Tag Archives | Search Engines

Goodbye, AltaVista. I Loved You Once, But I'm Happy to See You Die

If you were going to compose a list of the ten greatest technology products ever, it would be a plausible contender. If you were compiling a list of the ten greatest Web services and didn’t include it, I’d tell you your list was wrong.

It’s AltaVista–the first great search engine. Probably still the second greatest one ever, after you know who. And as Liz Gannes of All Things Digital is reporting, it’s apparently going away due to downsizing at its current owner, Yahoo. (Other victims of Yahoo’s death panel include the once-great Delicious and AllTheWeb, the bland Digg clone Yahoo Buzz, the could-have-been-neat MyBlogLog, and stuff I can’t identify, such as Yahoo Picks.)

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The Tech That Got People Talking on Twitter in 2010

Topsy is a search engine whose results are determined the pages people are talking about and linking to on Twitter. The more a page gets mentioned–especially by influential Twitter users–the higher it’s likely to show up in Topsy’s results. It’s an interesting approach that works well for stuff that people are chattering about at the moment (strangely enough, the results for “chrome os” are meatier than the ones for “rutherford b. hayes.”) It can also do things like show you a list of Twitter users who are oft-retweeted on a given topic (such as HDTV or cars).

The site is built around a giant database of Tweets that have been analyzed and indexed, so the Topsy folks know a lot about the terms that show up most frequently on Twitter. I asked them to compile a report for me on twenty tech terms and how often they were referenced. It’s not a perfect mirror of the Twitter zeitgeist–Topsy only pays attention to Tweets that contain links and ones which have been retweeted, and it finds keywords even if they’re in a URL rather than the meat of the Tweet–but it’s still a useful reality check.

Here it is…

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Ask.com Lives!

In my new Technologizer column for TIME.com, I write about Google alternatives, including Bing and Blekko. I also say I’m sorry there aren’t more of them: Among both big longtime Google rivals and startups, there seems to be a widespread assumption that Google has the search-engine market locked up and investing in core search-engine technology is therefore pointless.

One of those big longtime Google rivals is Ask.com, which announced last week that it’s going to cease work on its own search engine, use one provided by an unnamed third party, and focus on its Q&A service. Yesterday, I met up with Ask CEO Doug Leeds here at the Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco, and we talked a bit about the company’s change in focus.

Leeds, first of all, said that he was sorry that it didn’t make sense for Ask to continue to build its own search engine from scratch. He pointed out, accurately, that Ask had a history of doing inventive stuff that later showed up in in its larger competitors. (Parts of this 2007 Ask redesign look like a blueprint for Google and Bing in 2010.) He said that made it tough for a smaller site such as Ask to compete based on pure innovation, and factored into the company’s decision to outsource search.

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Ask Not…

Ask.com–the search engine forever best known as the search engine formerly known as Ask Jeeves–is getting out of the search engine business and focusing on its recently-introduced Q&A service. I like competition–especially competition in product categories dominated by one massive player–so I’m sorry to hear it. But I’m not surprised. Basically, Ask never seemed to know what it was, and if it didn’t, how could its users?

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Blekko, an Interesting First Draft of a New Way to Search the Web

Blekko, a new search engine, opened up to the public today in beta form. Um, a new search engine as in something that intends to compete with Google, the Web’s most deeply-entrenched service? Yup. Unlike certain other past entrants, though, this one’s ambitions–to get at least a sliver of the search business, not to crush Google–aren’t wildly implausible. And even though it could stand more refinement–I found some of its results impressive but others downright disappointing–it brings a new and potentially powerful idea to the table.

That new idea is the slashtag, a keyword you append to the end of a search query to limit results to a predefined list of sites. Many of Blekko’s slashtags Slashtags help you search authoritative sites on a given topic, such as American history. Others are meant to skew results in a particular direction–for example, glenn beck /liberal, glenn beck /conservative, and glenn beck/humor get you radically different results.

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Introspectr Indexes all of your Web Activity

Social networks threw the order of the inbox into disarray. Now, a start-up is seeking to encapsulate every interaction–regardless of where it occurs–into a unified search engine.

A private beta of Introspectr launched last Wednesday following its demo at NYC Tech Meetup that Tuesday night. I was there, and liked what I saw.

Introspectr indexes your Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. It also pulls in content from external URLs such as Bit.ly links embedded in Tweets.

Co-founder Simon Murtha-Smith demonstrated finding a lost apple crisp recipe. The recipe was not named; it was simply referred to as “AC” in a message, followed by a URL. Introspectr still managed to locate the recipe.

The idea is not exactly new, but something like Introspectr could become a necessity for those of us who have an active social life. Gmail solved the e-mail search problem, but e-mail only captures a fragment of today’s conversations.

Google’s Buzz was an attempt to pull social networking into Gmail, but from my perspective it was an oddball addition that didn’t fit. Introspectr is what Google’s inbox should behave like today. It’s simple, and it works.

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Bing Gets Facebook-ized

I’m at an event at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus, where a bunch of Microsoft and Facebook executives (including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg) just finished showing some new Bing features that should start rolling out shortly. The two companies (which first established a partnership four years ago) are working together to integrate stuff Facebook knows about you and your friends into Bing search results, using Facebook’s Instant Personalization feature.

Mostly, what Bing is doing is looking at which Facebook Like buttons your buddies have clicked around the Web, then inserting a module into search results that spotlights pages they’ve given a thumbs-up. We saw examples involving searches relating to cars, San Francisco steakhouses, and the movie Waiting for Superman.

When you search for a person, Bing will also use your Facebook friendships to try and return relevant results–the example we saw involved a search for “Brian Lee” that returned a module with Brian Lees who were friends of the user’s friends.

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Yahoo’s “Accordion” Interface

Yahoo has rolled out some search improvements, including an “Accordion” box at the top of some search results that groups relevant items into sections such as Stories, Images, Videos, and Tweets. Not bad! I don’t, however, understand why the first results in the Accordion box are “Latest on:” links with only the vaguest association to the thing you searched for–I got the same list of breaking search terms for anyone who was in the news (such as Barack Obama and Sarah Palin), and the same list of musicians for any pop artist from the past sixty years…

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Google’s Page Previews Are What’s Great About the Search Wars

Boy, am I glad the ridiculousness of smartphone patent wars hasn’t carried over to web search, because Google’s testing of full page previews illustrates everything that’s great about stealing another company’s ideas.

Some Google users are spotting full page previews today, according to Patrick Altoft at Blogstorm. This allows users to see important content from a website without clicking through to the link. Chunks of text containing search keywords are broken into orange boxes, and the entire page layout is visible from within Google search.

Clearly, Google ripped this feature from Bing, where page previews have been part of search since day one. So what? Bing does it differently, with simple, unobtrusive preview boxes that only draw out a few lines of text and other important details. Sometimes the imitation is better than the original, and sometimes it’s worse, but Google’s and Bing’s desire to differentiate themselves is always reflected in the product.

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