Tag Archives: search

It’s a big week for Facebook. Yesterday they announced the Friendfeed acquisition and today they’re upgrading their search capabilities.

When I teach personal branding on Facebook, I always warned people to make a note of important things when they see them – that the information will disappear into the stream as fast as it got there. Now that is no more. Facebook has improved search to cover all those great (and not-so-great) things in your stream.

According to their blog post,

You now will be able to search the last 30 days of your News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan. If people have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people’s profiles as well as relevant Facebook Pages, groups and applications.

So now you can find that site someone shared with you and you were going to look at later. The search results filter things on the left-hand side, which is a familiar format for Facebook users. You can view results by friends, posts, applications, and more. You can even search the Web and Facebook will source the results from bing.

This definitely makes Facebook more useful for me – if only because I do put off acting on my friends’ suggestions and this makes things more searchable. Will I change my privacy settings to make my content available to everyone on Facebook? Probably not. I’ll stick to my friends in my walled garden and be perfectly content.

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Cheers!

Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

Google’s Chrome initiatives have been a major topic of interest given Google’s long term goals to incorporate as many of its products into intertwined, revenue-generating aspects of its company. But what about all the other browser add-ons that have long since known what Google is going after with so much browser integration?

VideoSurf is the latest to create a browser add-on that seeks to add value to what we already experience on the web. The newly released VideoSurf Firefox extension offers videos at a glance, giving you the ability to see what’s behind shortened URL video links, among other things (download it here).

But let’s talk about the shortened URL preview option, considering the buzz that’s been going around today about Tr.im dead-pooling and the concerns it’s brought up regarding the Twitter third party app market. Shortened URLs are among the easiest ways to spread spam and malware around social media sites such as Twitter, giving VideoSurf the attractive feature for seeing what’s behind the shortened URL before clicking on it. If you already have Firefox then you’re able to see the full URL behind a shortened URL, but VideoSurf’s Firefox extension takes things a step further by giving you a video summary complete with the video title and a thumbnail.

Some other highlights of VideoSurf’s new browser add-on include Google and Yahoo search enhancements, giving you additional video results based on your initial query. VideoSurf results pull from Hulu, and Fancast, among others. Hover your mouse over the search results thumbnails and you’ll see a short preview of the video.

This is an interesting search enhancement, given Google’s own video search results, which are often separate from the main search results, as well as Yahoo, which has recently teamed up with Microsoft, adding to some of the multimedia results already present on Microsoft’s latest project, Bing.

But for some added Google search result enhancements, VideoSurf also perks up your YouTube queries as well. Based on searches performed on YouTube, VideoSurf will also give you results from other sites across the web. If you’d like to see full-episode web clips for certain queries, this particular feature is right up your alley.

Admittedly, some browser extensions can be overwhelming and annoying, especially those that act automatically based on something as basic and as frequent as web searches. To curb any hatred towards its new Firefox extension, VideoSurf has made its tool pretty customizable so you can turn it off and on with one click, and pick and choose which features you’d like to use for your personal preferences.

Of course, VideoSurf is pretty niche in its service offerings, and you’re only going to appreciate this tool if you’re a video junkie (I actually do know a few of those). Nevertheless, I tend to appreciate the browser approach towards solving certain problems. VideoSurf has selected some handy features for its new Firefox extension.

Sourced from PR 2.0

When it comes to savvy, proven, and incredibly successful tech investors, Ron Conway is among the top of the list. He has a gift or an uncanny sense of shrewdness, or a fusion of both, to identify real opportunities that will transform into successful exits and also fuel and inspire aggressive innovation in the process.

At the Real-Time Stream event in Redwood City, California organized by TechCrunch, industry pioneers and pundits discussed the state and future of the Real-Time Web also referred to as the “now” Web.

To help entrepreneurs, startups, and industry leaders monetize this tremendous opportunity, Ron Conway offered his vision for the Top 10 ways to profit from Twitter and the real-time Web:

10. Lead generation
9. Coupons
8. Analytics, analyzing the data
7. Enterprise CRM
6. Payments
5. Commerce
4. User-authentication, verifying accounts
3. Syndication of new ads
2. Advertising – Context and display ads
1. Acquiring followers

According to Conway, if you add these up, initial estimates equate to roughly $5 billion. In comparison to traditional monetization in search, Google earns about $20 billion in ads per year.

To view additional pictures from the Real-Time Stream event, please visit my album on Flickr.

To see pictures from the 4th annual TechCrunch August Capital summer party, please visit this album on Flickr.

Connect with me on:

Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, or Facebook

Read more from Brian Solis:

Blog: PR 2.0
Book: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
Social Map: The Conversation Prism

Sourced from PR 2.0

I’m blogging from the Real-Time Stream event in Redwood City, California organized by TechCrunch. I will share more of my thoughts and observations in a series of posts at a later time – there’s just so much too process in “real time.” Let’s just say that the future of search, streams and the concept of the “Now Web” is blindingly bright.

One of the presenting companies here is Collecta, a new take on Web search, social aggregation, and real-time aggregation..

Collecta recently launched a new platform in public beta that fundamentally changes the way people find and access information on the web.It is especially interesting for any brand manager attempting to harness and organize conversations across the social Web.

What we’re learning through Twitter Search, is that people want access to the immediacy of conversations tied to keywords, regardless of the authority, Page Rank, and SEO.

This is the dawn of real-time search…

It’s the difference between finding the right content on the Web and finding the right content, right now across the Web and Social Media.

As Collecta CEO, Gerry Campbell puts it, “I want to know what are people saying about my topic, right now. The minute you put rankings and filters on search, it stops representing real-time.”

Last year I introduced the Conversation Prism with Jesse Thomas to map the social landscape as a way of discovering REAL insight into the conversations transpiring across social networks, where and when they occurred.

Initially, I expected brand managers and marketers to use the search boxes within relevant networks to search for past and current conversations. The dream was, of course, to have a search window into the social web and the social graph, in real-time. Collecta, among other specialized tools such as One Riot, Topsy, and PeopleBrowsr are peeling back the layers of society, focusing the our attention to enhance and amplify listening, and plugging us directly into the conversations that shape impressions and perceptions.

While searching the Conversation Prism is real-time is not yet fully realized, it is imminent.

Essentially, Collecta enables Internet search to finally keep pace with the real-time information streams on blogs, microblogs such as Twitter and FriendFeed, traditional news sites, Web sites, and social networks such as Flickr, YouTube, and Digg. It then centralizes the search results in easy to read, continually updating streams.

While not every search requires the immediacy of real-time, Collecta’s technology can dramatically transform the end user experience in countless applications, such as watching a live stream of comments on a sporting event or television show, following breaking news or a natural disaster, or keeping a close eye on brand or product comments.

I asked Gerry about the inspiration behind Collecta and his response paints a picture representing a true shift in technology and behavior, “The evolution of media needs to catch up to the pace of how people are consuming data now. We need to rethink search from the user perspective, not trying stuff results into existing paradigms and products. We have to start from scratch.”

He continued, “Every minute, stories are told on the Web. Yet in traditional search, most are usually ranked out of the results and therefore, people don’t get a chance to see them. With Collecta, you can see these stories break and unfold.”

Unlike other aggregator or search tools that are simply a mashup of information built on top Twitter Search, Collecta has built an entire ecosystem and infrastructure based on the open messaging standard XMPP. Over the past decade, the Collecta team has placed an early stake in the future of XMPP. And the recent launch of Google Wave ups the ante on XMPP’s position in the real time web.

Collecta is a river, while traditional search architectures are oceans.

Connect with me on:

Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, or Facebook

Read more from Brian Solis:

Blog: PR 2.0
Book: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
Social Map: The Conversation Prism

We haven’t quite figured out what realtime means when it comes to search, recommendations or other queries on data pools. But we’ll soon find out. Another realtime service called Cognitive Match has raised its first round of funding from Dawn Capital, according to TechCrunch UK. While the financial details of the funding have not been revealed, the funding amount for the London-based startup is around £1 million.

The team behind Cognitive Match is well versed in search and data mining, with founder and CEO Alex Kelleher having previously co-founded an analytics company called Touch Clarity, which was acquired by Omniture nearly two years ago.

With a combination of artificial intelligence, math, psychology and a semantic approach to data mining, Cognitive Match appears to be moving towards the next generation of realtime content-matching. What kind of content? product offers, blog search, advertising and just about everything else that the word “content” encompasses when it comes to the Web.

So far we’ve seen some rather specific search tools utilizing realtime methods, such as OneRiot’s Twitter search engine or FriendFeed’s realtime format for sharing users’ feeds. While we’re seeing the realtime approach broaden to include more of the Internet, Cognitive Match is going beyond basic search with its particular tactics.

That means that Cognitive Search could readily be used for a wide range of recommendations, ad placement, and more. Just as Google revolutionized and then monetized web search, Cognitive Search aims to set new standards for optimizing profits when it comes to responding to a given query in nearly every aspect of Internet content. In realtime, of course.

It’s this sense of immediacy that’s dazzling the web world right now, in part thanks to the constant content push made able by microblogging platforms, mobile access an the overall shrinking of the globe’s technology gap. What we’re left with is a mass of data that’s difficult to infiltrate, and a growing necessity for strong filters that still won’t make us work. Just give us what we need, give us the most recent data on what we need, and appeal to our need for instant gratification.