How do people find you?
Jeremey Zawondny charts the numbers and uncovers what appears to be a common pattern: That in terms of search referrals, most people find him using Google, followed by Yahoo, and then to a much lesser degree the other search engines, including MSN and AOL.
Interesting to see how far down the chart MSN and AOL are.
Chris Pirillo launches a very thin looking meta search tool at http://gada.be (no .com extension here).
A couple ideas are going on here. One is that the search criteria can be placed in the URL itself. For instance, to search for “Tablet PC” you’d enter the URL:
Chris has a full description here.
Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t work all that well with the TIP on a Tablet PC. Maybe someday we could get to the TIP reco logic so we could adjust this. For now, if you want to use the URL search approach, you’ll need to use the a virtual or real keyboard.
However, the other part of this service that works quite nicely is the rendering of the aggregated search results.
Go to the home page for goda.be and enter “Tablet PC” in the text field. You’ll get a nice clean page of search results from a bunch of different engines. No fuss. No clutter. I’ve gotta try gada some more.
Google 2.0 beta is now available.
New features?
* A sidebar: Vista may not have a sidebar anymore, but Google desktop does now
* Quick bar: Launch searches or application.
* New GMail searching and more.
There’s also a sidebar plug-in developer API.
I tried downloading and installing the latest Google Desktop on my M200, but it complained saying that Google desktop was “partially incompatible” with my EVDO installation. The suggested solution is to uninstall and reinstall Google desktop (which I don’t have) as well as the EVDO software. Weird. Oh, well. I’ll try it on another machine when I get a chance.
I’ve been playing with Google’s new “blank” searches. Quite impressive.
Here’s the new feature in a nutshell:
“instead of asking [who invented the parachute?], you can enter the query [the parachute was invented by *]. (The blank, or wildcard, search is marked by * - an asterisk.)”
Here’s an example. Search Google for:
Robert Scoble is a *
and you’ll get back as the first hit:
“Robert Scoble is a “technical evangelist” who works for Microsoft”
Cool.
And who am I? Checking Google for:
I get back two hits with the topmost hit:
“Loren Heiny is a developer who totally get’s tablets!”
Thanks for the kind words Julie Lerman, but I’m just like a lot of enthusiastic Tablet developers. We see great potential in the platform and try our best to build the apps we can envision.
OK, what about less well-known people, where there are tons of mentions on the Internet. Give it a try. Search Google for:
George Bush is a *
Ooops. I’ll skip that one. 
Checking facts is made easier by the new query support too:
* is the capital of Arkansas
Correctly, Google replies Little Rock. Cool.
Now what about finding a recommedation of a product? For instance, how might you search for the best Tablet PC, Google-style? Here’s one query:
* is the best Tablet PC
The answer according to CNet (April 2004) is a Motion Tablet.
OK. Here’s a harder one:
* is the best *
Sure enough not much interesting is returned. The query is too general.
The trick is to think in terms of how a content author would have phrased the answer you are looking for. For instance, you don’t ask “How many quarts are in a gallon?” Instead, you query Google for “There are * quarts in a gallon.” Typically, this means you should think in terms of declarative statements rather than questions.
Next up Google can try to rephrase questions as declarative statements with blanks and perform the searches. For instance, Google could try to translate “What does Robert Scoble do?” or “Who is Robert Scoble?” to “Robert Scoble is *” or with less success “Robert Scoble does *”. This probably isn’t all that easy, but what’s so smart about Google’s blank approach is that it’s one step along the path to solving the bigger challenge of making search easier. True, you can learn a lot from a top down approach that starts with the question-based queries, but I like this results-oriented approach better. My guess is it’ll lead to better results quality faster. Just a guess though.
Here’s what other people on the Net think Google should do:
Rumors are flying that Technorati is to be sold next week. [via Scoble]
Technorati is the search engine I use the most for scanning through blogs. It has some rough edges, but so far I find it the most useful.
The other thing I admire about Technorati is that it is improving. The searches are getting faster, the breadth wider, and the search quality….well, somewhat better. My big concern is that it appears to be falling victim to spammers more and more. I hope they can fix this.
Responding to Microsoft’s new Virtual Earth beta in a SF Chronical article, Gary Price of SearchEngineWatch.com, says of the new service:
“…the focus on aerial imagery is more of a case of companies trying to impress users with gee-whiz technology than anything else…I don’t think that seeing an image from the air is going to make me go to a store and buy something.”
Instead Gary wants to see more data appear as you scroll through a map.
OK, sure more geo-tagged information would be nice, but otherwise I couldn’t disagree more strongly.
Yes, checking imagery can impact where or when I might buy something. I do this already. When planning out my TechEd trip a couple months back–where did I go to figure out which hotel I wanted to stay at? maps.Google.com–with the aerial imagery enabled. It made a big difference in my choice. Yes, it would have been nice if I could hover over a hotel to see how much a room is and maybe have shaded red regions where hotels were sold out over a given date range, but I wanted to feel good about where I was going to stay. I wanted to know if there was a restaurant near by–or was the hotel isoltated. Did the area look rundown? I’ve already done the same thing in arranging my trip to PDC 05.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I want more. Yeah, better resolution would be nice, but I also want real time projections of highway video overlayed on the maps. Yes, I want to see what the traffic is like in the same map. I even would like to see similar real-time video projections of mall parking lots or at toll-booths or other high-congestion areas.
The state of Arizona has a terrific real-time map with road-conditions. I’d love to see the road condition tags augmented with maps.google.com or similar services. We need real-time, RSS-like feeds that people can merge with the images.
How else might I use aerial imagery to determine which store I will go to? How easy is it to park? Do I have to go to a parking garage? How much might that be–that’d be nice to see graphically in a map. Is the entrance to a store best approached from the south or the north? Is there a mass transit terminal near by that I can take? I might pick one place over another that looks closer. These are the types of things I check already.
Do I check maps.google.com whenever I want to drive to buy something? Nope. But when I’m unsure of an area I’m finding myself doing it more and more. And now with my EVDO-equipped Tablet PC, I expect this trend to continue.
Virtual Earth is a beginning. Hopefully, it won’t just be a gee-wiz toy as Gary predicts, because I see a lot of great uses for it.
Overall I like the direction. It appears that both Google and MSN are competing to provide searchers with greater visual detail and more geo-tagged information. That’s great. My only suggestion is for them to tie in real-time feeds from other sources–current store hours, wait times at the DMV, projected video feeds, and on and on. There’s plenty of room for some very useful geo-oriented views of the world.
The “Locate Me” feature in Virtual Earth is clever–it can locate your position by checking for access points at known positions. (Give it a try. It’s very cool. Requires a download.)
But I wonder, is this really that scalable of a technique? I can see it working reasonably well with access points that are fixed, however, is this a good assumption for home-owned or small business access points? What if people move? What if they upgrade their hardware? What if they carry their access point with them on a trip? Or shuttle it back and forth from work? Of course, noone says every access point needs to be added to the database. However, I still wonder if the technique will scale in location and over time.
I wonder if an EVDO version may be supported in the future. That would be interesting too.
MSN’s Virtual Earth, which went live today as a beta, looks cool. But lots of people are noticing that Virtual Earth has outdated imagery. To some degree this isn’t a big deal. After all Virtual Earth is just in beta.
However, the imagery I’m most interested in around Tempe, Arizona, for instance, looks to be 10 years old or so. Others have noticed a similar set of old images around the Apple campus [Forbes]. Even the World Trade Center towers are still in New York’s photos.
Hmmm. I already have plenty of old maps stuffed under the seat of my car. I really don’t need another.
I look forward to Virtual Earth updating their images. It looks like it could be a useful service–particularly when I’m looking for local businesses at home or while out of town.
“Locate Me” in Virtual Earth is very cool.
The tool locates your location by checking for known WiFi spots.
It is a system tray component, but looks interesting.
Hmmm…Just tried the Virtual Earth site here and downloaded the Locate Me feature. It couldn’t find me–although it did use the IP address to guess that I’m in Phoenix–which is correct. Makes sense that it couldn’t use the WiFi to locate me. I’m in a neighborood so it’s unlikely that at this time that there are any known access points in the Virual Earth database.
Oh well.
Here are some developer details for Virtual Earth.
Want to add MSN desktop search results to your app? Jonathan Hardwick finds the link that shows how. Well, it kind of shows how.
MSN launches local search today. You can check it out at:
You don’t need to worry about memorizing this odd URL though. A “Local” tab is available at http://search.msn.com.
It looks like a good first step. The aerial photos aren’t so hot–at least in the Phoenix area they are a bit blury with poor contrast and panning stutters–but the search results are reasonable.
I’ll be trying it out over the coming days. Maybe Google will still win out, but only trying it out for real will tell.
One feature I like in Google better is that I can write in an address while in the local.google.com mode and it won’t force me into a separate map mode. I can seemlessly swap back and forth between looking for a restaurant and addresses that I know.
So what could MSN provide that would make me switch? One feature I’d like to see is integrated driving and parking directions. This is particularly a big deal for me when driving into a downtown area.
Similarly, when I travel to conferences one of my first questions is how do I get from the airport and how can I use the public transportation to get from point A to point B? What shuttle buses are there? How much might a taxi ride be? There’s lots of money revolving around these types of travel issues. It could be quite lucrative if one of the search engines could help serve this market better.
Bill Gates demoed a future satellite image map service for MSN at Wall Street Journal’s D:All Things Digital conference yesterday. SearchEngineWatch has more here.
Great to see this. I’ve been using Google’s satellite images at maps.google.com more and more–passing along the tip to friends and family. It’s surprisingly handy. (Go to maps.google.com, enter an address, and then click on “Satellite” in the orange bar at the top-right of the browser page. You can pan around by clicking and dragging the satellite image. It’s surprisingly super fast.)
This past week I needed to make book a hotel for TechEd, for instance. Unfortunately, I was doing this late and the suggested hotels on the conference list were all booked up. Turns out TechEd is sold out. So using a hotel list provided by the Orlando area, I went through website after website. And when I found a hotel that looked promising I checked Google’s satellite photos to see where the hotel was in relation to the convention center and in general what the area looked like. Was it a downtown area? What did a walk to the convention center look like? Would I have to cross a busy street? A field? Did the actual hotel building look like a converted Motel 6? And so forth.
I’ve been using the satellite-enhanced maps so much, I’m almost preferring them to the vectorized maps. If I can see something–a road, a building, etc–I am more apt to believe the map is correct.
And I love the concept behind the augmented maps, such as HousingMaps where houses for sale are marked on the satellite photos. It’s so fast and easy to use.
I’ve yet to figure out how to hack the Google maps, but it would be fun to do. Hopefully MSN’s Virtual Earth effort doesn’t forget about the developer and comes up with a way to display third-party geo data on the fly too.
Some other things I’d like to see:
* More detail. Be able to zoom in further. * Real-time projection/overlay of freeway traffic cameras.
* More coverage in the US and overseas.
* More customization hooks. How about a real-time FedEx map of their truck locations? Would that make you trust their service more? Or less? House and apartment hunting will be relying upon these services more and more I bet.
* If a satellite site links to a webpage, can it automatically pick up context tagged photos that show additional photo details about a building? Think of it as RSS for satellite maps.
* What about hiking and biking trails?
* Merge road/map labels with the satellite photos.
Lots of exciting commercial and non-commercial possibilities.
First and foremost, though, the baseline has to be fast, easy to use, and loaded with data, like Google’s Keyhole satellite images.
I’m looking forward to trying MSN’s entry too. It’ll be interesting to see which service the third-party efforts align with. Will Google gain an entrenched foothold in the developer community that’ll be hard to overcome? Or will MSN be able to leverage Microsoft’s online community of friends, come up with a concise third-party story (that avoids the word “hack”), and outreaches Google in the coming year? Should be quite telling.
MSN has officially launches their desktop search application today. Interestingly, BetaNews is reporting that a corporate version of the search tool will be available later this year. Very nice.
In related news, is a tabbed browser in your IE’s future? Sounds like it.
The hiccup in Google
Here’s a recording (by Adam Herscher using his Windows Smart Phone) of a graduation speech Google co-founder Larry Page. A couple good tidbits. [via Slashdot]
Larry talks about the early days of Google, taking risks, and of allowing innovation to “start small” although at the same time pursue big ideas because you’ll find them easier to achieve in that you’ll be able to persuade other people to join the effort.
He also suggests that engineers not bother with going to business school and read business books instead. I agree partly. If you’re just going for a degree, I see his point. But if there’s something unique in the program, it may give you an opportunity to meet new people that’ll have a critical impact on your future endeavors. Business is in large part about relationships.
He also talks about Google’s efforts to be an engineering company and to be ethical–two things which I imagine are challenging to maintain when there’s lots of money being tossed around.