04/11: Can search results offer more insight?
I got to spend Halloween with Bill Gross, the founder of IdeaLab. I went as Flav-o-flav, which I think scared a few kids away from Bill’s doorstep. For those of you that don’t know Bill, he created this great technology incubator that brought dozens of companies and ideas to life in the dot com heyday of the nineties. Some worked and some didn’t. Google owes its cost-per-click revenue model to IdeaLab and their company Overture (which got purchased by Yahoo.)
There is a lot of talk these days about social networking, with sites like MySpace and Facebook where people communicate with each other to increase the content on the site.
What I am most excited about are the sites that offer more context to enrich results to make them more relevant. Sites like Flickr let readers apply keywords to images that others can than use for searching. Simple keyword searching is no guarantee of finding what you are looking for.
I was at Billy’s house because he was telling me about his exciting new site, Compete. This site takes Yahoo’s search results and applies additional information to give you a better picture of the site. Now I still think Billy has some work to do with this, but it definitely has the potential to better help searchers find what they are looking for.
The last time Billy and I were together, we were celebrating the eToys IPO with champagne and steaks at the Palm in NY. After we turned out the lights this Halloween, Billy put 100 Grand candy bar in my Flav-o-Flav coat and said ‘Bob, Will this cover your losses on eToys?’ I chuckled as I opened it up and took a bite. I forgot about my fake gold tooth, which got stuck in the candy bar. We both had a good laugh and shifted the conversation onto more interesting.
There is a lot of talk these days about social networking, with sites like MySpace and Facebook where people communicate with each other to increase the content on the site.
What I am most excited about are the sites that offer more context to enrich results to make them more relevant. Sites like Flickr let readers apply keywords to images that others can than use for searching. Simple keyword searching is no guarantee of finding what you are looking for.
The last time Billy and I were together, we were celebrating the eToys IPO with champagne and steaks at the Palm in NY. After we turned out the lights this Halloween, Billy put 100 Grand candy bar in my Flav-o-Flav coat and said ‘Bob, Will this cover your losses on eToys?’ I chuckled as I opened it up and took a bite. I forgot about my fake gold tooth, which got stuck in the candy bar. We both had a good laugh and shifted the conversation onto more interesting.
