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Posts Tagged ‘leading-the-way’

When it was announced that this administration was redefining space-related goals (and, many seemed not to notice, increasing NASA funding by $6bn) there were mixed reactions. We’d already spent a bundle on moon mission stuff, but it was over budget and behind schedule

Original post:
Buzz Aldrin: this “new direction” for space programs sounds great

Whether we realize it or not, there’s a race going on in the skies above us. With the advent of wireless Internet access creeping into what once our sanctuary of solitude at 37,000 feet has now become a domain for self-righteous dingbats to livestream their flights for all to see. Leading the way is Virgin America who announced today that they are the first airline in all the land to offer Aircell ’s Gogo in-flight Wi-Fi service on every single flight

Read more here:
Virgin America first to offer fleetwide Wi-Fi, gives other airlines the bird

Searchology is a periodic state of the union for Google search (here’s the last one), and we’re here on the ground to see the announcements live.

Less than a month ago the company rolled out major new News and Image search products at a similar press event in San Francisco.

My live notes are below:

First up is Vice President of Core Search, Udi Manber.

He says the 20th century dream was to conquer nature (dams, roads, airplanes, rockets). The 21st centure will be about understanding people (health, communication, education, knowledge). Search is a big part of it, possibly leading the way, he says.

Whatever the user problem, Google needs to fix it. Connection speed, language, etc. Manber is talking about fine tuning search more than anything, including things like bringing weather, sports, flight information, maps and other information into search appropriately to answer questions. Translation of information on the fly is also a key issue.

We’ve made a lot of progress, and you’ll see some more today,” he says.

Next up: Pat Riley, senior search quality engineer. His presentation is called “Making “Did you mean?” even better. He’s talking about the did you mean link at Google and how they’ve improved it.

Example: query for “labor” could mean work, department of labor or childbirth.

Adding spelling to the product to help users. Someone types ipodd, for example. Google suggest ipod instead. In the background Google is sending the incorrect and correct query to the back end to process queries. An alternative solution is to ask the user first and make them click a link, which results in less stress on Google.

Next up is Scott Huffman, Director of Engineering, talking about Mobile Search. Search needs to be fast, relevant, comprehensive and fresh, he says. You should expect all these things on your mobile device too, he says.

Mobile search is growing faster than PC search, he says. It’s the primary way some people access the Internet. And it is inherently local, knows where you are and is with you wherever you are. But there is a challenge with devices - there are hundreds of them with widely varying capabilities. Search is generally difficult to use. Keys are small, or no keys at all.

Mobile search needs to be Complete (all of Google, on the device), Easy (effortless to search and get answers), and local (knows where you are).

Users need to search the whole web and the mobile web (sites optimized for mobile devices).

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There was a lot of buzz last week upon the announcement that Twitter would soon expand its search offering to crawl links tweeted out on top of the tweets themselves. The ramifications of such a move are potentially large, as it would seem to be a way for Twitter to serve up a tailored, real-time view of what’s hot around the web. Who knows how long it will take Twitter to actually do that, but you don’t have to wait — another company, OneRiot, is launching the same functionality today.

And scanning tweets is just a part of what OneRiot plans to offer. Today, it will also launch with a Digg link search, and soon it hopes to roll out live search results from a wide range of social services, Tobias Peggs, the general manager of OneRiot, tells me. But there are two keys to how this will work. The first is that OneRiot is crawling not just tweets and diggs, but is actually crawling the pages behind the links themselves. And second, this is all done in real-time. Content is indexed within 35 seconds, Peggs said.

Big claims are one thing, but how does it actually stack up? Pretty good from my initial tests (running on an incomplete dev server). For example, I did a search for “Spock” (not to be confused with the title of Star Trek III). In the real-time view, I got a glimpse of recent links related to Spock that people have been tweeting out and digging recently. These are done in reverse chronological order, and are constantly updating when someone tweets or diggs another link. (But the same links are bundled together to avoid clutter.)

If you’re more interested in quality over real-time views, you can simply switch to the “Pulse” mode, which shows popular recent links about your query. Both views show not only the link, but who the link was first shared by (on either Twitter or Digg), and can also be expanded to show all the retweets and other users who dugg the link. Those users’ names are all hyperlinks as well to their respective profiles on Twitter or Digg to give them proper credit for the finds.

Unlike FriendFeed, which recently implemented its real-time element, OneRiot takes the “queue” approach, where it indicates at the top of the results that there are new results waiting to be viewed. This is the same thing that Facebook and the actual Twitter Search use. Peggs says they built the system both ways to test it, and that users overwhelmingly favored this queue approach. The actual real-time view made some nauseous, he joked.

But why is OneRiot better than a service like Scoopler, a service we covered the other day that also does real-time search? Well, OneRiot believes the two are simply different. Scoopler is focusing on conversational search (basically what Twitter Search is now, searching for words in tweets), while OneRiot is about content search (more like Google). Eventually, Twitter wants to evolve into a cross between the two, and some reports indicate that Google is also interested in exploring this intersection. But for now, it would seem that OneRiot will have a bit of a head start in parsing the real-time shared web links.

One reason OneRiot believes that real-time content search is more valuable than real-time conversation search, is because conversational search is too easy to spam. We’ve already seen that in some regards when users manipulate the trending items on Twitter. That’s more difficult to do with links because OneRiot is looking at the content of the links and can pull out any that it thinks are spam. That would stop those links from appearing over and over again in the results.

Rather than focusing on making money right now, OneRiot is taking the Twitter approach, and trying to create a product that users will love first. But the future has potential to be pretty bright in terms of monetization when OneRiot decides to turn it on (assuming that it gets a lot of users). According to tests OneRiot has done, real-time searchers are more likely to search multiple queries. And they do so more often throughout a day than those doing a regular web search, according to Peggs. And because OneRiot is looking at the content within links, it can see if a link is to an article talking about Britney Spears wearing some kind of outfit, and will serve up a contextual ad that relates to that. But again, that’s down the road — the users have to come first.

To get those users, the service will first and foremost have to be good at what it does. It’s hard to know exactly how on a large scale OneRiot will stack up to Twitter Search or a simple Google Search for something, because as I mentioned, I’m testing it out on a limited development server right now. When it launches in a few hours, it should be more complete — but it is still very much a work in progress, according to Peggs. Still, the promise of real-time search is great. And it’s certainly more interesting that some of the stuff OneRiot was previously working on.

Being able to get a current look at what hot items people are sharing across social networks on the web is something people want. But can a startup like OneRiot live up to the real-time hype? We shall see.

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