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The Search world's headlines were ablaze this week with the announcement that Google has reached an agreement with YouTube to acquire the video sharing and rating site for the extraordinary sum of $1.65 billion in stock. 19-month old YouTube has yet to monetize any of its services but has achieved incredible popularity of reportedly up to 100 million visitors per day. What's most interesting about the deal are the parallel licensing agreements that accompany it. Universal had already agreed to allow YouTube to access approved copyright-protected content, as well as incorporate it into their own homemade videos. SonyBMG has agreed to let YouTube users "interact" with videos by Sony artists. And YouTube has penned a deal to create a CBS branded channel on YouTube that will feature short clips from popular CBS programming, CBS news snippets, previews of its new fall lineup and more. There's also a user-generated content aspect where "fans" can upload their own content from "tailgate parties, pep rallies and other campus events." Meanwhile, a giddy domain name speculator based in Seattle who owns the URL GooTube.com is seeking to cash in quickly. Posting on Craig'sList Seattle, he stated, "I am the owner of GooTube.com, and we currently have plans to sell our rights to the name at live auction at the end of this month. We have decided to attempt to fetch one of the largest amounts ever for a domain name sale now, to give hungry and forward-thinking domain investors the opportunity to purchase, and/or to strengthen our selling position for a potential offer from one of the Big Three." We don't know whether to say Good Luck! on the domain sale when GooLuck may be more appropriate.
Video search leader Blinkx has announced a deal with Microsoft which will use Blinkx technology for searches on MSN sites and Live.com. Blinkx already powers video search on AOL, ITN, Lycos and Times Online, and indexes video from BBC, Reuters, MTV and Fox among others. The company has indexed 6 million hours of audio and video, and is slated to be the biggest video search engine on the Web. Microsoft intends to pay Blinkx a licensing fee based on the number of visitors who use the search engine. Blinkx has been an innovator in using voice recognition and contextual analysis to locate images and recordings. Using Blinkx, a consumer can search for videos based on keywords or phrases. The results reflect not just a search of titles or text information attached to the video but also uses speech recognition to find matching words in audio tracks. Unlike YouTube or Google, Blinkx stores search information on videos, but not the videos themselves,meaning that computer costs are kept low. It makes for cheaper legal bills when you consider YouTube's copyright issues raised by storing and playing video pieces it does not own.
Google's new Code Search has arrived to help you search behind the screens, finding function definitions and sample code, including code within archives (.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip), CVS repositories and Subversion repositories. As cool a Search tool as this may be, the new service is giving some security experts a sinking feeling. Hackers for years have been using Google's main search engine as a way to find Web sites that might be vulnerable to a particular attack. Many security specialists are concerned that by searching for a given string of code or a specific error message, they can identify Web-based applications ripe for attack. The new Google Code Search could make that process even simpler by enabling users to search for regular expressions, exact strings and even restrict their searches to code written in specific programming languages. Gary McGraw, CTO of Cigital Inc., a software security consultancy based in Dulles, Va., cited the formerly proprietary code that runs Diebold Election Systems' AccuVote-TX electronic voting machines as an example. A voting activist was able to download the source code from a Diebold FTP site, which led to the exposure of a number of security flaws in the software and widespread questions about the accuracy of the machines and the integrity of votes cast with them. Of course, given that kind of scrutiny, maybe code transparency is not such a bad thing.
Between the lines of today's best selling books one can find abundant topics for group discussion. Galvanizing this interest, a new Seattle start-up which goes by the name of Shelfari, wants to create an online community around books, readers and their ideas in much the same way Flickr has done it around photos or YouTube around videos. After registering with Shelfari, and adding titles to your personal bookshelf, you can find fellow readers who have added the same books, read their opinions, check out other's shelves for titles that may be of interest, or send a note to other community members. The main competitor in this market category to Shelfari is LibraryThing of Portland, Maine. Since opening a little more than a year ago, that company has attracted more than 88,000 members who have cataloged about 6.2 million books through the service according to the Seattle P-I. AbeBooks, a Victoria, B.C.-based online book retailer, bought a 40 percent stake in LibraryThing in May.
The ability to rank or rate the relevancy of results delivered by search engines is rapidly becoming an integral part of Social Search. One such social experiment, URL.com, has joined the crusade. If you have time to grade your search results, and want to share those grades with others, URL.com wants you!
Drugstore.com Inc. is backing up its position as a low price leader on both branded and generic medications. The Seattle-based company has launched a new feature on its site to underscore the price-value proposition. A new Price Checker feature that enables visitors to quickly determine prices for drugs sold on the site has been expanded to include competitors' prices for Drugstore.com's 100 top-selling drugs. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Earlier this year, Wired Editor Chris Anderson brought out his visionary book, The Long Tail, which illustrated how highly specialized, lesser known, niche products like special subject movies, books, DVDs and the like, can amount to greater cumulative collective sales numbers than the few mainstream best sellers. Applying the Long Tail theory to Search terms, the principle suggests that by mining your log file data and then developing page content to coincide with the more detailed terms people are using to find you, you can raise your Web connectivity in terms of organic visibility and conversion accuracy. The same principle applies to PPC advertising as well where more specialized terms can be added to a campaign for a fraction of the bid price of the more popular and heavily trafficked search terms, often 10 or 12 cents instead of one dollar or more. The author explains how in traditional retail, you have the 80/20 rule, with 20 percent of the products accounting for 80 percent of the revenue. Online, Anderson sees the "98 percent rule" in effect. That's where 98 percent of all the possible choices are in play. Now the PR firm of Connors Communications is beta testing a stand alone service that puts the Long Tail search theory into practice. They call it HitTail. The HitTail system consists of a single line of JavaScript code placed on every page of your website which enables you to logon to their server and see all the search hits as they come in -- in real-time! The list is automatically refined using a proprietary algorithm which pulls out Long Tail search terms as suggestions. These suggestions can be examined and exported to a to-do-list which is essentially the list of topics for your new content. Currently there is no charge for this service while it is in beta and they intend continuing to provide a free service for all websites whose traffic is under a certain limit. For sites which exceed that limit they will be offering a paid version. <http://www.mylongtail.com/register.asp> ********************** |
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