages, Newcomb shakes his head, and says Powerset wants to do much more. "We're switching the core out," he says, adding that when you do that, you’re also going to fundamentally change the image, video, blog and all other searches that Google is doing. Google may be caught in an "innovators dilemma," co-founder Steve Newcomb says, because it can't turn on dime.

Cofounder Barney Pell has a logn post about Powerset and natural language search. He says 5 to 10 years from now we will look back and say, "remember when we used to search using keywords?"

Posted on October 5, 2006
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Amazon Drop Features From A9.com

The Associated Press reports that Amazon has dropped features from A9.com including its street-level yellow pages feature.

Amazon.com Inc.'s A9 search engine has dropped some of its most widely touted features, including the ability to remember everything a user has ever searched for and a service that showed detailed, street-level images of major cities.

The Internet retailer removed the functions, along with several others, late Friday. Amazon.com spokesman Drew Herdener said the company is "shifting its priorities to areas where it can provide the greatest benefit for customers."

A9 had put considerable effort into taking detailed, street-level photos of 20 U.S. cities, which people could use to map directions and find businesses. Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. also have invested heavily in such photographic search technologies.

Amazon.com has switched the main provider of its A9.com search results from Google to Microsoft's Live.com search engine. Amazon is also using IceRocket.com for blog search as well as other third party searches like Flickr and Wikipedia.

Posted on October 3, 2006
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Google Has the Most Dead Pages

Google is the leader is dead and old pages according to a study cited by Google Operating System.

Ziv Bar-Yossef, from Google, wrote a paper about sampling random pages from a search engine's index using queries. He explains some of the technical details in this video, including the utility of sampling random pages: comparing search engines, estimating the amount of spam, of fresh results etc.

He applied the results from his paper and compared Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. Here are three charts that show a comparison of the index size, how many dead pages are in each search engine and how fresh the results are. The charts are only an estimation, and they have a bias of around 10%. As you can see, Google doesn't do very well.

Ziv Bar-Yossef found that about 2% of Google's pages were dead pages compared to less than 1% for MSN and Yahoo. Sometimes dead pages can contain useful information -- such as the cached pages of a site that has been removed -- so it isn't always a bad thing to store dead pages. (via Search Engine Watch)

Posted on September 25, 2006
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Ask.com Rolls Out Emoticon Search

Ask.com blogs that they will now return an explanation for emotion searches like :) and :D. They will also help readers searching for LOL and ROFL.

For a long time people have wanted the ability to search for terms and phrases on the web using non-letter (A-Z) characters. Put another way, searching using non-alphanumeric characters.

Well the time has come here at Ask.com and we've started to roll-out some what we hope are useful and practical examples.

We now offer a growing list of emoticons (aka smileys) that can be found by simply typing the smiley into the search box. Look for the definition in a Smart Answer box at the top of web results page.

Here are some examples. (Note: We hope our readers already know the meanings of these examples).

Accoona Search Engine Debuts

AI algorithms analyze results and rank search results according to relevance to each specific user. Information is directly relevant to the search terms.

"Accoona is modeled after the human brain, it's designed to think with you and for you," said Eckhard Pfeiffer, Accoona chairman and former Compaq president and CEO. "The next phase of the Internet is about finding, not searching. It's all about context."

***

"Today is either the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning," Pfeiffer noted, quoting Winston Churchill. "Today we are making history."

With Wednesday's launch, Americans join millions of consumers in China that are already using their own version of the search tool. Accoona has secured an agreement with China Daily Information Company as the "preferred search engine portal across China for the next 20 years on an exclusive basis." China Daily was established in 1981 as the only national English-language newspaper distributed in China, according to its Web site.