Google announced and released a number of innovations to their core search product this week, including search options and support for microformats/RDFa. What I think is most interesting about this is not so much the specifics of what they have done, but that they continue to innovate in core search. This contrasts with several other big names on the Internet, such as eBay, which for years have not really improved their core offering. One thing this suggests is that Google has in fact built a...

Google announced and released a number of innovations to their core search product this week, including search options and support for microformats/RDFa. What I think is most interesting about this is not so much the specifics of what they have done, but that they continue to innovate in core search. This contrasts with several other big names on the Internet, such as eBay, which for years have not really improved their core offering. One thing this suggests is that Google has in fact built a...

I recently wrote that the reason we can now get some real AI results is that we have a large body of data available. One area in which this applies is visual search. There are already some fantastic examples of what can be done with a large number of images in the work that has been done on pulling images from Flickr to assemble detailed views. There are also a couple of visual search engines already out there, such as Riya. The great thing for teaching a lot of these algorithms is that there...

I recently wrote that the reason we can now get some real AI results is that we have a large body of data available. One area in which this applies is visual search. There are already some fantastic examples of what can be done with a large number of images in the work that has been done on pulling images from Flickr to assemble detailed views. There are also a couple of visual search engines already out there, such as Riya. The great thing for teaching a lot of these algorithms is that there...

Yesterday I wrote about Apple’s update push of Safari and how easy it would have been for Apple to do the right thing. With Google’s most recent addition to search, “search within a site,” things are a bit more difficult to figure out. At the moment when you search on Google bestbuy you get a site search box in addition to the search results. The same is true for a number of other e-commerce and content sites (e.g. Washington Post). From the merchant’s or publisher’s perspective this is prett...

Yesterday I wrote about Apple’s update push of Safari and how easy it would have been for Apple to do the right thing. With Google’s most recent addition to search, “search within a site,” things are a bit more difficult to figure out. At the moment when you search on Google bestbuy you get a site search box in addition to the search results. The same is true for a number of other e-commerce and content sites (e.g. Washington Post). From the merchant’s or publisher’s perspective this is prett...

Yesterday I wrote about the need for competition in search from an Internet ecosystem perspective. But what if you are a shareholder in Yahoo or Microsoft? Should they outsource search to Google? Here too I believe the answer is a clear NO. If Google did not have grand ambitions that are directly competitive with large parts of Yahoo and Microsoft then this might make sense – but one would hardly recommend to GM to buy their engines from Toyota. Yes, there is a lot to a car other than the eng...

Yesterday I wrote about the need for competition in search from an Internet ecosystem perspective. But what if you are a shareholder in Yahoo or Microsoft? Should they outsource search to Google? Here too I believe the answer is a clear NO. If Google did not have grand ambitions that are directly competitive with large parts of Yahoo and Microsoft then this might make sense – but one would hardly recommend to GM to buy their engines from Toyota. Yes, there is a lot to a car other than the eng...

Don’t be evil?

Don’t be evil?