The Search Lounge

NY Times article – Algorithms Get a Human Hand in Steering Web

Chris — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 20:47:18 +0000

Every few years an article pops up that’s surprised that human beings tune search engines. Here’s the latest from the New York Times: Algorithms Get a Human Hand in Steering Web

It’s a good thing that humans do this, otherwise I’d have no job!

Google Sandwich

Chris — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 18:11:32 +0000

Found on Reddit: You can tell that Google and I are really close

Searching for company headquarters

Chris — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 03:13:49 +0000

I like how Google shows the answer for corporate headquarter searches like: amazon headquarters. For all I know they’ve been doing this for a long time, but I just noticed it recently when researching the search engines by location article.

An update on my 2006 “Search Engines by location” article

Chris — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 18:59:00 +0000

Back in November 2006 I wrote this post: Search Companies by Location. Time to check in on the list. It’s a bit of a randomish list. I mean what exactly is a search company?

And obviously there are lots of new companies so maybe some day I’ll make a new list. But here’s the list from 2006 updated with current status:

United States

Silicon Valley/Peninsula/South Bay
A9 – Palo Alto still there
Become – Mountain View – Sunnyvale
Collarity – Palo Alto still there
Google – HQ in Mountain View still there last I checked
Kosmix – Mountrain View acquired by Walmart Labs, moved to San Bruno
Krugle – Menlo Park Redwood City
Oodle – San Mateo still there
Riya – San Mateo became Like.com and then purchased by Google (right?)
Spock acquired by Intelius in 2009
Surfwax – Menlo Park not sure
Yahoo – HQ in Sunnyvale yup yup
Zvents – San Mateo i think still there

San Francisco
Groxis closed
LookSmart my former company carries on as an advertising network. still in SF
Powerset acquired my Microsoft, still has an office in SF
Rojo not sure, but rojo.com redirects to blogs.com
Technorati still in SF
Trulia still in SF

East Bay
Ask – HQ in Emeryville still there
Seeqpod – Emeryville closed

Washington State
Findory – Seattle, WA closed
Infospace – HQ in Bellevue still there. corporate name is now blucora (at least I think that’s what’s going on)
MSN – HQ in Redmond ok
Zillow – Seattle still there

Elsewhere in the US
Answers.com – New York, NY and Jersulem, Israel. hq in St. Louis. owned by AFCV Holdings, LLC (I think)
AOL – Dulles, VA hq in New York City now
BusyTonight – NYC closed
Gigablast – Albuqurque, NM still there
Icerocket – Dallas, TX still there
Indeed – Stamford, CT and Austin, TX hq in Stamford
Lycos (Hotbot) – Waltham, MA still in Waltham. owned by Ybrant Digital.
MetaGlossary – Aventura, FL Palo Alto
Relona – Nashua, NH still there
Searchles – Washington D.C. still there
Snap – Pasadena, CA not sure
Vivisimo (Clusty) – Pittsburgh, PA still there

Outside the US

Exalead – France Paris, France
Kartoo – France meta search
Lexxe – Australia Epping, Australia

Not sure where these are located

Accoona ?
Eurekester -SF, New Zealand? San Francisco
Dogpile part of Infospace. HQ in Bellevue
Keotag New Caledonia (?)
Ixquick The Netherlands
Metacrawler another infospace property
Metafind another infospace property
Rawsugar appears to be closed
Rollyo appears to be closed
Webcrawler another infospace property
Wink part of mylife.com

BuzzFeed article: Searching For Pizza In 2008 Vs. Today

Chris — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 20:10:50 +0000

Interesting observation in this article: Searching For Pizza In 2008 Vs. Today.

On the left is a Google search for -pizza- in 2008. On the right is a current screen capture. The pictures says it all:

How many homepages does Yahoo build every single day?

Chris — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:56:59 +0000

Really cool way to visualize the scale happening on the Yahoo front page:

http://www.visualize.yahoo.com/core/

Web search engine query language – what’s it called?

Chris — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 23:37:42 +0000

I have a question:

Natural language search is: what is the population of Portland?
Boolean search is: salt AND pepper

So what do we call the sort of “regular” syntax that web search engines have made so popular and common as a way to query for information?

Watson is just a super search engine

Chris — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 18:19:03 +0000

Not like I’m so smart or anything since I’m sure lots of people thought the same thing, but the first thing that went through my mind when I heard about Watson was that it was a search engine disguised as a Jeopardy contestant.

Watson is just a super search engine.

If you’ve ever wondered what search quality/editorial/analysis people like me do at search engines, a big part of our jobs is training and evaluating machine-learning systems like Watson.

Bloglines is closing

Chris — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 20:11:17 +0000

I just saw that Ask.com is officially closing Bloglines. Read more here: Bloglines Update. I’m sorry to hear it. I’ve been using Bloglines for 5 or 6 years. The first couple years I checked it obsessively for new articles about search and other interests. Now I check in much less frequently, maybe a couple times a month. But it’s still a good place to catch up on articles that where timeliness is not so important. I’ll have to decide whether to find a new RSS reader. Or not.

Bing’s Visual Search

Chris — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 03:31:42 +0000

Bing is playing around with some new visual search functionality. Check it out here: Bing Visual Search.

Have a look here at US Presidents. I like the layout – it’s clean and easy to see a lot of images at once. It’s cool how you can mouse over each thumb and the search box automatically populates; and under the search box there is a bit of structured data about each President. However, it’s not so easy to navigate through all the images if you’re looking for something in particular, especially if you look at something with a whole bunch of things like dog breeds.