I just read about an interesting new website called SciVee created by The National Science Foundation, Public Library of Science, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center that appears to be targeted to become a YouTube for Science. According to the Slashdot post scientists can upload their research papers, accompanied by a video where they describe the work in the form of a short lecture, accompanied by a presentation.

A quick perusal of the SciVee website front page right now shows a featured pubcast called Structural Evolution of the Protein Kinase-Like Superfamily. I will need to explore it some more but judging on first impressions it appears to be a great idea. Instead of watching mindless stuff on You Tube I now have the option of tuning into some intellectually stimulating content for a change. It will definitely be very interesting to see what kind of scientific content makes it onto SciVee as the site matures and grows. If you have the time SciVee is worth checking out and bookmarking.

I haven’t blogged in a while and thought I would write about Freebase. I just recently received an invitation to try out their alpha version and my first impressions are quite positive. According to the Freebase website:

Freebase.com is home to a global knowledge base: a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone. It could be described as a data commons. Freebase.com is enabled by the technology of Metaweb, which is described at www.metaweb.com.

Freebase.com allows anyone to contribute, structure, search, copy and use data, through either the Freebase.com web site or through application program interfaces (APIs). Freebase makes it easy put data in and pull data out for any commercial or non-commercial purpose.

At first glance it looks like they may be appearing to clone wikipedia but according to their website they are different.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with information arranged in the form of articles. Freebase is more of an almanac, organized like a database, and readable by people or software. Wikipedia and Freebase both appeal to people who love to use and organize information. In fact, many of the founding contributors to Freebase are also active in the Wikipedia community. Whenever Freebase and Wikipedia cover the same topic, Freebase will link to the Wikipedia article to make it easy for users to access the best of both sites.

From my brief use of the service and limited understanding I think the most exciting aspect about freebase is that it is free and open for anyone to use. The other thing I find exciting is its ability to put structure around data so that programmers can use the meta-data to access the information in the database through an application programmer interface (API) in new and innovative ways. Structure is supposed to be given to information in the Freebase database through the concepts of topics and properties, types and domains. It will be interesting to see how this database evolves over time and how the information is categorized. If you have the time it’s definitely a project worth checking out and contributing to.

Well I just read that Google missed second quarter earnings expectations. Although earnings were up 28% it clearly failed to meet investor expectations as the stock fell 5% in after hours trading. Is this a sign of further trouble in the short term? Probably not. But this is clearly another indicator and further evidence to suggest that Google’s dominance in search may be on the decline.

Google isn’t just losing web search engine market share but they are now beginning to disappoint financially. To me it suggests that maybe other players in the market are starting to level the playing field and beginning to hurt their earnings if not directly, at least in a somewhat indirect and tangible way. Google’s acquisitions have been widely reported and here is a good list of them. Over the years one can see that their acquisitions have increased dramatically. Here is a link to a graph from Mashable showing Google’s acquisition by year from 2001-2007. This at least suggests that there has been a strategy at Google for some time to distinguish itself from its competition through acquisition.

These disappointing earnings are possibly an indicator that Google’s attempt to maintain it’s advantage and distinguish itself from the competition through acquisition may be a failing strategy. As the above shows, it’s apparent that Google’s focus may have strayed from innovating from within to innovating through acquisition and this may be having an negative impact on its bottom line in several ways. First, and most importantly maybe some acquisitions were not wise and may have had a directly detrimental impact on its earnings. Second, it’s been readily apparent to me for a while that the relevance of Google’s search results are not what they once were or could be. Is it possible that by focusing so much on acquisitions that Google has inadvertently neglected what is truly important and that is improving its search results. Could this be the real reason why Google’s web market share declined in June? I don’t know for sure but it’s an interesting topic for debate.

Here are some other links to give you a different perspective on Google missing earnings expectations.
Google Earnings Up 28% but Miss Expectations
Google is human, earnings miss

Is the public starting to acknowledge that Google may not be the only option when it comes to search engines? Within the past week compete and comScore have released web search market share results for the month of June which seem to indicate that Google is indeed losing market share to its competitors.

comScore June U.S. Search Engine Rankings
compete June Web Search Market Share Results

According to the above results it appears Microsoft may have gained some web search market share at Google’s expense. At the moment it’s unclear if this is a trend that will continue into the future or if it is just a blip of some sort. However, there was some very good analysis at search engine land analyzing the compete results of last week in an article entitled Compete: Microsoft Gaining Searches; Live Search Club Giveaway Working.

Whatever the reason for the drop in search market share it definitely appears that Google will have a tougher time maintaining its dominance in search going into the future than it used to. The established search engines are retooling and making their search results more relevant and taking away the lead that Google had. It will be much harder in the future for Google to distinguish itself from the rest of the pack like it might have in the past. Also, it is inevitable that with so many unknown search engine challengers continuously appearing they will eventually manage to chip away and erode Google’s dominance. Only hindsight can tell you for sure but I am betting these results may be signaling the beginning of a new trend.

Since I have been looking at my use of search engines with a little more determination recently I am slowly starting to realize that limiting myself to one search engine may not be a wise idea. While reading an article entitled Ask.com: Today’s Google Free Alternative at Search Engine Land today I found more concrete evidence to support the case for varying your use of search engines. The article points to evidence from an interesting research study seeming to suggest that when you do the same search across most of the major search engines, they return radically different results. The study was conducted by InfoSpace the owners of Dogpile.com in collaboration with researchers from Queensland University of Technology and the Pennsylvania State University. Search Engine Land also provides a good summary of the results of this study here. If you want to read the complete study you can find it at the following Infospace web page. Or you can access the pdf of the report directly using this link Different Engines, Different Results: Web Searchers Not Always Finding What They’re Looking for Online [.pdf]. It’s definitely interesting to see some empirical evidence on the subject matter and I thought more people should be made aware of it.

Here are a few other noteworthy links on search I found on eBizMBA today that I thought shouldn’t be overlooked and others might find useful:

The Future of Search: The head of Google Research talks about his group’s projects.

How To Define Web 3.0.

Google Places Ad In Search Results

Also, here is a Mashable post I found discussing a new social networking/bookmarking (cross network search) tool that just launched called Streakr that some of you may want to check out.

There has been quite a lot of positive press on the web about a new people specific search engine called Spock. When it first came out I initially had an inclination to try it out but immediately discovered it was a private beta and only available through invitation only. Since I am kind of a slow adopter I just made a mental note that I would try it someday. I didn’t particularly think it was worth the effort to bother going through the hassle of looking for an invite. But just the other day on TechCrunch I read an interesting post about how you could get an invite to any private beta from a web site called InviteShare. So I decided to give it a try and signed up. I browsed the list of web sites currently in private beta that InviteShare is currently sharing invites for and decided to see if I could snag an invite to Spock. It didn’t take very long for me to eventually receive an invitation to use Spock. I didn’t think it could be that easy. From this positive experience I can say InviteShare is a great idea and it definitely makes it easier for individuals to share invites with others who are really interested and want to try out private betas. If you are interested in private beta invites this is a site you should check out.

Now to look at Spock. Spock bills itself as the online leader in personal search and boasts having over one hundred million people already indexed. That is definitely an impressive number and Spock’s objectives are lofty as they intend to build the broadest and deepest people specific search engine. The Spock home page provides the user with a traditional search box where you can search for people. I did a search for Mahatma Gandhi and it returned me a picture, some biographical information and websites to find information about him. You are not limited to searching for people’s names however. You can search for a category or class of person or subject. For instance, you can search for a term like Pro Football Hall of Fame and have returned players such as Dan Marino and Warren Moon who are in the Hall of Fame. You can also do a search for global warming and have it return people such as Al Gore and Bill Clinton. The search possibilities are obviously endless and you are only limited by your imagination. If you aren’t in the mood for searching however, Spock also provides three categories of lists 10 deep below the search box, that one can browse called people, news and searches. My first impressions of this search engine are quite positive and I can now see why it has received some glowing reviews.

Besides Spock there are also some other people search engines available that you can try right now without needing an invitation that are also quite capable at finding people on the web. Some interesting people search engines worth checking out include Wink People Search, yoName, ex.plode.us, TrueScoop, and ZabaSearch. Most of these search across various databases, the web and various social networking sites to provide you with results. Each is a little different than the other and they each have their strengths and weaknesses. You will probably need to do some experimenting to see which one works for you and which you prefer. There are most likely other people search engines but these are just a few I was able to discover that were worth mentioning.

A New Web Repository For Data and Graphs

I just discovered this very innovative web site called Swivel. According to its website Swivel was founded in December 2005 by Dmitry Dimov and Brian Mulloy and its mission is to liberate the world’s data and make it useful so new insights can be discovered and shared. The concept behind Swivel is quite simple however, as it is basically a web repository that allows users to upload data sets so that others can view them, explore them and share them through the web. The best and most visually appealing way to explore the data sets uploaded by users on Swivel is through graphs but you can also download the spreadsheets and view the tables they are based on. I had quite a bit of fun exploring the graphs and data available on Swivel and can see some good uses and benefits coming from it. There are several options to view graphs or data by most viewed, most discussed, highest rated or most recent. You can also read comments or ratings others have left about the graph as well write comments on or rate graphs yourself. If you want to learn more about Swivel and what it’s about here is a link to a tour of Swivel’s features from their website.

According to their website they expect to make money on this venture by appealing to businesses or professionals who want the great functionality the site offers but want to keep their data private and secure. They plan to offer a professional edition of the web site in the future. The business model they have planned works as follows: if you upload data for the public, Swivel will be free but if you choose to upload data and keep it private and secure there will be a fee. It’s uncertain whether this business model will scale but Swivel seems to think it can.

Swivel may indeed have the potential to be the “You Tube for Data” and from my initial glance it does appear to have a lot of good things going for it. The site is very usable and has a the look and feel one has come to expect from web 2.0. If you are into graphs or just exploring data this website will probably appeal to you and keep you hunting for more information.

Recently I read an interesting VentureBeat article on a new natural language search engine called Powerset and I became immediately intrigued. I really wanted to try it but the search engine was only available by invitation and I learned it would only be released to the public sometime later this year in the fall. Since I was disappointed and wasn’t able to test Powerset I decided to investigate and see if there were any other natural language search engines available that I could try. I was able to identify several and they included Hakia, Lexxe, and Brainboost. So I decided to learn more about what natural language search entailed.

In really simple terms I came to understand that a natural language search engine allows you to use a plain regular spoken language such as everyday English to enter your search query. From my initial cursory understanding using this type of search, you can ask a question or type in a sentence to describe what you are looking for and the search engine will process the sentence through programmed logic to find the keywords by their position in the sentence. With such a basic understanding I decided to try out some simple queries on each of these three search engines and see how they compared with each other and with Google.

The first query I tried was a simple one: How old is Hillary Clinton?

Brainboost was able to return the year Hillary Clinton was born to me which was 1947 as the first link while Hakia was able to return her birth year on the fourth link. With both these search engines I would have had to calculate her age myself. Lexxe on the other hand did a much better job and returned me the answer: Will Be Sixty-one Years Old in 2008 as the first link. Google returned me her age on the first link as 59 years old and her birth year as 1947.

So I decided to try a geometry question next. The query I posed was: How many sides in a pentagon?

Lexxe returned: There are five.
Brainboost returned: 5 = S in a P – Answer >>> Sides in a Pentagon.
Hakia returned: A polygon with five sides is a pentagon.
Google returned: A pentagon has 5 sides and 5 angles.

I then posed this query: How many programming languages?

Only Brainboost returned something that seemed relevant as an answer: Thousands of different programming languages. The others including Google disappointed.

Another query I made was: What is contributing to climate change?

All the search engines returned results in somewhat different order but for the most part found links that showed humans may be contributing to climate change in some fashion or other.

The last natural language query I thought would be interesting to look at was: Will natural language processing provide better search?

Lexxe’s response to this question was indeed amusing as it answered “no” but it did provide some very useful links on natural language processing. Brainboost faired the worst on this search as it only returned one link on natural language processing. Hakia and Google also both did a good job at returning useful links on the subject matter. Hakia listed this rather useful link on Natural Language Processing that I thought was especially noteworthy to mention for those wanting to learn more about the subject.

Obviously many other search queries can be compared but that I will leave as an exercise for yourself. From my superficial analysis all these natural search engines appear to perform adequately and probably as good as the traditional Google search. However, I am unqualified to determine whether they are indeed better or worse. The issue is quite open to debate. Here are some links for you to read to get a more in-depth perspective on this debate:

On Natural Language Search
We Are All Natural Language Searchers…
Hello Natural Language Search, My Old Over-Hyped Search Friend
Jeff Bezos’ Risky Bet
In a Search Refinement, a Chance to Rival Google

I suppose only time will tell which type of search is better but at the moment these natural language search engines do provide an interesting alternative.

Below are some links if you want to read further about natural language processing:

Wikipedia: Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing Frequently Asked Questions
Parc Research: Natural Language Processing

I think almost everyone today is aware of the collaborative volunteer written Wikipedia and the important positive or negative influences this project has had on the web in terms of reference. However, I am not so sure everyone knows that there are also search engines out there today attempting to make sense of the web by referencing information found on the Internet in an encyclopedic format. These search engines are trying to organize the web in such a way that when individuals query a topic they receive an encyclopedic like summary of the subject matter as a response. This type of search can possibly come in quite handy and be invaluable when trying to grasp a new unknown subject or when wanting a general overview of a specific topic where you have very little prior knowledge. What follows will be my look at some of these search engines.

A Look At Factbites

Factbites was created by Rapid Intelligence, a content technology company based in Sydney, Australia that focuses on computational linguistics, data mining, data warehousing and artificial intelligence. According to their web page factbites is a place where results make sense and the focus is more on content analysis than link popularity. The approach used by factbites is to provide users with meaningful, relevant sentences from every site in the search results. The major benefit of this approach is that it allows one to gain a great deal of factual information on a topic without ever having to leave the search page. Is factbites better than Google? They seem to think so, as they have a page that compares Factbites vs Google. The page provides a good argument for one to consider using factbites for encyclopedia style searches that I tend to agree with. After trying out a few searches it seemed to do what it advertised. Another positive about this search engine is that the user interface is very polished. It provides you with the results in a clean fashion and doesn’t clutter your screen with too much noise. Overall I was very pleased with the goals of this search engine and I will probably have more than one occasion to use it in the future.

A Look At SenseBot

This search engine is being developed by a New York company called Semantic Engines LLC a firm that focuses on information search and retrieval, text analysis and understanding and question-answering systems. According to its website the technology that they are using is protected by Patent Pending. More specifically, the website states that SenseBot is a new type of search engine that delivers a summary in response to a search query instead of a collection of links to web pages. At the moment it uses the results of Google and Yahoo and returns a concise summary of the topic being queried. They suggest that SenseBot would be beneficial for a user trying to understand a concept, identify the best source of information on a topic or understand a particular area of knowledge. Other areas it could also be useful for are to get a summary of a person, event or activity. The website provides a good selection of sample queries showing how Sensebot can be put to use. In my brief use of the search engine it appears to do an adequate job of summarizing. I tested it by querying Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton and it provided useful summaries but not what I would call comprehensive. The user interface for this search engine is not as elegant as factbites at this point but I am sure it will improve. This search engine is useful at the moment and with some refinement in the future can definitely hold some promise.

A Look At Answers.com

Answers.com was launched in January 2005 by Answers Corporation and is more like your traditional encyclopedia. Today its website boasts that it is your free “one-stop shop” with instant information on over 4 million topics. Answers.com has collected authoritative facts by licensing top-quality reference work to give its users comprehensive, relevant information. The reference content comes from publishers such as Houghton Mifflin, Columbia University Press, Thomson Gale, Britannica, Barron’s, Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, MarketWatch, Investopedia, All Media Guide, Who2, AccuWeather and eSpindle. A test search querying for Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton returned much more concise and comprehensive encyclopedic summaries of both individuals than SenseBot did. The user interface of answers.com is quite elegant and readable. If you need a quick comprehensive trustworthy encyclopedic reference on a topic or individual this website is definitely a must to consult.

A Look At Creedopedia

The last search engine I want to highlight briefly is a specialized one called Creedopedia. It is a more focused encyclopedic search engine that concentrates on religion. Its goal is to make your search for useful information on religions of the world easier. The user interface for the search engine is simple and the results page is astonishingly similar to that of factbites in look and feel. I did a search for the term Christianity and thought the results returned were reasonable. If you need a focused encyclopedic search engine on religion this is as good as you will probably find.

Conclusion

From my superficial look at these search engines there appears to be a lot of innovation happening to provide useful encyclopedic search results to users. Since I have only scratched the surface in writing this I have probably missed some very good encyclopedic type search engines. It will be interesting to see how much more refined and relevant these systems can become in the future but at the moment they are very usable alternatives.

I was able to receive an invitation to try out the closed beta of the English version of Mister Wong – Europe’s Largest Social Bookmarking portal and so I thought I would write about it today. For those who don’t know about Mister Wong it’s a German social bookmarking site similar to del.icio.us that was launched in the spring of 2006 by its founder Kai Tietjen. According to its website it boasts over two million visitors per month, it now lists more than one and half million bookmarks and it is more popular than del.icio.us in Germany. Although started in German, Mister Wong is also available in Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and French. These details piqued my interest so I decided to see what all the fuss was about. I signed up for an invite to beta test their new English site and not too long after I received an invitation in my email to join their closed beta test. I followed the straight forward registration procedure and I was good to go.

My first impressions of the website are very positive. It was nice to see a clean and simple site design that looked attractive. It’s features include a tag cloud on the right hand side and on the left hand side a section showing popular bookmarks which it terms browser burners and also a section showing the newest bookmarks which it describes as fresh bookmarks. In the most basic terms the feature set is similar to del.icio.us. The features include saving bookmarks private or publicly, creation of public or private groups, buddy lists, easy bookmark addition, the availability of a mister wong toolbar, and a blog button/wordpress plugin.

In my brief testing of the site I found it quite usable and fun to use with lots of good potential. If you are tired of del.icio.us or looking for an alternative, Mister Wong is definitely a strong and worthy competitor to watch.