I hope Wolfram Alpha does well ... I really do. I've thought for awhile that Google really needs a viable competitor, which will help drive search forward. However, I'll wait until the site is launched before announcing them as a serious competitor (even then, I'm willing to give them months or years if their product holds promise, AND they demonstrate the ability to roll out improvements on a regular basis). I'd also be interested to see if they have an API, and how easy it would be to tap into their system to create vertical apps. 

So here's the link for today from the popular (non tech press) ... article is a bit too hopeful IMHO: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/an-invention-that-could-change-the-internet-for-ever-1678109.html.

Not everyone needs to spend a six figure expense to monitor reputation.

Marty Weintraub has a nice tutorial up at: http://www.aimclearblog.com/2009/03/16/how-to-build-a-reputation-monitoring-dashboard/ ... using free tools from Google and others to monitor info sources. This is nicely done.

While larger companies will want (and need) advanced analytics and filtering options (normalization of source names, for one), this is certainly worth pursuing.

 

Check out BlogScope's tools for visualizing content from over 30 million blogs and 520 million posts. The site (http://www.blogscope.net/) currently is in preview/beta release, but has some nice tools allowing you to track the popularity of a search term, as well as running a comparison against two search terms (see below for an example). BlogScope also allows the embedding of their charts in other content ... such as blogs.

 

Overall, this is a good tool, it will be interesting to see if they develop additional analysis modules, as they could begin competing against some of the larger buzz monitoring outfits.

Happy Friday to all. Just a few links of interest today while I work on redesigning a directory application I wrote some time ago.

Anyway, while I've been listing a lot of new search startups of late, I haven't paid homage to the pioneers in the search field. So ... here are a few (the "Big Three"):

• Dialog - Strong tools for business and scientific searching.  
• Factiva - Good international coverage (mainly Europe, with some Asian sources).
• LexisNexis - Great source for news monitoring 

Other links:

• Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy.

 

A few links of interest:

Check out an interview (by SEO Book) of Quintura's CEO: http://www.seobook.com/interview-quintura-search-ceo-yakov-sadchikov ... an interesting discussion on an alternate search engine and how they are positioning their business. Quintur also offers a search engine for kids, located at: http://kids.quintura.com/, as well as free widgets that you can embed into blogs and websites.

 

 

My friend and client Dieter Pauwels just launched a blog at: http://lifecoaching.dieterpauwels.com/.

Dog lovers may want to check out: http://www.bestfriendsstudios.com/ for a collection of handmade gifts and stationary.

Check out Technology Review's short article on advancements in facial recognition technology at: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21384/?a=f. While this technology will be extremely helpful for security and law enforcement applications, it could also be leveraged to improve video search algorithms, by automatically extracting individual names from videos. I can imagine a system whereby the individual's name is extracted and perhaps weighted by how long they appear in the video. I'm still waiting for technology that automatically recognizes logos, trademarks and other visual cues from videos ... features that would be much used by CI and Media Monitoring applications. 

 

Some sites are reporting that Cuil, a competitor (hopefully!) to Google in search, is breaking their sites when their searchbot comes to index content.

Read more at: http://techgage.com/news/cuil_taking_down_some_websites and http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=338&tag=nl.e539.  

If these reports are true, Cuil may need to quickly improve their indexing processes, or some sites may begin blocking Cuils search bot.  

This past week, Twitter acquired Summize (now located at: search.twitter.com). Read the official release here: http://blog.twitter.com/2008/07/finding-perfect-match.html. We'll see how this goes ... certainly all of social media needs better search tools; hopefully Twitter will devote some resources to improving the search interface.