The innovation in the search technology is predominantly being done in the UI side. Will it really increase the user adoption? Emre Sokullu on ReadWriteWeb has this to say:
“ Like Quintura, Snap relies heavily on UI innovations. The problem with relying on UI innovation is that the barrier to entry is too low. The big players Google (SearchMash) and Microsoft (Live) are actively experimenting with UI innovations.
However I think UI innovations will be very suitable for vertical search engines. For example flight search engine Kayak and job search engines like SimplyHired and Indeed can deliver UIs that take into account the unique requirements of their topic focus. Quintura Kids and Quintura’s upcoming ‘Search In Site’ feature can also succeed by delivering UIs for niche audiences. However I don’t think that up and comers like Quintura Web Search can easily convince us to change our general search attitudes. It’ll take more than UI innovations to compete with Google. ”
The partial results of the poll:
Yes, the likes of Quintura provide a viable alternative to Google for general search 17% (9 votes)
Yes, but it won’t be a single alt search engine - united they stand… 19% (10 votes)
No, the barrier to entry (for other startups and bigcos) with UI innovation is too low 31% (17 votes)
“In a more generic sense, GIS is a tool that allows users to create interactive queries (user created searches), analyze the spatial information, edit data, maps, and present the results of all these operations.”
There are couple of communities on Mapunity. BlankNoise is one of them. BlankNoise as described on Mapunity :
“The community works to document and prevent the street sexual harrassments against women in india.”
“The service, called McAfee OK, works at the provider level and inspects all mobile content such as ring tones, images, video, and even applications that may be uploaded by subscribers onto the network.”
“The suite will include antivirus protection, a personal firewall, anti-SMS spam protection, a password manager, and data-encryption technology.”
This probably gives us an insight into the mobile future. These announcements tells us that going forward, there will be lot of problems with the mobile content. And we thought mobile devices will make our life simpler. Oh boy!
Nokia filed a new patent about semantic visual search engine. Om Malik reported this on GigaOM.
Nokia is already experimenting with mobile ads and it is interesting to see Google and Nokia competing in mobile space.
Talking about mobile ads, according to this article :
“A surprising 35 percent of adult cell phone users said they are willing to accept incentive-based advertisements.”
This validates the whole mobile advertisement market space. I think, this option will be very lucrative to the students and other teenagers. Time will tell how this market unfolds in future.
The idea sounds quite romantic. The convenience of reading books, blogs and other articles from a mobile device is indeed fascinating. If the Scobleizer tip is right, it will give some serious competition to other mobile readers.
For me, when it comes to surfing or reading on the mobile devices, it is not very exciting. The small screen is always a challenge. The mobile devices should come equipped with a projector that can project the contents on to a wall or something simulating a 13-14 inch screen. The post projector or cell phone looks very interesting. Another news.com article claims similar technology.
“Finland’s Upstream Engineering is working on an LED (light-emitting diode) projection system that potentially could, because of its small size and relatively low cost, allow manufacturers to put projectors inside MP3 players, cell phones or other portable electronics for a few dollars.”
Google continues to surprise me. Google launched GMail Paper. You can order print outs of your emails (GMail emails) and Google will post the print outs to you for free! The paper is environmental friendly and the GMail Paper service costs nothing as the cost will be offset by the advertisements on the back.
“The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica.”
The interesting feature is photo printing.
” Photo attachments are printed on high-quality, glossy photo paper, and secured to your Gmail Paper with a paper clip.”
I am sure the GMail Paper will reduce to a photo printing service for all the GMail users!
Ok, this one is probably April Fool’s joke like Google Tisp, but how about something like a fax? It might make sense for business users. I have never used it but it seems TPC Fax is one service that does exactly this.
About a service like GMail Paper, it probably will make some sense as it might attract people using Kodak Gallery or Butterfly photos to start using GMail with the idea of photo printing and thus increasing GMail users and more eye balls for google ads on GMail! The key will be to charge bare minimum to the GMail users for the photo printing costs.
After Google validated the search engine market space, there are many new comers as I covered in my Smarter Search Engines post. KoolTorch is yet another candidate. KoolTorch claims - “KoolTorch is a next generation, patented technology that provides a USER FRIENDLY interface for viewing and navigating search results. ” I am not sure if it is all that the company claims but it does look like an interesting candidate. If they work on the UI a little more and on their search results, it can be a promising contender in the search engine space.
Things that I liked:
a) It shows me all the 50, 100 results on one page. It truly uses AJAX to enrich the user experience. I can mouse over the result number and it will show me what the result is about.
b) It gives me both the image and text version of the search results interface.
c) It categorizes the results and shows me all the results with all the categories in one interface.
Things that I did not like:
a) Does not work on firefox. It only supports IE right now.
b) It is probably a bug that it returns zero results at times. When I searched on “Salma Hayak“, it returned zero results. When I searched on “Hayak“, it returned lot many results. The first result is a tripod link. With google, the first result was an imdb link. I was impressed with the results when I searched for “Steve Jobs“.
c) I would want it to also show me options to look for the metadata of the results: Like only images, videos, forums, newsgroups etc.
The concept is great but somehow I get this feeling that it is still not pro to go mainstream. The company is probably aiming to just build technology to get bought over by Yahoo, Google, Microsofts of the world.
These unlimited mail storage space looks like a marketing ploy to me. How many of us actually use more than 200MB of mail space? I am still using less than 10% of my gmail account when I have not deleted most of my emails for last 2 years and sent songs to my friends on my email! Its like saying verizon offering unlimited night and weekend talk-time. They know that handful of users will use more than 2000 night and weekend minutes in a month.
What I find amusing, though none of us will ever use more than a GB of mail space or more than 2000-3000 night and weekend minutes, “unlimited” does lure us into at least checking out the service! What keeps us using that service or turn into a faithful repeat customer will ultimately be the ease and value that service brings to us. So the companies need to work on making the service with enough value for the end user and then can use these ploys to attract new customers. Thats where gmail exceled. It not only gave the biggest mailbox size but also a great user experience for the end users. I am so happy with gmail that I do not even look at any other mail service even if they are giving “unlimited” storage space!
I always thought that Fax machines, corporate scanners and printers can be security threats but never thought a photocopier is something that I should handle with care! Here is an interesting article - Photocopiers can be security threats
“Sharp, one of leading manufacturers of industrial photocopiers, issued a press release this week, just in time for tax season. Sharp commissioned a survey of 1,005 adults in January 2007 and found half of those contacted did not realize copiers posed a significant security risk. Additionally, 54 percent of the respondents didn’t realize that photocopiers stored images of the documents they had reproduced. And a majority of the 54 percent thought photocopying and mailing sensitive documents was safer than providing similar information over the Internet.”
I saw a documentary on History channel once. It claimed the CIA planted a prism sort of piece in a window of KGB establishment. CIA then used some lasers pointed to that window prism and it will return the laser beam modulated with the voice! So security is compromised everywhere in the new developed world. Photocopiers, Google Earth, Personalized portals, Social bookmarking websites, Photo sharing like Flickr, Picasa- we have so much of personal information on the web that can be used to reveal the information that we might not have intended to share with others.
Google is synonymous to search. But does it really answer all your search queries? I have found better results on ask.com at times. It is supposed to have more natural language support. As a user, I do not really care what support or technology a search engine has or whether it gives me “googol” results! In-fact I want it to show fewer and better results! And I want it to classify and arrange these results with proper tags so that I can sift through the set I want to. Clusty (previously Vivisimo) attempts to filter and arrange the results so that user can look for the related results group. Now there are more companies around the corner like Hakia, Wikia, Freebase and new search engine being developed by wikipedia and amazon. Click here to read an interesting posts on Hakia. I am pretty sure Google is not sitting idle with all these geeks and genious technologists and they are also working on the next generation search engine. As Google says, “Search is not a solved problem yet”. Google has been trying many things with its new experimental search engine searchmash.
