Written on April 4, 2008 – 2:32 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our '
About' page and subscribe to our
RSS feed.
If you came here from Digg it would be great if you could actually Digg us too! Do you have a start-up that we should write about?
Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
So I hope Garrett Camp, co-founder of StumbeUpon, uses Slideshare since he has just summed up all the hot topics of the web in thirty minutes. It was hard to keep track with. No kidding! All the important questions the web community struggles with, were discussed by Camp. This would have been a really interesting presentation for a less tech-savvy crowd, but most people in the audience probably didn’t hear anything new. Although it was interesting to see an overview of the emerging Web 3.0.
So after a short summary of the history of search - from directories, to algorithm, to social networks and social media - and types of search - page, query, image, visual, video, people, product and music - Camp shared some thoughts on the future:
- social search is on a roll
- collaborative annotation becomes more important: use tags!
- taming the wisdom of the crowds: expertise is more important than popularity.
- trust becomes more important than authority. You want to know the people who recommend stuff to you.
- search will adapt to the device you’re using.
Camp also described the personalization trend. “One-size-fits-all is history”, he said. Google made some first steps with Google Personalized. So the audience wants recommendations, and one way to get those is by asking input from your users - as Wikia Search does. Another way is helping your users create the best query possible by suggesting search terms and sources.
The third option is social search: what are your friends searching for? Which sites do they like? Before Camp climbed the stage we saw andUNITE, and they seem to focus on this social searching by matching your search terms with those of your friends.
The fourth way to get a personal recommendation is collaborative searching, so if you look at the example of andUNITE, the service would then compare your search terms with people you don’t know, but do have similar interests. Thus human intelligence is combined with an algorithm.
I think it’s a pity Camp didn’t talk a bit more about discovery, since that’s what his service is all about: exploring random cool sites. I’m sure he’s a visionary guy, so I hope that the next time he’ll share more of his views on discovery instead of just summing up the latest developments.
Written on March 29, 2008 – 12:08 pm
Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
I have written before about how QRcodes are a great way to access websites on mobile phones and how they are already commonplace in Japan. They are used in advertising and in everyday services that allow mobile access.
Cabal recently blogged about another method for locating websites in Japan. The method shows a search box with the search term inside that will help you locate the website in lieu of a URL. Of course this implies you should go home and type this term into your favorite search engine to locate the website.
This system only works if you have the top search result position or the top advertising position on that keyword, but I am guessing these companies have made sure at least that they bought the keyword out so they appear as the top paid search result on all the major search platforms. The thinking is that people can remember a keyword easier than a URL. From doing a quick ask-around of Japanese friends, it seems that most find this advertising annoying and unclear. I am not a fan of it either.
Another method that seems to have a quite high representation in Japan and hasn’t been talked about in western press that much is the menu navigation method.
The Menu Navigation Method
This method of getting people to your website is also aimed at mobile users. Entering URLs on a mobile phones can be time consuming and frustrating, so many advertisers are looking at ways to get users to their pages in simple ways that involve scrolling and clicking rather than typing.
This method is based around one of the sad realities of the Japanese mobile web. Most traffic on the mobile web is funneled through the landing pages of the major carriers (DoCoMo, AU and Softbank). It is changing slowly but it is still the case that most people use these pages just as many PC web users use Yahoo, Google or other portal pages to find their content.
This is an example from the ANA website showing the navigation paths from each of the three major carrier topages. NB. DoCoMo uses iMode, AU uses EZWeb and Softbank uses Yahoo Keitai.
Using this established familiarity with this portal page navigation, a lot of advertising replaces the URL with a path of navigation from the top portal page from the major carriers. The carriers are obviously happy because it keeps people in “their world” as long as possible.
More important though, they also charge money for portal listings. This process allows them to filter for “approved” content and control the economics which is fast moving towards free for connectivity on the mobile phone. As connectivity charges go down, total advertising and listing revenues are growing.
The main flaw to this method is the difficulty in remembering the navigation steps, sometimes there are up to 8 pages to click through before you get where you are going. The negative effects of this are limited by the usage case which usually has the advertising appearing in locations where you can refer to the navigation path while entering in your mobile phone. Places such as magazines, train platforms and PC sites are common locations to see them.
The Menu Navigation Method looks to be here for a while, but only as long as the carriers control the navigation pathways. Once people start to break out from the major portals, you may see the use of this technique drop, but if history is anything to go by, the Japanese people will keep to their safe portals for a while yet.
Written on March 17, 2008 – 12:43 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yes, I’ve again discovered a new search application that tickled my interest. It’s called Surf Canyon and it specifies your search results by offering three relevant links. After downloading a browser extension, Surf Canyon shows a bull’s eye behind a search result. When clicking on it, Surf Canyon gives you three suggestions within the search page itself. So it’s basically helps you to find relevant results in the ever growing amount of rubbish content on the web.
These days, new search apps and services popping up everywhere so you gotta offer something special if you want to get noticed by the crowd. So I decided to test the pitching skills of Surf Canyon’s CEO Mark Cramer. What is his service going to add?
Cramer: “Innovation is very strong at the moment. There are literally thousands of different search-related websites right now. We certainly fit into that trend, however, our technology - real-time personalization - and implementation - client-side browser extension - are, we believe, innovative and powerful.”
So how does Surf Canyon fit into the future of search? Cramer: “We believe strongly in implicit personalization. Clustering, query suggestions, visualization and universal search will certainly be very important, however, as the quantity of content on the Internet explodes, it is becoming increasingly difficult to access all of that information with two- and three-word queries. Users could enter more keywords, either suggested or not, but this can be difficult, tedious and often eliminates potentially relevant documents. Therefore, something is needed to get a better understanding of the user’s intent beyond the query.”
“By disambiguating the user’s intent post-query, we enable access to a much greater quantity of information by automating the process of digging out relevant results”
And Surf Canyon believes to have found that. Instead of looking at the surfing history, Surf Canyon focuses on real-time behavior. “This behavior gives very strong signals as to the user’s ‘at the moment’ intent, which is potentially a much more important indicator of relevancy”, Cramer explains. “These indicators of relevancy are imperative since the ambiguous nature of queries makes it virtually impossible to put all of the relevant results on page one. By disambiguating the user’s intent post-query, we enable access to a much greater quantity of information by automating the process of digging out relevant results.”
Apart from it’s new approach on search personalization, I also like the international mindset of Cramer and his team. Most US-based start-ups just focus on the huge home market, yet Surf Canyon works in 13 different languages. And that immediately pays off, since the search service is pretty big in France, Cramer says. Why is that?
“The major reason we’ve got so much traction in France probably has to do with the excellent coverage we’ve received there. We got nice reviews at Outils Froids and Journalistiques. But most important was the review on Rue89. It helps when somebody compares you to Google in an article entitled “Welcome to the 3rd Age of Search”.
I think other US-based start-ups can learn from Surf Canyon’s approach. As you can tell, offering European languages definitely works when your service is relevant for Europe. So yes, it might be worth the effort and money to hire some French or German students.
Written on March 11, 2008 – 3:08 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As you might have noticed I’m writing a lot about search these days. In another post, I gave an explanation for that: people want to find similar people. Yet after a few days of reading about search and talking to search experts, I think I can broaden the reason somewhat: People are looking for two sorts of experts.
First of all, those with similar interest can be considered experts, since they know a little what you’re like and therefore can help you find the right stuff on the web. So that’s why a search engine like andUnite - that matches search terms - makes sense.
Second, we want professionals to scan whether the information we find is correct or not. Andrew Keen already warned us in his book ‘The Cult of the Amateur‘ for the damaging effects of false information - caused by the wisdom of crowds - can have. And let’s face it: the web is still really cluttered. Try finding a decent hotel with Google, I wish you all the best.
Newsweek published an excellent article about this last point this week. Jason Calacanis, founder of the human-powered search engine Mahalo - that will make finding that hotel easier with a Top 7 list - told Newsweek: “The wisdom of the crowds has peaked. Web 3.0 is taking what we’ve built in Web 2.0—the wisdom of the crowds—and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.” (more…)
Written on March 8, 2008 – 12:16 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Quintura, a visual-based search engine for browsing and discovery-type search launched its search engine for search on individual web-sites and blogs. When entering a search term, Quintura shows a cloud with related tags. Search blog AltSearchEngines already installed the engine their sidebar. After trying it for a while, I definitely see the use of this visual search option. Time for an interview with the co-founder, President and CEO of Quintura Yakov Sadchikov.
Of course, I asked him why visual search is the future. “The visual-based search is more intuitive and easy to use. Making a parallel here, iPhone is an example of a visual-based user interface that is taking smart phone market by storm. Look at Quintura as an iPhone for the search market.” That’s quite statement, as there are more visual search engines appearing, like ManagedQ.
The search experience it totally different though. ManagedQ loads full screen and shows screenshots combined with tags in a sidebar. Quintura however keeps it simple and just shows tags. Smart move, since the clouds of Quintura can be easily installed on blogs and sites. That has two major advantages: the chance that Quintera will get viral is bigger and it makes a pretty good business model. Right?
Sadchikov: “We can educate the market about new search experience that Quintura brings and start creating a web index and monetizing it straight away. We now have 1,000 web-sites and blogs that joined our site search program. It includes portals with a monthly traffic of several million users. All those sites and blogs that embed Quintura site search widget are actually Quintura advertising network since we plan to start selling graphical ads in the widget’s search cloud. We expect a number of affiliates to grow to 10,000 by the end of 2008.”
That sure sounds good, yet I doubt whether Quintura will be successful in non English-speaking countries. The problem with the visual search engine is it doesn’t handle other languages than English*. When I search in either French of German, tags like ‘through’ or ‘the’ are popping up. So, just like the iPhone, we’ll have to wait a while before Quintura gets really useful in Europe.
(By the way, today is women’s day. So the guys from Quintura created a women-specific search engine. Ladies, please let us know what you think)
*Update: Charles Knight from AltSearchEngines mailed me that Quintura also handles Russian.
Written on March 8, 2008 – 12:03 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
These days everybody is talking about the ‘open’ trend on the web. So do I, since it’s huge. Yet I also notice another trend: finding similar persons. It looks like people finally discovered that the web is an ideal medium to meet like-minded people. Last week I discussed matching service Lovest.at, today it’s all about a German service that turn search engines into meetingplaces: andUnite.
The service launches in an English and German version tonight, and by then you’ll be able to find people with similar interests, based on your search terms. You can sign up (anonymously), install a plug-in that creates a social overlay on Google & Co and the service automatically starts collecting your search terms. The advantage for the founders is obvious: valuable information. Yet what’s in it for us?
I’ve asked co-founder Bernd Storm van‘s Gravesande: “Christian Schmidkonz and me were both frustrated with the boring and lonely process of web search. We thought that it would be always more useful to be able to ask someone who knows something about a problem or question instead of browsing though pages and pages of more or less interesting search result links. We thought that the value of a search term must be much higher than just being used for retrieving links from a database.”
Bernd and Christian were also curious what happened when they’d collect search terms in a profile: “Would the collection really represent our interests or even characters? And would we be able to get to know interesting people if we match our profile with the profiles of others? So, basically we started with an experiment but already with the first prototype it turned out to be a intriguing and addictive tool we created.”
“Most people don’t want to change their favorite search engine.”
They hired Christoph Fuchs, a ‘highly talented’ student, to help them developing the service. Now, it’s all about promoting their special concept. “We have to convince the users every day, that andUNITE offers a unique service which is not only useful but also fascinating and as already mentioned addictive.”
AndUnite immediately reminded me of Jimmy Wales’ plans to build a Google-killing social search engine. So far, people don’t seem to be really excited about Wikia Search. Why would andUnite do any better? Bernd: “Well, Jimmy Wales tries to set up a completely new search engine where users have to participate actively in the so-called social part of Wikia in order to make it lively. With andUNITE we sit on top of Google, Yahoo! or Live. We think that this approach will be more successful because most people don’t want to change their favorite search engine.” (more…)
Written on February 22, 2008 – 1:18 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Mobile internet is hot - we all know that - and one of the rising stars in the mobile world is Taptu, a social mobile search engine. They won the Global Community Award at the MoMo Peer Awards on February 13 at the Mobile World Congress and Robert Scoble proved on PodTech that it comes up with better results than Google does. Officiously, it seems like Taptu has the potential to become a big player in mobile search. So it’s about time that we hear the story behind this UK-based start-up. After a nice and interesting email conversation with the Taptu team, CEO Steve Ives told us where he got the guts from to challenge Google and what the social aspect of Taptu is.
First of all, the Google Question. Every time a new search engine sprouts, this is the first question critics try to answer. Ives: “A Nokia guy I met at a party confided to me that he thought Google still hadn’t yet cracked mobile search properly, and some fresh thinking was needed in this market. We started to look at it, and the more we looked, the more ideas we came up with. It became a bit of an obsession after a while. We pestered the VCs constantly after that, eventually they gave in and invested in us.”
When moving a service to mobile, something gets lost in the translation.
Google’s position seems untouchable when it comes to desktop search, but challenging the giant on the mobile phone might work. Ives explains why: “Services like Google were born on the desktop and then moved later to mobile. When moving the service to mobile, something gets lost in the translation. A desktop user will use search 5 times a day or more, but a mobile user that discovers Google Mobile or Yahoo OneSearch typically only searches once every 5 to 7 days. We believe that to get people to use mobile search 5 times a day or more - in other words, to make mobile search a mass market service rather than a niche service - then you have to give it a social context. Mobiles are supersocial devices, so if your service isn’t relevant to you in a social way it won’t get used that often.”
Next to a Google-challenger, Taptu is also a social search engine. Jimmy Wales plugged this term in January when he launched Wikia Search. During an interview I had with him, he said: “One of the weaknesses of current search engines is that their algorithms take a long time picking up new good sites. (..) It takes only one community member that finds a good new site and lets the community know.” What does Ives thinks of Wikia Search? “We’ve been watching Search Wikia quite closely. They have some similar ideas to us about how to improve the quality of search results through social interactions. But we are totally focused on mobile, which is a completely different medium to the desktop, so the dynamics of sharing are rather different also.” (more…)
Written on February 20, 2008 – 2:29 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When starting a social service these days, you can’t just create an independent system anymore. You need to connect, aggregate and integrate. There’s just no way that you can ignore the Dataportability, OpenID and OpenSocial guys. They’re everywhere, coining the exact same terms I’ve used in the first sentences of this post. As Marc Canter cried out during Le Web 3: ‘We all want services to connect with each other!’
CEO Maria Sipka during the Data Sharing Summit
Later today, a new bridging-gaps service will launch. It’s called Linqia and it collects and lists detailed profiles of thousands of online communities and groups. Of course there’s a search option, so you can find the smallest and most hidden groups. Users can upload existing groups and rate and comment them. So, which services are following the trend and granted Linqia access? Co-founder and CEO Maria Sipka told me that Linqia has secured content from 18 communities and social networks - with names like XING, ecademy, Viadeo and Live Journal. Companies can sponsor community categories, which some - like Weblin, ESADE and AutoScout24 - are already willing to do.
Linqia wants to help people connect to other people, their interests and needs. Sounds pretty cool, and it gets better. Sipka told me about the social vision of Linqia: connect the developing world to the developed world through online communities and groups. When a community from a third-world country connects to the web with their 100 dollar laptop, chances are high they’ll be a bit overwhelmed by all the possibilities. Sipka asks us to imagine a community of farmers in Ghana. They want to use the web to find a group of experts on the topic of wheat and how to maximize the harvest amidst drought conditions. That’s where Linqia comes in. Through its search engine, the community would be able to find some helpful scientists who at the same time want to gather information from the farmers. The big challenge for Linqia here, is to reach those communities from the developing countries.
However, I don’t have any personal interest in wheat so I searched for a different community. Yet when I tried to find one of my favorite bands, the Babyshambles, I couldn’t find a group. Same thing happened when I searched for my favorite networking event OpenCoffee. So not all the obvious groups are there yet, but the idea of making them all available sounds like a good plan. Linqia will have to get big shots like Facebook and LinkedIn on board and let them open up their groups. So far, Facebook just counts as one community, yet it contains thousands of special interest groups. It’s necessary to be able to search through those groups as well if Linqia wants to fulfill the thousands of different wishes of its visitors.
Email
Twitter
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
