Yahoo News beta

Yahoo News has a beta test of a new look. They made it more powerful and customizable with a focus on reading content from specific sources (e.g. BBC, New York Times).

There are remarkable similarities with some of Findory's features. Findory Favorites allows readers to list their favorite sources; Yahoo News beta has a similar feature called "My Sources".

The source pages are also similar. The new Yahoo News source page for Weekly Standard is here. Findory's Weekly Standard page is here. Findory's is more complete with a greater focus on discovery, but the resemblance is apparent.

Unofficially and off the record, several people at Yahoo have expressed admiration for Findory. I'm not surprised to see these moves by the search giant. I hope that Yahoo will go a step further and target personalized news.

Frankly, it's amazing that our tiny little Seattle startup is at the forefront of news personalization. It's silly to see others so far behind in personalization technology. We would be pleased to see the giants join us to help readers find and discover the news they need.

Personalized news is the future. The sooner we all can make that future a reality, the better for all our readers.

[see also Gary Price]

More My Jeeves

Gary Price has the details on some new features in My Jeeves.

Become.com launches

Become.com, a product information search engine, just launched.

With my first few searches (e.g. "6.1 sound card"), I was underwhelmed, but your mileage may vary.

It's certainly a good idea though. Despite attempts from Amazon.com, ePinions, Consumer Reports, and others, the Web has no authoritative, objective, comprehensive source of product information. Whoever builds that would be providing a useful and valuable service.

Chris Sherman has a detailed review.

Questioning tags

Ubergeek Tim Bray asks:

Are tags useful? Are there any questions you want to ask, or jobs you want to do, where tags are part of the solution, and clearly work better than old-fashioned search?

I really want to believe that tagging is big, a game-changer, but the longer I go on asking this question and not getting an answer, the more nervous I get.

Tags, for those of you not paying attention to all of this, are a social software feature where random people mark various types of content with keywords. Del.icio.us, the popular social bookmarking tool, is one of the early experiments with tagging. More details at Wikipedia.

Update: Danny Sullivan and Gary Price also question tags.

Update: Stephen Green (Principal Investigator of Advanced Search Technologies at Sun) has an interesting discussion of tagging. At one point, he says, "[Tagging is] not really a new way of indexing documents, it's actually an old way that didn't work very well," but he balances that by later saying, "I'm wondering whether we couldn't get some of the benefits of a controlled vocabulary."

Update: John Dvorak at PC Magazine savages tagging, saying that "nobody outside the groupthink community really cares about any of this" and that "the 'folksonomy' notion ... is doomed to failure" because it will succumb to "vandalism and spam." [via Loose Wire]

Update: A couple months later, Tim Bray says, "It's looking like the answers are: Yes, tagging is useful; No, it's not a replacement for full-text search, even partially."

Del.icio.us investors

Del.icio.us apparently has taken a minority investment from a diverse group that includes Union Square Ventures, Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O'Reilly, and Bob Young.

With so many big investors, one has to wonder what the valuation could be for this to be still a minority investment.

See also my earlier post, "Profile of Del.icio.us"

[via Loose Wire]

Update: I should have also cited Del.icio.us Founder Joshua Schachter's post on the delicious-discuss mailing list.

Update: Fred Wilson, a partner at Union Square Ventures, posts his thoughts on their investment.

Google Maps + Craigslist

Paul Rademacher combines Craigslist and Google Maps to create a clever and compelling way to find houses for sale or rent. Well worth a look.

[via Gary Stein and Om Malik]

The future is "my media"

Jeff Weiner (SVP of Search at Yahoo) spoke at the Warton Technology Conference and mentioned personalized information:

The future ... won't belong to either mass or micro players, but rather to consumers who will increasingly tailor their information gathering to their needs and tastes. "The future is going to be 'my media'."

It's an excellent vision, but I think Jeff is overestimating his customers' patience. Users are notoriously lazy. If you ask them to do work, most of them won't do it. From their point of view, you're only of value to them if you save them time.

Customers do want information tailored to their needs and tastes. But, if any work is going to be done, it's going to have to be done by a computer, not a person. People expect you to just make the right thing happen.

[via Search Engine Watch]

Google and question answering

Jonathan Betz at Google announces Google Q&A which returns instant answers to some queries (e.g. "What is the capital of Washington state?").

Ask Jeeves and MSN Search have had this for a while, but one thing about Google's effort is particularly noteworthy. They appear to be extracting the answers from their web crawl. From an InfoWorld article:

Google feeds this service with information from Web sites it considers reliable, but it hasn't established formal relationships with any content provider whose information is being used for this feature, [Google Director Peter] Norvig said.

Google doesn't expect that the owners of the Web sites will complain over the possibility that this new service will steal traffic away from them, Norvig said. On the contrary, being featured at the top of Google's results list will give these Web sites great exposure, and will likely result in increased traffic.

This is a first step down a long road toward understanding the vastness of knowledge stored in the Web. At the end of this path lies a futuristic Oracle of search engines that processes and understands all of human knowledge and responds with a concise and accurate answer to any query.

It will be a long time before we get there -- I'm not sure we will in our lifetimes -- but it's exciting to see progress toward that goal.

See also coverage from Gary Price and Nathan Weinberg.

Feed readers from newspapers

John Gartner at Wired writes about the trend of newspapers offering their own branded feed readers.

Offering their own feed readers feels like a desperate move to me. It's grasping at control of the distribution channel. Given that there's literally hundreds of RSS readers, including offerings from giants like Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves, I doubt also-ran feed readers from individual newspapers will gain noticeable market share.

See also my earlier post on how newspapers would benefit from embracing new distribution channels.

Blogger is slogging

Adam Penenberg at Wired reports on widespread complaints about the performance and reliability of Google's Blogger service.

Scott Johnson (VP at Feedster) claims that the problem is weblog spam and that Google should focus their effort on eliminating all the bogus weblogs.

Yahoo supports Wikipedia

Yahoo announces that they will "dedicate hardware and resources to support Wikipedia" and use Wikipedia content in Yahoo Search.

Google made a similar offer a couple months ago. Google uses Wikipedia content indirectly through their Answers.com definitions.

[via Yahoo! Search Blog]

Update: Tara Calishain points out that the higher visibility of Wikipedia will increase the incentive for spammers to start mucking up the Wikipedia content.

OJR on Findory

Mark Glaser at OJR reviews a few weblog aggregators including Findory. An excerpt:

[Findory] comes in as perhaps the most high-concept entry. Findory attempts to take the Google News format two steps further -- by offering an interface with just news headlines and blurbs, and another with just blogs. But Findory's most interesting feature is that the weight and placement of stories depends on what you click through to read on repeat visits .... A fascinating experiment.

[via JD Lasica]

Attention XML and finding relevance

Dare Obasanjo (PM at MSN) makes some great points ([1] [2]) about Attention XML and managing information overload. First, on what we'll see in the next generation of feed readers:

The attention problem is the problem that ... eventually readers get overwhelmed by the flood of information hitting their aggregator's inbox. Some have used the analogy "drinking from a firehose" to describe this phenomenon.

Ideally a user should be able to tell a client, "Here are the sites I'm interested in, here are the topics I'm interested in, and now only show me stuff I'd find interesting or important". This is the next frontier of features for RSS/ATOM aggregators.

Current feed readers are too cumbersome for the mainstream. What we need is a relevance rank for weblog posts that helps readers find the news they need.

Dare then turns to Attention XML and whether it helps solve this problem:

After talking to Steve Gillmor I realize another reason I didn't like the attention.xml spec; it ignores all the hard problems and assumes they've been solved. Figuring out what data or what algorithms are useful for determining what items are relevant to a user is hard. Using said data to suggest new items to the user is hard. Coming up with an XML format for describing an arbitrary set of data that could be collected by an RSS aggregator is easy ....

If anyone figures out how to do this right, it is unlikely that it will be made available as an open pool of data. The 'attention.xml' for each user would be demographic data that would be worth its weight in gold to advertisers. If Bloglines could figure out my likes and dislikes right down to what blog posts I'd want to read, I find it hard to imagine why the Bloglines team would make that information available to anyone including the user. For comparison, it's not like Amazon makes my 'attention.xml' for books and CDs available to myself or their competitors.

Unfortunate. I've looked at Attention XML several times myself. Steve Gillmor and I seem to share the same goal, managing information overload. But I agree with Dare that it's unclear how to get this data sharing format adopted or if we even need to get it adopted to move toward our goal.

FeedBurner and RSS advertising

FeedBurner announces a $7M round of funding. Very nice.

When the company first started, seemed to me that they were just a small, free RSS caching service, not that different than the tens of other caching solutions out there.

FeedBurner is still a feed caching service, but they're trying to break through into advertising in RSS feeds and premier (subscriber only) services like more sophisticated tracking and metrics on RSS feeds.

As I've said before, I think there's some serious issues with advertising in RSS feeds. If you're only publishing short excerpts in your feeds, the feeds themselves are ads, advertisements of the content on your website. Adding more ads to the ads will be annoying and will drive people away.

If you're one of the sites that do publish full text feeds, you might never expect people to come to your website to view your content. In that case, advertising is much more reasonable. The key here would be to make the advertising as targeted and relevant as possible.

It'll be interesting to watch FeedBurner. They're right at the center of the growth of RSS.

[via Brad Feld and Matt Marshall]

Update: Two years later, Google acquires FeedBurner for $100M. It appears Google was most attracted to FeedBurner's 430k subscribers (in May 2007) and Feedburner's tracking and metrics services.

While the companies seem like a good match to me, at $230 per FeedBurner subscriber, I might have balked at the price. If Google had hacked up a FeedBurner knock-off and handed out a $100 bill to any FeedBurner subscriber who switched, I suspect Google would have done pretty well.

But, hey, after spending $1.6B on YouTube and $3.1B on DoubleClick (not to mention Microsoft's $6B for aQuantive), I guess $100M is pocket change.

Congrats to the FeedBurner team! You did build a great product and deserve this outcome.

Google Maps + Keyhole

Many are talking about how Google Maps integrated Keyhole (which they acquired about four months ago) to offer nifty satellite images. For example, here's a top-down view of Amazon HQ in Seattle.

Just like others have offered maps before, others have offered satellite and aerial photos. But Google has combined this with a snazzy interface that lets you do things like click and drag the viewpoint around while the images refreshes dynamically.

Chris Sherman at Search Engine Watch has a particularly thorough review of the new service.

Desktop search reviews

Adam Baratz at Ars Technica posts a very detailed review of all the desktop search tools.

[via Findory -> Marc Orchant]

Findory is growing and growing!

This graph shows Findory's traffic growth for the last five quarters. Growing fast!

The graph is hits per quarter on the Findory.com website. The Y-axis starts at zero. Our current traffic is over two million hits per month.

Great to see so many people enjoying personalized news!

Google and competition with eBay

Steven Levy at Newsweek asked Eric Schmidt (CEO, Google) about competing with eBay:

[Eric] just laughed. "It's a perfectly reasonable question, but it doesn't compute here," he says. "If I said at a meeting, 'Are we going to enter eBay's space?' everyone would look at me and say, 'Why? They do a fine job.' The genius of Google is that we find new ways to solve problems that were never solved before."

But no one is expecting Google to launch an also-ran auctions site. Google don't play that game.

What's more likely is that Google's innovation in other areas will impact eBay. For example, some merchants are responding to increased fees on eBay by switching to Google AdWords and marketing and selling their goods directly to customers.

Google is quite aware of this. Eric Schmidt even said that Google is going after small merchants, trying to help them find customers for their products. And Google is doing it with more than just AdWords. Google's Froogle also makes it easier for people to find small sellers.

No one expects Google to launch an eBay look-alike. But it is likely that these two giants will find themselves increasingly pursuing the same customers. The more merchants can be discovered by customers using Google, the less those merchants need to use eBay.

[Newsweek article via John Battelle]

Update: Two years later, a BusinessWeek article reports the eBay "magic is gone ... Shoppers are simply not buying all the inventory anymore. Some items languish without a single bidder. Many shoppers opt for other sites including Amazon.com, use sophisticated search engines such as Google and Yahoo!, or head to store sites directly."

Trends in online news

Mark Glaser at OJR writes about Yahoo News and trends in online news. Some excerpts:

One way to build on the time spent on the site is to make the story pages more rich with links to relevant content on other pages

"People don't start from the front page, they often start at story pages," [Former WSJ Online editor Neil] Budde said. "So if this is the first point of entry into our site, what can we do to expose people there to more of what we have available? I think it's important for any news site."

[Yahoo Director of Personalization] Scott Gatz ... [argues] the key to success for winning over the masses was not bothering to even call them "RSS feeds".

"If you look at how we've integrated RSS into Yahoo News, we're not actually using those three letters very much," Gatz said. "So you look at it, and it says what would you like to add to your political news? Here are some political blogs. Would you like to add CNN or MSNBC onto your news page? The fact that it happens in XML or RSS isn't the important thing. Most of the users don't want to have to figure that out."

See also "Targeting and online newspapers", "XML is for geeks", and "Getting your grandmother to use RSS".

[via John Battelle]

Google Gulp FAQ

Google Gulp is one of the funnier April Fools jokes today. Whatever you do, don't miss the last question in the FAQ:

When will you take Google Gulp out of beta?

Man, if you pressure us, you just drive us away. We'll commit when we're ready, okay? Besides, what's so great about taking things out of beta? It ruins all the romance, the challenge, the possibilities, the right to explore. Carpe diem, ya know? Maybe we're jaded, but we've seen all these other companies leap headlong into 1.0, thinking their product is exactly what they've been dreaming of all their lives, that everything is perfect and hunky-dory -- and the next thing you know some vanilla copycat release from Redmond is kicking their butt, the Board is holding emergency meetings and the CEO is on CNBC blathering sweatily about "a new direction" and "getting back to basics." No thanks, man. We like our freedom.

Sweet. You gotta love these guys. Tellin' it like it is.