Buzzsonic.com

I rambled on here about finding flights and deals online in the ‘traditional’ manner using meta-searchers so you dont have to visit each individual travel site etc, but there is an even more time efficient way by using RSS. I’m assuming that readers have some entry level knowledge of RSS, if not, read this to get some background on the format that’ll help save you bundles of time.

I use the Sage RSS reader in my Firefox browser. Its a great lightweight way of reading RSS feeds without having to log-in to an online reader or fire up a desktop stand alone ( I use Feed Demon for more heavy duty feed trawling). Once you’ve installed Sage in Firefox you can open it in a browser sidebar to view your feeds.

The “big three” online travel agents, Travelocity, Expedia and Orbitz all now offer various RSS feeds.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in the day, Ajax was better known as a household cleaning product, or even a leading Amsterdam football (as in soccer) side, nowadays its an overused buzzword for (hold your breath) Asynchronus JavaScript and XML a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The first use of the term in public in this context was by Jesse James Garrett in his February 2005 article Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications.

Anyway, I’m one of those people that buys a lot of domain names so I know searching for a new name has always been a little ‘clunky’. Of course there’s an increasing amount of search solutions using Ajax to make the experience a bit more aggreable. Squurl.com seems to be the nicest looking so far with a number of options from the neat drop down under the search box. Opinions at community tech news site Digg seem to suggest that Squurl is a carbon copy of the similar featured InstantDomainSearch.com . They both point to Yahoo domains for suggestions (should your search prove fruitless) and they both point to the useful ‘hack’ site Xona Domain Hacks which suggests alternative URL mash ups.
Domain Resources

Whois Domain Tools (DomainTools.com)
AlexaHolic.com
Ajax Powered Domain Searching (Lockergnome.net)

I was given a good excuse today to put some of the newer video search options through a stiff user test. My wife is a massive fan of the Fox TV medical drama ‘House ‘. Starring as the lead character is English actor Hugh Lawrie. Back in the UK, Lawrie is more famous for his comedic character acting and plummy English public school accent.

A culture shock for me then trying to take him seriously with the American accent that is layered on thickly for his latest character Dr. Gregory House, after spending years watching him make me laugh hysterically in ‘Jeeves and Wooster’. Getting to the point, I thought this would be an excellent challenge to try and find a clip from ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ to prove to my wife that yes indeed, he really was English.
We simply entered, Jeeves and Wooster in the search box and waited.

Engines Running…

Yahoo’s much vaunted updated video search was first. Four results and bingo, a clip with Hugh. Unbelievably the clip with him is from a Russian P.G Wodehouse fan site and is dubbed in Russian.
The AOL owned Singing Fish (also used by MSN for their video search) turned up two results, one a ringtone. Blinkx TV had nothing, their TV search and archive was limited to mainly US programmes. The new Google Video search option fared no better returning one result, a mention in a news clip.

Where too next ? Alta Vista and All The Web are both now owned by Yahoo and as such returned the same four results as their owners. And here’s where the options start to get thinner on the ground, outside of trawling P2P networks.

Talk of tentative connections (or is it degrees of separation, now we’re bombarded by social networks?). ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ was based on characters, Reginald Jeeves and Bertie Wooster from P.G Wodehouse books. He is the quintessential “gentleman’s personal gentleman” and is Wodehouse’s most famous character and also where search engine Ask Jeeves sourced their name.

Related

Yahoo and Blinkx Launch New Video Search Options [Buzzsonic News]
Search Battle Heads For Video [Wired.com]
Will Video Search Pay Off? [Internet News]
AOL Revamps Singing Fish Audio Video Search [Buzzsonic News]

News search experts have long been wishing for Google News search results to be dished out as RSS feeds. For a company usually renown for its forward thinking innovation Google have been slow to usher in any serious useage of RSS feeds, mainly because the search power house has been actively supporting the rival syndication format Atom.

No sooner said than done. ScrappyGoo is an unofficial app that lets you search Google News and generates a unique RSS feed of the results. By default, each feed has sixteen entries and uses standard boolean operators.

ScrappyGoo uses Gnews2RSS, an open source, experimental PHP script developed by British programmer Julian Bond . He’s already run fowl of Google when he was hit with a cease-and-desist order last year.

And then there was two. Just as I was finishing this post another Google RSS news generator came to my attention. The GNewsfeed from Justin Pfister also offers geo targetted results.

Thanks to John Batelle’s Searchblog

Related Links

Google Moves to Block RSS Scraping [Internet News April 2004]
Google News RSS/RDF Feed Generator [XML Mania] now blocked
Google Mulls RSS Support [CNet News]

No great surprise to learn on Friday (via CNet’s News.com) that Yahoo are working on a music search engine for finding downloadable songs and music data from across the Internet. The specialty engine will let people search on an artist’s name, and retrieve all the available songs from other music services, as well as album reviews and band information from Yahoo Music. The Launch name was ousted in favour of a rebranding to Yahoo Music in February.

Concrete details are scarce at the moment with Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s director of media search, declining to comment on the development of the audio search engine last week. Two of Yahoo’s search acquisitions, Alta Vista and All The Web are still destinations for MP3 file seekers with their specialist audio search options, though both have been made somewhat redundant by the more streamlined P2P search options from people like Kazaa, Limewire and Grokster.

Yahoo have been investing heavily in music for a while now with the $160M purchase of the MusicMatch jukebox software and download site late last year and in the buyout of pioneering UK music portal Dot Music from British Telecom eighteen months ago.

“It makes sense because Yahoo’s got access to all this music to begin with,” Gary Stein, an analyst at Jupiter Research told CNet. “Music needs better search, and by looking at the structured data of music–title, genre, etc., they could provide a better experience.”

An estimated 24.5 million people visited Yahoo Music in March, according to market researcher ComScore Networks. The new Yahoo search service will compete directly with other search services like AOL’s SingingFish, GoFish and the CNet owned MP3.com.

Related Links

Yahoo Developing Music Search Engine [SearchEngineWatch Blog]
Yahoo Developing An Audio Search Engine [CNet News.com]
Yahoo Search Blog [YSearchBlog.com]
Yahoo Readies iTunes Rival for Launch [CNet News.com]
Yahoo to Challenge iTunes With New Acquisition [NY Times]
AOL Revamps Audio Video Search [Buzzsonic News]
Legal Download Search Engine GoFish to Launch [Buzzsonic News]

We mentioned Podscope, the search engine for Podcasts last week. Connecticut based TV Eyes, the real-time broadcast search provider behind the venture had promised a launch this month and sure enough they kept their promise.

Pretty neat it is too, a very basic front end with just a logo and search box. We did a search for ‘new wave’ looking for a possible MP3 blog that was micro-broadcasting old punk chestnuts from the 70s. Nine results came back. Next to each search result you get a + sign, click on that and a drop down reveals a couple of buttons to play a clip, a link to the podcast site and another link which opens the originating site in a framed page with the choice of playing back the show via Windows Media or Quick Time players. Theres also a link to the RSS feed URL so you can plug the feed straight into your podcast software of choice and a link to download the whole show. We thought it was pretty cool.

Related Links

Podcasting [Wikipedia.org]
iPodder [Sourceforge]
Podshow [Podshow.com]
Podcast Alley [PodcastAlley.com]
How to Get Podcasts and Also Make Your Own [Engadget.com]

P2P software pioneer Ian Clarke, creator of the Open Source P2P platforms Freenet and more recently Dijjer has this week quietly unveiled his latest project, Indy.

Speaking to P2PNet Clarke promised that Indy, “does for freely available independent music what Google does for the world wide web.” Indy uses collaborative filtering, a system similar to that used by Amazon to recommend books, etc, to prospective buyers, to learn about your musical preferences in relation to other Indy users.

“Everything it plays is from online indie music freely available on the web and you can rate each piece at between one and five stars. Using that as feedback, Indy will find and download music that’s keyed to what you like as opposed to what you don’t like.”

“We were concerned that even with all of the advancements with online media in the past few years, it was still pretty difficult just to find new independent music that you liked.”

According to Clarke, Indy is inspired by iRate, another collaborative music filtering set-up. As users rate music in iRate it automatically finds more free music that you’ll like by finding people with similar music tastes. Indy is said to have a much cleaner and simpler user interface and it is freely available for Windows OS initially with other platforms in development.

Submit Music to Indy

Related Links

iRate Radio [iRateRadio.com]
Freenet Creator Unveils Dijjer P2P [Buzzsonic News]
Dijjer [Dijjer.org]
The Free Network Project [Sourceforge]
Mobster [Sourceforge]
Collaborative Filtering Research Papers [JamesThornton.com]
Collaborative Filtering Comes To Independent Music Makers [MasterNewMedia.org]
The Music Business and the Big Flip [Shirky.com]
InDiscover [InDiscover.net]

Fairfield, Connecticut based TV Eyes, the real-time broadcast search provider which has been indexing television and radio broadcasts since 1999, will debut a Podcast search engine called Podscope later this month. Every word within an Internet podcast will be made searchable which is equally applicable to video blogs and personal videos. Podscope will crawl the web to look for podcasts, when it finds one, it will create an index against every word within the content. Podcasters are also able to submit url(s) for crawling.

“With a looming explosion in such user generated rich content as Podcasts and video blogs, there is a growing need to empower consumers to find and subscribe to programs that meet their diverse interests, commented Allen Weiner, Vice President and Research Director at Gartner. “Searching and indexing these varied audio and video programs will not only benefit content-hungry consumers, it also adds legitimacy and velocity to this burgeoning space.

Podscope isn’t the first speech recognition search technology. HP’s Speechbot has been online for years in demo form using speech-recognition technology to create a searchable transcript. BlinkxTV which we featured here last December also uses speech-recognition technology to create searchable text transcripts.

Related Links

Podscope: New Search Engine Will Allow You to Keyword Search Every Word Spoken in a Podcast [SearchEngineWatch Blog]
Pod Catch [PodCatch.com]
BBC To Massively Expand Podcast Trials [iLoveRadio.org]
Podcast Lab [PodcastLab.com]
Podcast Alley [PodcastAlley.com]
Busy Podcasters Guide [iPodder Sourceforge]
Podcasting (aka How To Get Podcasts and Also Make Your Own) [Engadget.com]
Podcasting Power [MercuryNews.com]
A Look At Other Video Search Tools [SearchEngineWatch.com]

There’s seems to be a split amongst the search engine cognoscenti as to wether Google has lost its crown to Yahoo, now that the expanding search giant has pulled up its socks with the purchase (in December 2002) and fine tuning of Inktomi. Here we’re not so sure as we tend to use both and keep an eye on the newly tweaked MSN Search too.

Still, Norwegian Asgeir S. Nilsen started search engine forums gossiping at the beginning of the month with an April fools joke that has taken on a life of its own. YahGooHoo!gle started as a post on geek news bible Slashdot announcing a Yahoo/Google merger.

The search site actually could be the answer to many web researchers prayers, comparing search results between the two market leaders and splitting the results across a framed results page. How long the site stays up without Yahoo and/or Google pulling the plug or setting the legal bulldogs onto the useful comparison site is anybody guess.

Related Search Resources

YaGoohoo!gle Blog [Yagoohoogle.com]
Comparing Google and Yahoo Search Results [Langreiter.com]
Search Wars are About to Get Personal [CNet News]
GoogleGuy [Googleguy.de]
Google vs Yahoo, the War of the Search Engines [MSNBC.com]
Search Engine Watch [SearchEngineWatch.com]

Not one but two new search options for video content on the web were unveiled today only hours apart of each other. First out of the blocks was a “test phase” version of the previously hinted at Yahoo video search. The site went up on Wednesday and competes against pioneers like the AOL owned Singing Fish which was recently upgraded.

The Yahoo video search service lets users narrow their query results by file formats, such as AVI, MPEG, QuickTime, Windows Media and Real, by size and by duration (less or more than a minute). Users can also choose to filter results based on Internet top-level domains, so only results from .com Web sites would be listed, for example. Users can also choose to filter content unsuitable for minors from the search results.

Yahoo search executive Jeremy Zawodny had more to say on the company weblog. Why video? “The costs of producing video content have been steadily decreasing in recent years. Between the adoption of broadband Internet connections, and easier to use video editing software, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing a lot more video content make its way on to the Internet. And what’s out there today is just the tip of the iceberg.”

He continues to explain: “It’s often not easy for a web crawler to find downloadable and streaming video content. Unlike web images and most audio files, videos aren’t always easy to discover. When we started thinking about how to make it easier for anyone to expose video and other rich media content, one of the first things we thought of was podcasting and RSS. Podcasting uses RSS Enclosures to provide an audio file along with a news item or blog posting in an RSS feed. At the most basic level, this (new search option) is just a matter of pointing to a video instead of an MP3 file.”

Search results show a thumbnail of the video, the name of the file, screen size, length in seconds, and size in MB with 20 results per page by default (though this is customizable from 10-100).

Video search is nothing new, the Yahoo owned Alta Vista and All The Web search engines have offered a video search option for years though the technology has improved. Yahoo are now deploying a method called “Media RSS”.

Media RSS is a new RSS module that supplements the enclosure capabilities of RSS 2.0. Enclosures in RSS are already being used to syndicate audio files (Podcasting) and images. Media RSS extends enclosures to handle other media types, such as short films or TV, in addition to providing additional metadata with the media.

Only hours later Blinkx released the Beta version of Blinkx TV, which allows you to search the web for video and audio clips. Blinkx had previously been known for its downloadable desktop search app which actually beat Google’s similar offering to market in the summer. According to media sources search giant Google is courting broadcasters and cable networks with a new technology that would do for television what it has already done for the Internet: sort through and reveal needles of video clips from within the haystack archives of major network TV shows. Microsoft is also developing a search engine for video.

Blog search engine Blogdigger recently revealed a media search option on their site, enabling users to specify media files in five different classes: audio:, video:, image:, torrent: and text ( a catch all including things like PDF, ZIP or Microsoft Word documents) that Blogdigger indexes from the RSS feeds used on blogs like us here at MBN24. Both Compaq and IBM have been working low key on multimedia search options for a while now too.

Related Reading

Yahoo Launches Video Search, New RSS Format [ResearchBuzz.com]
Blinkx Unveils Video Search Engine [CNet News]
Striking up Digital Video Search [CNet News]
At Yahoo, Signs Point to a Bigger Media Move [CNet News]
Search Meets TV [SearchEngineWatch.com]
TV and Search Merge [BattelleMedia.com]
AOL Revamps SingingFish Audio Video Search [MusicbizNews24.com]
Google Audio Search [Oristus.com]

In reaction to rumours that search leaders Google, along with Yahoo and MSN were busy improving the multimedia search capabilities of their own search engines Time Warner’s AOL announced that they had improved the service of their Singingfish audio video search engine to cater for the increasing user base of their year old acquisition.

Singingfish, which until now has remained backstage and focused on licensing its technology to other companies, will move toward the spotlight to position itself as a player in the multimedia search space. “We’re introducing Singingfish as a destination site for the first time,” said Karen Howe, Singingfish’s vice president and general manager.

Singingfish wants to attract feedback from users and learn from usage patterns in order to take that insight and base multimedia search innovations on it, she said. “We want to push the envelope over what you can do with audio and video search,” she said in an interview with Digit Online.

According to AOL, search queries had risen dramatically from a few thousand to around 700,000 per day and they are indexing around 14 million multimedia files in various formats (both streaming and normal) like Windows Media, Real Audio, QuickTime and MP3. This figure doesn’t take into account the queries Singingfish technology handles for clients such as Microsoft and RealNetworks, which if counted would increase the volume to about 7 million queries per day.

Older alternatives like AltaVista and AllTheWeb have offered advanced audio-video search options for a few years now and are both owned by Yahoo though they both may well be integrated into Yahoo’s Inktomi search results in the future.

AOL bought Seattle based SingingFish from Paris-based consumer electronics company Thomson in November 2003 for an undisclosed amount. Thomson, famously, alongside the German based Fraunhofer were behind the development of the MP3 format. .

Related Reading

SingingFish Pushes Multi Media Search [DigitMag.co.uk]
SingingFish Unveils MultiMedia Search Tool [PCWorld.com]
Singingfish Floats New Multimedia Search [InternetNews.com]
Google is Listening:Searching Audio [Forret.com]
Legal Download Search Engine GoFish to Launch Monday [MusicbizNews24.com]
Striking up Digital Video Search [CNetNews]
Google Audio Search [Oristus.com]
AOL Buys Singingfish, Rolls Out More Search Changes [SearchEngineNews.com]
Lycos MultiMedia Search [Lycos.com]
Exploseek [Exploseek.com]
the Bit Torrent File Search Engine [Yotoshi.com]

A new search engine launches Monday (November 29th) aimed at helping potential buyers find legal digital content across the growing number of legal download services. In essence GoFish.com is another shopping metasearcher though with a narrower target. It fetches feeds from merchants’ media catalogues, indexes them and makes them searchable. The company is getting feeds from iTunes, Napster, Musicmatch, eMusic, Streamwaves and a host of other online merchants, allowing users to search across all the services from one place. The site also looks for audiobooks, video, ring tones and games.

San Francisco based GoFish, was started by Michael Downing, founder of the ill-fated “music locker” service Musicbank.com. Musicbank was originally designed to compete with (pre-Universal and CNet) MP3.com’s streaming locker service — known as My.Mp3.com — that allowed users to stream music from a database of music the company stored on its servers. Downing sold his music-player software company Sonique to Lycos in 2000.

GoFish will make a 9 percent to 15 percent commission from merchants for every sale it sends their way. The site also will earn commissions when users sign up for monthly music subscription services offered by Napster and other online stores. Given the already wafer thin margins operated by merchants its hard to see anyone getting rich from that revenue model though the company are pinning their hopes on licensing out the technology to other websites and search engines.

Downing said he already has talked with most search engines about partnerships and hopes to announce a deal before the end of the year. In an interview with the Mercury News he said the prospective partnership is with a second-tier search engine rather than a top site like Google or Yahoo.

In the sparse detail on the GoFish website they report to have indexed 12 million media files and claim to be the largest, deepest reaching, and most expansive search platform for digital media in the world. If the project sounds alarmingly familiar, late last year SingingFish.com another audio video search specialist from Seattle sold out to AOL for an undisclosed sum. Though Singing Fish relies on their own indexing technology rather than plugging into third party databases and also outsources the search service.

Related Reading

Fishing For Music With GoFish [SiliconBeat.com]
Napster, My.MP3.com, Digital Music, and the Future [NetFreedom.org]
Musicbank Calls it Quits [Wired.com]
Eric Gibb’s Musicbank Portfolio [Chromatic.net]
Musicbanks CEO: Hitting the Right Notes [BusinessWeek.com]
Singingfish Grows As Multimedia Search Provider [SearchEngineWatch.com]