Once again we provide you with all the little weekly tidbits that are talked about at our summer search industry cocktail parties, golf outings, and yachting regattas. If one feels that they want to repeat these morsels amongst one’s co-workers, superiors or (heaven forbid) inferiors, then we understand of course. One must do what one must do dahling. Just leave my name out of it.
This week it was all change in the world of search engines but not how some people may have expected:
Google Nearly See-Through
Google continues to get more transparent – or is it just the illusion of transparency? Ok let’s all calm down and try not to be paranoid. In bigger news than, say, Cuil launching, Google is giving users insight into how a search has been tailored to them as an individual. They can also see what their results might look like without those filters on. Rank is indeed stank.
I Say it Here and it Comes Out There Dept. - YouTube Does Speech to Text
In another important advancement for search engine-kind YouTube is rolling out some pretty good speech to text mojo on selected clips. This should help search engines to get even better results and add more video to universal search.
The Birth of Cuil
I won’t waste more virtual ink on this one – you can see our initial take here. Now the question is – who will buy Cuil and when? Nice launch publicity though, shame about the engine. Also don’t transpose the “l” and the “i” when looking for Cuil unless you are a fan of Italian porn (or so I hear).
Yuil Logs Some Positive Results, Gets Burned
Meanwhile at a place Yahoo likes to call BOSS (Building Open Source Search or some such thing) an enterprising gent decided to ape Cuil’s interface and attributes using Yahoo’s new open source do-it-yourself kit. Oh irony is a cruel mistress – it worked better than Cuil! But it wouldn’t be Alanis-writing-a-song-about-irony-without-knowing-what irony-actually-is ironic without this triple axial twist: Yuil’s creator turns out to be Yahoo VP of Platforms Sam Pullara, one of the few execs left there, and for his trouble was politely asked to turn Yuil off.
Can Live Thrive with Homepage Hotspots?
MSN’s Live rolled out a new image background homepage design (see above) with imbedded hotspots, though right now only the non-hotspot version appears to be loading. The non version is very clean but the hotspot version added something truly different to the search homepage experience, though whether it’s “better” is open to interpretation. The opportunities for using the image as an ad platform are also notable. The background image has rollovers that take you to relevant search results tied into where the mouse is. Roll over a river in a picture of someone fishing and it might say “Fishing Trips on the
Brothers Gonna Work it Out – Scrabulous? Never Heard of it – We’re Wordscraper!
While Hasbro and Electronic Arts struggle to launch Scrabble on Facebook, archfoes the Agarwalla brothers struck back by nixing all of the obvious Scrabble design cues and rules adding some coolness and re-launching the app-formerly-known-as-Scrabulous as Wordscraper. Nicely done.
