The resource of the day is: http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html, a directory of LISTSERVE® mailing lists in use around the world. Mailing lists can be valuable assets to researchers, as they often allow one to tap into expert opinions, and perhaps get alerted to events before they get published my traditional media or even blogs.

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.

Cognition, a NLP and Semantic search company announced Tuesday that they could map more than 10 million semantic connections, enabling them to help other companies build search engines that "understand" the query. This is a company and technology to watch; they offer API access to their system to help developers build "web 3.0" tools. Check them out at: http://www.cognition.com/.

 

 

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. 

 

It is nice to see that a few companies continue to try to improve the user search experience. Just checked out Omgili, a social search engine that covers product review sites, mailing lists, discussion forums ... basically it is a vertical search engine for many types of user generated content. They claim to crawl over 100,000 individual sites. They also have some basic graphing tools in their advanced section to help users track "buzz". In addition, Omgili also provides API access for companies wishing to integrate Omgili results into their own systems.

Overall, I found Omgili to be a useful tool ... it is one of the few search engines that actually index product reviews and discussion forums ... I hope they're able to continue to improve upon their search engine.

 

 

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.  

Google just got another competitor ... the search engine Cuil (www.cuil.com) just launched, and claims that it searches a large index than Google. Thus far, I've seen some errors when I try to visit Page 2+ of search results. I'll try again later to see if they resolve some of these issues. Read the TechCrunch analysis here.

Note: Danny Sullivan just posted an in-depth review of Cuil as well, he brings up some great points (Yahoo, Ask, and Microsoft have been around for awhile, but all have not gained search share from Google). Read it at: http://searchengineland.com/080728-000100.php. 

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.