spotsearch

Friday, October 28, 2005

The iPod Revolution

I just bought a new 5G Video iPod (see my iPod with Video Review). Audio quality and convenience is great, video viewing is not too bad. Sure, it's a shiny new toy for listening to music, but, it's actually more than that these days. That's because it's the beginning of the "podcast" revolution. Podcasts are really nothing more than audio (or video) content that people or companies have created and are distributing freely (like broadcasting, except you listen to it on your iPod). What's significant is that now podcasts are aggregated in one convenient place, iTunes, and that there is a mass market of tens of millions of iPod and iTunes users that will soon rival the reach of the U.S. television broadcast market. I already get much of my news from podcasts. I listen to ABC news and NPR shows on my iPod, I listen to investing shows on my iPod too. I even listen to Ebert & Roeper on my iPod.

I think this is the start of something big. Sure, radio and television will be around for a while, but, over the next few years, I predict that podcasting will rise as a new media distribution outlet that will significantly eat away at radio and television viewership. Podcasting lets you get exactly what you want and lets you timeshift (listen or watch WHEN you want) AND spaceshift (listen or watch WHERE you want). The audience is out there now, the devices are good enough for audio and not too bad for video (probably in a year or two really good video podcast devices will be out there), and great content is starting to appear.

Monday, October 24, 2005

The Kosmix Health Search Engine is alive!

After being at Cosmix Corp. for about 8 months, the parent corporation for our consumer search site, on Friday, October 21, 2005, we have left stealth mode. Well, sort of. We just had a stealth launch of our consumer search site Kosmix.com, a Medical and Health Search Engine. At this early stage, it's still in alpha release mode, as we have plenty of work to do, but, it is actually working very well. Search quality is excellent right now for most queries.

So, what have we done? We've built the most comprehensive (as far as I know) health-focused vertical search engine to date. Our coverage is *far* better than HealthLine, which also debuted this week (you can see for yourself by trying out some rarer queries). You can see that we also have sub-categories that help you learn more about and discover other information about your query beyond the normal one-size-fits-all list that is the standard for the major web search engines.

We have a few cool features included as well. For instance, if you type an acronym in all capital letters, such as: MS we suggest the fully expanded acronym as a query. Also, we give Wikipedia, the "open source" encyclopedia on the web, first class status: If you type in a query that matches a Wikipedia topic, a link to it shows up at the top.

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Search Freshness

I was curious to see how well some search engines deal with freshness. A perfect test for this task is the debut of a new company, so I'll use Zvents as my test subject. Zvents went live on October 4th, and today is 4 days later, 8pm October 8th, so let's see what we can find....

Technorati.com: 85 posts found
They claim to be able to index blog postings within 5 minutes of them going up, pretty impressive. And they try to index every blog site. The problem is coverage- they tend to miss blogs that are not part of a major blogging site.

Blogsearch.google.com: 97 posts found
Google's new blog search engine seems to have slightly more coverage than Technorati. One drawback, they currently only index the RSS feed data (and not the actual target pages themselves).

IceRocket.com: 85 posts found
IceRocket is Mark Cuban's blog search start-up. It does a reasonable job of matching Technorati.

DayPop.com: 3 pages found
DayPop is a news and blog search engine. Clearly they're lagging behind the competition in terms of coverage.

News.google.com: 9 pages found
Google's search engine for news sites.

News.yahoo.com: 9 pages found
Yahoo's news search.

Search Engines: I list the number of pages found as well as the number of pages reported because they differ. Pages found is much less than what they report, possibly due to many reasons, such as estimation algorithms, duplicate counting, etc).

Search.msn.com: 49 pages found (6,686 pages reported)
Microsoft's search engine is doing pretty well.

Google: 195 pages found (12,100 reported)
Google seems to have excellent coverage and freshness.

Yahoo: 224 pages found (1,160 pages reported)
Yahoo also has excellent freshness and coverage.



One final test, checking major search engines for links to Zvents, using the query link:http://www.zvents.com

Yahoo: 86 pages found (174 pages reported)
Quite good.

Google: 1 page found
Strange- google had tons of pages it found for the "zvents" query and yet only had 1 inlink. What's going on here?

Search.msn.com: 49 pages found (837 pages reported)
Microsoft's search is even beating google on link queries.

del.icio.us bookmarks - 80 user bookmarks
The bookmarks of del.icio.us users is interesting to see. This link comes from OnoTech (Ethan Stock).

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Zvents - event search is here!

My friend Ethan Stock's startup, Zvents, has just gone live. I've been playing with it for a few days now and, I think it is a fantastic idea, and is well-executed. It's the synthesis of event search, tagging,blogging, and communities all rolled into one site.

One of the coolest things about Zvents is that it lets you embed live events calendars and listings on your site. For instance, the examples below are live Zvents event listings.

Upcoming Search Engine Events in the bay area


Sunday, October 02, 2005

Leaving IBM. Is Anybody Safe Anymore?

I worked at IBM Almaden for over 7.5 years, until February, 2005. In my last 5 years there, I worked as a researcher in search and information retrieval, as the lead architect for the Webfountain indexer and the OmniFind (Enterprise Search) product. Life at IBM Almaden was pretty good. The salary was comfortable, the work environment was great (window offices), the people are great, the work was interesting. But with a large company like IBM come disadvantages of being at a large company like a massive beaurocracy that gets in the way of getting things done, difficulty in bringing research to market, way too many meetings due to way too many people being on a project, and a somewhat unexciting direction. IBM seems to be morphing into a services company. It's shedding its core technology businesses that made it great. No more PCs, no more Thinkpads, those divisons are sold to Lenovo. Likewise, IBM, the inventor of the hard drive, shed its hard drive division to Hitachi. Previous technology divestitures include selling its global network to AT&T, spinning off its printer division to Lexmark and selling its Network Hardware Division to Cisco.

And then there are layoffs. During my time at IBM, there was an across-the-board layoff of 10% of its U.S. workforce, potentially no one was safe. I guess it's the reality of doing business in a competitive world. Although I was not directly affected, I knew people who were, and it sent a strong message from IBM management that you were a commodity that could be outsourced.

IBM also has made the philosphical decision of avoiding consumer-facing markets. This leads to projects and research that are well, boring, or less satisfying (at least for me) to work on. I'd much rather work on something that people I know can actually use. All this set the stage for my departure...