November 21st, 2007, 5 Comments »
Google recently announced its foray into the telecommunications space with Android, an operating system and software developer kit for mobile devices. I watched the video, which was fairly dry (and Sergey, you can afford a shirt with a collar), but I was missing the context and meaning of this announcement.
Over at Slate, Tim Wu has written a readable overview of what Android might mean to the staid telecoms industry in the US.
Nor is the problem of retailing Android phones trivial. Anyone with an Internet browser can use Google search or Gmail, but in the American mobile world the main barrier to market entry is reaching consumers. Today, more than 90 percent of Americans buy their wireless devices from their carriers. It is true, again, that Google has T-Mobile and Sprint provisionally on its side. But if only some outlets will sell a Gphone, fewer people will buy them.
Incidentally, I wasn’t super-interested in the subject matter, and abandoned it after a few episode, but I learned a lot about the early days of the telephone industry from Cory Doctorow’s reading of Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown.
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October 11th, 2007, 5 Comments »
I was perusing my HitTail stream o’ referrers this morning (there’s kind of a zen calm watching the river of referrers go by). Right between searches for “saran wrap but ass” and “george stroumboulopoulos is he gay”, I found this search:
allintitle: “in films”
You can probably guess what it’s for, but here’s the official word from Google:
If you start a query with [allintitle:], Google will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title. For instance, [allintitle: google search] will return only documents that have both “google” and “search” in the title.
The technical writing is a little ambiguous there. Do they mean the page title, as in the phrase that appears at the top of your browser (and comes from inside the title tags)? Or do they include headings on the page as well?
In any case, I’m not sure how useful this will be, but it’s always handy to learn another search shortcut.
5 Comments »
September 13th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis invited me to check out his new human-powered search engine. Specifically, I installed Mahalo Follow, a kind of ‘search buddy’ Firefox plug-in that pops open a sidebar when it thinks Mahalo has some content relevant to the page I’m on (mostly search engine results, but I think it’s opened on other pages as well). That content tends to be a list of the ‘best’ links associated with the content. Here’s an example.
Obviously this service is straight-out-of-alpha, and needs to be populated with much more carefully-selected content. But I don’t think it’s for me.
Like you, my dear readers, I’m a pretty sophisticated searcher. I’ve been doing it a long time, I understand how the search engines work, and so I usually have good intuition about where (and more importantly whether) I’m going to find a particular piece of information.
As an exercise in thinking about how I search, I made a little list of search queries I ran the other day. This isn’t complete, but it’s a pretty representative sampling:
- How many units did the Sony Walkman sell?
- What is the URL for iLife on Apple’s site?
- What is the URL for Google AdWords?
- When did Malta achieve independence?
- Are there any Bill Callahan videos on YouTube?
- What nationality is KT Tunstall?
- Verify the correct spelling of ‘tchotchke’.
- Where’s the trailer for ‘Atonement’?
- What, if anything, do Dennis Leary and the BC Lions have in common?
- What century was the Great Siege of Malta in?
- What’s the URL for a Malta Times article I read in the paper?
- What does the BlackBerry Curve 8310 Smartphone look like?
- Where’s the Wikipedia entry for Geocities?
- How wide is Sicily?
- Who is playing Johanna in Tim Burton’s “Sweeney Todd”?
General Knowledge About Plasma TVs
My searches are really specific. Mahalo seems to want to help me out most with general information (by providing links) on a topic.
I can imagine that, if I was seeking some general knowledge about a suject, Mahalo might be a decent resource. If, say, I wanted to know more about plasma TVs. But it’s quite rare that I want that kind of generalized information. And when I do, Wikipedia rarely fails me.
Speaking of Wikipedia, Mahalo will live and die on user-generated content. It pays contributors US $10 to $15 per page of search results they create. I might give it a try, but that money isn’t worth my time. If Mahalo agreed to share the revenue generated from that page with me, then it might eventually become a better deal.
Besides, I’d much rather contribute to the emerging collective knowledge of humanity that is Wikipedia. Mahalo, after all, is just a company.
UPDATE: In writing this article, I’d meant to cite a recent post by Seth Godin, in which he touches on the problem I gather Mahalo is trying to solve:
The fact is that search engines are very good at fairly simple searches, and very good at finding information about single products, services, people and ideas.
But they’re terrible at connections, at rankings, at horizontal results. They can’t help me find the 25 most important up and coming artists in the United States. They can’t help me find six products that are viable alternatives to something that was just discontinued. They can’t help me rank the service of four accounting firms.
1 Comment »
July 11th, 2007, 5 Comments »
A client recently asked me how they could get their site to show up like this in search results (that’s not my client, just an example I found):
The answer is disappointingly vague. From Google’s help system:
The links shown below some sites in our search results, called Sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.
We only show Sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good Sitelinks, or we don’t think that the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.
At the moment, Sitelinks are completely automated. We’re always working to improve our Sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.
I also found this discussion about Sitelinks. It indicates that they have nothing to do with your site’s popularity or traffic.
If it were more important, I’d go do an exhaustive analysis of sites with Sitelinks in the search results, and figure out what makes them tick. I believe the Sitelinks only show up when you search for the domain itself (here’s an alternative example for the screenshot above, without Sitelinks), so those searchers are very, very likely to click the first result, Sitelinks or not.
5 Comments »
July 6th, 2007, 1 Comment »
The other day I encountered this unlikely success story from South Korea:
Tapping a South Korean inclination to help one another on the Web has made Naver.com the undisputed leader of Internet search in the country. It handles more than 77 percent of all Web searches originating in South Korea, thanks largely to content generated, free of charge, by people like Park and Cho.
Daum.net, another South Korean search portal, comes in second with a 10.8 percent share, followed by Yahoo’s Korean-language service with 4.4 percent.
77%–those are Google-sized numbers. South Korea seems to be on the bleeding edge of a number of technology trends, thanks to ubiquitious, awesome broadband and, I gather, certain cultural inclinations. They are, I believe, the nation that plays the most hours of online games per capita in the world.
1 Comment »
May 26th, 2007, 10 Comments »
I’ve written previously about my struggles with Google and its deeply b0rked identity system. It’s also a pet peeve of Boris’s.
Inspired by Google’s recent acquisition of FeedBurner (where, yes, I have at least one account), I wanted to render my pain as a diagram. I doubt I’ve got the order of sign-ups exactly correct, but it’s in the ballpark. All of the email addresses are fake variations of the real thing. Maybe I should have been more responsible along the way, but clearly the issue here isn’t all PEBCAK.
Identity fiends may also be interested in my little video parable about user names and passwords.
10 Comments »
May 23rd, 2007, 7 Comments »
SHEREEF: hello and how are you doing this is Mr Agdar [name changed] and i would like to order some flowers from your shop to my company in West Africa and can you tell me the types of flowers you have and their prices each so that i can make my selections. hope to hear from you asap..
ME: I’m afraid you have the wrong email address–I don’t sell flowers.
Best of luck.
SHEREEF: Ohh Okay What do you sell?
ME: Nothing, really, we do services work.
SHEREEF: Dont you know any shop there so tht you give me their address so that i buy some of their goods?
This guy wants to buy anything wholesale and re-sell it. Where should I sent him?
I’m sure this happens to everybody, but certain Google users have a mentality about their search results. It goes like this:
“Because your site is ranked highly in Google, you must be an expert in my search terms. Furthermore, you must sell them for a living.”
He no doubt found me because of Flowers For Al and Don. If he’d asked for something other than flowers, I would have thought it was just a variation on Nigerian spam.
Another recent example is horse soccer balls. If you Google “horse soccer ball”, my site is the fourth result. The first result is a site which actually sells horse soccer balls (the excerpted text in the search results even implies this).
And yet I’ve received more than one call from people wanting to buy just such a ball. Odd, eh?
7 Comments »
May 8th, 2007, 3 Comments »
You know, I always had mixed feelings about Google Analytics. I liked the quality of the data they captured–it always seemed more realiable than other services–but I came to dislike the interface. It ran really slow on my laptop, and presented my data in some peculiar ways.
Happily, Google has just launched a new version of their stats package, and it looks way better. From the Google Analytics blog:
We’ve redesigned the reporting interface for greater customization and collaboration. This should make it easier for businesses and website owners to find and share the data you need to make informed decisions. The new version presents data more clearly and in context, so you can look at a single report to gain insights rather than having to pull up several reports to understand what action to take.
You can take a tour to check out the new features and interface. Also, Andy Beal has an in-depth look at the new version on Marketing Pilgrim.
UPDATE: Hmmm…spoke too soon. Either there’s an interface bug for Firefox on OS X, or my three-year old PowerBook is too slow. The new app errors out when I click the little down arrow beside the date to modify the date range.
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