Jookster mashes up web archiving, social networking, and ranked searching to provide a new service that I think has some interesting things going with it. After signing up for a Jookster profile and installing the Firefox tool-bar, users have access to personalized searches and instant web archiving. Clicking on the Jook This button in the tool-bar instantly archives a copy of the page you are visiting and indexes it for search. You can go back at your convenience and search through all the pages you have jooked. The cool thing about Jookster however is not the fact that it can archive and index content, Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 has been doing this for ages. The cool aspect of Jookster is the social aspect. Adding buddies with similar interests expands your search results to include things jooked by them, and their buddies, and their buddies buddies, etc. You can specify how many degrees of separation you want to search. The search results are ranked by how many degrees the person who jooked a page is away from you. This feature brings in a concept that has been much talked about at the Supernova conference this week; the fact that outside of the web, we use trusted contacts so look for information, and judge the quality information based on the what you think of your friends. Jookster brings this idea to the web, and I think it could be the start of something big. Imaging searching for information on the ecosystem of the amazon rain forest and being able to see that a biologist you know had jooked a result; wouldn't that immediately reassure you that the information there would be good stuff?
I think Jookster is a great idea, and even if it turns out that it is one of the many startups that will go belly up in this boom, I'm confident that the underlying ideas it embraces will be something that we are using for years to come.
PR 2.0 firm Edelman Inc. has announced that it will fund the creation of localized versions of Technorati in German, Korean, Italian, French and Chinese. This is good news if for no other reason than that it will make one of the most functional blog search engines more usable to non-native-english speakers and others. It's a sign of respect, it seems, for the global community that is the blogosphere. There's some Walmart (Edelman client) money put to good use. This really may put Technorati over the edge in terms of blog search dominance. If they can pull it off this will mean huge page views and advertising revenues.
I've been eagerly awaiting the arrival of Sphere.com for some time now and the first
public version doesn't disappoint. It's a new blog search
engine that uses profiles, highlighted blogs and some interesting
algorithms to make searching for blogs a changed experience.
There are downsides, but more on that in a minute.
Good support for RSS, results that look useful, multimedia options,
AJAX, date and relevance variables. The downsides are that
there doesn't appear to be a FireFox plug-in yet, no support for
tagging or other user applied metadata and a widget that only works
with TypePad. That it's not based entirely on inbound links
and doesn't support tags means that the algorithm really takes a
different approach.
For those concerned about Technorati getting blocked in China, I just recieved an email from the editor of China Web2.0 Review, Tangos Chan, to let me know it is now accesible. Here's his take on the situation.
Stephen Baker over at BlogSpotting writes a short post about vertical search as he watches a Vivisimo presentation on
the topic. Two examples provided by the speaker are firstgov.gov and a Ben Franklin vertical search page on Clusty (Ben Franklin?). It makes me wonder
- is vertical search really a viable milieu? Baker titles his post "Could
Vertical Search Supplant SEO?" The only answer to that seems like a big No - general search and SEO are
just so simple for users.
Conceptually it sounds great, but I don't know of too many consumer facing
vertical search engines worth using. Do readers here use vertical (topic specific) search engines?
Government documents might make sense. Ok, job and classified search, maybe medical. I like GovTrack.us. Does blog search count as vertical search? Does looking at
intersecting tags in del.icio.us count? Local search? Perhaps my interests are just too narrow, but I have a hard
time getting excited about this field relative to it's impact in the abstract. General web and blog search seem
powerful enough that a good query finds me what I need. Some one please turn me on to some exciting vertical search
options.
Search
engines are a rich, complicated and important part of the world these days. That's an understatement. Danny
Sullivan is widely regarded as one of the leading experts in the field. Today marks 10 years since he began
writing on the subject, and he's got a good long overview posted at SearchEngineWatch.com- with a nod to the future.
It's industry history, and well worth checking out.
Have you seen the magnifying
glass in Clusty search results? There are other systems too, I know, that
provide relatively quick preview windows for your search results. Cooliris is a new Firefox plug-in that pops up
a preview window pretty quickly when you hover over Google search results. I think I like it. The company
says their "sights are set on ebay, myspace, technocrati, pubmed, yahoo, msn and many more!" I've just
begun playing with this one, but it looks like there's a fair amount to it- more functionality than you might
think. Thanks to, where else: eHub.
Interesting write up over at the NY Times today on how news media
is getting into the SEO game - writing headlines with spiders and bots in mind instead of just for
humans. The question of whether SEO will continue to influence journalistic writing further down the page is
poised as a key issue.
There appears to be little thought given here to metadata and microformats,
though - which could help optimize news under the covers so that human readers don't have to suffer the consequences
quite so much. That seems especially true if human effort required could be mitigated through automation.
Another gem from eHub today, Keotag is
a beautiful, multi-functional search engine that finds items tagged with your search term in 14 different tagging
systems (Technorati, del.icio.us, shadows, 43 things, etc.). Search results are returned quickly and displayed
with a very nice AJAX interface. There isn't support for Flickr or other photosharing apps, nor for video apps
that support tagging, but it is so smooth and fast that I'll be probably be using this instead of TagCentral from now on.
See also the tag creation function for your
blog posts. Now if only they'd turn this into a bookmarklet or blummy plug-in.
Systems like this are notoriously fly-by-night, but this one has AJAX, pastel colors and rounded corners.
So it's gotta be for real, right?
Wow, pretty sweet — Yahoo is integrating blog
search with their news search, as well as adding Flickr photos and My Web 2.0 results into the mix. This brings together user-created
and mainstream media in a way that's unprecedented, totally beating Google to the punch on this one as well as
leveraging the goodness of both Flickr and My Web 2.0. From the announcement, we should expecting yet further
integration of community created content (podcasts, e.g.) in the future.
The index only includes a subset of the larger blogosphere (those that are included in the My Yahoo feed directory), but will grow to ideally
include everything from the blo.gs ping stream. The interface doesn't quite put blogs on equal footing visually —
they're off in a sidebar while the regular news search results are in the main pane — but I actually sort of like
the way this is done. It's not going to alienate mainstream users who want to stick with their traditional MSM sources,
but will provide a still visible alternative. Social software nerds (raising hand), bloggers, and others already kicking
back with their second (or fifth…) cocktail in the cluetrain dining car can just click on through to the
interface that shows blog search results in the main pane and Flickr results in the sidebar at right (here's an example search on Web 2.0).
I dig it. For once, I only have one small request — I want a way to make the blog news search interface my
default for news search, so I don't have to click through each time (with option to click through the the mainstream
search results).
Via Kevin Burton via Niall Kennedy: you can now do Technorati searches on
multiple tags using the Boolean "or," such that a search on "folksonomy or ethnoclassification" (has the latter term officially
died? There are precisely zero posts with this Technorati tag) will return you all blog posts with either tag. This
takes care of some of the ambivalence problems in tagging, but I'm going to echo the sentiments of Tech Crunch and say that the Boolean "and" operator would also be
highly useful for generating uber-relevant search results.
Jookster mashes up web archiving, social networking, and ranked searching to provide a new service that I think has some interesting things going with it. After signing up for a Jookster profile and installing the Firefox tool-bar, users have access to personalized searches and instant web archiving. Clicking on the Jook This button in the tool-bar instantly archives a copy of the page you are visiting and indexes it for search. You can go back at your convenience and search through all the pages you have jooked. The cool thing about Jookster however is not the fact that it can archive and index content, Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 has been doing this for ages. The cool aspect of Jookster is the social aspect. Adding buddies with similar interests expands your search results to include things jooked by them, and their buddies, and their buddies buddies, etc. You can specify how many degrees of separation you want to search. The search results are ranked by how many degrees the person who jooked a page is away from you. This feature brings in a concept that has been much talked about at the Supernova conference this week; the fact that outside of the web, we use trusted contacts so look for information, and judge the quality information based on the what you think of your friends. Jookster brings this idea to the web, and I think it could be the start of something big. Imaging searching for information on the ecosystem of the amazon rain forest and being able to see that a biologist you know had jooked a result; wouldn't that immediately reassure you that the information there would be good stuff?
Search
engines are a rich, complicated and important part of the world these days. That's an understatement. Danny
Sullivan is widely regarded as one of the leading experts in the field. Today marks 10 years since he began
writing on the subject, and he's got a good long overview posted at 
Have you seen the magnifying
glass in 
