August 19, 2008 10:39am

Is Linking to Yourself the Future of the Web? - O'Reilly Radar

Posted by michael.twofish tagged , and
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At the time, I noted the way that more and more information that was once delivered by independent web sites was now being delivered directly by search engines, and that rather than linking out to others, there were strong signs of a trend towards keeping the link flow to themselves.

Is Linking to Yourself the Future of the Web? - O'Reilly Radar

I may exist in a bubble1 but it seems to me that an opposing tension is emerging. Twitter has been used2 by many people as a search and question answering service, as has FriendFeed more recently. Aparently people find things like Digg useful too3. By their nature, the organic links in these serves are mostly external, though of course both services are somewhat limited by the number of followers someone has.

  1. Yes, I exist in a bubble. ↩
  2. Yes, when it worked, fine. ↩
  3. Though for the life of me, I cannot work out why. ↩

December 17, 2007 10:10am

What the hell is that song?

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Prediction of the day. Within 5 years--let's say by Christmas 2012--it will be possible to search for a song by playing or singing a bit of the song. People will be able to sing into their computer and be taken to search results where they can play and purchase the song. Or they'll be able to hold their phone up to the radio, and get a text message back with information on the song and where to buy it. Maybe 5 years is even a bit on the long side.

October 11, 2007 5:45pm

Search APIs

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There's quite a difference between the terms of use of Google's and Yahoo!'s search APIs. While both say you're not allowed to do anything illegal or mission critical (I especially like Yahoo! saying you can't rely on the API if you're operating nuclear facilities), they differ in terms of what you're allowed to do with the results. Google spends a lot of time saying what you're not allowed to do once you get results (you can only retrieve a small number of results (8 at the moment), you can't use them as the main content on your ...
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September 20, 2007 4:39pm

Image search

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[Update: A friend from Microsoft says, "The UI switches to a more basic scheme if you're using a browser that's not recognised, for example the Firefox 3 and IE8 betas. What are you using - can this be the explanation?" Ah, indeed it is, no need to panic.] [Update: Live seemed to have turned off all the cool features and are back to boring image search. What happened?] Of the three main search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Live) Live search is streets ahead when it comes to image search. They also appear to be the only ones ...
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September 7, 2007 5:31pm

The system of use is the repository

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In the beginning, Web search was based on aspects of the resources being indexed, like term frequency and inverse document frequency. That's of course still important but things really took off when search engines started to treat the Web as a connected graph, placing as much importance on the interconnectedness of the resources as what was in the resources themselves. Google made a huge jump forward in this area with its PageRank algorithm. As things stand, search for digital material for teaching and learning (or learning objects or open educational resources) focuses on the resources themselves (or metadata about them), ...
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August 29, 2007 3:14pm

Feeds in search results

Posted by michael.twofish tagged , and
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I'm finding more and more feeds are being returned from Google. This seems like stupid behaviour to me. You use a search engine to meet an information need. I want to know something about Ferret, I'm likely to use a search engine to find it. Do I want to subscribe to a feed? No, that's way too much commitment. If I find what I'm after and the site looks interesting I'll poke around a bit and then I might decide it's interesting enough to subscribe to. The correct behaviour would be for Google to return a link to the ...
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