Webism Today » search

Algorithms got me cross-eyed

Andrew — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:08:31 +0000

Released to YouTube over two months ago LMCDuff08’s Mad Avenue Blues is only now beginning to surface at some of the more ‘traditional’ media sites.

The excellent song is a parody of Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ and is sung as “The year the media died”. In it the big traditional media owners and buyers succumb not just to digital marketers like search agencies (to which the lyric “Algorithms got me cross-eyed” and the title of this post comes from) but to the changes in user behaviour.

Facebook shuts down NewsFeed application.

Facebook testing real time search

David Law — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:53:00 +0000

Facebook announced on their blog today that they are testing a new version of Facebook Search. By the looks of it this is an attempted rival to Twitter’s real time social search engine Twitter Search. The new search feature is only being rolled out to a very limited number of testers for now, but from the looks of it, it is a long overdue feature for Facebook.

Twitter Search has become the definitive real time social search engine since it was launched by Twitter and despite attempts by Google to create a more real time search function, it is still the best way to find out who is talking about what right now.

Facebook search, as Ben Parr at Mashable notes, is not the most impressive of tools and is long overdue an overhaul. The new search function lets you search what is being said about a certain keyword in the news feeds of your friends, pages that you’re a fan of and any news feed that has been made public by the owner.

Although Facebook search will be resticted to people you’re friends with and public facebook profiles, it looks like it could begin to rival Twitter Search as the top real time search tool.

Facebook search could also be an invaluable search tool for brands wanting to monitor what is being said about them amongst their fans. Although, there will be no way for them to see conversation amongst people that are not fans; the people who are most likely to be saying negative things.

Facebook will be expanding the search feature to more people over the coming weeks.

Google adds forum and review search

David Law — Wed, 13 May 2009 08:35:00 +0000

Google appear to have added a few more search criteria to their UI. Amongst these new options are forum and review search. The UI looks a lot more like Google Blog Search where you are able to search posts from the past 24 hours, past week, past year etc. So this is a sign Google are moving towards real-time search along with the added value of conversation search.

This will be another great addtion to the many brand monitoring tools out there. There are currently quite a few forum search engines, such as BoardReader and Omgili, but it is very interesting to see Google move into it. First looks show that it is quite comprehensive, although there doesn’t seem to be the opportunity to create trend graphs like you can do with Omgili Buzz Graphs.

Google have also added review search. In the past, there haven’t been many tools that let you specifically search reviews. I had bodged together a consumer review search on Google Custom Search a while ago, it searches all the consumer review sites I know of, but Google’s new filter appears to search both ‘professional’ and consumer reviews.

This is all very interesting stuff that gives an insight into where Google are going with search – showing they recognise the importance of social search and being able to search what people are saying.

Top marks to bigmouth Andy Travers for pointing this out.

Big changes coming to Twitter Search

David Law — Thu, 07 May 2009 09:53:00 +0000

Twitter appear to finally be doing some interesting stuff with their search application. Twitter search was recently integrated into the home pages of all Twitter users. This meant that rather than having to go to search.twitter.com, users could search Twitter right from their home page.

The latest news is that Twitter are working on crawling the links that people post in their tweets. Cnet Webware reported yesterday that Twitter search, which in the past only indexed the text of tweets, will begin to index the pages that people are linking to on Twitter.

This is a big development as it will begin to make Twitter Search a more complete search engine and more on par with Google. In the past, Twitter search was fantastic to searching what people are talking about, but it was not particularly great for finding useful content; however, Twitter Search may have the one up on Google as their search engine is real time. So you will be finding content that people are talking about then and there.

Twitter are also planning on taking into account reputation ranking in Twitter Search. This will mean that when you search for a particularly talked about trend in Twitter, Cnet point out, “Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank search results in part based on that”.

This will be an interesting addition. Currently Twitter search just shows results based by time, and nothing else. When reputation comes into it, arguably you will get more relevant results.

Twitter have not said how they will rank reputation though. It may be something similar to Twitter Grader; basing reputation on number of followers and number of friends, as well as amount of retweets and conversation frequency.

It is unclear whether results from people with a higher reputation will give us more relevant results. Take the Schiphol disaster as an example. We could end up just seeing what Stephen Fry said about something, and that might not be as relevant as seeing results from people that were actually at Schiphol whitnessing the event. Hopefully Twitter will take things like this into account.

I pity the (April) fool.

David Law — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:30:00 +0000

It appears as if today is not going to be a slow news day. Already it’s been reported that The Guardian has taken its newspaper out of print and onto Twitter, dangerous hummingbirds have been spotted in rural Gloucestershire (by Dr Julius Doctor) and Warner Bros have acquired the Pirate Bay. It’s April 1st and in keeping with tradition, the Internets are awash with April Fools’ day jokes.

Not only are spoof news stories spreading virally today, websites are messing with us too. YouTube have turned their videos upside down, Reddit have redesigned their homepage to resemble Digg and Google have introduced a new Gmai l feature which allows you to auto respond to those attractive and strangely frequent business propositions from Nigerian princes, princesses and kings.

Google have always been keen April Fools tricksters. Last year they launched a search feature called gDay that allowed users to search into the future. They also announced a partnership with Virign called Virgle, a joint venture to go to Mars.

Big April Fools pranks have been going on for many years. The BBC pulled a spectacular April Fools stunt in 1957 when they managed to fool a large amount of the British public with a 3 minute Panorama documentary about Swiss farmers harvesting spaghetti from spaghetti trees. The documentary was followed by numerous phonecalls from the gullible public enquiring where they could get their own spaghetti bush.

To keep up to date with the 2009 april fools jokes, you can see a comprehensive list at April Fools’ Day on the Web.

Manic street features

David Law — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 10:18:00 +0000

Google, who recently launched its new UK Street View service, has been forced to remove a number of its images; due to complaints that some of the pictures displayed are considered too revealing.

Such images include a man walking into a sex shop, a man vomiting, whilst another showed a group of people being arrested; not exactly appealing images for your local street. There have also been reports of images displaying people’s homes and the streets they reside on, which has not pleased many residents.

As a result, offending images have been replaced with a black screen and the words: “This image is no longer available”. Whilst it is not surprising that a few offending images were discovered, Google have claimed that the percentage is very small, and a lot less than expected. In fact, it has been stated by Google that they are more than happy to remove any images if they are asked.

Furthermore, faces and registration plates contained in images are blurred out. This was in order to maintain privacy rights, which was ruled in 2008 by the Information Commissioner’s Office. But this was not to be the case for various areas in Birmingham, where several faces and numbers plates were not blurred out.

However, despite such concerns there are still many individuals who are pleased with what Street View has to offer so far; DigMo! being one fan particularly impressed with the service.
To date, Google’s Street View is available in nine countries; including the United States, Netherlands, Japan, Italy, Australia, France, New Zealand and Spain. Within in the UK, Google have mapped the streets of more than 25 cities.

Street View has raised many privacy concerns due to the images being captured without people’s permission. In addition, there are individuals questioning the overall purpose of the service. But such concerns should not affect the overall popularity of the street mapping service; whether it’s for genuine research or perhaps even entertainment purposes.

Twitter incorporates search in home page

David Law — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 09:43:00 +0000

As predicted by The Next Web, yesterday Twitter announced that they were testing a new home page interface that incorporates the popular and extremely useful Twitter search in the top right hand corner of the screen.

The new interface is being tested on a random number of accounts before they roll it out to the rest of us. Or, in Twitter’s words ‘once a bunch of us have kicked the tires a bit’.

Not only does the new search box incorporate into your home page, it also features a trending drop down that shows you the hot trends people are talking about.

Twitter search has been such an important and useful feature of the site for so long and I’m surprised it’s taken so long for Twitter to incorporate it in the home page. When ever you want to know what is being said about someone or something on Twitter, search is a fantastic tool to get an instant insight. It is also a great way to find new people to follow.

Despite how useful Twitter search is, there are a multitude of other tools that fill in the gaps where Twitter Search falls down. TweetVolume is a fantastically simple tool that allows you to compare the amount of mentions of any term in Twitter. Twist gives you a line graph showing the amount of mentions of a term over time and Monitter allows you to compare mentions of a particular term in real time.

And because we’re all narcissists in social media, TweetStats and Twitter Grader are wonderful ways to reassure us that being number 37,334 out of 1,323,857 on Twitter actually means something.

Google glitch causes worry for internet users

David Law — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:19:00 +0000

Google has revealed that the problem which caused every site on the internet to be labelled as unsafe was down to human error.

For around 40 minutes (Google’s calculations) on Saturday afternoon (GMT), or for more than 90 minutes (various users’ calculations), every search result offered by Google came up with a warning that “This site may harm your computer”.

This warning – that was displayed on all sites, even the UK’s government homepage, Wikipedia and Google itself – came up on all browsers and each local version of Google. The glitch affected Google’s organic results but the sponsored links still went directly to their landing pages. It appeared to the user as though all the sites contained some sort of malware that would install itself on your computer, but Google has come out and said that it was merely human error.

Google’s Marissa Mayer wrote on the official Google blog: “What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message ‘This site may harm your computer’ if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods.

“We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs.”

While all sites temporarily came with a warning that may have diverted traffic away from them, stopbadware.org was inundated with visitors trying to find out what was wrong with their favourite sites that caused the security site to crash.

Finding the words in the video

David Law — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:48:00 +0000

I am sure you have been there. Cruising through YouTube videos and you find a gem. One that you need to share and especially the best bit that made you laugh so hard you nearly wet yourself. Your friend pops round, you settle down in front of the screen and you need to find that scene. Your friend is not impressed with the start and you want to just need to show them the funny bit, but where is it? The part where he is talking about dog foulingâ€¦why cant you find it?

Well, Google sympathises with your pain. Not so much about the dog fouling scene that you need to find but surely the part where you can now search through videos using words that are spoken in it.

The Google Video Search gadget has been designed for a higher purpose than to assist you in finding the best bits of video clips. It is Googleâ€™s contribution to the elections that are taking place now in the states.

The technology uses voice recognition to take what is spoken in a video and convert it into text and then indexed enabling users to search through speeches (some which are easily over an hour in length) to find a point they missed, want to hear again or to share with a friend. Videoâ€™s from YouTubeâ€™s Political Channels are being used in the gadget.

Google does put a disclaimer on the software saying that it is not 100% accurate so users should anticipate a certain number of mondegreens a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said such as in the Jimi Hendrix classic â€œPurple Hazeâ€ many people report hearing â€œexcuse me while I kiss this guyâ€ when really the famous artist sings â€œkiss the skyâ€.

Although speech recognition software is still quite a ways away from the likes of Hal, there could be hope in the use of this new Google gadget by the search giant to crack the last few holdouts in the technology. However popular the new gadget proves, we are bound to expect a few choice mondegreens from it.

No related posts.

In our Big Brother World should we be bothered if Google is watching?

David Law — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:50:00 +0000

According to the most recent statistics, the UK boasts 4.2 million CCTV cameras â€“ that is one for every 14 people in the country. The small island has so many cameras that the total number of cameras in the UK counts for 20% of all the cameras in the world. With so many cameras poised to capture our movements in public and not so much as a whimper from the public, why are we all of a sudden up in arms when we spot the conspicuous Google spycar taking a few snapshots?

Well, the people up in arms may not be you or I but it has certainly ruffled the feathers of Privacy International who are currently known to be seeking out more information on the details of the project from the Information Commissionerâ€™s Office.

There was a bit of an outcry a while back when Google was sending out its spyvan-cam on its home turf. It has now begun blurring peopleâ€™s faces in the pictures it took then and plans to do the same for the snaps it takes in Europe. Google will also blur out vehicle number plates and has already put in place the technology to do so. It recognises faces and number plates and works to blur them out.

So far the Google spycar has been spotted in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff, proven by a snapshot of the Google Street View car by the Register. A bit like taking a picture of your friend taking a picture.