I still don’t buy that Google is “gripped with fear“, but I agree with Danny Sullivan’s analysis that Google’s new “Explore Google Search” page (with a link in the usually sacrosanct real estate on the home page) is a reaction to Microsoft’s campaign to market Bing. I’d be curious to know what fraction of Google’s [...]
Entries from June 2009
Google Markets Itself
June 17th, 2009 · 24 Comments · Quick Bites
Tags:
JCDL 2009
June 17th, 2009 · 3 Comments · Quick Bites
For the benefit of those of us not lucky enough to be attending this year’s Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2009), a number of attendees are live-tweeting the conference using the hashtag #jcdl2009. I’m sure there will be blog posts (like these), and I’ll try to round up what I can when the conference [...]
Tags:
Spam in the Twitterverse
June 17th, 2009 · 3 Comments · General
I’ve noted in the past that “real-time” alerting systems, in contrast to search engines that place less emphasis on immediacy, are particularly vulnerable to spamming. It’s a lot like telemarketing–you could avoid it entirely if you routed any questionable calls to voicemail, but then you would, at the very least, not be able to be [...]
Tags:
Wikipedia: Play The Ball, Not The Man
June 16th, 2009 · No Comments · Quick Bites
Today’s Freakonomics blog in the New York Times has a nice post entitled “By a Bunch of Nobodies: A Q&A With the Author of The Wikipedia Revolution“, in which Annika Mengisen interviews Wikipedia editor/administrator Andrew Lih. Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite: Q: A while ago, Essjay, one of Wikipedia’s most prominent editors, lied [...]
Tags:
Hunch Has Launched
June 15th, 2009 · 5 Comments · Quick Bites
For anyone who has been waiting to try Hunch (which really is a “decision engine“) but didn’t manage to snarf an invite, today is your lucky day: Hunch has launched. They’ve added some new features too–for example, they offer a faceted navigation interface that lets you bypass their ordering of the questions in the decision [...]
Tags:
Don’t believe everything you read in the New York Post
June 14th, 2009 · 36 Comments · General
Now this is the sort of publicity that even $100M can’t buy: the New York Post is reporting that, in response to Microsoft’s recent Bing launch, “FEAR GRIPS GOOGLE” (all caps in the original): Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft’s rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top [...]
Tags:
Guest Post at the Federated Search Blog
June 12th, 2009 · No Comments · General
I wrote a guest post at Sol Lederman’s Federated Search blog entitled “The Problem with Federated Search“. Here’s an excerpt: The case for federated search is straightforward: no single organization has all of the answers, and therefore no single index can ever hope to complete satisfy its users’ needs. Federation allows the developer of a [...]
Tags:
Google Wave or just a Blip?
June 11th, 2009 · 8 Comments · General
Yesterday, I was fortunate to attend a presentation from a Google Engineering Director about Google Wave, an online communication and collaboration tool that Google recently unveiled at the Google I/O developer conference. For those who, like me, were unable to attend I/O, Google has posted the entire 80-minute presentation on YouTube (embedded above). For those [...]
Tags:
Back from Endeca Discover ’09
June 10th, 2009 · 5 Comments · General
I hope that regular readers forgive the recent sparsity of posts. I spent most of the last three days attending Discover, Endeca’s annual user conference. It might come as a shock to some (especially the PR folks who keep sending me press releases), but I’m not a professional blogger, and I actually hold down a [...]
Tags:
Attending Endeca Discover
June 9th, 2009 · No Comments · Noise
Apologies for the unusual hiatus in posting–I’ve been attending Endeca Discover (an annual user conference) and haven’t managed to allocate time for blogging. I’ll make up for it by blogging about the conference tomorrow, when I’m back to what passes for normality. In the mean time, feel free to follow the conference on Twitter.
Tags: