Search Engine Futures!

January 31st, 2008 by Guest Author
Posted in Guest Authors | No Comments »

By David Pennock

I am happy to report that on my suggestion intrade has listed futures contracts for 2008 search engine market share.

Here is how they work:

A contract will expire according to the percentage share of internet searches conducted in the United States in 2008. For example, if 53.5% of searches conducted in the United States in 2008 are made using Google then the contract listed for Google will expire at 53.5…

…Expiry will be based on the United States search share rankings published by Nielson Online.

I think this could be a fascinating market because:

  • Search engine market share is very important to these major companies, with dramatic effects on their share prices.
  • Search engine market share is fluid, so far with Google growing inexorably. However, Microsoft has cash, determination, Internet Explorer, and the willingness to experiment. Ask.com has erasers, 3D, ad budgets, and The Algorithm. Yahoo!, second in market share, often tests equal or better than Google, and new features like Search Assist are impressive.
  • The media loves to write about it.
  • A major search company might use the market to hedge. Well, this seems far-fetched but you never know. Certainly, from an economic risk management standpoint it would seem to make a great deal of sense. (Here, as always on this blog, I speak on behalf of myself and not my company.)

Finally, I have to comment on how refreshingly easy the process was in working with intrade. They went from suggestion to implementation in a matter of days. It’s a shame that US-based companies are in contrast stuck in stultifying legal and regulatory mud.

Zvents makes Local Search pop!

January 30th, 2008 by Guest Author
Posted in Alts, Guest Authors, Reviews, Verticals | 1 Comment »

There is a class of web search engines that can prove even more useful than Google within a certain context. I’m talking, of course, about Vertical Search engines – the writer and tech strategist Sramana Mitra considers them Google’s Achilles heel and Profy.com’s Cyndy Aleo-Carreira seems to agree. This blog also has long held the position that vertical search represents a powerful mechanism to find information on the web, and is a key category to watch in the search wars of the future. [see: The rise of Vertical Search Engines from Aug 2006].

Another way of achieving a similar focus, in order to improve the relevance of search results, is by segmenting by location rather than by industry vertical – i.e. create a hyperlocal search engine that limits its search results to a given geographical area.

One such alternate search engine is Zvents, which is relentlessly focused on local information, of any sort. This company, which has been around since early 2005, has just introduced an advanced feature called Federated Local search – basically, its own version of Universal Search (recall that Google introduced its Universal Search feature with much fanfare last May).

Federated Local Search: Multi-Dimensional Results for Local Information

What does Universal Search mean, for a local search engine? Initially this was not very clear to me; an email discussion with Paul O’Brien, Director of Marketing at Zvents, inspired me to draw the following diagram:

The basic idea is to enable the user to implement a general-purpose search within a local context. This allows the user to find local information about a given topic, across many different dimensions. For example, a sports fan living in San Jose, CA who tries a local search for the term “hockey”, would get the following different types of results:

  • Upcoming games for the San Jose Sharks, the local hockey team
  • The location of Roosevelt Park Roller Hockey Rink
  • The description and link for a local “Hockey Night” event
  • Results about relevant personalities (what Zvents calls “performers”)
  • And other related links …

Zvents has already partially implemented this vision, although some of the lower-ranked results could provide a better match. Hopefully these will improve in the future as the search index grows and the algorithm improves. A screen shot of this local Hockey search in Zvents is given below.

Similarly, here’s a search for the term “Web 2.0″ for Cupertino, CA:

Outcome: Relevance

The big advantage of this type of search, over a general-purpose Google or Yahoo! search, is that the user can obtain the benefits of a broad cross-section of results, while still constraining the search to a limited geographical area.

This is not a significant issue in highly developed, urban, technologically advanced areas like Silicon Valley, Boston or New York; but it could one day make a big difference for someone living in David Letterman’s “home office” of Wahoo, NE , or even more important, someone trying to find the Boston Public School located in Boston, Ontario – as we’ve seen before, highly popular keywords tend to swamp nearby long-tail keywords in the search results for major search engines.

From a business model perspective, hyperlocal searches tend to provide highly qualified prospects for local merchants, so I would guess that this type of search is very easily monetizable in the long run.

From a user interface point-of-view, the NLP-like implementation of time period for the search engine (”when: tonight, this weekend, …”) is a nice touch; I tried different possibilities (”next month”), and it seemed to work just fine.

On a more technical note, Zvents has been making waves with the release of its open-source Bigtable clone called Hypertable, which adds a C++ option for this project.

Going forward, it will be interesting to see how Zvents scales to additional locations, and to additional dimensions within each locality. Will it make inroads into the market share for any of the major search engines, or into that of other locally-focused web sites like topix.com and craigslist?

Editor’s Note: You can see more of Nitin’s articles on The Software Abstractions Blog.

Health Search Engine OrganizedWisdom

January 30th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Reviews | No Comments »

OrganizedWisdom Health is a human-powered, doctor-guided search service for health. The site provides reviewed search result pages, called WisdomCards.

Wisdom Cards are available for the most popular health search terms and phrases without the clutter, redundant links or index spam typically found in search engines. Each WisdomCard provides useful links and resources for any health topic. They’re created by OrganizedWisdom Guides and reviewed by doctors to make sure they are spam-free and organized. In addition to filtering out the bad links, WisdomCards highlight tips and warnings, such as Guide Favorite, Guide Warning and In Memoriam.

OrganizedWisdom helped ignite the Health 2.0 revolution with several “firsts” including the first company to assemble a team of health guides and physicians to organize the world’s best health wisdom from across the Web. Today, OrganizedWisdom continues to bring innovation to online health care by leveraging social media and the power of collaboration technologies to improve the quality of health search.

OrganizedWisdom was founded in 2006 by Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes because they were frustrated with wading through cluttered search results on machine-generated search engines trying to find what they were looking for, especially credible user-generated health content.

Health search, like many other categories (although with much higher stakes) has become a time-consuming trial and error process, featuring clutter from people selling things, spam-infested search results masquerading as authentic sites (known as “index spam”), and duplicative links to redundant libraries of licensed health content.

It shouldn’t be a time consuming process to quickly find links to the very best resources when searching for health information. So, they are solving this problem by adding the wisdom of trained expert search guides and physician reviewers to the power of algorithmic-only search tools and social bookmarking sites. This human-powered model helps them deliver superior health search results by eliminating search index spam from low-quality websites, links to duplicated libraries of licensed health content or potentially dangerous web sites.

Matchpoint Launches Local Business Search

January 29th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, News | No Comments »

Matchpoint, an online service for people to anonymously request and compare offers and proposals from businesses, announced today the beta launch of its service to include over 10 million local businesses across the United States. Consumers now have more options to quickly and privately get competitive offers from local businesses in their neighborhoods as well as from major corporations that operate nationwide.

Here are a dozen reasons to give Matchpoint a try in your town:

- From LASIK eye surgeons to gyms to house cleaners, Matchpoint provides consumers with a new way to find and select businesses that can provide them with the products or services they need.

– Matchpoint’s matching service allows consumers to forgo the fatigue that results from using search engines to find relevant businesses as well as the effort that goes into contacting and researching businesses — many of which are not online. Instead, with Matchpoint:

- Consumers describe their needs by filling out a short category specific search form after which they are matched with three to five businesses that match their criteria.

- Businesses then have an opportunity to respond to the consumer’s search through Matchpoint’s proxy message service.

- The consumer’s email or personal information is never given out so they maintain control of the process, evaluate the responses, and can then contact the business(es) directly whenever it is convenient for them.

- Users can access the Matchpoint search forms on thousands of websites in Matchpoint’s partner network, where they are placed relevant to the content they are reading.

- The Matchpoint model expands on the success seen in key verticals such as finance, health and fitness, to 10 million businesses in nearly 3,000 business categories.

- Unlike traditional search engines or PPC models, Matchpoint advertisers only pay to have their offer or proposal delivered to qualified prospects that meet their target customer profile.

- The expansion scales a model established by GetVendors.com, which Matchpoint recently acquired. Search portal GetVendors.com is an online resource for consumers looking for household services in California.

- Integrating the GetVendors technology, Matchpoint now includes a unique method of delivering leads to local businesses over the telephone whenever they are matched to a consumer’s search.

- Local businesses that are not already registered with Matchpoint can respond to consumers via voice mail messages that Matchpoint delivers to the consumers’ email inbox (the consumer always remains anonymous).

- Local businesses that do the majority of their business over the phone can now utilize Matchpoint to meet new customers online without needing to have a web site or any online marketing expertise.

Carrot2, a Search Results Clustering Engine

January 29th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, Guest Authors, Reviews | 3 Comments »

I (Mary Ellen Bates) was recently doing some research for a client on the topic of social capital (see, for example, Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone). It’s a difficult topic to search and, of course, I retrieved kajillions of results from several search engines. I went through as many of them as I had the patience for, and I tried a number of refinements to further focus my search. But I found it difficult to find what I wanted in the major search engines.

Then I remembered hearing about Carrot2, an open source search-results-clustering engine, just recently out in beta. In a nutshell, it takes search results, analyzes them and, on the fly, creates groups of the most common concepts or terms from those results. Since this is all done by algorithms rather than by humans, expect the odd result every once in a while, but I found the clusters to be consistently useful.

Carrot2’s default is to search the web using eTools.ch, a Swiss meta-search engine that queries 10 search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN. However, since eTools only returns the top 20 results from each search engine, I prefer not to use eTool search results. Instead, you can click a tab to limit your search to Google, Yahoo, MSN, Wikipedia, PubMed and a few other finding tools. Because clustering is a computationally intensive process, Carrot2 limits the search results by default to the top 100 results from any of the search engines. However, you can click the Show Options link and set Carrot2 to search and sort up to 400 results. (Note that increasing the number of search results also increases the number of results from each search engine when using the eTools meta-search engine from 20 to 40.)

Geek that I am, I find it even more intriguing that, under that “Show Options” link is a pull-down menu that lets you select which of six different sorting algorithms you want to use. The clustering results are dramatically different (although keep in mind that the search results themselves stay the same — only the clusters change). With my “social capital” search, I was able to see a variety of groupings of my search results, and identify some of the key writers and terms.

Carrot2 may not be your day-to-day search tool, but it is tremendously useful for those searches in which it is difficult to sift the wheat from the chaff.

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