Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

The more I look at visual search engine SearchMe, the more I like it. In a way that text-based search engine Google has never done, SearchMe brings thumbnails to search results without losing any of the textual indicators we need to process relevance. SearchMe is also innovating in clustering search results into categories or topics, something Google has experimented with their sets demo but never implemented into the larger search engine. Perhaps the best way to show you how much more relevant SearchMe can be is through a short example, searching for “Obama.”

The first thing I get, as I type “Obama,” is a list of categories that SearchMe finds relevant. I click on “Politicians” and it takes me to the next screen, the main area for exploring search results:

There are a few features you should note that set the SearchMe results apart from their competition. First, they keep the list of categories you’re interested in just one click away from instant filtering at the top of the results. Second, all of the available space of the page is filled with a gigantic preview of the search results. The title of the website is shown at the bottom, along with the site URL when you mouseover the results. Essentially, their search results are a better version of Apple’s coverflow, applied to websites. Clicking on a preview will take you directly to the page of interest, in the same tab, just like most search engines do today.

Their dynamic snippets code is nice, as well, highlighting the search terms you used in multiple colours. It appears to have been implemented directly in the coverflow-like flash engine, or behind the scenes is coming back as a new layer of image, as it loads only after the high resolution preview has loaded. An unfortunate side-effect of their highlighting algorithm is that when searching for multiple words, like “Calderon de la Barca,” the words will be highlighted separately, even if found next to each other.

Not all their results work well; for example, searching for “China” leads me into irrelevance, regardless of the category I choose, and also brings up this half-rendered view of NBA China, that my own browser renders properly. Other search terms also return odd categories and funny previews, but I imagine that this is something that will improve over time. The big problems for a search engine, responsiveness and interface, are already solved as SearchMe is both lightning fast and beautiful.

If you’re interested, you can go check out their blog or signup to the private beta. Apparently, the venture is Sequoia backed, according to Techcrunch, which probably means it’s serious about being a big web search contender in the future. According to Louis Grey, the searchme spider is aggressively hitting his blog, too. It will be interesting to come back and a year and see how SearchMe has evolved. The most likely outcome for this is being acquired by one of the big four–Facebook, Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft–since it’s hard to imagine unseating any of them in the popular mindset.

Oh yeah, I’m a I’m a baller! You know you’ve made it when you get your own supplemental link unit section from Google! I’ve been waiting a long time for these, and now I’ve finally got them, even if they are a little bit incorrect. I think I’ve got some 301 redirects that need to be changed…

Since Techcrunch just mentioned Yieldbuild, a company I love, in YieldBuild Raises $6 Million Series B For Optimizing Ads, I figure that now is a good time to throw in my two bits. If you don’t know, Yieldbuild is the internet’s premier advertising optimization tool, boosting webmaster CPM and CTR. Crunch says it uses computer algorithms to automatically optimize your site’s ad spots with the most profitable combination of ad layout, style, and network. The system continually tests alternative configurations of layouts, networks, and color, looking for the highest performing ones.”

Does it really work? Check out this chart:

The answer is simply yes–it improved CPM on my blog network by 21%. If you discount revenue from other blogs, this one went from 1.51 CPM to 2.51 CPM, an increase of 66% just due to using Yieldbuild. Now that I have a fulltime job, I don’t have time to bang out optimized advertising solutions. If you’re like this, why not let Yieldbuild do it for you?

My favorite blog in the world has a post about the year to date downtime of various social networks which is revealing. Not a single one achieves the famous “three nines” uptime SLA (although Amazon’s S3 service offers a two nines 99.99% uptime guarantee).

Yahoo 360 isn’t a real social network, but it had great uptime

The best of these is Yahoo 360, with 99.9938% uptime over the last two months, followed by Myspace (99.969%), Facebook (99.8822%), Linked In (99.7024%), and finally Windows Live (99.4482%). MySpace was only down for 25m, while MSN Live Spaces had an embarrassing 7hrs 25m of downtime.

Some kind of bizarre cross between the words “knowledge” and “knoll”, the name of Google’s new product Knol, according to my astute girlfriend, “just doesn’t make sense” and is “hard to pronounce.” The NYT has a good article Wikipedia Competitor Being Tested by Google explaining what Knol is:

The service, called Knol, which is short for knowledge, would allow people to create Web pages on any topic. It is designed to include features that permit readers to submit comments, rate pages and suggest changes. However, unlike Wikipedia, which allows anyone to edit an entry, only the author of a “knol,” as the pages in the service would be called, would be allowed to edit. Different authors could have competing pages on the same topic.

The sample Knol page they give indicates what the service is and does:

You write a page, Google hosts it, it competes with other Knol pages (which probably will be given preferrential SERPs results, ala Wikipedia today), there are Adsense Ads, Google profits, you profit, and Wikipedia / Squidoo / Yahoo Answers go down in flames. There are a few problems with Google moving into the content business, and with Knol:

The name sucks

It’s un-brandable, it evokes an etymology of trolls, and it’s forgettable. The name has no association with the Google brand or any of the current Google products. Why not go with something simple and consistent, like “Google Pages?” Oh wait, pages.google.com is already taken.

The conflict of interest

Once Knol pages start ranking ahead of Wikipedia pages for various topics, Google will have violated it’s “do no evil” corporate policy. When it takes a stake in the content that appears in its search results, those results must either remain entirely impartial–which makes bad business sense–or they must rank Google content better than other content–which makes bad ethics sense. Who thinks Knol will start with a PR10? Me.

Fighting Wikipedia

Last time Google tried this, with Google Answers, it failed horribly. No one really wanted to contribute. Somehow, someway, Wikipedia has figured out the magic sauce that gets thousands of fanatical Wikipediers to build up their content. Google hasn’t done that yet, and that is Knol’s major barrier to entry.

Oh, the Spam

Building out spam pages will become easier and more lucrative with backing from Google. Instead of creating a blog about the latest keyword of choice, just make Knol pages. Google promotes them for you, and gives you a cut of the cash. How are they going to fight this?