The integration between YouTube and Google is becoming ever-stronger.
We were doing a bit of research on Google today and noticed that they’ve now included the ability to actually watch the videos that are coming up as search results, _within_ the Google search results.
Continue reading Play YouTube Videos Within Google Search Results
Just when Microsoft was developing as bit of a confident man-about-town swagger about its rising search engine performance, a new report from Nielsen/NetRatings delivers a humbling slapdown in the goolies.
The figures, released yesterday, show that after gaining ground for a couple months, Microsoft lost a chunk of their search market share in April, while rivals Google and Yahoo enjoyed lengthy back-slapping sessions as traffic rose.
Continue reading Google Rampant: Microsoft Search Slips Up
Information overload is a buzz phrase which has been getting a lot of use recently. It refers to the enormous amount of information which we now consume (largely because of the level of accessibility to content which the Internet gives us), and the challenges that that creates. Another important issue is the Long Tail, as recognised by Chris Anderson, and the way that relates to content. In other words, there is now far more information available which makes discoverability much harder.
Continue reading Attention: A Cure For Information Overload?
If you travel around the UK a lot and find the homogenisation of High Streets into identical rows of bland coffeeshop multinationals a deeply depressing experience, you may find delocator.org.uk the perfect site for your needs.
Bearing a passing resemblance to the ‘store locator’ seen on the Starbuck’s site, the delocator lets you type in a UK post code and find the nearest ‘non corporate cafe’ near you, with a drop-down menu for selecting the distance range to search, from 1km to 15km.
The site’s still in early days and because it relies on users to input recommended cafes, the coverage isn’t as complete as it might be, but the author told Digital Lifestyles that he intends to add more functionality ‘in the Spring’ (he’s also asked for help in running this site – contact him here.)
Despite this, we still managed to find two non-corporate cafes within a 1km of us, with the results displayed in a text box containing a description of the cafe and address details, accompanied by a zoomable Google map.
Delocating the world
The first Delocator website started up in America, tasked with “assisting the public in finding and supporting independently owned cafes” and proved a great success, with over 5000 independent cafes across the States being inputted by users.
The site encouraged other activists to create their own delocator site using a downloadable toolkit, with a second site being set up for Canadian users, delocator.ca, with the UK site now being the third of what may turn out to be a multinational anti corporate franchise (now there’s a concept!).
With Starbucks promising to open a new branch every fortnight for the next decade in the UK, we reckon local, independent coffee shops need al the help they can get.
Free Rosey Lee in the East End
Elsewhere, Starbuck’s shiny new store in Whitechapel in the East End of London found itself the subject of an unusual protest last week by those cheeky scamps, the Space Hijackers.
Setting up a stall and dishing out free fair trade teas, tasty home made sandwiches and delicious cakes to passers by, the protesters hoped to illustrate “what the area will be missing if Starbucks and their ilk are allowed to settle in.”
Naturally, the urban75 website went along to lend their support (and scoff some tasty banana cakes) – see their photo report here
Readers in London may have noticed in the past couple of weeks, posters on the tube and elsewhere advocating an ‘Information Revolution’, in response to the fact that one company allegedly controls 80% of the information on the Web. No more information is given, but the ad suggests a visit to information-revolution.org to find out more.
Sitting on the tube, opposite such an ad, I figured that there were only two possible companies which could be accused of controlling 80% of information on the Web; it could plausibly refer to either Internet Explorer’s market share (and would therefore be an advert for Firefox) or Google’s market share. Since I knew Mozilla wasn’t planning any advert like this, I assumed that it was a competitor to Google, and concluded it was probably Ask (since neither Yahoo or Microsoft would manage to think outside the box to such an extent). However, I dismissed that idea instantly as it seemed so unlikely that a well respected company would attempt such a pathetic campaign, and that therefore it must be some new search engine with far too much venture capital. By that point I had lost interest, and began examining the ventilation panel.
I didn’t think any more about it until a storm erupted on the blogosphere a few days later. Ask guilty of astroturfing! screamed the headlines. The search engine had launched a deceptive marketing campaign (astroturfing because of the attempt to impersonate grass roots activity – get it) without disclosing that they were behind it. Finally getting round to looking at the campaign Website, I discovered a blog, including a post on why the ‘revolution’ had been forced to ‘go underground’:
The regime supporters are telling us to “advertise” the features we have, rather than wage an underground revolution. If only we had a choice! Everyone knows that: A) you have to try a feature to really understand it, and most people have been brainwashed that they don’t need to try another search engine’s features and B) advertising doesn’t work anymore!! That’s why we had to go underground.
Not to mention the factually inaccurate statement that the Internet is 15 years old – the world wide web is 15 years old. The Internet, as we all know, was born well before that. But we can’t blame them for the mistake, because, apparently ‘The Red Bull ran out at 1am on Saturday, so this post may not make much sense!’
My encounter with this revolution, which will inevitably result in a world changed forever in about a week’s time, was last Saturday evening, when a nice man from Ask offered me a free badge and a T-shirt in Covent Garden, from a peculiar-shaped trailer. I declined the gift, although I was very tempted to make my evening out more exciting by making use of their free Internet access inside the trailer. I was interested to see, however, that they had responded to the blogosphere by plastering an Ask logo on the trailer. Maybe the revolution felt that it was gaining enough momentum to come out into the open.
I didn’t tell the nice man from Ask this, but I have a suggestion to the revolution which I will tentatively put forward here (although those nasty spies from Google might also pick it up); build a better product. The route to market domination is not through silly campaigns where no-one can work out what is being advertised, but through making a product which is such an improvement over the existing market leader that people are prepared to switch. A departing thought; if Ask does manage to build a better product, and become the new monopoly, I wonder whether they will continue to advocate using search engines other than the most popular?
Still in beta but already a big hit in the Digital Lifestyles office is the Walkit.com website, a mapping site designed for perambulating pedestrians keen to do their bit to fight global warming.
Currently covering a large chunk of London, the site helps walkers plot cross-town journeys in a similar fashion to London Transport’s Journey Planner.
Users simply type in the postcode or street name of their start and end points and a zoomable street map (based on Streetmap.com) is generated, with the walking route clearly marked in blue.
If the user hasn’t been specific enough with their addresses, the interface offers up a list of more precise locations, including road intersections.
Burning the lard
Once you’ve generated your walking map, an information strip tells you the total distance and how long it would take to complete the journey at slow/medium/fast walking rates.
Folks still battling a post-Christmas beast of a belly might find the column displaying how many calories you might expect to burn depending on fast you’re shuffling along useful.
According to their data, a fast walk from Brixton to Oxford Street would take 65 minutes and burn 347 calories – less than the calories in the two pints of Stella we’d need to drink to recover.
‘The Good Life’-loving, Tom and Barbara types can also feel extra smug checking out the ‘Co2 avoided’ column, which lists how much carbon dioxide the same journey would have created by car, taxi or bus instead.
Nearby tube and rail stations are also included onscreen as well as options to print the map, print or view written directions and email the route to a friend.
Clicking on the written directions automatically centres the map on that location, which is rather a nice touch.
Currently the system only produces the most direct route, rather than the ‘nicest’ route and the tech bods at walkit are looking into ways to include some pedestrian-only routes across parks, by rivers etc.
Another thing missing is the ability to plot routes involving multiple points: it would be great to plan an afternoon’s walking and have an instant readout of the miles walked and calories burned – and if there was a version that could be carried around on our Palm Treo, all the better!
Ken don’t care
Launched by a “tiny outfit” motivated by a desire to get more people walking, the walkit.com team deserve all the support you get, and with their much-publicised green agenda, you’d think ol’ Ken Livingstone, Transport for London and the Labour spin team would be scrambling to get onboard.
Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case with a faceless ‘Senior Customer Services Adviser’ at TfL only commenting that it would be, “counter-productive to invest public money in another journey planning tool specifically for walking”.
A new survey has seen Google continuing to exert its dominance on the US web search market, grabbing a huge 47.4 per cent of the sector, up 0.4 per cent during December.
Yahoo, ranked number two, also enjoyed an increase of 0.3 per cent over the same period, giving them a 28.5 per cent market share.
The figures from web audience measurement company comScore Networks revealed bad news for the third placed search engine, Microsoft, whose share dipped by 0.5 to give them just 10.5 per cent of US web searches.
Also heading downwards was InterActiveCorp’s Ask.com search engine, slipping 0.1 per cent to 5.4 per cent.
Google’s rise in the world’s largest internet market seems unstoppable, with the company notching up gains in 16 of the last 17 months.
With an estimated 6.7 billion searches by US web users in December – up one per cent from November – potential advertising revenues are immense, proving ample financial impetus for the search engine giants to embark on endless consumer-wooing feature updates for their services.
The overall US search market has ballooned by 30 per cent since December of 2005, with comScore reporting that consumers performed 3.2 billion searches on Google sites and 1.9 billion searches on Yahoo!
[From Reuters]
Google is converting its Californian headquarters to run partly on solar power, creating the largest solar installation on any corporate campus in the United States.
The Internet search giant has said that its jumbo-sized solar project will eventually deliver nearly a third of the power at its 1-million-square-foot campus in Mountain View, near San Francisco.
Kitting out the campus will require the installation of more than 9,200 solar panels on high-tech offices known as the “Googleplex.”
Expected to be up and running by next Spring, the panels should be able to generate about 1.6 megawatts of electricity – enough power to supply about 1,000 homes.
Google haven’t disclosed the costs of the project, but it’s unlikely to cause much of a dent in the pockets of a company reputed to have nearly $10 billion in the corporate coffers.
With about a trillion hard drives purring away and Borg-like billions of PCs busily indexing this interweb thing, we imagine Google’s energy costs must be sky high, but David Radcliffe, Google’s vice president of real estate, reckoned that anticipated savings from future energy bills should pay back the solar project’s costs in five to 10 years.
“We hope corporate America is paying attention. We want to see a lot of copycats” of this project, he commented.
Nice one, Google.
Unhappy with the inaccuracies of the online encyclopaedia he set up, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has announced that he will be launching an alternative to the free online reference this week.
The free spin-off site, sporting the rubbish name of ‘Citizendium,’ will introduce user registration and editorial controls for user-submitted articles in an attempt to filter out pesky trolls, biased contributors and Tourettian troublemakers.
“Wikipedia is amazing. It has grown in breadth and depth, and the articles are remarkably good given the system that is in place. I merely think that we can do better,” Sanger said.
“There are a number of problems with the system that can be solved, and by solving those we can end up with an even better massive encyclopaedia,” he added.
An invite-only pilot version of the non-profit site will launch this week, although there’s no news about a full release.
The rise of Wikipedia
In five short years, the advert-free Wikipedia has become one of the most popular research tools on the Web, boasting more than 2 million articles in 229 nationalities, with Nielsen NetRatings registering more than 33 million unique visitors in September this year.
Such is the explosive growth of the site, this figure represents a whopping 162 percent rise from the same period last year.
With anyone able to write and edit content on Wikipedia, the site has been accused of unreliability, with controversial topics and some political entries being bogged down by never-ending disputes from warring factions.
Sanger has accused Wikipedia of failing to keep a grip on its writers and editors, commenting that the latest articles don’t represent a consensus view, just a reflection of what the most persistent ‘posters’ say.”
Larry Sanger hopes to introduce some order to his rival site by introducing editors, volunteer ‘constables’ and personal accountability which will see people using real names.
Although the site will be open to submissions from anyone, editors will be empowered to authorise articles with “constables” charged with wading into rows and asking, “why can’t we all just get along?” Or something .
With backing from an unnamed foundation, Citizendium hopes to evolve with public participation, growing from a “fork” of the open-source code of Wikipedia, with new content replacing existing content until it grows into a new compendium of its own.
The Citizendium Project
Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge
Microsoft is officially launching its updated next-gen, ‘Live Search’, search engine today as the company tries hard to catch up with market leaders Google and Yahoo.
Microsoft is currently languishing a distant third behind search engine kings Google, currently hogging a hefty 45 percent of all search engine queries in the US, with Yahoo notching up 29 percent of the market compared to Microsoft’s mere 13 per cent.
From today, Microsoft will start replacing the current MSN Search engine on MSN.com with its new Live Search branded label, which features a souped-up image search service, better local search, a redesigned user interface and new tools for refining query results.
We can’t say we particularly liked the new AJAX-tastic interactive interface – it may well be technically cleverer than Google’s, but we’re fans of keeping it simple, thanks.
In line with its rivals, Live Search will also feature a new social search service called QnA, where surfers can pose questions and get answers from other users.
There will also be new options to view full-size photos in image search results and more “bird’s eye” aerial images in its local search service (another Microsoft project now shedding its beta label in the US and UK).
Derrick Connell, general manager of the Microsoft search business unit, explained that the new Live Search feature will be implemented progressively across different MSN host servers.
Microsoft’s new search engine – with its Google-a-like super-simple homepage – has been in public beta testing since March at Live.com, which is also shaking off its beta status this week.
These updates reflect Microsoft’s mustard keenness to grab a juicy slice of the search engine market, with search engine-based advertising proving to be a fast-growing, multi-billion-dollar earner.