Do search engines care about the usability of your web pages? Does it make a difference whether your web pages are easy to navigate or not? A recent patent application from Yahoo indicates that search engines might take a look at your web page design.
Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0
Yelp lets customers write reviews of restaurants, shops, and all sorts of other businesses in communities throughout the country. And that’s the sort of service that makes the site both incredibly useful and incredibly dangerous for business owners.
Now Yelp is giving business owners tools that let them keep a closer eye on the reviews their establishment is receiving. If you sign up for a Business Owner Account, you can track how many people view your business page, update your business profile, and send messages to people who have reviewed your business. In order to get a business owner account, you’ll obviously need to verify that you actually run the business in question.
Of course, there’s no guaranty that you’ll be able to prevent people from writing that your food tastes stale or that your bathrooms are smelly unless you actual improve your food and clean your bathrooms. You know, unless those folks on the internet are lying. But that never happens.
[via TechCrunch]
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At SEO By the Sea, Bill Slawski has a post on a patent filing by Microsoft in using the age of a domain to reduce the impact of link farming on Search Engine results. The concept uses the information obtained from the domain hosting a site to calculate the age of the website.
This patent application assumes that newer domains have a “higher likelihood of being spam and/or being a part of a web farm that attempts to artificially inflate domain rankings for domains in the web farm.”
By looking at the age of domains that link to those newer domains when determining a rank for a domain, domains which have Links from older domains “may be ranked higher than spam domains and/or less relevant domains.”
The concept is novel in that it does not affect the rank of the source page as such but affects the rank of a page linking to the source page and looking to benefit form the link 'juice'.
The technique does seem to theoretically be very effective in curbing link farming but that means to have a relevant site you have to now onwards be really consistent and regular. Posting regularly over a long period of time must now make a difference in the rankings for a site.
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YouTube has added a suggest feature to its video search similar to the Google Suggest at Google Labs.
An excerpt from Google OS Blog
The feature is enabled by default, but you can disable it in the “Settings”. For now, YouTube Suggest seems to be live only for international sites like YouTube UK and only if you search from the homepage, but it should be available at YouTube's main site in the near future.
Expecting research at its parent to contribute to the search function at YouTube is obvious. But what YouTube does well is use the data on how its users navigate the site to come out with better techniques.
“Our algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers,” Google explains in a FAQ published on the Google Suggest page. “By suggesting more refined searches up front, Google Suggest can make your searches more convenient and efficient by keeping you from having to reformulate your query. Google Suggest might offer suggestions that you will find novel or intriguing.”
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Google Suggest : new tool for SEO in the Travel Industry? - 31 janvier 2008
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Yahoo has been in the news for its product announcements and for its fight to stay from Microsoft. Now, in adding to the news, its CTO Ari Balogh is talking about an Open Strategy (the OS in Y!OS) that will see social elements binding together the various properties under the purple umbrella
An excerpt from SearchEngineLand
Rather than creating another social network, Yahoo will be seeking to create a single profile that helps ground and center the social experience across the network. This is what has been missing at Yahoo - a social center (360 failed to gel and provide that). YOS also seeks to make the whole of Yahoo more social by overlaying relevant contacts and discussions on different pages within Yahoo, including the home page. To that end, there's an emphasis on what amount to widgets, though that word isn't used, that can be placed throughout Yahoo on various pages. The whole strategy extends into mobile (consistent with the spirit of Yahoo onePlace).
This is one move where Yahoo has to play its cards well and it will do better than Google. For one, Google itself has not been very successful in the social space. Among them, Yahoo has a greater clout with its various online properties. Done well, Yahoo could end up being the one stop for all your web activities and then with an improved search it would all fold in together.
That is the most optimistic view ofcourse. If the rewiring goes well Yahoo would be what FaceBook wants to become. But whether it can pull it off on its own and how the Microsoft merger (if it occurs) will affect it is to be seen.
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Called VisualRank, Google Researchers - Yushi Jing and Shumeet Baluja presented a paper at the International WWW Conference in Beijing detailing on a image search technique that would work on algorithmic detection of components in an image.
An excerpt from the article at TechCrunch
Notably, the new image search technology doesn't just index text associated with an image in determining what's in it. Google is now talking about using computers to analyze the stuff in photos, and using that to associate it in a ranked way with keyword queries. In effect, they're talking about something similar to PageRank for images (but without the linking behavior).
The technique they have used considers each image as a web document with the similarity between images being taken as hyper-Links. So the visual links are used to construct a rank for the image and the most relevant will surface when the user performs a query. Moreover, the visual links are computed using different features that are associated with an image - for example, for a people search facial characteristics are used, for landscape color is used.
Image search has its special engines such as Like.com which do product search with a true image analysis. The earlier process for image search was always based on mining the text used to describe images to return relevant results.
Google massive computation power may be the perfect testbed to apply this process and it is to be seen if the problem of automated image recognition is finally near solution.
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Filed under: Internet, Social Software, web 2.0
Social media tool Chirpscreen is out of beta, and has a few new tricks up its sleeve. When we first looked at Chirp in January, the application was a tool for grabbing images from your Flickr and Facebook accounts and showing them on your Windows desktop. Now Chirp has added support Twitter and eBay. A Mac client is also available.
Chirpscreen comes in two parts: a desktop viewer called Chirpscreen and a screen saver. The screen saver is still Windows-only, but Chirpscreen Desktop runs on Macs and PCs.
When you first run Chirpscreen, you’ll be presented with a slideshow of Flickr photos. But you can enter your login details for various social networks in order to see content from your contacts, including Facebook and Flickr images and Twitter messages. You can also enter keywords to see an assortment of images from public Flickr photostreams and from eBay.
Chirpscreen Desktop also lets you respond to Twitter messages or leave comments on Facebook images. It’s also easy to share Flickr images via email or through Facebook.
[via WebWare]
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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Browser Tips, Social Software, web 2.0
Facebook has finally rolled out its new chat feature to all users. That means you can chat with anyone on your Facebook contact list if the two of you are logged into the Facebook web page at the same time. But what if you like the idea of chatting with your Facebook friends, but hate the idea of keeping Facebook open in a browser tab all day?
Mozilla Links discovered a nifty trick for adding Facebook chat to your browser sidebar in Firefox. All you have to do is click on your bookmark toolbar and create a new bookmark. Give it whatever name you like, and enter this for the URL:
http://www.facebook.com/presence/popout.php
Make sure to select the button that says “Load this bookmark in the sidebar” and you should be all set.
Note that you can drag the sidebar divider to make the Facebook Chat window larger or smaller. If all you want to do is see your contact list, the sidebar doesn’t take up much space as all. But if you want to actually open a chat window with one or more of your contacts, you’ll need to widen the sidebar a bit, which will cost you some valuable web browser real estate.
Facebook Chat isn’t the only instant messenger you can open in a Firefox sidebar. You can also create bookmarks for Google Talk and Meebo.
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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0
There are two interesting Twitter stories making the rounds this morning. First up is the launch of a localized version of Twitter for Japan. The fact that the microblogging service is branching out to other countries isn’t particularly surprising. But what is significant is the fact that the Japanese version of Twitter features advertisements, something which the English language version of the site lacks.
It’s likely that Twitter will roll out English ads at some point. The site has no other source of revenue. But whenever you roll out an ad-free service and then start placing display ads on the interface, people will complain. So it’s probably a smart move to include advertisements from the get go in Japan.
In other news, an apparent Twitter privacy breach turned out to be a bit of a false alarm. But only a bit. Blogger and Twitter user Orli Yakuel discovered that many of her Twitter direct messages, which were supposed to be private communications between two users, were showing up on her public timeline. This is basically the same thing as posting your private emails on your blog. Not good.
It turns out that Twitter probably wasn’t responsible. Rather, Orli was testing a new service called GroupTweet, and entered her account info instead of setting up a new account. But this raises another issue. There are a huge number of third party tools for Twitter. And many require you to enter your login information. While we’ve been pretty happy to do this in the past, figuring the worst that could happen would be that someone would start sending out Tweets in our name and we’d delete our account, the possibility of our private messages being made public hadn’t really occurred to us. There really needs to be a better way for third party applications to access your Twitter data without requiring your username and password.
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A new patent application with the name “Ranking Domains Using Domain Maturity” shows how search engines could determine the quality of a web page by its age.
Filed under: Internet, Social Software, web 2.0
Ever wish you could plot Twitter public timeline messages on a 3D map of the world? No use trying to pretend. We know you, and we know that you think of absolutely nothing else all day. Fortunately, there’s a cure for what ails you: Twittearth. Or Twittervision. Both web applications do pretty much the same thing: show a rotating globe with the latest public tweets. But newcomer Twittearth is marginally more attractive, and it has cute little icons to represent each messge.
Twittearth also comes in screensaver form. Windows users can download the screensaver and look at the latest tweets from around the globe when their computer goes idle. Not that you’re likely to be sitting in front of your computer and reading the screen when it’s idle, but the spinning globe is still pretty, OK? A Mac version of the screen saver is in the works.
There’s also a module for Twittearth users to login to their Twitter accounts and post tweets, but we weren’t able to actually send a message no matter how many times we hit submit.
[via Mashable]
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Filed under: Fun, Internet, News, Social Software, web 2.0
Yes. It’s true. Now, you can broadcast to the world what you eat, want to eat, feel like eating (hey, let’s keep it clean) on a site dedicated to doing just that, called FoodFeed. We guess there’s no end in sight to the banal, continuous, slog of bytes that people feel they must ingest and digest too.
Among the amazing features FoodFeed offers is the ability to search by yes, you guessed it - Food! Now you can put a search term in like, say, chicken, and bingo - everyone who has eaten chicken pops up. Wow. After you scroll through all the exciting chicken eating people, you’ll probably either a). want to find all the beef eating people b). throw up or c). find some other place to explore on the interwebs or d). go outside and get some fresh air.
If you must tell everyone what is on your plate, well you can set up a feed, but first you need a Twitter account. Just add “having” as a friend on Twitter. Then check your feed out at “http://username.foodfeed.us.” You can post by sending tweets to @having (showing up in your Twitter updates) or d having (not showing up in your Twitter updates).
What do you think? Do you think people are interested in your food itinerary? Are you riveted to others’ food moods?
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Latest release of search statistics from HitWise have Google topping the U.S search market with a whopping 67.25% as against 20.29% for Yahoo and 5.25% for Microsoft.
An excerpt from the hitwise report
www.google.com
Mar.-08 : 67.25%
Feb.-08 : 66.44%
Mar.-07 : 64.13%
search.yahoo.com
Mar.-08 : 20.29%
Feb.-08 : 20.59%
Mar.-07 : 21.26%
search.msn.com
Mar.-08 : 6.65%
Feb.-08 : 6.95%
Mar.-07 : 9.01%
www.ask.com
Mar.-08 : 4.09%
Feb.-08 : 4.16%
Mar.-07 : 3.48%
This means further gaining of ground for Google as against Microsoft and Yahoo. It seams more like this is one area where Microsoft may have a tough time dominating even with Yahoo under its belt.
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Contents of this feed are a property of Creative Weblogging Limited and are protected by copyright laws. Violations will be prosecuted. Please email us if you’d like to use this feed for non-commercial activities at feeds - at - creative-weblogging.com.
Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0
When it comes to desktop alert clients for social networking feeds, there can be only one. Well, that’s not really true, but when it comes right down to it, do you want to run one application to keep track of your Twitter updates, another for posting to Jaiku and Pownce, and still a third to track FriendFeed updates? Probably not, which is why Twhirl is such a nifty little application since it can now do all of those things, and support for video micro-blogging service Seesmic is coming soon.
That brings the total number of Adobe AIR-based desktop clients for accessing FriendFeed updates to at least two. The other day we told you about Alert Thingy, a new desktop client for keeping tabs on your FriendFeed information. But just as Twhirl was busy adding FriendFeed to its repertoire, Alert Thingy’s developers were adding Twitter integration, which means the two applications are now fighting for the same user base.
At this point, Twhirl has a much stronger Twitter client than Alert Thingy and Alert Thingy has a much more elegant FriendFeed interface. And both applications eat up more RAM than we’re really comfortable with. But development on these desktop notifier/communication clients is happening at a pretty quick pace and both tools are worth keeping an eye on.
[via TechCrunch]
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Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0
If you have a decent social network but still haven’t jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon yet, here’s another reason to get on: when you find yourself arrested in a foreign country that may not offer you contact with the outside world, send a tweet out before you get taken down. Like James Karl Buck, who tweeted himself out of jail in Egypt.
After getting arrested for taking photos of a demonstration, Buck tweeted the word “ARRESTED.” His friends, obviously knowing what that meant, talked to the right people, because the next day Buck walked out with an attorney paid for by U.C. Berkeley while having the U.S. embassy on the phone with him.
This story of a Twitter emergency use highlights two things: 1) using Twitter on a cellphone can be a great way to let a lot of people know fast that something is wrong, and 2) it’s probably only as effective as the social network in your Twitter-sphere. Which is really just a guess, but an emergency tweet is unlikely to carry the same amount of weight with people that you don’t know.
Although probably no one should rely on Twitter as an emergency service, it’s nice to know that it’s there in case we need to let everyone know we’re in trouble. Thanks Twitter.
[via Techmeme]
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Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0
Six Apart has released a new Facebook Application called Blog It that lets users write blog posts directly from Facebook. That in and of itself wouldn’t be particularly exciting or useful. But here’s the cool part. You can also associate Blog It with your accounts on multiple blogging and micro-blogging platforms so that you can update a series of blogs from one location.
Blog It supports TypePad, Blogger, LiveJournal, Moveable Type, WordPress, Tumblr, Pownce, Vox, and Twitter. Users can choose to simply use the application to simultaneously (or individually) update their status messages on Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, or other micro-blogging services. Or you can write a full blog post, have it show up on your various blogs, and send out a quick note through Twitter, Pownce, and your Facebook news feed to let your friends know you’ve got a new post up.
You can check out a demo video after the jump.
[via Mashable]
Continue reading Blog It: Post to a dozen blogs and social networks at once
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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0
Facebook has rolled out two new features. The first is a Google Trends style tool called Lexicon that lets you graph popular keywords that have appeared on Facebook profiles, groups, and walls. The second is the addition of third party data to Facebook Mini-Feeds.
The graph feature is pretty much self explanatory. You enter a term, and Facebook will show you how frequently it pops up on the site. Enter two terms, separate by a comma, and you can compare their popularity. The Mini-Feed update is a little more interesting, but only a little. Users can now associate their Facebook accounts with Flickr, Picasa, Yelp, and del.icio.us so that pictures, reviews, and Links they post to those sites will be added to their Facebook feeds.
The move seems designed to help Facebook compete with a number of new “lifestreaming” services like FriendFeed and Socialthing! which allow users to track updates from across a series of social networks. The difference between Facebook and those other sites is that FriendFeeed and Socialthing! let you track far more than 4 networks. Where’s Twitter, Pownce, Digg, Reddit, and YouTube?
It should be interesting to see if Facebook fleshes out its lifestreaming features in the future. It would seem to be in the company’s best interest to do so. Because if users decide that it’s easier to keep track of their social networking data while visiting a 3rd party site like FriendFeed, that means they’ll be spending less time at Facebook’s page, which means less advertising revenue.
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A new study about the click behavior of web searchers has been released this month. What do people click and what does this mean for your website rankings?
Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0
Looking for a quick way to conduct a poll? Online polling service PollDaddy has added a new Twitter feature that lets you ask a group of people what you should have for lunch, who you should vote for, or anything in between.
Users can set up a poll in a matter of seconds. Just visit the web site, type a short question, and select a few possible answers. You’ll need to enter your Twitter login information in order to send out the poll. PollDaddy will automatically shorten the URL and send out a tweet under your name.
We’re guessing that most users will either see your poll the moment you post it or they won’t see it at all, so this service will be great for Twitter users with a large number of followers who need to get some information quickly. But you can also post Links to your poll on a web page or pretty much anywhere else, so you could theoretically use PollDaddy’s Twitter feature to gather information over time as well.
[via WebWare]
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Researchers from the Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology and Queensland University of Technology have done a study on the classification of web searches.
Informational searching involves looking for a specific fact or topic, navigational searching seeks to locate a specific Web site and transactional searching looks for information related to buying a particular product or service.
The research was the first published work of its kind done using actual searching data, with the aim of real-time classification. Researchers analyzed more than 1.5 million queries from hundreds of thousands of search engines users. Findings showed that about 80 percent of queries are informational and about 10 percent each are for navigational and transactional purposes.
The results will perhaps help in providing technologists an insight into the kind of queries to base their focus on. The navigational and transactional queries are sure to peak once mobile internet and business over the net gathers more pace. The mobile revolution will have a big impact on how search evolves in future and perhaps the next big tech company will emerge from there.
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