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Wikia, an Open Search Engine

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, plans to launch a search engine code-named Wikia in the first quarter of 2007. Following the model of Wikipedia, the new search engine will have user-editable search results.

"Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term [Tampa hotels], for example, and you will not get any useful results," said Jimmy Wales. Well, maybe the example is not very good, because I see mostly useful results.

Mr. Wales did the impossible by creating an excellent resource of information with the support of a community. Now he wants to repeat the success, but this time the project will be supported by advertising.

"Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: 'this page is good, this page sucks'. Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that," added Wikipedia's founder.

I think the main job of a search engine is to understand how relevant a page is for a particular query. To scale, a search engine should that algorithmically. While people have a better ability to decide if a page is relevant, that doesn't mean spammers won't try to push their sites.

But the main reason for creating a search engine is that he thinks search is broken "for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack accountability, lack of transparency." Google, for example, won't become open source because it uses proprietary algorithms, other search engines could copy its code and people could tweak their sites to abuse it.

It will be interesting to see if a search engine based only on human intelligence really works.

Update: Jimmy Wales explains in a Wired interview that "the core of the concept is the open-source nature of everything we're intending to do -- making all of the algorithms public, making all of the data public and trying to achieve the maximum possible transparency." Wales doesn't give a launch date: "The project to build the community to build the search engine is launching in the first quarter of 2007, not the search engine itself. We may have something up pretty quickly, maybe some sort of demo or test for people to start playing with."

Google Wishlist for 2007

Google did a lot of great things in 2006. Think about it: in December 2005, we didn't have Google Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, chat in Gmail, Google Notebook, Google Trends, Google Earth for Mac and Linux, Google Checkout.

What would I like to see from Google in 2007?

- A better Gmail that lets you preview messages, search and manage attachments.

- A real Google Address Book with shared profiles that works in all Google services and it's easier to manage than the current Gmail Contacts.

- A way to search the content created using Google services (Gmail messages, calendars, Blogger posts, comments, Google Notebook, Google Groups).

- A central place for all the files uploaded to Google.

- Video conferences, call to phone numbers, spell-checker, interoperability with Skype, AIM, plugins in Google Talk.

- A more interactive Google News.

- A personalized feed reader that filters the news, finds related perspectives and creates your own news site.

- Bring Google Desktop to the desktop by integrating it into a file manager. You know, like Total Commander.

- Bring time to web search, archive content and let me search the web the way it was on a certain date.

- Google Recommendations: extend this gadget to a new service.

Plus something that's really hard (who wouldn't want that?):

- Bring meaning to search: find structured content, use tagging, annotations, object recognition to improve text search, image search, video search.

What would you like from Google? In case you're wondering, someone from Google will read your wishlists.

Google 2006 in 12 Pictures

January

Google agrees to censor search results in China. "In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on Google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy. While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission."

Compare the image search results for [Tiananmen] in Google China (screenshot below) with the uncensored results.

February

Google integrates instant messaging into Gmail. Google saves your chat history and lets you search it.

March

Google acquires Writely, an online word processor, that will later become a part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

April

Google Calendar launches: it's easy to use, integrated with Gmail, you can create and share events. Later on, Google will add search for public events.

May

Google Co-op is a new platform that involves improving search results by using experts and communities. Google Co-op is behind the search refinements you see for health-related queries (and others), Google Accessible Search, custom search engines.

June

Google Checkout, an easier and safer way to make payments. But also an incentive for AdWords advertisers.

July

Google is officially an English word.

August

Google Apps for Your Domain lets you access Google services using custom mail addresses.

September

Google Reader has a new interface and becomes one of the best online feed readers.

October

Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. This way, Google gets more exposure for its contextual video ads and admits Google Video wasn't too successful.

November

A sign that Google had a great financial year: on November 21, Google's shares jumped to $509.65.

December

Google officially launches the new version of Blogger that adds dynamic publishing, labels, and a more flexible template editor.

Migration to the New Blogger Takes Too Long

Migration to the new version of Blogger, which is now out of beta, stirred a lot of controversy. The problem is that migration takes too long, or at least much longer than people might expect. Here's a balanced post from Google Groups that offers some suggestions:

Okay, so it's now been a little over 11 hours since I initiated the switch over to the new Blogger. Admittedly, I didn't think that it was going to be a couple minutes to transfer over my more than 2,000 posts, but never did I think that I was going to be out of commission for, well, 11 hours (and counting). Yes, I'm still being "moved."

(...) Blogger employees do admit that it may take longer in some cases, but I have to laugh when that "may take longer" means hours, and lots of them at that. This lack of communication with its customers is classic Blogger and something that really doesn't surprise me. Wouldn't it have been nice for Blogger to tell us that there was the possibility that things would take hours and hours for some of the larger blogs to prepare us for the extended down time? It's such a simple thing, but it's something that Blogger, for some reason, has always struggled with in my years of using them.

All the new features that the new Blogger brings with it are great. But the thing that would make this place 100 X's better is open, honest communication mixed with better customer service. I realize that we're talking millions of blogs here, but I also realize we're talking about Google. With Google shares trading at $450+, you might think they could afford to increase Blogger's staffing just a tad. That would be a huge improvement.

Christmas Trees on Your Desktop

If you have Google Desktop and want to add some Christmas decorations to your desktop, you can choose one of these gadgets.

GX'mas Tree
A Christmas Tree that lights up more powerful if you use your computer's CPU more. Includes a small collection of Christmas songs (MIDI).

Christmas Tree
This tree looks better than the previous one and it's also customizable, but it doesn't have music or shiny lights.

Virtual Christmas Tree
You can actually decorate this tree (in the screenshot). While doing that, listen to carols and watch the snow fall.

All the trees can be detached from the sidebar and can be enlarged using the "Zoom" option.

Other holiday gadgets are available at Google Desktop site.

Google Bookmarks Gadget

This gadget for the personalized homepage has been around for a while, but now it looks better and has new features.

The purpose of the gadget is to let you access your bookmarks. As you probably now, Google Bookmarks is a service that stores private bookmarks and could be used in connection with Google Toolbar or other extensions.

The gadget lets you restrict the list of bookmarks to a certain label. It's also easy to edit bookmarks or to manually add bookmarks. The only missing feature is search.

Google Books Generates Results in No Time

If you do a search on Google Book Search, Google says it found the results in "0.00 seconds". Even for advanced queries, Google's performance is amazing.

Does this happen because Google doesn't index too many* books or it's just a bug?

* A search for a common word like "they" returns 3,520,600 results.

Larry Page Introducing Google Search Features

"We recently added some new features to Google. The most significant is a summary for each result that highlights where your query matched. This makes for a much more informative summary than most search engines provide. You can actually see where your query matched without having to download each page.

Also, you can fetch contents from our repository by clicking on the "Cached" link near each result. This often is faster than going to the original, but of course can give you outdated information since it is based on our last crawl. This feature can be very useful if the original is not available or the network is down, you will still have access to the page (but not the images)."

(Larry Page, July 1998)

Predicting Your Favorite Music

Think about 3-4 favorite singers or bands. Go to Google Sets, enter each artist name in an input box and click on "Large set" button. Hopefully, Google Sets, that uses artificial intelligence to predict other items similar to the ones already entered, will show you a big list of related artists.

Then go to Radio.Blog.Club and see if Google was right. Enter the artists you aren't familiar with and listen to their music.

Your Top Google Searches in 2006

Every important search engine showed its (slightly adjusted) top of popular search queries. If you use Google Personalized Search, Google saves all your queries and the search results you've clicked. So you can have your own top if you go to this page.

You'll also get a top of the most visited sites and pages from the search results.

Of course, the top will be accurate if you searched Google while being mostly logged in (for example, you use Gmail).

In case you're wondering, the top from the screenshot is for illustration purposes only (although my top query in 2006 was... "google").

Ask X, a Unified Interface for Ask.com

Ask.com launched Ask X, a site that mixes different specialized searches and uses AJAX to show search results faster. Similar to Google's SearchMash, Ask shows image search results, news, blog posts in a right sidebar. But unlike SearchMash, Ask actually shows those results and doesn't wait for you to expand the sections. Another good choice is displaying only results from search types connected to the query. Ask X shows search suggestions and refinements in a new sidebar, displayed on the left side of the screen, that remains always visible.

The trouble with this kind of mashups is that pages load slower and may look cluttered. But if search result pages provide the right balance between web pages and additional information, you'll get a wider perspective. In 2007, search engines will move towards one interface that mixes specialized searches.

Google Pushing Blogger... Really Hard

It's no secret that Google uses AdWords to promote its products. If you search for "blogger" you'll have a surprise (for "blog" the situation is similar). Basically, there's a very slim chance someone will go to other site than blogger.com. Why?

1. There's an ad for blogger.com at the top.

2. Google recommends you to try Blogger (you'll see the same tip for almost any keyword that contains "blog"; that includes: "blogs", "blogosphere", "weblog", "bloglines").

3. The first result is for blogger.com and there are also four more pages displayed next to the result.

4. The second search result is still for blogger.com.

So, basically, the first eight relevant links from the page send you to blogger.com.

Blogger Is Out Of Beta

Blogger Beta is no longer a beta. Now it's called the new Blogger.

While not everyone can migrate to the new version (large blogs should wait a little bit more), Blogger is feature-complete and doesn't have major bugs.

"The new version of Blogger is metaphorically bursting with features, from the big guns like drag-and-drop template editing and post labels (...), to little polishes like a better-designed Dashboard or that you no longer need to solve a word verification CAPTCHA to post a comment on your own blog."

Hopefully, the Blogger team (or what's left from Blogger) will also add basic features like: comment spam detection, no separate page for posting comments, photo management.

But for the moment I'm happy: if you change the title of a post, the URL remains the same. In case you've seen a 404 error here, this must have been the cause.

Related:
Blogger's new features

Google's Discontinued Services

Google launched a lot of services over the time. Some were successful, others were decent, but very few were discontinued. Here's a list.

1. Google Keyboard Shortcuts (2002) - use your keyboard to navigate between search results.

2. Google Voice Search (2002) - search Google with a telephone call. This way you didn't have to type queries, as Google used voice recognition.

3. Google Viewer (2002) - view Google results as a slide show. Google Toolbar has this feature, but it doesn't go to the next result automatically.

4. Google Webquotes (2002) - read comments about a web page.

5. Google Compute (2002) - an add-on for Google Toolbar that allowed you to use your computer's resources to help research projects (the program worked only when your computer was idle). "When you enable Google Compute, your computer will download a small piece of a large research project and perform calculations on it that will then be included with the calculations performed by thousands of other computers doing the same thing. This process is known as distributed computing."

6. Google Answers (2002) - get answers from researchers for a fee. The product was discontinued in November this year.

7. Google Search API (2002) - a SOAP API that allowed developers to integrate Google's search results into their applications. The product is now deprecated.

8. Google Deskbar (2003) - search Google from your desktop and see search results in a mini-viewer. The product has been integrated into Google Desktop.

9. Google X (2005) - a Mac-like interface for Google. The page has been live only for a day and it has been removed to prevent a suit from Apple.

10. Google Video (initial version) - search the content of television shows. Google recorded the TV programs and allowed people to search closed captions and see images from the show. You couldn't play videos.

As you can see, some products were replaced by more powerful ones, others were unsuccessful, had copyright problems or technical difficulties. It's interesting to note that most discontinued products were launched in 2002.

Blogger Beta Integrates with Picasa Web Albums

Blogger Beta, who won't be in beta for too long, hosts images on Picasa Web Albums. Now you have to accept Picasa Web's terms of use to post images.

Also the URLs resemble those from Picasa Web. I wonder if we'll see more integration with other Google services, now that Blogger uses Google Accounts?

{ via phydeaux3 }

Google's SOAP Search API, No Longer Supported

The SOAP search API allowed you to obtain search results and integrate them into your applications. You could develop applications like Google Share that measures the popularity of an item within a domain (for example: Bono's Google Share for U2 is 54.6%), create a meta-search engine by mixing different APIs and more.

Now Google suggests using Ajax Search API, but this is very limited, it's suitable only for web applications, you can't reorder the search results or add other search results. Google also says: "AJAX Search API is the only permissible way to publish Google AJAX Search API results on your site. We'll block your application if it accesses search results outside of the API."

Applications that already use the SOAP API can continue do that, but the service could become unreliable.

O'Reilly Radar says: "The AJAX Search API is great for web applications and users that want to bling their blog, but does not provide the flexibility of the SOAP API. I am surprised that it has not been replaced with a GData API instead."

Nelson Minar, who authored the API, has an explanation: "It seems like good discipline to me; when your corporate culture has a "go fast, do a lot of things, fail often" approach to product development, you have to do something with the things that succeeded in launching but then failed to make a big impact on the business."

Google Search API has been launched in April 2002, one week before Google Answers, that was also discontinued.

Google Earth Goes to Space

NASA and Google have signed an agreement to "work together on a variety of challenging technical problems ranging from large-scale data management and massively distributed computing, to human-computer interfaces".

NASA will provide Google with interesting data, like statistical data on atmosphere, that will be available in Google Earth. Other plans include: "real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle. This agreement between NASA and Google will soon allow every American to experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon or through the canyons of Mars."

The collaboration makes perfect sense: NASA has a lot of collected data, Google has a scalable system that lets it share the data with the world.

Google Buys Endoxon

Google has bought Endoxon, a Swiss company focused on web-based geo information services. The company provided imagery for map.search.ch, a successful map service, and local.ch, a local search service - both limited to Switzerland.

Endoxon has been working on a technology called "blue", that extends their products to the whole world. "blue is visualized information on the web. blue is the clever linking of a world map server, a search engine and a GIS. blue is a high-quality, comprehensive points- and map server, a virtual worldwide marketplace, a search and services platform. The user can search for information or he can visualize his own collected information. The download of selected blue data onto the mobile phone is possible. But blue is not only a vision. Its reality: Endoxon has been collecting, enhancing and geo referencing worldwide satellite and aerial images for a couple of years now."

Google acquired Endoxon's internet, mapping and data processing business units. Google says the acquisition "will enable us to leverage their analysis capabilities and will help us build out and improve the functionality of Google Earth and Google Maps across Europe."

Real Time Weather Information on a Google Map

Weather Bonk shows a lot of information about weather by cleverly mixing many public APIs. The site autodetects your location and lets you choose a weather information provider. You can find on the Google Map: webcams, radar positions, traffic information and more. There's also a very nice trip forecast that lets you find the best day for your trip.

Google Adds More Services to the Homepage

This is strange. Google added two new services to the "More" menu: blog search and the newly-released patent search. I don't know how many people are interested in blog search, but adding patent search is an unwise decision.

Maybe Google should let people customize the list.

Update: I went to google.com using another browser, and the homepage didn't have blog search and patent search. That means it's a limited test.

Holiday Spirit, on Google Search Pages

Google shows candles and trees on the borderline between search results and ads for queries like "Christmas", "Hanukkah" (Jewish holiday that started on December 15 and ends on December 23 this year), "Kwanzaa" (a week-long holiday that honors African-American heritage - from December 26 to January 1 in the US).

{ Thank you, Oren K. }

Google Phone?

The Observer reports that Google is in talks with Orange "about a multi-billion-dollar partnership to create a 'Google phone' which makes it easy to search the web wherever you are".

A Google-branded phone could include a browser that uses Google's transcoder to optimize web pages for the phone, easy to access Google search, maps, Gmail, Blogger and maybe more.

"The device would not be revolutionary: manufactured by HTC, a Taiwanese firm specializing in smart phones and Personal Data Assistants (PDAs), it might have a screen similar to a video iPod."

Last month, Eric Schmidt said: "Your mobile phone should be free. It just makes sense that subsidies should increase"

While a Google Phone is just a rumor for the moment, you can't deny it's an interesting idea.

Update: Many rumors floated since this article was posted. Here's a list of the most trustworthy rumors about the Google Phone.

Update 2: Google Phone turned out to be a mobile platform - Android.