Tech analyst, AI & the web
Last Friday we posted about weird search engines. We got some good comments and found some new weird search engines to add to our list. Note that we mean weird in a good way – as in something a bit different. To remind you, here are the original ‘weird’ search engines: www.ufocrawler.com/search www.GhetoSearch.com www.omnipelagos.com www.wabbadabba.com … Read more
In yesterday’s interview with Matt Cutts from Google, on the topic of next-generation search, we touched on how Google is tackling the issue of indexing (and advertising around) online video. Matt implied that Google is looking for an equivalent to PageRank for online video: “…in the Web we have this notion of reputation – which … Read more
Spanning Sync v1.0, an application that provides two-way synchronization between Google Calendar and Apple iCal, has launched after seven months of development – including a four-month beta period. As The Unofficial Apple Weblog noted, Spanning Sync also syncs between multiple Macs and Google Calendar accounts, with iSync-compatible devices like iPods and mobile phones (iPhone too … Read more
In Read/WriteWeb’s interview with Matt Cutts of Google today, on the topic of next-generation search, the very last question I asked him was how Google is going about indexing video. It’s a big question, because with YouTube and other online video sites seemingly taking over the Web (as far as consumer content goes), video search … Read more
Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing the head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts. The topic of our conversation was Next-Generation Search. In my pitch to get an interview with someone at Google, I explained how Read/WriteWeb hasbeencoveringNext-Gensearcha lot and so it would (obviously) be great to get Google’s views on this topic! … Read more
The mashups of our Top Alternative Search Engines list continue! Charles Knight spotted a great post by the Search The Web 2.0 blog, which took the top 100 and attempted to rank them by market share. The reason for this ambitious undertaking was a comment that Charles made when we first published the list: “…people … Read more
The Read/WriteWeb Job Board has now been combined with the Job Boards at two popular Web Business blogs, VentureBeat and Alarm:Clock. This means that when you post a job to the R/WW Job Board, it now displays on VentureBeat and Alarm:Clock as well as Read/WriteWeb. I’m not sure what numbers the other two blogs do, … Read more
At the end of January we wrote about a new service called Imagini Friends, which is a social network that calculates your “VisualDNA” and uses it to find other people that match. At the time, it reminded me of the personality tests you find in magazines like Vogue. Well it looks like Imagini has recently … Read more
At SXSW there was a panel entitled ‘Using RSS for Marketing’ (our coverage here from Sean Ammirati). Mick Liubinskas, from group communications product Tangler, left a good comment on our post: “RSS is a big topic of discussion around Tangler. Obviously we want to do it, but there’s doing it and there’s doing it well. … Read more
The mashups of our Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list continue! The Name Inspector, a fun and interesting blog run by a PhD in Linguistics, has done a linguistic analysis of the 100 search engine names on the list. His conclusion is that “the search for search engine names has drawn on some creative linguistic … Read more
While the serious talk today is about Freebase, a new next-gen search engine from Danny Hillis, it’s the end of the week and so time for a bit of fun. Author of the popular Top Alternative Search Engines list, Charles Knight, flicked me an email this morning with an example of a weird alt search … Read more
Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Top Web News Earlier this week we reported that Yahoo’s mobile social networking experiment Mixd had closed, after two months of testing. Actually it had shut down at the end of February, but it wasn’t noticed by bloggers at the time. What certainly … Read more
ShoppingPath.com is launching the beta version of its shopping comparison service. A preview of the ShoppingPath technology is located (for some reason) at the domain www.CrispyShop.com. What caught my eye was its unique, ipod-like, product comparison UI. It’s a mix of Ajax and Flash and is quite interesting… maybe even compelling. Here is a screenshot, … Read more
I wondered how long it would take before Pageflakes responded to the new-look My Yahoo beta, given that the sharing and ‘pages’ features in My Yahoo beta are very similar to what Pageflakes has already done. Sure enough, the following quote by new Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen was just emailed my way. And actually Dan … Read more
Hot on the heels of My.Netscape’s personalized homepage makeover, Yahoo has announced a new version of its own long-running personalized homepage, My Yahoo. It will at first be a private beta, with a limited number of users being offered a beta account at http://cm.my.yahoo.com/upgrade. Yahoo’s plan is to gather feedback from those early users and … Read more