TechnoCloud

I often show social discovery wonder StumbleUpon in presentations to demonstrate the alternative forms of site discovery emerging on the web. To this point, I’ve just been an interested observer and occasional Stumbler.

No longer. Some influential soul discovered TechnoCloud and gave it the thumbs up to recommend it to other users. Cue a relative flood of traffic to the site.

Having enjoyed some brief spurts of traffic via Digg and Reddit in the past, the Stumblers seem a slightly different breed. Rather than the crash and burn mentality of leaving at the first click, Stumblers stayed longer and actually read some additional pages to see just why some of their fellow Stumblers thought it worthy of a thumbs up.

(It should be pointed out that this is partly due to a thumbs up for the homepage rather than a specific page, but I think the point still stands.)

See the record day in the chart below and happy Stumbling!

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Google often tests variations on the search engine results page locally before releasing them to all users. Today I noticed one such variation with ’searches relating to’ appearing at the bottom of the search engine results page.

Others have reported seeing this earlier in the year, but it’s the first time I’ve come across it as a UK user.

The results are not the search suggestions that Google provides on the likes of the browser toolbar, but contain some tangents, e.g. ‘dogpile’ under a ’search engines’ query.

I’m not signed into Google, which was my first thought, but clearly Google has records of users searching for ‘x’ who then search for ‘y’, possibly due to failing to click on a search result. This would explain why the results are found at the bottom of the page and highlight yet again the importance of being on the first page of results.

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Good post from Danny Sullivan breaking down what Google’s forthcoming Universal Search means in visual and descriptive terms.

In short, Google will be incorporating into the default search engine rankings page results from across it’s various search engines, e.g. video, images, books… This presents all kinds of challenges in terms of user interface, information overload and access to the nugget(s) of information you were searching for in the first place.

Web users have seen these changes coming in various guises for some time as Google has tweaked the interface in various markets. At different times I’ve seen images, maps, blog and news results dripped into the results page. The next evolution looks to make those tweaks live across the search engine.

It’s Google’s own version of the wider widgetisation of the web where different data sources are pulled in from across the web customised to the user’s individual needs and preferences.

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Interesting to see that Google is moving into StumbleUpon’s serendipitous discovery territory with the addition of a recommendations button to its toolbar.

In a twist from StumbleUpon’s social discovery approach (people like you, like this), Google’s dice icon will take you to its recommendations based on your own search history.

Another step in Google’s personalisation of the web, following the likes of custom search and the personalised start page.

As a fan of StumbleUpon I hope that their critical mass in terms of community and more social method of discovery will help them survive the competition from Google and many others.

How long though until Google incorporates social search into the service - after all aren’t inbound links just that?

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Up to a couple of weeks ago very few visitors were coming through to this site from the search engines. In fact it took a couple of months for Google (MSN Search and Yahoo were more accommodating) to even offer up the site as a result for a direct search on ‘TechnoCloud’.

I’ve semi-dilligently built up inbound links and populated the site with content, but Google refused to send even a dribble of its endless traffic TechnoCloud’s way. This started to change thanks to inclusion in Dmoz.org, the Open Directory Project, which Google uses as one element of its ranking system. After that you could search for ‘TechnoCloud’ and find the site.

I’ve read before about Google ‘Sandboxing‘, but not experienced it first hand. The theory goes that Google will place new sites for around six months into an equivalent of internet purgatory.

Around six months after making my first post on TechnoCloud, it appears that Google has given the thumbs up to the site. As if a switch had been flicked all of a sudden, I started getting through a regular stream of visitors from the search engines on the likes of ‘Facebook mobile’ and interestingly the ever popular ‘Make your own Supermodel’.

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Google has been steadily been building a suite of products tied into a single Google identity - think Gmail, Adsense, Google Video, Groups etc.. Now Google is taking further advantage of those user accounts (as well as trying to create a few more) by adding more personalisation to searches.

Now when you are signed into your Google Account, Google is offering a combination of personalised search recommendations and the personalised homepage, to bring, duh, a more ‘personalised’ search experience.

The goal is that it learns from your search history and preferences to bring you more relevant search results. So, when searching for ‘Saints’ it will focus on my footballing interests rather than my religious ones.

Those searchers that may have more ‘private’ search queries can sign out of their account, but for the rest of us it should result in a more satisfactory search experience, as it learns more about our personal preferences.

More loyalty to the Googleverse and better search results - they hope it will be a winning strategy.

P.S. Sorry for the rush of Google-related posts, but they have been doing some interesting things of late (plus I’ve re-subscribed to their blog).

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Note to self to check out Ookles when it launches in early 2007. The details are sketchy at the moment, but they claim to be another entrant into the facial recognition field alongside the impressive Riya, whose ecommerce search engine, Like.com, I featured back in 2006.

Initially the site will focus on photo storage, but video and podcast storage are promised later. It will be interesting to see if they apply their facial recognition technology to video search as well as photo search and how well it actually might work - no easy task. Audio recognition is an easier problem to address, with several tools already available, including Pluggd.

The site is expected to be built using oh-so-web-2.0 Ajax and will also boast automated album creation, handy if you’re trying to copy across years worth of personal media.

Expect to see more of these services as the explosion in multimedia content on the web continues.

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That man in constant motion Robert Scoble points to Quintura, an intriguing search engine based on refining your search through a tag cloud.

It boasts a clean interface, accompanied by a helpful one minute tour, and I found it simple to use. You type a query, related search terms appear in a tag cloud which you can add to your search by clicking on them, refining the search results below. You can roll your mouse over related search terms to see hints for additional search terms or click on an ‘x’ symbol to remove that term from your cloud.

It’s an interesting way of quicky refining your search results for ambiguous terms, e.g. spears (Britney or weapon?), something that Google and others have looked to address through predictive search ‘did you mean’ links within the search results.

The search results state that they are ‘Powered by Yahoo XML’ suggesting that Quintura technology can be built on top of other existing search services.

The service tries its best to include the relevant Web 2.0 must-haves, starting of course with the obligatory blog. However, ‘Share it’ at present just emails a link to Quintura to a friend rather than an extended social network of recommended sites. Likewise ‘Save it’ just shows you how to save a link to your search rather than any kind of social bookmarking. 

These elements of course can be developed over time and this is at present a ‘beta’ (what isn’t these days?). Their corporate site indicates there’s more plenty in the pipeline, so this is one to watch.

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Adaptive Blue have released version 3.0 of the BlueOrganizer social bookmarking tool, with a Firefox extension that is a contextual search menu linking you into the ’social mediasphere’. On first look, it brings to mind the Hyperwords project with its contextual browser extension for interacting in more depth with the keywords on a page.

After a brief install and browser restart, you can right-mouse and see a ‘BlueMenu’ either for a highlighted piece of text or for a page as a whole. The menu opens into all the poster children of social media, with stalwarts Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Flickr and the rest just a menu click away.

In theory, this click takes you directly to the tag or results page relevant to your selected term, but it doesn’t always work in practice. It worked fine for me on del.icio.us and YouTube, but just took me to the homepage of Wikipedia and an ‘all tag’ page on Odeo for my chosen search of ‘media technology’.

Helpfully, it opens the page in a new tab allowing you to explore multiple choices without losing your original context. There are revenue models in place for the existing product, with paid placement possible in the menu of default options and affiliate links to take you through from your search for a film to buying the DVD.

Why are we waiting?

Ironically for a tool that is supposed to save you time, my biggest grievance is with the menu load times - on one occasion over 20 seconds and regularly more than 5 seconds. This needs urgent attention, if its to evolve from a bit of fun for early adopters into a genuinely useful tool. It appears I’m not alone in this (see comments).

Also the tutorials could be a lot simpler and shorter, if it’s going to gain a large audience. Better to focus on the basics and let users learn more as they become more familiar with it.

Certainly the idea of contextual search is an interesting one that has many potential applications, particularly when the user is able to customise their search menu, evolving it into a viable portable digital lifestyle aggregator.

Image 1: loading - you may be watching this for a while…

Image 2: the menu in action

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It can be difficult to find photos you know you’ve taken. Most of us will by now have hundreds, if not thousands, of digital images strewn across hard drives. The more diligent among us will no doubt spend time carefully categorising and tagging each precious image. Some have even posted a power tip or two for speeding up this activity. For the rest of us, image analysis may help. Picassa should soon have image analysis (follow this link for more information.) Another potential solution is being developed that will be able to recognise elements in photos and videos by the Acemedia consortium.

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