As one of its weekly new features for Hulu for the Holidays, the company has rolled out new advanced search functionality. Hulu's blog notes that the new feature is part of an ongoing effort to improve in the area of search. This is going to be crucial for Hulu moving forward as users have more and more videos to sift through in their ever growing catalog.
This new advanced search allows users to filter their searches by fields like show title, season number, video type, network, air date, and people. This really helps you to narrow down a search if you have a specific video in mind that you want to track down.
When Hulu first launched, search wasn't as big of an issue since the library of videos that they offered was relatively small and easy to browse through. However, as the site has grown larger, it has become more difficult to find what you are looking for. By taking steps such as launching advanced search and debuting support for search operators back in April, it is clear that Hulu is making an effort to correct that problem.
The L.A. Times and now, Mashable are reporting that a security hole in Twitter allows protected tweets to be indexed by Google. After looking into the matter, we have determined that Google is not displaying protected tweets but rather indexing all public tweets, some from accounts that are now protected.
At first glance, there seems to be a hole in Twitter's protected tweet security, with the prime example being tweets, supposedly written by Bill Clinton showing up on the search engine. However, the tweets that appear here belong to "Fake Bill Clinton" from when he owned the @billclinton username and the account was private. One of the tweets that is indexed by Google under @billclinton can be found, migrated to @notbillclinton's account here.
A few of the "protected" Bill Clinton tweets.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)It appears that all Twitter users whose accounts have been protected since they opened them are in no danger of their tweets being indexed. It appears that if, at some point, the profile was public, then the tweets made during that time continue to live in Google's index.
This incident was definitely a scare for users with protected accounts who value their privacy on the site highly and have placed some degree of trust in Twitter to keep their tweets safe. Twitter has had some security concerns in the past, with a slew of their corporate documents being exposed and before that with several high-profile accounts being hacked. Since the "protected tweets exposed" fiasco is essentially a non-issue, it appears that Twitter has the service's security under control for the time being. Privacy and trust are big issues for companies like Twitter and had this been a real issue, surely many users would have felt betrayed.
Web pages have long included anchor links, which, when clicked, send you to a specific section of the page. Wikipedia uses them heavily to help users jump between headings and navigate the sometimes large articles more efficiently. Google has announced that it is now including these anchor links in search results. This is right in line with Google's mission of helping users to find the information that they are looking for as quickly and accurately as possible.
Google calls out the headings (Overview, Requirements, Important reactions, See also) in this Wikipedia article on nuclear fusion.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)For an example of how this works, try searching for "nuclear fusion." As you can see, Google pulls out the headings in the article, so if I was really interested in the requirements for nuclear fusion, I could jump straight there. This is a great addition and really helps in cases where you are dealing with long, text-heavy pages.
If you are a Webmaster and want to set up your Web pages to identify sections to Google, then read this post on Google's Webmaster Central to get you started.
Since we first covered Paglo in November 2007, the site has seen some significant advances. On Monday, Paglo is implementing a visual representation of NetFlow traffic data.
Basically, NetFlow allows IT administrators to see a detailed view of traffic patterns by protocol. You are able to see who is using the bandwidth on your network in order to better understand why the network is congested. This can be a very powerful tool for IT administrators, and it adds another notch of value to Paglo's Web 2.0 IT product, which I've endorsed in the past.
Since we last checked in, Paglo has also introduced a monetization system. Paglo was free during its beta period, but now it has a monthly subscription model in place. Users pay based on how many devices they want to index and also how long they want to store data for reporting.
Managing 50 devices and storing data for 30 days costs $50 a month. The prices scale up from there. Users can still use the service for free, but the free version has serious limitations.
Users of the free service can manage only 20 devices and can store data for only seven days in the past. Only keeping seven days of data basically makes trend data features worthless because it can't effectively track them.
Although the prices may seem high by consumer standards, keep in mind that this is mostly meant for the enterprise, so the higher price tag fits.
In the middle of May, Yahoo sent out a call to developers to develop customized search results using their SearchMonkey platform. Today, Yahoo announced the availability of Yahoo! Search Gallery. Search Gallery serves as a showcase for custom search add-ons that have been developed, such as Yelp, Last.fm, and LinkedIn.
Yahoo has a great concept here and one that could greatly improve the search experience for users. I was genuinely excited that customized results from sites that I frequent would magically find their way into my regular searches. While I still think that this is a good idea, the actual implementation needs some work.
Searching for restaurants, names, and other things that you would expect to throw back customized search results often does not. In the case of a search for my name, the LinkedIn entry was thrown in at the bottom of the page. Since I had explicitly told Yahoo Search that I want information from LinkedIn to show up in my searches, I would expect them to be given "above the fold" priority.
The current implementation requires you to manipulate your searches to get any customized results, in many cases.
I had to fool around with it for awhile before it would throw back a customized result for one of my favorite local restaurants, which is absolutely listed on Yelp, and even then it would not give me anything. It was not until I added the word "yelp" to the search that I saw a customized listing and it was a local.yahoo.com one instead of one from Yelp. There are obviously restaurants that custom results work for, but there is no reason why it shouldn't work on any Yelp listed restaurant that comes to mind.
All complaints aside, this technology is definitely something to get excited about, but the implementation (whether on Yahoo's end or the 3rd party developer's end) is just not there quite yet. Look for this to make a big impact when they finally get it right.
Web video search company Mefeedia has just debuted its new news video search feature.
The company, which launched its video search feature in March, explained in a blog post on Wednesday that it now has more than 500 news video sources, searchable by keyword. News sources currently being tracked by Mefeedia include the following:
- Networks: ABC News, MSNBC, CBS News, Fox News, CNN
- Online publishers: The New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, CNET Networks, The Washington Post
- Shows: 20/20, 60 Minutes, Nightline, Today
- Magazines: BusinessWeek, Newsweek
- Podcast producers: TalkCrunch, ReadWriteTalk, The Wall Street Journal
- Blogs and vlogs: WebbAlert, TMZ, Political Lunch, The Ointment, Beet.tv
In an e-mail, Mefeedia's Frank Sinton said the company expects to hit 5 million unique visitors this month. This is great growth for this company, which launched its video search engine in March.
Editors' note: The Web Services Report is published by CNET Networks, which is expected to become a part of CBS in an acquisition set to close in the third quarter.
Paglo is launching the public beta of their service today. Currently, Paglo has been implemented at 800 companies, each with a target employee size of between 50 and 1,000 people. The core functionality of the service remains the same, but the most exciting addition is Paglo Share-its.
Share-its allow Paglo users to share their searches, dashboards, and alerts with other Paglo users. Theoretically, Share-its will eliminate the need for every IT person to create their own solution to the same problem. For example, if a new security exploit is found in a certain version of Flash, someone in the Paglo community might create a Share-it to identify the devices in the network that are at risk and need to be patched. Perhaps another Paglo user collaborates and improves upon this Share-it and creates an even better solution. Now, the entire community benefits from what they can collectively solve. Paglo is calling this "social solving" and I think that it could be a very powerful asset.
(Credit:
Paglo)
Paglo is free for everyone to use, at least through this summer. At some point in the future, Paglo has said that they may start charging a monthly fee for the service, or at least for the advanced version of the service.
As I said in my previous review, I really think that Paglo is doing a lot of things right here. With the addition of Share-its, Paglo is certainly taking an already killer service to the next level. As the first solid Web 2.0 IT startup, I would really love to see them do well, so if you are in the IT sector, give it a look and maybe you will have a few less headaches trying to solve problems and a few less fires to put out.
The selection of video sites that Mefeedia indexes is extremely impressive. Right now, they are claiming 15,000 video sources in their index. They put together the following sampling of offerings on their blog.
* Major Video Sharing sites (YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe, Blip, Veoh, and many more.
* Web Series Sites (AllorNots, Quarterlife, BoingBoing TV, 60 Frames series, Next New Networks series, etc.)
* Video Blogs (Steve Garfield, Ryan Is Hungry, etc.)
* TV Sites (Hulu, CBS, ABC, and others)
* News Sites (CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, CBS News, etc.)
* Music Sites (Imeem and others)
Obviously Mefeedia has the content and that is what really counts in a useful multimedia search engine. However, I tend to agree with Marshall when I say that the interface needs some work. The layout and colors just don't quite flow well for me yet. The search results page for established shows like Heroes, for example, have a much nicer look than a standard results page, like this one for Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
Despite the less than perfect interface, Mefeedia has very good community features. Playlists and subscriptions allow you to track your favorite users or content through RSS feeds, which is nice for those of us who live in Google Reader. I think that Mefeedia has something really solid here. Mefeedia is definitely worth checking out if you're looking for content beyond YouTube.
Just about everyone else on the Internet has written on the potential acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft for $44.6 billion, but I thought that I would weigh in on what I think this might mean for search and Web services.
According to ComScore's search share numbers for December 2007, Google has 58.4 percent of the market share, with Yahoo and Microsoft trailing at 22.9 percent and 9.8 percent, respectively. If Microsoft and Yahoo combine forces and change nothing, that will put them at 32.7 percent to Google's 58.4 percent. While those numbers are certainly not enough to overthrow Google, maybe the combined minds at the two tech giants can come up with something. Somebody has to try to make a stand, so that Google doesn't run away with the industry completely. That said, I think that Google is here to stay, even though this may be its biggest challenge yet.
On the Web services side of the issue, this acquisition is looking really good for Microsoft and Yahoo. Long Zheng has a great rundown of the services that Microsoft and Yahoo provide and where they overlap. The combined user bases of Microsoft and Yahoo's Web mail services far outpace that of Gmail (they actually both beat Gmail individually), so we will put one in the win column there. If Google Talk wasn't dead enough before, it sure will be now. Google has not even come close to touching either Microsoft or Yahoo in the instant-messaging market. One more thing on IM, if this acquisition goes through, a little service called AIM is going to finally be in their sights.
Microsoft will benefit from taking control of the leading photo-sharing site, Flickr, since its only photo-sharing solution that currently exists is through its Windows Live Spaces product. Several services from the two companies will likely be merged down the road, such as Upcoming integration in Live Events, Yahoo Widgets being integrated into the Vista Sidebar, and a merger of Yahoo Answers and Live QnA. Services that are likely to get the axe include Yahoo Maps, since Microsoft's Virtual Earth technology far outperforms Yahoo's, Yahoo 360 (or whatever it ends up being once it is done "transitioning"), and most likely some of Yahoo's music services.
$44.6 billion is a lot of money to pay for an acquisition, but Microsoft has deep pockets. The deal initially makes me a little nervous, but after thinking about it for a little while, I am feeling better about it. I'm not convinced that Microsoft will take away Google's search crown as a result of this acquisition, but it will instantly become a larger player. This acquisition will lead to almost complete dominance by Microsoft over Google in the Web services arena, but not necessarily in search.
The Web 2.0 style IT management tool, Paglo launched in beta on Monday.
Paglo is essentially an IT search engine that indexes a ton of information about the network you are managing. For example, if you are concerned about how many copies of Microsoft Office are installed on computers at your company and want to make sure that you are complying with your license, Paglo allows you to view that statistic in real time.
There are three key elements to Paglo: the Crawler, Search Index, and UI. If you are a network administrator, for example, you install the Paglo Crawler on your computer, and it will crawl the entire network, looking for computers, installed applications, devices, such as BlackBerrys, and information about users. That data is then uploaded to Paglo's secure servers and loaded into your personal Search Index.
Once all of this data is online, you can access it from any Web browser, so your access is not limited to only when you are at work. Maybe network admins can finally get some vacation time and still stay up to date with what's going on.
Paglo's UI basically works by allowing you to search for key terms you are curious about within your network. It can also, for example, allow you to find the e-mail address for any user on the network if there is a problem with his or her system. The real value of Paglo, in my opinion, however, is its Dashboard feature.
Paglo's Dashboard can be compared to a customizable home page, with space for widgets that show you different data about your network. So, if you want to save your search for computers with Office installed, you can put that data on your Dashboard, in graph form, for quick reference.
When I talked with Paglo CEO Brian de Haaff and CTO Chris Waters, one of the things that they were the most excited with is the ability to share search queries with the Paglo community. If one IT pro comes up with an extremely useful, but complicated, search query, you can just grab that query and put it on your Dashboard, instead of having to come up with it yourself. This, in combination with Paglo's open API, creates a great opportunity for a variety of mashups and dashboard widgets.
Paglo is concentrating on delivering a quality, free product for now but will most likely be adding additional premium functionality in the future for a price. It's nice to see Paglo bringing IT into the Web 2.0 realm. Hopefully it will gain enough traction to grow into an essential tool.
