So, the fact that IBM and Yahoo! are teaming up on a free enterprise search product suggests that they want to put a bit of pressure on Google. And why wouldn’t they? Google’s stock prices just keep going up despite relatively modest increases in their earnings (and certainly not comparable to their total stock value), so why not try and force them out of one of their key corporate markets?

Granted, it’s debatable exactly how much impact this might have. Google’s revenue is largely focused on their search advertising, after all!

This seems like a clear attempt to budge Google out of one of their markets, however – and may be the kind of thing that Yahoo! needs to be doing in order to continue to compete.

The IBM and Yahoo! product, Omnifind, is available for free. You can also read more about it at SEO Principle or Search Engine Land (linked above.)

Although it is, essentially, a fairly simple interface for tracking competitive information which is easily available, the ability to push all that information together is certainly a worthwhile service. From a consultant’s perspective, it’s worthwhile because you can create multiple projects to track: keep your eyes on each client’s area at a glance.

Naturally, my first thought is about adding more features: for example, tracking ranking reports using your selected keyword list and checking against your competitors’ ranking. I know, I know…ranking reports are practically worthless. However, knowing how your own search performance holds up against your competitors’ is still valuable: and this would be a relatively easily automated tracking tool.

It’s interesting: I know perfectly well that Alexa data is practically worthless by itself. However, between a set of sites all in the same market (say…competitors), the relative performance data may still convey some usable information. It’s not the numbers you need to look at: it’s the relationships.

DailyLit is a very simple service which allows individuals to sign up and receive serialized versions of literary classics in their email. (Literary classics in the public domain, at any rate.)

It sounds intriguing – the thought of receiving Dickens in serialized format makes me feel like I’m jumping backwards in time to read Bentley’s Miscellany or some such vehicle for serialized literature.

It seems like creating immediacy in media is the most common use of modern technology – it’s refreshing to see a site which is using technology to stretch an experience out, instead. For myself, it’s easy to sit down and read for hours on end – so I don’t do it frequently. I’d lose myself in a good book and fail to get a tiny bit of work done. DailyLit suggests the possibility of controlling those habits!

However, that’s off the topic for this post. What I actually intend to write about it Google’s recent changes to the preferred domain feature in Sitemaps. Previously, they automatically added the "non-preferred" domain to your listing of sites owned when you set a preference. They will no longer be doing this, do to complaints of confusion from users.

I don’t know how widespread these complaints were, but it certainly came up in a Cre8asiteForums thread in August, where Vanessa Fox actually responded to a member’s complaints about the preferred domain system.

It’s nice seeing Google explicitly responding to problems – and in a reasonably efficient manner, as well. The complaints were initially posted on August 20th at Cre8asite, and the changes were announced today – September 12th. Three weeks isn’t a bad turnaround.

That said, it’s important to keep in mind that your www and non-www versions of a domain are, technically speaking, different web addresses. Like any subdomain, the "www" domain represents a subset of what can be present on your domain name. Although having this automatically added is confusing, given that many people don’t differentiate between the two addresses, maintaining the ability to register separate Sitemaps will still be possible.

Of course, their information pages do say that there is no premium edition:

Is there a premium version of this service?

Not at this time. However, if your organization has advanced needs not met by this free service, let us know and we’ll get in touch when a premium service is available for your organization.

But I think we can all pretty easily see the possibilities available with the expansion of Google Spreadsheets and Writely – or future related products. As has been observed by several people around the blogosphere, this project seems to be targeting the enterprise desktop market using a service business model.

It’s also very easy to see the appeal of a service model of office software. This could certainly relieve some of the burden on IT departments to maintain licenses, install and reinstall software, and maintain support for diverse products. Of course, many IT departments have gotten to the level where this kind of maintenance is highly routinized – nevertheless, the appeal can’t be ignored.

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of takeup the service has – will this be primarily appealing to mid-sized businesses with undersized IT departments, large corporations, small business owners? Will the targeted education market like the idea? Who knows…in many cases, the lack of control of their own hardware and data centers may sway IT directors away from the product.

I can’t even guess, really…

Google news provides excellent, high-quality results and has stringent requirements for news providers. Average feed scrapers scrape, well, whatever they can find. But can an algorithm tell the difference?

Tim notes, in particular, the interesting recursive nature of searching aggregators. Since many aggregators are scraping results from other search engines, it’s not impossible to have some very complex results.

As an in-between case ask yourself this: if you’re doing a websearch (on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, …) do you want any of the results to be … search-result pages themselves (from Google, Yahoo!, MSN)? That is, if you search for “snorklewacker” on MSN web search, and you click on result #4, do you want to find yourself looking at a websearch results page for “snorklewacker” on Yahoo! Search, which in turn has (as result #3) the Google search results page for “snorklewacker”?

Altogether, an interesting question – no really conclusive answers, however.

The article also reports that Digg will be increasing their social-networking aspects, adding the ability to pick and share your category preferences with friends or add personalized input to what appears on the pages. Although, from the description, I must admit I’m not really clear what "add their input to what appears on the Web pages" may mean.

This is, of course, rather interesting when you consider that AOL’s recent launch of Netscape.com as a user-rated news source includes a number of these additional options.

It’ll be interesting to see what impact these new options may have on Digg. First of all, the front page itself may change significantly. There’s only so much room on the very first page of a site; and the percentage of tech news is likely to decrease. Despite the fact that Digg’s audience is currently almost exclusively people involved with or interested in the technology industry, this may very quickly expand to include others with interests solely in comical videos or in celebrity news. To me, this would be a serious diminishment in the value and interest I’ve received from Digg.

But, maybe this won’t happen – it’s also quite possible that Digg’s new push will fail to escape from the tech crowd, and the new categories will tend to populated with geek favorites such as Star Trek clips.

My personal feeling is that the expansion into current events and other news categories is great – although it reduces the overall focus of the site, these are interesting and potentially fruitful ways of retrieving information you may not otherwise see. However, I think that the incorporation of video may be a mistake. This detracts from the otherwise (mostly) serious information and articles available on Digg, supplanting it with popular media and pointless video clips. These have their place; but I feel that the inclusion of video is likely to seriously diffuse the newsworthy content available on Digg.

It should come as little surprise that I’m not intending to write about the frozen treat. Despite the fact that it’s looking like a hot, muggy day and I certainly wouldn’t mind one – writing about frozen treats won’t bring them into my hands. The meta-search engine, on the other hand, I can easily take a look at, without needing to travel to New Orleans.

Huckabuck’s Technology Offering

Huckabuck.com is one of the rising crowd of new metasearch engines. They’re big selling point is the use of an equalizer-like search tuner, allowing the user to define their preferred blend of results. Not happy with your search? Perhaps you wanted a pinch more Technorati in the mix. I’ve mentioned before that I think user-customizable search tools are an important new development in search. This is probably one of the more user-friendly examples of this kind of technology I’ve seen.

I’ve reviewed attempts at customizable search before – I was highly critical of MSN’s Search Macros and not incredibly thrilled with the anemic offering from Mojeek. Both great ideas, but neither particularly well implemented. Huckabuck, on the other hand, seems to have a very nice, clean implementation. Unobtrusive when not activated, yet very easy to understand and use when you choose.

The implementation is in AJAX, with all the fancy graphical interactions available to that technology. However, appearance is not what I’m reviewing; I’m interested in results and usability. Here’s the tuner itself:

The use should be pretty clear from the outset. A set of sliders, to disable or adjust the use of these six data sources for the metasearch. Also, above those sliders, arrows to navigate between a variety of presets emphasizing technology (Digg), social search (del.icio.us), research (Google), shopping (MSN), or blog search (Technorati). Each preset places an emphasis on a different engine. Interestingly enough, no present places any emphasis on Yahoo – perhaps Yahoo is lacking in any kind of specialty?

As an aside, this isn’t necessarily a negative – Yahoo may simply provide the best results for a generalist search. Although, with the growing importance of contextual search and vertical search, this is a dubious positive.

Continuing to the right side of the selection panel, we have the ability to change theme (not interested), an autocompletion option (intriguing), a virtual keyboard (curious), and the ability to change the number of results per page (very nice). Some of these are useful, some are window-dressing, but they are all very clearly conveyed – and that’s what matters to me.

I played with the autocomplete feature a little – it’s a lot like Google’s Suggest. A neat time saver for common searches. If you’re looking for something a bit more off the beaten path, it doesn’t have much to offer, of course. The virtual keyboard was also a little intriguing. I’m not sure this is really a worthwhile addition – perhaps, in combination with autocomplete, it could be somewhat handy. However, to me the primary purpose of a virtual keyboard should be as an aide for mobility impaired users. This particular implementation will certainly be usable by that population – as long as they browse with JavaScript activated. The AJAX implementation of the tool does mean that, from an accessibility perspective, it may not be perfect.

In fact, without JavaScript, none of these tools will function at all. Still, there are some advantages to browsing without JavaScript – the advertising won’t function as well.

What about the search results?

Well, there’s not much to say there – Huckabuck isn’t using their own algorithm, so the results are rather at the mercy of the engine they’re drawing data from. However, the customization available using the search tuner gives them an edge – if you don’t like their results, it’s very easy to change. I do wonder, however, whether it might not have been more user friendly to use their presets concepts as their slider categories. As it stands, you adjust the importance of a data source in the results – what if, instead, you adjusted the importance of, for example, commercial data in your search and the interface adjusted MSN’s importance in the background? Many users may not be aware of what engine would be best to adjust for their results – but would probably be more quickly able to identify what type of data they were more interested in. Huckabuck’s slider presets provide this data, but the sliders themselves are a more obvious tool than the selector for the presets.

Other thoughts about Huckabuck

I like the fact that the owners of Huckabuck, Chris Schultz and Blake Killian, are deeply involved with the New Orleans community. They are sponsors of BrainJams New Orleans, which is doing a lot of work to help rebuild New Orleans businesses.
I also love the fact that they donate a portion of their search profits to charity. For a startup, this is a exceptionally wonderful choice. Currently, the beneficiaries of Huckabuck’s Social Mission are Tipitina’s Foundation, working to rebuild New Orlean’s music culture, and the Backbeat Foundation, also supporting musicians in New Orleans. As a musician myself, I certainly find their goals uplifting.

More information:

• Huckabuck Blog
• Phil Bradley on Huckabuck
• eHub Interview with Huckabuck

However, it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to expand the program to a more general advertising audience.

At the same time, Google is looking forward to the launch of their new PayPal competitor, Gbuy. John Battelle has an interesting take on the launch – questioning whether the world is ready to trust Google with their finances:

However – and as odd as this might sound – I am not sure the world is ready to trust Google with its payments. I sense the overall cultural vibe on Google is that it’s gaining too much power.

Perhaps he’s right – there’s no question that Google will be walking into the world of online payments as a rote beginner compared to Paypal’s well-established goliath.
Regardless of Google’s preparation, they’re getting some serious press in advance of the launch, and it’s reasonable to expect that this project will need to be "ready-to-wear" – nobody will want to entrust their payments to another eternal beta service.

It’s not really quite that sophisticated, of course. Texas will be creating a 24-hour telephone hotline to report possible activies, rather than providing a neat AJAX interface – but it does seem like the government is becoming more and more aware of the possibilities offered by modern web technologies. Along with the recent requests for web firms to preserve collected data for two years, they’ve been using commercial records to track information for a number of years.

The plan to monitor the Texas border is not particularly well thought out – intending to help control illegal border crossings, the practice may actually make it easier.

Also worth noting that computer access isn’t limited to the good guys. It surely won’t take long before other clandestine crossers, such as armed smugglers, find that they can use the cameras’ images to determine the best places, and the best times, to cross. Worse, they could put property owners at risk if somebody decides it’s better to find a camera and take it out, rather than look for a new crossing point.

The Brownsville Herald

What makes the idea interesting to me is the very thought of a governmentally established "vigilante" warning system. It isn’t at all new to request citizens assistance in discovering illegal activities, but using the internet to enable citizen reporting seems a new step.