9 posts tagged “search”

Social search is still in unmarked territory, as no single winner has been crowned for their attempts with semantics, online behavior, and human power. But there are those out there that are determined to make it happen, and I very much enjoy exploring new ways to search and discover, based on a number of associations brought about by every new technique that emerges.  Here is Part II of the Niche Search series, profiling Prefound and Searchbots .

Read Part I here.

Prefound

Prefound is a site that has amassed its users searches and provides their previous experience to help your new search flourish.  It's a human-powered search in the sense that it relies on the community to organize search results on a given query.  They are basing your search on other's experience to give you something more relevant than a crawler can find.  Until technology has formed an artificial intelligence to match that of human intellect, human-influenced experience will continue to drive many in the social search realm.

Searchbots

Searchbots has been a project (work in progress) for some time now, and has taken the act of search and turned it into a bit of a game.  Your Searchbot is a personal buddy that will tailor its search results to fit your needs.  It's dynamic in its interactions, so the more information you feed it, the more relevant your search results become.  The bot's battery life will actually get low if you don't feed it with more info!  You can search by mood, color, keyword, and all sorts of things.  The search becomes tangential in this regard, as it incorporates a bit of StumbleUpon tactics and betters its results based on your reaction to a given website it has provided.  Not to mention, you can customize the look of your little Searchbot.

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Google's new frontpage gadget lets you watch MTV content.  This gadget, one of thousands provided for your frontpage, brings in all kinds of tv programming that's been provided by networks' broadband channels. 

So if you'd like to consider this a loophole for Viacom's persistently upset stance on Google playing their content, go right ahead.  But I can't imagine that this is much different than finding search results for Viacom--or even video search results for that matter.  The content isn't pirated (it shouldn't be, at lease).  As a matter of fact, the way in which you can watch MTV using Google's gadget feed  is probably what Viacom would prefer over the pirated content that has made YouTube what it is today. Legality.  That's all that Viacom wants, right? And maybe some revenue kickback. 

At any rate, many are speculating that this new Google gadget will increase the strain on the relationship between Google and Viacom.  And maybe it will. It's still easy to find those pirated YouTube clips with a quick search on Google Video, but I guess all that really will have to be worked out in the courtroom. Could Viacom get all that upset about the RSS feed on Google?  Would they, in turn, get mad at all the other companies that are allowing users to make their own program line-ups based on content provided through these feeds?

MyStrands is a social music discovery site that has been in the press quite a bit lately.  Their most recent announcement was the launching of their Social Player yesterday, which makes their service available through their Symbian mobile platform.  A good portion of their core functions found on their website have been optimized for their mobile website.  They have included a powerful search function that still allows you to search for and discover music and friends, wherever you go.  The mobile app is still fully integrated with the MyStrands API and truly brings social networking and entertainment to the cell phone.  With the current trends, it's important to note the increasing capabilities of mobile devices as well as the web-based solutions that are being rather opportunistic when it comes to this expansion. 

Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarria, VP of Communications for MyStrands, gives great insight to this expansion during our phone interview, shown below (see video here).

So tell me a bit about your recently released Social Player.

It's a music player for Symbian mobile devices. The Social player is a music discovery tool and has a strong community component. We can see  the strong evolution in mobile industry. Right now we use the mobile phone to talk, and early adopters use mob phone to do work (send email on their Blackberries). Some years ago we used the PC to do office work and now we use the PC to do fun stuff.  Soon the mob phone will help us stay connected but also be a gateway to entertainment.  That's why we're buidling the MyStrands Social Player.  It helps you discover music and stay connected with friends.

And how does the Social Player work?

Every time u listen to a song it gives you a recommendation of songs that are similar. Then you can get more info about the song and artist on our mobile website. We have over 6 million songs, and not just with the big recording labels but from independent artists too.

Then there's the community component. It helps you discover new people with similar music taste to yours, and tells you who else is listening to that song. You can see their profile and see what they're listening to as well.

And does this include what theyre listening to at the same time, or does it include their entire playlist?

It shows their entire playlist in real time. So it will show who listened to it when, whether they listened to it 2 hours ago or 2 days ago.

What challenges did you have in creating the Social Player across cell phone platforms?

It's very tough to deal w/them.  You have a different handsets, and different technologies. Not all services work on all technologies. One of the things with the MyStrands social player is that you don't even need to be with an operator.  You just need a cell phone with connection to Internet. 
To be realistic, if you want your technology to reach millions of users, you need a partnership with an operator.  Or u need a lot of marketing.

Do u have a partnership?

There's not much I can tell you but we're in talks with a lot of people.

And where do you see some of these mobile trends going?

This is just the beginning of the mobile revolution. We'll see more and more cool things you can do on the phone. for example with the iPhone, they'll sell who knows how many units, but it will open the eyes of the end user and let us know that the phone is capable of doing more cool things.  Until the iPhone we didn't use the phone to do things like listen to music or see Google maps. But w/the marketing from Apple, it will be a behavior changer.

How are you planning on leveraging that?

At the end if you think about it, this is a product that we've announced and what we've seen is that people that have used it talk about it to other people.  We've been getting a lot of feedback.  What we're missing is time to put into effect all those ideas.  We'll offer more and more solutions. 

What 'm saying is that there are a lot of initiatives like the iPhone, and PartyStrands, and the MyStrands Social Player that are suggesting that the future is mobile. People are getting more familiar with the possibility of the phone. 
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Imagine you're going to school and you're on the bus, and you have 20 minutes to get to school. What do u do? Maybe talk to your friends. With MyStrands, you can listen to music and know what your friends are listening to at home or even at school.
We're approaching a wonderful age and music and mobile are made for each other.

Last.fm took the opportunity while at SXSW to mention that they will be incorporating video search into their services.  Modeled after their vast music  social recommendation technology, they feel that video is the natural next step.  Online video is, after all, the new music.  Last.fm will create their video search service based on their Audioscrobbler software, which is currently used for music.  They have already signed deals with EMI and Warner, which will allow Last.fm to stream their music videos. 

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And while there are several businesses including video search in some fashion, as well as the growing number of start-ups that are tackling video search with a fresh take, it is the type of recommendation system that Last.fm may propose that will really give the best access to the long tail of music videos.  Amazon and Netflix both built strong businesses on social recommendation systems.  And considering the difficulty in finding the true nature of a video and relying heavily on keywords that content owners have attached to their content, leveraging a social recommendation system is a nice way to get around such an obstacle.

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Tappity is a mobile phone service that has formed a community around sites that are optimized for mobile use.  It also serves as a frontpage of sorts, for your mobile phone.  It's got a pretty high level of interactivity through mobile phone usage, as users can submit and vote for sites they like.  In this sense, Tappity becomes much like a social search engine for your cell phone.  It's apparent that technology and culture are moving in the direction of centralizing the mobile device, but it's companies like Tappity that take the initiative to create applications ready for today that provide a great deal of value for our current lifestyles.

I got a chance to chat with Scott Robbin, the creator of Tappity, regarding his first start-up from his parent company Halobrite.

So tell me about Tappity. Is it more of a hub for sites that are optimized for mobile phones?  Or is it a mobile search engine?

  Eurekster has raised $5.5 million in a round of venture capital funding, suprising many since they've recently lost their biggest client, Friendster, to Google.  The search engine that has dedicated its services to searching communities and social networks has provided value to many, nonetheless, and has become an easy solution for bloggers and niche communities across the board.  When it comes to niche search engines, Eurekster has proven to have staying power. 

Their swiki feature has proven rather popular and useful to those wanting to add a customized search tag cloud to their website or blog.  In terms of the service they provide to communities, it's unique in that they study user behavior in order to provide better search results.  This can be monetized, but not as much as a deal with Google, apparantly.

Eurekster's round of venture capital funding was provided by Technology Venture Partners of Australia and Transcosmos Investments of Japan, as well as additional private investors.  If their loss of Friendster as a client has hindered them in any way, particularly in closing a deal with another larger company, I'm sure their latest round of funding will help them to further their development and put them in a better position in the long run.

WikiSeek is a byproduct of the Wikipedia phenomonon, and the purpose of WikiSeek is to better search none other than Wikipedia itself. This has confused several people, especially since it appears to be much like the other company that is a much talked about offspring of Wikipedia--Wikia. Wikipedia search results that show for a WikiSeek query can be edited; hence the wiki nature of the service. But WikiSeek suffers from the same perils that many search engine start-ups are facing, and that's the fact that they have very few search results.

Though backed by Sequoia, many are wondering what WikiSeek's true purpose would be, and how they will go about incentivising someone to use WikiSeek and use the edit tool for Wikipedia articles. It would be different if you could edit the search results. Perhaps that would provide more value than simply offering a way to search for entries on Wikipedia. While they do display results that are not from Wikipedia, these cannot be modified in any manner.

WikiSeek does have a few good features though, including a tag cloud that is displayed with each search query, and a search plug-in for you to add to your own website. Otherwise, I can't imagine many other than Wikipedia fans utilizing WikiSeek's service.

Krillion is a company dedicated to local search in a very specific way.  With years of experience running backend development for Yahoo search, it's no wonder that Krillion co-founder Joel Toledano created such an effective product.  The purpose of Krillion is to find the local search results that are most useful to you, and more importantly, they are presented to you in the most useful way. Krillion not only gives you the retailer locations at which you can find your item, but they also provide manufacturer information, maps and contact information, prices and details on the specific item you're researching, and even a click-to-call button that will put you in contact with the right department--not just the retailer's overarching customer service number.  

This is what Krillion's founders call Actionable Local Search; it's location-specific as well as procut-specific.  And it gives you a very comprehensive way of not only finding what you're looking for, but rearranging your search results as needed.  List the results by price, proximity, retailer, or a number of other fine details.  Create tear-off sheets that can be printed and touted to the nearest Home Depot.  So what Krillion has done is helped the consumer with the search online, and helped the retailer with the sale offline.

"We've got our finger on the

pulse of the Internet"

It all sounds basic enough, but there is so much that was involved with the creation of Krillion, including over a year of backend development.  There was a lot of local information to incorporate with the emergence of Krillion.  And when we think about search, we often take an optimistic approach, regardless of how many times we've been disappointed in the past, spending far too long looking for specific information online. 

When I met for a web conference with the creators of Krillion, they were kind enough to do a Google local Chicago search with me for a refridgerator.  And I gotta tell ya--the fact that none of the local Home Deopt locations, or even the Sears (which is a mere 6 blocks away) location turned up in our search results was disheartening.  To make matters worse, the nearest location was in a west suburb, and some of the results included a store that sells satellite dishes.

The same search on Krillion provides a slew of locations that are displayed in a relevant manner, and presents all the information I need in one place.  I don't have to toggle between my Home Depot and Lowes browser windows, and write notes on a separate sheet of paper.  And since they will be integrated with the indexes we use everyday for our favorite search engines such as Google, the information will be easy to find.  We won't have to remember another URL destination (though that's one easy way to find Krillion's search information) in order to start our search.  What Krillion provides is a truly specialized local search.

This is key to Krillion's business model, in the sense that they've found a nice way to monetize their search.  It isn't by selling text ads, but by providing dedicated and detailed visual space to the consumer, as well as a directive to get them into the store.  Through Krillion's search results, they are also able to map out consumer trends that are invaluable to retailers and manufacturers alike.  In this way, Krillion makes it that much easier for bix box retailers to become more visible online, extending their online presence directly to the people that matter.

Krillion's value to advertisers extends further than this: they will also be able to offer market research data that will lend to better analysis of the relationship between the Internet and their stores, as well as having additional points of comparison for their other marketing campaigns, such as newspaper ads, that are designed to generate in-store traffic.

Krillion is still in beta, and is currently only searching appliances.  But as they grow, they will offer more things to search for, such as home electronics.

See idea for Krillion mash-up here.