Emad Fanous

You may have noticed that Google has changed the appearance of their site. They’ve moved their different search types to the top of the page rather than right above the text input:

Additionally, they will be using the “smart answers” a lot more where they supply you with different search results types for certain keywords (such as pictures, video, etc). They have dubbed this Universal Search…the idea being that you get all types of results in one search query. Here is an example of a darth vader search.

These changes are coinciding with Google Searchology, where a few industry insiders were invited to Google to view the new features.

A few other features include:

• A cross language search engine (coming soon) which will do some on the fly processing to match up your query in your language to web pages in other languages and show them when they are more relevant. The idea, according to Greg, is to “expand the value of the Google index and English language sites to non-English speakers.”
• Google Experimental which is a feature that exists within Google Labs. This will allow you to view various UI features they are testing (currently, they have timeline/map view, keyboard shortcuts, left hand search navigation, and right hand contextual search navigation). Hopefully, interested parties can check out all of the new features and UI changes from here in the future instead of asking a bunch of people…”hey, I think google is testing a new feature…do you see it too?” whenever they were A-B testing.
• Google’s Video Search will morph into a video meta search engine, currently only adding a few select sites into their index (like Metacafe).

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I cam across this page that shows us that Google’s search results page can be cleared out by appending “&output=googleabout” to a URL. A nice, uncluttered results page which you can use as your homepage as an alternative to the standard Google results.

Compare this pizza results to the uncluttered pizza results…and, as you continue to search, the “&output=googleabout” parameters sticks with you.

However, there’s more to it. As I started playing around with it, I noticed some of their extra data in the search results go missing. For example, if you were to search for pizza in 91101, you won’t see the Google Local results at the top. A couple of other examples:
birth dates/biographies with googleabout parameter, birth dates/biographies with the parameter
weather without parameter, weather with parameter
etc.

Using the parameter is a nice way to avoid extra sponsored links but you may end up having to click around more since you miss out on some of these quick answers.

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Both Google and Yahoo have released interesting APIs based on XML feeds and the HTTP protocol.

Under a year ago (I think), Google launched the GData API uses Atom or RSS and will read/download, update, edit, or delete the data. APIs are available for many of their products that use RSS or Atom feeds such as Google Calendar. This will allow people to create their own applications that leverage some of their products.

However, the more interesting product seems to have just arrived come from Yahoo. They launched Yahoo Pipes (I was playing with it last night but this morning they have the following message: “Our Pipes are clogged! We’ve called the plumbers!”). Hopefully they get things fixed shortly so others will be able to check it out.

Here’s what Tim O’Reilly has to say about it:

Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the “ue” this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. In short, it’s a good start on the Unix shell for mashups.

For those of you who use unix, you know that pipes (|) allow you to send the output of one command to another so you can chain lots of logic together. I like the idea a lot and it has a nice interface, much of which will have a learning curve…but not as big as Google’s since it leverages a drag and drop interface. This may mean more applications from creative people that are not as familiar with programming…which is always a good thing because it good ideas and products tend to build on existing ones.

Pretty interesting stuff. I can’t wait to see what people do with it…I also wonder if people will do things like remove ads from feeds and aggregate feeds to create their own minisites they can repurpose to create splogs or other similar sites…or if the original content creators will take any sort of action to prevent this from happening (I wonder if Yahoo uses a different user-agent which can be specified in the robots.txt file, for example).

Yahoo employee, Jeremy weighs on Yahoo Pipes in as well as Google employee Matt Cutts.

For you developers building local applications, Niall Kennedy brought my attention to a location extractor:

My favorite operator is the location extractor which analyzes an item’s text attempting to identify addresses, locations, or the URLs of popular mapping services.

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In case you’re one of the few people that hasn’t heard yet, Google has added more local results in the web search results.

LookLocal’s integration of all 3 major mapping providers is nice but will they please eliminate the popup message for Macs (or at least cookie the mac user so they don’t keep getting the same popup)!

If you stumbled along this blog and aren’t aware of local search and what it means to you, here is a primer…you probably also want to read about local search SEO.

Mapperz points out that Google Books has added mapping to their books (they plot places mentioned in a book onto a map).

Microsoft’s purchase of Vexcel is making its way into Live Local Search but the 3D rendering requires a downloaded plugin for IE 6 or 7. Boooo!

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Oops! Google briefly lost Google.de (Google Germany) when it forgot to renew its domain:

The search engine operator Google got back its German domain google.de this morning. Ownership of the domain had briefly changed hands last night. In place of Google’s search mask a website hosted by the young German provider Goneo would all of a sudden POP up when users tried to access the search engine at google.de. At the German domain registry DeNIC an investigation into how the hijacking operation was able to succeed is still underway. According to information gathered by heise online the name grab took place in a manner similar to that of a spectacular coup in 2004 during which a private individual was able to get control of eBay.de.

…

Last night at 8:30 p.m. the hosting of google.de had, according to Mr. Keilwerth, shifted to the German web hosting newcomer. When very shortly thereafter people became aware of what had happened, the company had without further ado allowed DeNIC to release the domain once again. Towards midnight however an outside KK application appears to have derailed google.de’s return to the search engine operator, causing it instead to end up in the hands of a Wiesbaden-based domain dealer. Thus it wasn’t until shortly after 9 a.m. that DeNIC was able to put an end to the domain’s odyssey. Goneo CEO Marc Keilwerth made it clear that he very much regretted what had happened and gave assurances that the company would in future carry out ownership checks of all parties filing KK applications.

A note to all you companies out there: set your domains on auto-renew, have the domain renewal email reminders go to a list of people who should actively check it, and, above all, if you are a registrar, at least set it up so you don’t lose your own domains!

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People have been using Wikipedia as a way to get high-pagerank pages linking to their sites. They used all sorts of techniques to spam the online user-created-and-maintained encyclopedia.

So now it has gotten to the point where all Wikipedia links are being marked as “nofollow.”

foo

The nofollow tag was agreed upon by the major search engines to combat comment spam in blogs about two years ago.

The mailing list message about why its being done seems to imply it may be a temporary move…take a look at the email subject:

Nofollow back on URL links on en.wikipedia.org articles for now

Emphasis is mine.

What may not be taken into consideration is that the actual code and database is available for download and used by many sites. Those links have already (and will continue to be) propogated until those other sites change/update their code and/or database.

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Andy Sack, Judy’s Book co-founder and CEO, believes Judy’s Book should have focused on a specific category, in a specific region (sort of reminds me of Openlist, formerly local-i or even how Citysearch used to focus on Arts and Entertainment categories before expanding). He wishes he had focused on restaurants, most likely in the Seattle area (where they are located) because of 1. consumer passion, 2. review writing (and how users trust friends’ recommendations over someone like Zagats), 3. daily activity (frequency is important…we eat multiple times a day so are more likely to review about it).

Andy definitely sounds like he knows what he is talking about. I would say that I would most likely have to agree with him on his 3 points on why restaurants is such a great source for user-generated content.

He summarizes his post by using Amazon as an example (they focused on books first before expanding). Nowadays, they’re into everything. Even their logo says so… A - Z (explanation).

Judysbook and Insiderpages have received a lot of attention lately for allegedly downsizing or changing directions.

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Wired wrote a detailed article on How Yahoo Blew It
detailing how they almost bought Google but refused to pay more than their $3 Billion offer. Terry Semel’s (Yahoo CEO) plan B was to buy a search engine and a PPC engine and merge those 2 with Yahoo’s technology. They then go on to blame Semel for his technical ineptitude for losing the search/PPC race.

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The official Google Maps API blog lets us know that you can Drive More Traffic to Your Maps API Site - Include KML Files in Your Sitemap.

If you have a site with maps on them, include a KML file somewhere on your site and use Google Sitemaps to expose them to googlebot (so it knows where to find them).

Including KML files in a sitemap.xml file (see http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html ) is a great way for you to help us index and drive traffic to your site. After publishing your data in KML, we’ll crawl the KML files that you specify in your sitemap.xml file. We’ll send users your way when they search for content that is found on your mashup site. As an added bonus, once your data is in KML, it will be available for viewing on Google Earth.

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Ask finally launched its Ask City, their take on local search.

They utilize a number of other IAC companies (Ask is an IAC company) to supplement their data such as Citysearch, Evite, and Servicemagic. They also incorporate a number of other partners not part of the IAC family.

While users of Citysearch will realize this is nothing new…Citysearch has been doing this for years, merging records from multiple data sources through partnerships and such…Ask, however, does it differently. They use their own search engine and, therefore, rank on their own idea of relevance rather than Citysearch’s take on it (which uses FAST). They also decided to use similar interfaces to Google (the map is central to the interface) and MSN’s Local Live (which uses various panes to utilize differing functions).

Ask separates out the various search types such as locations and events rather than creating a singular box/set of boxes that searches across all of them. While this diminishes convenience, it tends to increase accuracy/relevance of results. They also do as Google Local and Openlist has done and incorporate listings from a number of competing local search sites such as Insiderpages, Judysbook, and Yelp.

So, in short, this product is different than their “Local” product that they originally had which was built entirely of of citysearch where they accessed their content and utilized their search engine through an API. It incorporates more data and has a different interface. The ability to draw over the map and save the map is nice but I’d only want to do that to send it to someone with remarks on the map (i.e. Here’s how to get there…) and you can only email a link to that page rather than the image. I don’t like having multiple different panes for various functions. While it tends to increase relevance by narrowing down what the user intends, it tends to be cumbersome and I have to spend time searching around the page to find what it is I need to click on.

Disclaimer, look at my “About me” section.

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