search Archive

Guhmshoo put together a cartoon that I thought was interesting. The cartoon suggests that while we are celebrating our independence here in the U.S., worldwide we are all celebrating our dependence on Google.

James Thomas discussed his life without Google – could you do it?

Guhmshoo also recently revealed who he is and why he picked an alias to use when posting his cartoons.

Happy 4th of July to everyone in the U.S.!

It seems search engines are all the rage these days with a variety of launches over the past couple of months. Today Valley-based Surf Canyon and Ukraine-based Search Cloudlet have combined their technologies to create a new search engine.

Both companies previously offered browser plugins. We first reviewed Surf Canyon late last year and CEO Mark Cramer explained how the service works. Cramer explained how the application works — basically you enter a search query on Google or Yahoo as you always do. You select a search result and go to that page. If that page isn’t what you were looking for, when you come back to the search result, Surf Canyon looks at results 11-1000 and then recommends other results similar to the one you clicked on. It ignores results you skipped over because it recognizes you weren’t interested in those results.

We reviewed Search Cloudlet also late last year and the service provides a way to refine a search query by clicking on words in tag clouds.

The new search engine uses the technology from both companies to help searchers refine their queries to find exactly what they are looking for. Another similar service is offered by Russian-based Quintura.

Update: AltSearchEngines and Webware have additional coverage.

Last week was all about Bing and Wave – both products the respective companies believe will change something about what we do online. Master search engine journalist Danny Sullivan has an indepth review of Bing which is worth reading (along with his partners comparison review).

In the ”coming soon” video, Microsoft classifies Bing as a “decision engine”. The video makes it seem like a search engine.

Whether you classify Bing as a decision engine or a search engine, whether you compare Bing to Google or any other engine, I have one question for Microsoft….

WHY NOT USE LIVE.COM?

Something tells me that Microsoft hired an expensive agency which eventually (after large payments) came up with the name Bing. I’ve sat through hundreds of these type of presentations over my career and have found it funny how many times the agency misses what’s right in front of them. Now maybe the Bing name was developed in-house. Frankly it really doesn’t matter where Bing came from (note, when I hear bing, I think of the bing-bong chime on the subway when the doors close).

Live is nearly a perfect name. All of the social media techies are in love with “real-time” and Google and other engines have talked about wanting to add more real-time activities into their results. Microsoft could have worked towards branding Live as THE real-time results/decision/search engine. Real-time = Live. Everything inside of Bing could have been included along with the real-time results.

Will Bing be the next Google or the next Cuil? Who knows at this point but what I do know is that had they used the Live name for the brand, they would have been further down the better path.

Perhaps in future ads and videos we will learn what the Bing name actually means and why it was chosen for this new brand.

Earlier this month CenterNetworks was converted from Drupal to WordPress. Part of the conversion resulted in several of the CN sites getting hit with an exploit. It appears that one of the CN sites might have actually been hit earlier and I just never noticed it and only upon CN getting hit did I realize this other site was also hit.

This other site apparently lost most of its “Google Juice” which resulted in a major reduction in organic search site traffic. Here’s a graph of the before, during and after.

At the lowest point, nearly 70% of Google-referral traffic to the site in question was lost. As you can see from the chart above, slowly the Google Juice has been restored and we are back to normal traffic today. Phew, at least now I can get the investors off my back.

What did I learn from this experience? Google indexes sites very quickly but it seems to take about two weeks for the Google search crawlers to update an entire site. From what I can tell, there’s no real way to tell Google that a site was infected and that it is now clean of bad links. There is a re-inclusion request form but I’ve never received any feedback when I have submitted that form in the past so no idea if it actually worked. More importantly, the experience made me realize just how much Google controls how this site does monetarily each and every day.

Earlier this year Ask.com signed a deal with NASCAR racing to be the “official search partner” for the racing network. It sure seems like these days the “official” notation just means whoever will pay the most. Danny Sullivan has a good recap of the NASCAR search deal.

This weekend I noticed that Ask.com is now partnering with TNA wrestling.  You can see a screenshot of the promo below. Basically the announcer mentioned a trivia question and said you could go to Ask.com and after entering the full question, you will be provided with the correct answer. The concept has some potential although I think it will work better for NASCAR than TNA.

With the NASCAR deal, Ask.com controls the search on the nascar.com website. The official TNA website has a search engine in the middle of the page however it takes you to a site called SwagBucks with a search that is powered by Google and Ask. Even more interesting, the search results don’t seem to match the query very well. For example, a search for one of their current roster of wrestlers, Scott Steiner, brings me to a generic results page with not one result from the TNA website.

Perhaps the new Ask Jeeves character needs a DDT or a Hulkster legdrop to get his mind right about how site search results should work. 

Former Techcrunch editor Ouriel Ohayon is reporting via The Globes that social search Delver has been acquired by Sears. Yes, the powertools and "sponsored conversations" company Sears. The acquisition price for the Israeli-based startup was not disclosed. Ouriel notes that the price is probably not that high as the company was running out of cash.

Delver raised $4 million in a Series A round. About a month ago the company announced that they would either sell or close the company as they were unable to raise another round of funding the tune of $6-8 million.

The Globes notes, "Delver co-founder and CEO Liad Agmon will move to the US and become a VP at Sears. Delver’s employees will continue to work in Israel and the company will operate as a Sears’ development center."

In case you are seeking employment in the product management field, q&a service Mahalo is hiring. Check out the full job description on Craigslist. It’s important to know that you must be "THE BEST" to apply for this position. Some other important notes from the posting:

• you will work hard
• it’s "life-changing"
• it’s an "incredible" opportunity
• you must be ready everyday to "kill it" – yes, based on twitter messages, it does mean everyday
• you will work hard

It’s got to be tough around Mahalo these days… what’s happened lately you ask?

• they shut down their greenhouse
• in the new upcoming greenhouse, many of the tasks will be moved to Manila  or to the buck-a-post answers system
• Andy Beal claimed that Mahalo is involved in a "pagerank funneling link scheme"
• Leah D’Emilio – host of the very popular Mahalo Daily video show quit this week – the show will move to a weekly format to become profitable
• Apparently while they only want "the best" – they did hire a felon. Apparently Jason’s HR department forgot to do a quick Google check on their employee.

My questions about the felonious hire are…

• Once the Mahalo executives found out about this situation, did they share the news with the rest of the employees?
• What about the Mahalo team in Manila – have they been checked?
• I think there’s a difference between giving a person a second chance after they have served their time and keeping a person who has yet to be sentenced on the payroll
• While Jason plays down the security fears some of Mahalo’s users might have, they are now accepting money from users on Answers. While I am guessing the number of people who have deposited their own money is less than 10, I think those people are due some answers.
• Rafe at CNET asks similar questions about trust with regards to Mahalo going forward and Rafe also wonders if we should trust any Web service that has a convicted hacker on the payroll

Let’s hope next week is a better one for Mahalo!