Well, it turns out that my idea is old news

Google Custom Search Blog explains to add a CSE box in blogger.com.

I’m working on the WP plugin.

It’s not a novel idea, and it has been in my mind for years: there is a special set of URLs that define what I call my “personal slice of the web”. These are the sites that form my blogroll, the feeds I’m subscribed to, the links I tag using del.icio.us, the URLs included in my browser history, etc.

For each one of us, this “personal slice of the web” is much more important and much more familiar than the rest of the web. I have always thought that we should have better tools to manage this “slice”. We should be able to view and visualize it better, search it, share it, etc.

During the last couple of days I have been fooling arround with Google Custom Search Engine. A wordpress plugin that creates a CSE using your blogroll is almost ready, it just needs some polishing (you can see it here in action).

I have also written some code to create a Google CSE based on my del.icio.us links (a demo is here) but this needs more work -it’s just a couple of quick’n'dirty scripts.

Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc. fame anounced yesterday his latest startup Mahalo.

It’s a search engine with editor-picked results. It’s still in aplha and it may take a couple of years to get to a beta stage. (TechCrunch has all the details).

To me it looks like a wikipedia of search. It could work if Jason manages to attract a critical mass of editors. I’ll wait and see. I have the impression that Jason is betting on something else to make this thing work. A browser plugin, integration with some popular service, I don’t know. But there must be something.

(And to think that I emailed Jason a couple of days ago saying “I know how to make a better search”! -totaly different approach.)

del.icio.us: y.ah.oo!

Great news! Yahoo! is doing some really good moves lately and is moving fast to Web 2.0. (del.icio.us and Flickr, wow, the posibilities are endless!)

According to this InfoWorld article,

But they [Google] don’t share these advertising revenues with the end users who help them get the revenue, Gates said. “Google keeps all of the money with itself,” he added.
[...]
In its bid to share revenues with users, Microsoft may give free software or even cash to users, said Gates, who did not discuss further details.

Wow! While Google is trying to cut Microsoft’s main revenue stream (which in turn funds or could fund MSN) by pushing open source software like firefox, it looks like Microsoft may try to cut Google’s revenue stream wich is coming from on-line ads.

Do not take Bill Gates’ words for granted. Paying back search engine users is something that may never happen. If they were to do something like this they would have to rely on some kind of strong authentication scheme -or start a fight against all kind of bots and scripts that will generate fake search queries and clicks. To me, Gates’ words look more like a threat against Google -stay away from our business and we’ll keep out of yours.

But, in any case, you can see that this is war! Which side are you in?

I was listening to Kjell Nordstrom (author of Karaoke Capitalism: Managing for Mankind ) a couple of days ago. One of the most interesting things he said (kind of obvious once you are exposed to the idea) was that there are two kind of companies that survive in each industry:
- the fittest, the one that does what is supposed to do in the most efficient and cost-effective way. He named Ryanair as a good example.
- the sexiest, the one that people just love because of its appeal. It may be more expensive or not as efficient as competitors (like a BMW or a Gucci or even an iPod) but consumers are in love with the product -they just have to have it.

So… When it comes to search engines, I have the feeling that they all try to be the fittest. Most users agree that Google is ahead of all others in this field. Google search does one job and does it extremely well -no whistles and bells. But it’s not sexy. (Some may say that it used to be, when their approach was so different from the others and they were surrounded by this “underground-ish” hype. But they are as mainstream as it gets now).

Here is an example of what I mean. Take Yahoo. They have this Yahoo! 360 thing. They try to sell it as the Web2.0 killer app. Users do not care about Web 1,2 or 3. But they would probably love to see search results mashed up with celebrities’ bookmarks (Madonna’s, or Steven Jobs’ or Linus Torvalds’s). This would be a sexy feature!

I came across this blog. Their problem?

Many eBay UK shop (store) owners are complaining their traffic is massively down in the last 6-8 weeks since Google’s Jagger 1/2/3 update apparently removed millions of eBay items from the SERPS.

It could be for real or just a hoax. But it brings up a subject rarely discussed: As search engines become more dominant and are able to influence economy, politics and culture in a straight-forward way depending on their ability or interests, people will want a share of this power. This is not something new, it has happened over and over throughout history. People (probably Internet users and merchants in this case) will want to “democratize search”.

A year ago, I brought up the idea of a distributed query system. This is not an original idea -people have long talked about distributed search engines. I’m pretty sure some of the suggested models are much better designed than what I suggested -even though Amazon’s OpenSearch is amazingly close to this model.

What’s important is the vision of a search system that will allow every publisher (as small as an unknown blog or as big as Google, Amazon or Ebay) to contribute to it, and users to decide their “search neighborhood” (in a way this is what Yahoo! is trying to do with Yahoo! Mindset and Y!Q). It seems that Adam Bosworth has something like this in his mind too.

I really don’t know that the most suitable implementation of this “thing” could be. But I’m sure that as we moved from directory services (the original Yahoo!, and DMOZ) to search engines, we will be soon moving to a new, “decentralized” or “democratized” search engine model.

Richard MacManus has an interesting article about Web 2.0 Products We Need (But Which Don’t Exist Yet). Regulars of this blog will already know my list, but here it is in titles (all 3 of them!):

1. A service that will let us mix feeds according to user-defined rules.
2. Wider use and services that take advantage of geo-tags.
3. A microformats-aware search engine.

A couple of days ago I was in Rome with my girlfriend, Elina. Typical tourists as we were, we kept shooting photos with our digital camera. Storage is no longer an issue, I had my 20GB iPod photo with the camera conector. Most of the photos were shot in crowded places, some of them nearly packed with other tourists shooting their own photos and video.

“Have you ever considered how many photos around the world are you in?” Elina said.

I guess a lot, but there is no way to find them, is there?

Then I realized that had I bought the portable GPS receiver I wanted to (in order to geotag [1] my photos), me and others could search for on-line photos with the GPS coordinates and date of my journey. Something like “search for photos taken at the Coloseum on 2005-11-21 between 13:00 and 13:30″. If people geo-tagged their photos, I’m sure I could play my personal version of “Where’s Waldo” with some success…

I do not think that this could be done now, I do not know of a service that would allow me to query using GPS coordinates and date (or is there?), but wouldn’t it be realy cool if Flickr, Google, or Yahoo! supported such a feature?

BTW, you can find a photo of me here. If you were in Rome during the last weekend and you think I’m in one of your photos, it would be fun to send it to me!

[1] Read How-to: easily geotag your Flickr photos, HOW TO GPS Tag Photos: Flickr, Mappr, Google Earth….

Burning Questions, the official FeedBurner blog features an interesting analysis today. What they say is that feeds are not just about blogs anymore -and they are right.

Traditionally, feeds (RSS, ATOM and RDF) have been used to distribute a website’s content. Subscribe to a site’s feed and you get the “headlines”, a stream of items usually composed by title, publication date, abstract and main body.

What most web developers know is that this simple “schema” fits well enough not just “news” but other kind of data too. Take for example Flickr “photo streams”, where instead of a “body” you get the URL of a photo, del.icio.us bookmarks where each item is a user’s bookmark, or podcasts where each item “encloses” an audio or video “attachment”. One of the nice things about RSS, RDF and ATOM is that they are flexible enough to support uses like the above and (by design) are not limited to “news” items. Nowadays, almost everything is published as a feed -add wish lists, alerts, personalized search results and much more to the above mentioned.

Users tend to think that a feed derives from a web page content, when usually they are both representation of the same information that reside in some sort of database. The main difference is that usually web pages are focused on presentation, when feeds are focused in structure. As mentioned above, a feed has an inherent structure that makes it ideal for other programs or services to “consume”: parse, understand and extract “what matters” per case.

FeedBurner already gives some of these services. You can easily “mix” your blog news, with your Flickr photo stream and your del.icio.us bookmarks. You can even mix them in different ways, say gather all your weekly del.icio.us bookmarks in one single post in the new feed generated. Or you could create your own “video channel” of videos indexed by Yahoo! and tagged with a certain keyword, like “funny”, or “football”. Or automatically post your del.icio.us bookmarks as a single post in your blog on a daily basis using yadd. Or combine a GeoRSS blog feed with geo-tagged Flickr images. Or upcoming.org events with rsswether.com…

I’m quite sure (and Burning Questions’ article point to this direction too) that we will see more of this “rip-mix-burn feeds” trend in the close future. We should expect to see new tools that allow us to extract, parse and combine information from feeds into new feeds, as well as presenting those new feeds in new ways, generating unexpected results, services and added value.

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UPDATE. Check out this article too: The Second Coming of Content and RSS Feeds