Incremental Blogger

My favorite place to track tech news, Memeorandum, gets a new look. Well done.

Very cool street views of a city in this preview from the Microsoft Virtual Earth team.

Currently only portions of Seattle and San Francisco are available. Yes, this is just a technology preview. It’s cool though.

Someone asked how I might use a service like this? Simple. If I’m going to visit an area that I’m unfamiliar with, it would be handy to be able to tell what the area is like. For instance, will my walk from a convention center hotel to to a local restaurant be an easy walk through an area that I’d feel comfortable walking through? At night? What does a restaurant look like from the outside? What does the parking look like for the restaurant (if I’m driving)? What does the area look like that I might be planning on meeting someone at?

I wonder when real-time video for specific intersections or points of interest is coming? Hmmm.

Robert Scoble points to a new feature in Technorati, called the “authority slider” that improves the blog search results it returns.

The authority slider definitely narrows down the search results. That’s for sure.

I doubt, though, that this feature is going to pull me back to using Technorati more often.

Problem is, search isn’t everything. In fact, with the right tools I think I can find “more” without searching.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about how I “search” less to find more.

Google’s news.google.com is a case in point. I check news.google.com all the time for an overview of what’s going on in the news. Yes, I launch many searches from news.google.com when I’m looking for specific breaking news on Tablet PCs, for instance. However, most of the time I simply pop over to the news page to see what’s going on. I’d rather not search if I don’t have to.

I use Memeorandum in a similar fashion.

In fact, at least for me Memeorandum has the most useful presentation of blog content around. What I really appreciate is that it gives me a single page view of the “top” tech conversations going on in the blogosphere.

Now Memeorandum isn’t perfect. I’d really like to see summary pages for content other than Politics or Tech. I want a Tablet PC summary page and one for Robots, for instance. Launching a specific blog search, similar to Google’s search on news.google.com would be nice too.

I’ve got my fingers crossed that someone from GYM will realize how well Memeorandum would fit into their blog “search” infrastructure. It would be an ideal companion.

Google New is out of beta.

Google News has become one of my top visited sites. It deserves the 9 out of 10 page ranking that it has.

Google News is so much more than the news.google.com home page. It’s my gateway to much of the freshest, best-quality content on the web.

When I’m searching for breaking news on the Tablet PC, for instance, I often go to news.google.com first. When I want to see a variety of angles on a story, I go to Google News. When I want to get an overview of the hot stories, I stop by the Google site.

Back before Google News started, I dreamed of a site that focused on the “new” content of the web. I wanted something different than just a snapshot of all the web. I wanted to see only the new stuff over lets say the last 30 days. Then Google News came out and I found it to be just enough of a solution to the “new” web, that I became a regular user.

I still think there’s room for a company to create a search portal that only contains new content, but for the most part Google News takes care of my needs.

I’ve learned from Google News. It pointed out to me the value of not listing everything. And limiting content to trusted sources improves the “search” experience too.

It’s also for these two reasons that I put Memeorandum at the top of my “must visit” sites too. Yes, Memeorandum is every bit as much a winner as Google News. It’s that good.

The blogosphere is abuzz over whether Yahoo has given up an search. There’s too much parsing going on here. Yahoo isn’t giving up. Yahoo is staking a claim as to where it sees the greatest growth opportunities.

A couple points here. Let’s get serious. It’s very unlikely that Yahoo is going to overtake Google in search anytime soon. Scratch that. It’s extremely unlikely. It probably wasn’t a good PR technique for CFO Susan Decker to make a statement in a negative form, but it is reality.

Nonetheless, what Yahoo and every other company can do is work towards creating the best product it can in its own unique way. Let’s assume that Yahoo will continue to improve search–as all the competitors will. But this is just one piece of the competitive landscape. In general, the essential building blocks of success are to innovate, communicate, inspire, and nurture.

And here, it appears that Yahoo has a strategy for growing its market. Their argument goes that it’s not just about searching. It’s about the social networks that bring us together. It’s about the theory that we are communicating when we search. It’s about facilitating micro and macro communities of pictures, links, knowledge, or whatever.

I have no idea if this is where the markets want to go in the future. However, it’s a reasonable strategy for growing networks of consumers as well as networks of publishers. Facilitate enough people on each end and you have an economy.

(As an aside: You have to go no further than Apple to see the value of doing something well and not being the biggest leader in a de facto market. The markets will often reward a competitor for finding and facilitating growth. Apple has done this with the micro-consumption of music.)

Is there room for search to grow? Yes. Is there more room for growth outside of search proper? It appears that Yahoo is gambling that the answer is yes. We’ll have to see who win, but it is clear that Yahoo isn’t quiting.

Lot’s of talk this morning about Alexa opening up its index. It’s part of a welcome trend to provide APIs to search engines. I’m not sure of the economics of Alexa’s offering though…at least in terms for many of us that are part of the Google Economy.

It goes something like this: build or augment a site with Alexa’s data, strap on Google ads, collect money, pay Alexa.

This relationship will work if the cost for the value gained from the Alexa data is (significantly) less than the money earned from Google.

I’m sure there are other unique approaches where the equation is different, but this is what comes to mind in terms of what I see many people doing now.

For these people, maybe reverse revenue sharing would make more sense. What about splitting the Google ad dollars? If you generate $10 from Google ads, you get $9 and Alexa gets $1.

Dave Winer’s ready to go toe-to-toe with Google Base.

I’ve been wondering though: Is there a directory of Google-base RSS feeds yet?

I was holding out hope that the recently announced improvements in Technorati would improve the search quality for the term I search for a lot: “Tablet PC“. It hasn’t.

The quality of the search results continue to degrade. There’s just way too much spam–spam from what I can see that should be easy to detect.

Robert Scoble points to this interesting search engine experiment. Put in something you are searching for, the search results for three search engines will appear (unlabelled), you pick which one you think is most relavent.

I searched for “Tablet PC” and picked the Google search results.

I probably shouldn’t have searched for “Tablet PC.” I’ve searched for it so many times on a variety of search engines that I fairly sure which results were from Google and which were from MSN. I don’t think this tainted my choice of which results were the most relavent, but it might have.

Also, the test page only lists the top three hits. I generally don’t focus on the top three. I might expect the top one to be an exact match if I’m focusing on something very specific, such as a function name, however, otherwise I tend to scan the first page of hits. I also take into account not just how good the link is, but the text excerpt with it. This is where Google has done very well and I see MSN getting better and better.

So far in the experiment, Google is ahead with Yahoo second and MSN third.

New York Times covers the Google Print debate.

I’m one of those that would like to see books searchable online. Whether Google should be doing it is another issue. For me, it’s something that the Library of Congress should be doing. We’d all benefit. But reality is that this isn’t going to happen.

Two key copyright issues are at play here: 1) displaying search results with a portion of copyrighted material being displayed and 2) scanning copyrighted material in order to convert it into a form that can be used for other purposes.

In terms of displaying copyrighted material in the search results, I imagine that a small enough portion of the text–or possibly nothing more than the title and a page number–could be displayed to settle this issue.

The second area of concern is in terms of a derivative use of the material. For existing industries the trend has been towards preventing derivative uses without the permission of the original owner. The Internet–and in particular search engines–have exploded because the derivative use issue was resolved differently and most of us agree that it’s acceptable for search engines to archive, index, and display copyrighted web content. (Although there are some that dispute this.) We’ll have to see who wins. The court’s will have to decide this one.

Thrown into all of this copyright argument is money–in particular, ad revenue. If there wasn’t so much of it going Google’s direction, I imagine most would care very little about the copyright side. I can’t blame the publishers for arguing that they should get a split, but I hope the trend goes the other way. I expect it won’t though.

No matter how it is resolved, what I’d really like to see is the discussion become more public. As a society I think we need to talk through the advantages and disadvantages of making our collective knowledge more accessible–even if some may not gain as much as they’d like. Maybe then, through the process of the discussion, we’d all decide that a searchable book repository is worthwhile. Or maybe then, the publishers would realize that if only they had all their books digitally ready right now, that they could make a mint selling search rights to Google, today.

A beta version of Google Base is now public. Bindu Reddy of Google blogs: “This beta version of Google Base is another small step toward our goal, creating an online database of easily searchable, structured information.”

The user experience isn’t all that inspiring and the current contents are pretty sparse. So far I’ve run across quite a bit of job-oriented stuff. Search for “Tablet PC” for instance. I’m not sure what I’d expect to see, but I know this isn’t it.

Aside from the underwhelming UI, there’s an “upload” feature which supports RSS formats. I guess you could upload your whole store inventory and then someone could be using local.google.com to find you and your product. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to manage the temporal nature of your data though. And there are so many businesses that have massive “virtual” inventories–and what’s going to happen here if they were all to post their complete catalogs? The Google Base could quickly turn to jibberish. There’s a big difference between products in store and orderable. Maybe there’s some automation here possible to keep the online data in sync with your actual feed items. Actually, it looks like there is a simple “expire” time associated with each item. That’s not going to scale well.

I guess the idea here it to encourage tagging of data so that Google can filter and sort through the data better. You still need a webpage to use it so it’s not like Google is going to be hosting more than snippets of your content that you provide. But again, what about timeliness of the data–at both ends. Does this help me if I’m looking for a product that’s just being released and only one or two companies actually really, really have it? Does this help me look for a car or a job where the staleness of data is a big, big problem? A salesman might want me to check and see if an item has already been sold, but I don’t want to.

Now, these issues aside. I don’t see any reason why Google shouldn’t try this. It’s beta after all. However, like a bunch of other listing services, the quality of the service is going to greatly depend on the quality of the posts. It’ll be interesting to see how this works out.

CNet: “Microsoft plans to announce a business version of its Windows Desktop Search application on Tuesday at the IT Forum in Barcelona.”

Should be interesting to see what this product is like.

There are so many places for better search capabilities to be provided at the data, document, desktop, application, and network level. Good to see that MSN (or is that Windows Live?) is stepping up to the plate now.

Maybe effortless archiving at the data, document, desktop, application, and network level will follow.

More discussion of Google Print. [Via Boing Boing]

Yes, as Robert Scoble points out search is not finished. Actually, it may never be. Technologies will change. The balance of what’s economical will tilt. And people’s fashions will fade.

But still, in my mind I keep thinking how so much more interesting it would have been if MSN had started with let’s say a time-based focus at it’s core, rather than Googlifying its search.

MSN announced yesterday their intent to build a book search feature. It’s just a press release at this point. The first pass is to index publicly available books. Makes sense. The collection will need to be much, much larger though and I only hope the publishers get their act together and work through the issues with MSN versus fighting as they are with Google.

Also in search news yesterday, Google is working on a Craigslist-like online database of “stuff” (called GoogleBase), albeit with a decidedly Google-engineered design and structure.

A question comes to mind with a “classified-ad-like-system” such as GoogleBase: Will I trust the contents more or less if it’s posted on a Google service? If GoogleBase goes the direction of Blogger, the answer won’t be good. If GoogleBase goes the direction of AdSense, it’ll probably be OK. Which is Google’s true DNA? This should be interesting to watch. It’ll probably greatly depend on the quality of some of the early Base posters.