Antimail : Web Search

Statcounter: Bing leapfrogs Yahoo again

AdiOltean — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:00:24 GMT

You might remember Statcounter.com as the site that came in the news a few weeks ago when Bing overtook Yahoo, due to the sudden interest immediately after launch. Back then, as many predicted, it didn’t last long, as people quickly switched back to their old search habits.

But I just checked the Statcounter site and noticed that Bing just got ahead Yahoo again. Granted, this time in North America region only. On last Friday (26 Jun) Bing had 8.74% query share, compared with Yahoo with 8.55%.

Of course, this situation probably won’t last long either, but there are a few observations to make:

1) The two graphs are getting closer and closer, and it’s probably safe to predict that they will start intersecting a lot more often in the next weeks. The same trend can be seen in the WW numbers as well.

2) There is a curious pattern when Bing traffic is higher on Wednesday and Friday (not sure why?)

Either way, it’s an interesting area to watch out in the next weeks to come …

Bing Community - an undiscovered site

AdiOltean — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:29:00 GMT

Check it out:

http://www.bing.com/community/

Nice layout & content organization. Much better organized when comparing it with the typical forums/community sites that you see on Microsoft sites or MSDN (or other non-Microsoft ones)

What does Bing stands for?

AdiOltean — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:21:49 GMT

In my personal opinion, BING = Bing Is Not Google (to continue the tradition of recursive acronyms)

And it’s true. Bing attempts to be a decision engine, not just another search engine.

It is interesting that Google itself has an “I’m feeling Lucky” button, but using it simply means that you let the search engine make the decision for you. True, in some cases, this is good enough – but as a former Google user I don’t recollect using that button too much. I much prefer drilling into the results myself.

Yet another 3D photo wonder is now available - Microsoft Photosynth is available for preview

AdiOltean — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 01:23:00 GMT

Try it here: http://labs.live.com/photosynth. It is an interesting approach of building a 3D world from a bunch of 2D photos taken anywhere.

Coincidentally, Microsoft just released 3D maps in Windows Live Local, which also succeed to build 3D models of cities simply by getting data from a camera floating around in a plane.

Search Engines and Privacy

AdiOltean — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 21:49:00 GMT

The recent AOL scandal had one and only one learning lesson for any software company. Think 10x, 100x, 1000x about customer privacy. There is a large amount of discussions, opinions, passion on the blogosphere, but I don't think that anyone disagrees with the point above.

However, there is an alternate learning lesson that applies to you, or anyone browsing the internet. It is easy to forget how insecure the internet actually is. There is a simple rule:
1) Any URL that starts with http://xxxx is insecure. Never type private data like credit card numbers, etc in this URL. The data that you type is accessible to the target server but also to any intermediaries on the way (your ISP for example), etc.
2) Any URL that starts with https://xxxx is somewhat secure. (Note the S at the end of the URL moniker I wish we had a different URL moniker for secure HTTP because the two are so similar). By "somewhat secure" I mean that the data that you provide is obviously accessible to the target server, but innaccessible to intermediaries.

You might be worried by the word "somewhat". Well, HTTPS is still not 100% secure as there can be loopholes as well, for example, if the HTTPS link uses a bad/invalid/untrusted/expired certificate. To make sure, just look at the lock icon on the bottom of your browser and make sure that the certificate is valid and trusted by you. IE7 will also display a big, separate warning page if the target certificate is invalid, so you are better protected in this case.

Also, even if you have a valid certificate, the target service itself might do something stupid and release your private data. That's what hapened with AOL. So, to stay on the safe side, don't even assume that the Internet is a safe place to play.

Some might think that Internet anonymizers can be a good workaround. However, not even internet anonymizers can be trusted. Who knows if some internet anonimyzer (used by you) doesn't track all your activity to sell it for profit?

The conclusion? The internet is not a safe place. Nothing new, after all. A public road is not a safe place either. Just make sure you look around when you walk or drive. At least, that's what they are teaching us in the Defense Driving school :-)

New live.com launched! (with screenshots on Vista)

AdiOltean — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 02:15:00 GMT

Link: www.live.com

It looks beautifully, isn't it?

[Screenshot]

Digg surpasses Slashdot?

AdiOltean — Mon, 29 May 2006 07:15:00 GMT

Looking at Alexa, we can definitely see a trend:

Alexa might be contested, however. And, speaking of trends, Google Trends tells us a similar thing, this time with respect to Google search volume:

slashdot digg

New www.live.com launched!

AdiOltean — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 10:29:00 GMT

Check it out: www.live.com

Personally, I like the smart scroll feature.

Walking the long road ahead

AdiOltean — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 13:45:00 GMT

Recently there was a lot of noise in the media about a Microsoft official (Neil Holloway - President of Microsoft EU) "saying" that we will be twice as good as Google in six months.

Then I was pleasantly surprised that Neil soon corrected this misquote. Where? On a blog (John Batelle's blog). That is, directly, without official press statements and all that fanfare. A similar clarification appeared on the MSN Search blog as well.

That's what I like about blogs - you get a direct, personal communication, as opposed to the traditional coldness of the corporate walls.

P.S. And, if you ask me, there is a lot of room for improvement in web search (in general, not only for Microsoft), and a pretty long road ahead.

Favorites - this time, for real!

AdiOltean — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 07:58:00 GMT

Finally! I just noticed a new service in the http://live.com family: Live Favorites (http://favorites.live.com/)

You can import your existing IE favorites, organize them with drag-and-drop via an AJAX interface, etc.

The OpenSearch 1.1 specification

AdiOltean — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 23:42:00 GMT

I just installed a recent Vista build on my dev box, and I noticed a new set of options to add a custom search engine in IE 7. Which got me digging. For your browsing pleasure, here are some links:
- This page describes the current list of providers, and what else needs to be done on the missing providers. The requirements are simple - the search engine must support queries based on the OpenSearch 1.1 standard.
- The IE blog contains a little bit of history around Amazon and Microsoft working together on this standard.
- The A9 developer blog also contains some interesting details.

My top 10 tech predictions for 2006

AdiOltean — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 14:32:00 GMT

Let's see how this game will play out:

1) Amazon will come up with more and more interesting stuff. I expect to be surprised.

2) Someone, probably Yahoo, will buy digg and memeorandum. These sites are hot.

3) In 2004, Google captured everyone's interest with GMail, GMaps, etc. In 2005, the tables turned the other way around: everyone surprised Google engineers with lots of funny rumors (Google PC, Google OS, Google Browser, Google secret datacenters-in-a-box, dark-fiber secret plans, etc). Ignore all that. The truth is that, right now, every other startup is busy imitating Google. The conclusion? Google will have a really hard time coming with something truly innovative in 2006. Probably their biggest 2006 news would be related with buying other companies or closing expensive deals with other partners. I am not blaming Google or anything like this - they will continue to do their excellent work as usual. It's just that these new startups will overshadow their contribution in the future, to the extent that Google will not be able to come in front with almost anything new.

4) Right now, people love to speculate that the fight for the first place will be between XBox 360 and PS3. Well, I don't think so. I personally believe that the real battle will be 360 and... Nintendo Revolution. And, not only that, but 360 might have a hard time beating Revolution.

5) While technologically very good, from the sales point of view I personally think that Sony PS3 will have a very slow start (read: a big flop). Too expensive, games not spectacularly good compared with 360, Blue Ray not in demand, etc.

6) Speaking of which, the BluRay vs. HD-DVD battle won't settle until 2007 (translated = low demand for media in both formats). PS3 will be impacted too.

7) I can imagine that, right now, Yahoo is pretty desperate in fighting with Google on all fronts. So I expect that Yahoo will surpass Google at the end of 2006 in several areas where currently Google is a leader. One of these areas? Search relevance.

8) MySpace.com will enter in a legal trouble or something. They will remain #1 blogging site for teenagers, though.

9) 2006 will be the year when we will see more nice desktops in the mini/micro form factor, in the lines of Apple Mini. These new PCs will be advertised as damn fast (not for a gaming machine, though) and reasonably cheap (around $500).

10) End of 2006 (maybe CES 2007). We will start to see cheap cell phones with incorporated flash-based media players (4-8 GB seems reasonable). However, it is unclear what would be the portal to get songs on these devices.

Disclaimer: This is just my own personal gut feeling, take it with a grain of salt. My opinion here is unrelated with Microsoft's official position. And, BTW, I have absolutely no insider knowledge on any of these - this is why I tried to avoid any predictions on Microsoft products.

How Hotmail works? - an interview with Phil Smoot

AdiOltean — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 11:31:00 GMT

ACM Queue published an interesting interview with Phil Smoot. Phil is the person in charge of managing the development teams at Hotmail.

Windows Local Live is out in the wild!

AdiOltean — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 01:43:00 GMT

Here it is: http://local.live.com

Check out some cool bird's eye images:
- Space Needle
- Microsoft campus.

[Update - Dec 8, 11 PM] It turns out that the service is not exposed to the public yet. Funny enough, it works fine from my dev box, but not from my home computer. Maybe they block all the non-Microsoft IP adresses?

Infoworld says:

Beta 2 of the search service will go live at 9:01 a.m. Pacific Standard Time Thursday at http://local.live.com, according to Microsoft. The beta includes the rebranding of the service and new zoom and "bird's eye" features to the service's satellite imagery, as reported by the IDG News Service Tuesday

[Update - Dec 9, 12 AM] Live.com is now fully launched! (nine hours earlier). Or maybe it was launched all the time and I had a minor glitch on my network and I couldn't see it previously...

Will the giants fade away?

AdiOltean — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 23:54:00 GMT

Something interesting happened in the last few years. Something that I haven't explicity realized until I read Ross Levinsohn's statement. (Maybe you already know - Ross Levinsohn is the president of Fox Interactive Media, a large company who owns the the CNet/ZDNet duo, along with the very young MySpace.com)

>>> if you sit and wait for perfection, it's not going to be there. In the meantime, somebody else is reaching them every day

And I agree. Thinking of these "media titans" I realized that their days are numbered. I mean, the traditional news channels, as we know them, will fade away.

>>>Storming the walls is a matter of survival for Fox. According to Levinsohn, "Rupert [Murdoch] and the chairmen of the board really believe that, if we don't transform News Corp. into something broader than its existing businesses, we will literally be faced with something that makes us a bit irrelevant in 10 years."

Which made me thinking. Is this only about the news channels? Even more, how come that lately we see so many young, solid companies that just took the internet experience by storm? I am just thinking to a few of them:
- Digg.com - it's probably now more popular than Slashdot, and I think that it's the number one source of fresh news. It gives you the right balance between early news and garbage shifting, something where the slashdot.com failed to deliver (partly due to the dictatorial behavior of their editors?). Digg.com is simply unbiased. It's secret? Let the users publish their content. Let other users surface out the interesting stuff.
- MySpace.com - enough said. It's a fantastically popular web site. And keep in mind that exactly one year ago, MySpace.com was virtually non-existent.
- Livejournal.com - another succesful company that popped out from nothing in a relatively short amount of time.
- Flickr.com - so good that Yahoo bought them. Where on earth did they came from?
- Skype - well, it's not about publishing user content, but still, I agree that they are popular today as a social communication tool. And they too started from nothing, not very long ago. By the way, Skype is not developed in Silicon Valley, but in a small country in Eastern Europe, in Estonia to be more exact.
- (What else did I miss? Let me know)

The next question is to rationally ask ourselves why so many small companies are now succesful? Maybe the explanation is somewhat related with how web technology evolved in the last years. It is easier now to hire engineers with operational expertise in architecting and running large web farms. It is easier now to architect deploy a huge social service (By the way, I just mentioned the other day that MySpace.com uses only 33 servers for their front-end!). In the end, running a succesful service is cheaper and more predictable these days. There is another thing too: while the total mass of users you can reach is a finite number, the technology gets better every year. So it is logical to conclude that we will have a "tipping point" in the evolution of web economy, where any nascent company will know how to develop a solid internet-ready social service at a very affordable cost, and in a relatively short time. Maybe we already passed that tipping point?

So, looking to the list above, do I see a real trend here? I see more and more small companies that are amazingly succesful. All it takes is one, two years to start from nothing and get all the attention. And maybe that's how our Internet experience will look like five years from now. My bet is that five years from now, the real battle won't be between Google, Yahoo, eBay and Microsoft. The battle will be between all these new, fresh companies learning how to come out with cool things.

And the giants will fade away in the background. Yes, including Microsoft. Well, what can I say - that's what my crystall ball says today!