Archive for the "Search Engines" Category
Jan31

Google Gone Wild!

Posted at 10:40 AM • 3 Comments

Google is broken this morning, EST 10.18am.

Was looking around for Pro Tools 8 M Boxed/LE prices this AM and headed to Google search to check the shopping comparison for the iLok USB key. Surprised to find that the manufacturers site had been tagged with the dreaded Google malware ‘kiss of death’ page. Searching around for other terms brought up the same results.

youtube2

Even Google’s own paid shopping links were being redirected to the malware page. Last gasp try to search for my own music as 99th Floor Elevators. Every search result for that term got the malware redirect including the link to my video on YouTube.

Headed to Twitter to see what people are finding.

Breaking:What’s The Matter With Google? (Geekbrief.TV)
The Day Google Broke (The Next Web)
Google Broken (Google News Search)

Apr1

Buzzsonic Musicbiz Search Directory Updates

Posted at 6:14 PM • No Comments

I started the Buzzsonic music industry directory about ten months ago after importing the database from an older music directory at my other blog at 99th Floor Elevators. The old script I was using there, PHP Links was getting a little dated and had these unwieldy session ids and a creaking admin area.

the buzzsonic.dj music industry directory

I upgraded to a much sleeker, streamlined script called Indexu which has proved to be much easier to look after, edit and customize. I was thinking that old school directories (including the granddaddy of them all DMOZ) are just that, old school. Well, you’d think. But even in the age of a million and one bookmark organizers, social networks and web 2.0 hype, I have still to find anything that has made the Buzzsonic music directory obsolete.

That would be backed up with the fact that the visitors have kept increasing month by month so there is certainly a demand. Its not millions, far from it, but the first months visitor count of just over 600 uniques is now closer to 5000 unique visitors a month and 50,000 page views.

So, I’m painstakingly updating the directory entries right now, but with 3000 entries in there already its going to take a while. Hopefully we’ll have things tidied up pretty soon. We’re also working on music industry specific RSS news aggregator, which has been heavily ‘influenced’ by the brilliant PopUrls. Watch out for that one as the early version (Beta?), should be around in a couple of weeks, its called MusicFizzlr.com.

Mar23

Google Search Bot Indexing This Blog Within Two Hours

Posted at 10:31 AM • No Comments

I’ve heard lots of stories and theories about how to get your website indexed by Google and the other major search bots, (which basically boil down to Yahoo and MSN) in rapid fashion and my record up to yesterday from starting a new site to seeing search bots/crawlers activity on my server stats has been two days.

That record was trashed yesterday when the Google bot came a calling (crawling?) within two hours of my first post going up on the Musicbizhacks site. And I got a hit from a search query, “how do i get my cd distributed on itunes” that someone Googled, minutes after I’d posted this.

That’s pretty good going by any standards and is a good indication of how much faster and efficient the indexers have become. How did they do that? One simple method actually. I posted an incoming link on my MySpace profile and another in the header of my music directory, Buzzsonic.dj and that was it.

So. Anyone who tells you you need to submit your site to a search engine, or tries to sell you a submission service is living in 2002! Though you can still submit just to make sure of course. Cant get anyone to link into your website (basically all you need is an inbound link from another site that has already been indexed). Then add a link to one of your social network profiles (you have one right?). It really is that simple.

Related Reading

Search Engine Watch (Searchenginewatch.com)
How To Get Indexed By Google (Problogger)
5 Ways To Get a New Site Indexed Within 48 Hours or Less (SEONoobs.com)
Search Engine Optimization Forums (Sitepoint.com)
Search Engine Optimization (Digital Point)

Mar22

Travel Deals That Come to You, Using RSS and Firefox

Posted at 10:10 AM • No Comments

Interflug- Berlin Schonefeld Airport postcardConnie, Pacific Northern AirlinesPlane (Vientiane, Lao)Euroberlin postcardEuroberlin 737-300 beautiful postcard

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 »

Jul11

Domain Name Search Gets Ajaxed

Posted at 10:19 AM • No Comments

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.

There's a bunch of search servcies using Ajax

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)

May10

The Video Search Challenge

Posted at 12:43 PM • No Comments

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.

Yahoo Video Search came up trumps with the clip I was looking for, in Russian, bizarrely

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]

May10

Google RSS News Scraper Appears

Posted at 12:17 PM • No Comments

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.
ScrappyGoo offers unofficial RSS feeds from Google News
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]

May8

Yahoo Working On Music Search Engine

Posted at 1:44 PM • No Comments

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.

Yahoo are working on a music search engine say insiders

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]

Apr21

Podcast Search Engine Goes Live

Posted at 10:37 PM • No Comments

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.

Podscope.com, the internets first search engine for Podcasts went live this week

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]

Apr19

Freenet Creator Launches the Google Of Indie Music

Posted at 10:50 PM • No Comments

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.

Ian Clarke, the P2P software pioneer behind Freenet and Dijjer this week 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]