TechnoCloud

Google has entered the online music market with a new service for finding and buying music online, OneBox, through a partnership with music sites Lala and MySpace-owned iLike. The US-only service allows people to search using song titles, artists or snippets of lyrics. The songs are then available as ad-supported streams and paid downloads.

As the service appears in Google’s search results, it provides an alternative (albeit streaming rather than free downloads) to illegal torrents when searching for tracks.

In a sudden rush of originality and inspiration, I’m going to share surely the first ever list of 2008’s most popular posts!

10. Gearing up for something more useful
The awful pun in the title didn’t stop the traffic as this look back at Google Gears’ first year scraped into the top 10.

9. Google will see you now
One of my pet topics, visual search, made it into ninth as Google joined the innovators trying to unlock this most difficult and potentially lucrative of challenges in the search marketplace.

8. Adding Google Adsense on Wordpress.com
The painful move away from hosted Wordpress and then back again, did at least have some benefits. A list of handy advice for those contemplating similar folly and a coveted position in the top 10.

7. Google searches related to
Clearly I wasn’t the only one wondering where that appeared from…

6. Wii want cricket
Well, beach cricket did arrive only to disappoint, leaving one of the big questions unanswered for 2009 - when is the massive cricket diaspora going to get wii cricket?

5. Google plays the April fool
Always a ratings winner, this year’s April fools were mixed in terms of amusement value, but not in traffic value, cracking the top five.

4. BBC News video embed
It may be a post on a woefully out-of-date experiment, but with BBC iPlayer embedding still to appear the Google searches keep delivering the punters to this old post.

3. Build your own supermodel
Can there really be that many fans of Weird Science trying to build their own supermodel? It appears there are, as this old post continues to deliver.

2. Review of Chrome - the good, the bad and the too early
No surprise to see one of the stories of 2008 high up the list, as this not entirely postive review of Google’s Chrome browser made the top 2.

1. Lies, damn lies and social networking statistics
Everyone’s looking for them and Google keeps sending them to Technocloud to find them, helped no doubt by the catchy title. This post bemoaning the lack of decent social networking statistics, while offering up some of my own, pipped even Chrome to the top.

It’s been an interesting, challenging and exciting year. Best wishes to all for 2009.

Google has unveiled its SearchWiki product which adds a familiar social media flavour to Google’s clean search engine results page.

When signed and opted-in, the changes recall elements from Digg, StumbleUpon and most strongly Wikia search, the community-powered open-source search engine from Wikipedia. It allows for comments, influencing of the results (personal rather than community in Google’s case) and the good old rate up/down.

It’s no bad thing to use social media technology, but my gripe is with the clutter on the page. Google has made a fantastically successful search business on the back of its clean, uncluttered pages, that deliver you (usually) where you want to go with a minimum of fuss.

Google is always testing tweeks to their page results and this is a rollout of one such test, but the clutter to Google’s simple formula seems a test too far. Time will tell how univeral that opinion will be.

Amid what Google describes as a potentially infinite web, the search engine has identified a landmark trillion meaningful URLs (unique URLs). This is quite some figure when you consider that they passed the billion mark only back in 2000.

The mind-boggling figure illustrates the challenge for search engines in trying to judge value among so many competitive sources of information and in an environment where there are both fair (white hat SEO) and foul (black hat SEO) means to present content.

Understandable is the emergence of social software to facilitate peer-review of content sources to better identify value. After all, value is in the eyes of the beholder, with part of that value derived from one’s own community.

The likes of Delicious and Friendfeed offer forms of community search both allowing you to apply search filters through your own network. From my experiments, I find these useful in finding quality content, but not for providing the comprehensive reach that the major search engines offer.

While Google uses your own search history data to improve search results, it does of course use the wider community through apportioning value to inbound links (what’s of value to the community is of value to you). That community is narrowed by attaching more value to links from related topic websites to better idenfity the kind of niche communities that you benefit from on social software.

As yet, neither offer the best combination of the personal and the comprehensive to find the ideal search mix for the individual. There remain challenges in key areas, such as privacy, simplicity, data portability and applying the right filters at the right times. Then we can start talking about finding that trillion-in-one URL.

Yahoo have followed up their initial trial with Google’s search technology in signing a non-exclusive deal to carry Google ads on Yahoo properties in the US and Canada. The deal also includes moves to improve interoperability between the companies respective instant messaging services.

Understandably the move has provoked a huge reaction in the blogosphere given the background of the failed Microsoft deal. It is sure to attract the attention of the regulators given the two company’s positions as the top two in search, even if it is non-exclusive.

For Google this gives them access to Yahoo’s massive traffic and for Yahoo a big potential revenue stream and a clear strategic move after the failed Microsoft takeover.

Interesting to read that the Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have collaborated on standards for Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) - in simpler terms, the code you use to tell search engines not to spider a particular page or section.

The full details are available here.

Similar to Google’s guidelines for Webmasters, it would be helpful to have a set of consistent standards for the basics of search engine optimisation across the search engines. Obviously each search engine has its own closely-guarded algorithm that determines rankings, but with consistent guidelines on sitemaps, use/abuse of keywords and clear do’s/don’ts would be a big help in putting the emphasis firmly on supporting white hat practices.

Buried in a post on search quality on the Google blog was an interesting titbit:

we now offer an early form of face recognition on advanced search

Frustratingly that was all there was - it would be interesting to hear if this is technology they had developed themselves or if they are using a third party such as Viewdle, Like.com or even Blinkx, each of whom are innovating in this area.

Visual search is one of the great challenges in unlocking the potential metadata hidden in images and video. Alt text, image name and descriptions only take you so far in understanding a video or image’s content. They may do a good job of describing the overall content, e.g. visit to Paris, but struggle to explain either specific components of the static image (Eiffel Tower in background) or content variations within a longer piece of video (Notre Dame 30 seconds in).

Facial recognition technologies are nothing new in themselves and have been in use in airports for years, but getting them right in visual search is and remains an elusive, yet valuable prize.

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!

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.

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.