To Google’s credit, they have been pretty aggressive about fighting spammy search results from content farmers, but when it comes to your digits, they still haven’t found a way to filter out the spammers from the legitimate information. Take for example, a Google search for my own phone number

As you can see from the screenshot, Google is really good at finding any and all search results with this number in it, but most of the links presented are directing users to pages and pages of meaningless phone numbers. If you click on Google’s #1 search result for my phone number, it leads to a company named AllCallerDirectory.com. While this site does provide “reverse lookup” services, it will cost you $15 if you want to buy a report letting you know that it was Davis Freeberg who called. While my blog’s contact page does show up as the 2nd search result for Google, the remaining 467 results are all similar search spam of some sort.

By comparison, the same search on Blekko (who tends to use more aggressive spam filters) yields only 2 results, both of which are high quality hits.

It would be easy to blame AT&T for this problem, because I imagine that there are all kinds of data silos that surround our phone numbers, but when you consider the my number is actually a Google Voice number, there really isn’t any excuse for Google to be directing traffic to these paid services instead of my Google profile.

While I’ve never spent money on any of these reverse lookup services, I imagine that there are lots of people who have paid for information that they could have gotten for free. In an ideal world, I’d like to see Google partner with some of the telephone directories to improve these types of searches for consumers, but in the meantime simply nuking the “directories” that are gaming the system would be a positive step in the right direction.

I may have less brand loyalty to any one particular publication, but thanks to the magic of Google, it’s a lot easier to find a diverse set of opinions on topics that I care about. For the most part, I think that Google is the best thing since sliced bread, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t improve their product.

As the media landscape has gotten more competitive, I’ve noticed that publications are becoming increasingly aggressive at trying to monetize the eyeballs that they do get. This really started with the pop-up ad, but after the web browsers figured out how to turn this control over to the users, news companies seem to have switched tactics.

The latest trend is to insert an interstitial ad between you and the content. Usually, there’s some tiny link where you can bypass it or it auto-forwards after 30 seconds, but anytime I’m forced to watch an ad before knowing how good or bad the content actually is, it creates a lot of frustration with my web experience.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually a strong supporter of smart and innovative ways that advertisers can bring their messages to the public and I’m happier than most to support newspapers who are creating great content, but with so much bad content out there, I don’t feel that consumers should be forced to roll the dice, when there’s no payoff on the other end.

I could probably list a dozen major companies who are offenders, but my biggest beef is actually with Google. If I know that someone uses this type of aggressive advertising, it’s easy to quit visiting their site, but because Google is indexing billions of web pages, there’s no way to know which link is going to take me to real content and which link will take me to an ad.

As an example, if you search for the phrase “hardware spec for Microsoft’s pink phone” the first result is a story by ZDnet showing the first line of the blog post, but if you actually click on that link, it takes you to a page that is missing the content and only displays an ad instead. If you wait long enough you will be forwarded to the right destination, but isn’t this false advertising on behalf of Google?

If they know that someone’s browser is going to be hijacked, then why are they taking you to a different page instead. It’d be one thing if Google was trying to actively stop the process, but they’re actually helping publishers create more of these roadblocks on the web.

While Google is free to advertise (or link to anyone) that that they see fit, they should realize that this harms their own user experience while benefiting no one but spammy news publications. If a company like Bing or Ask.com were to come out with an interstitial ban, it would take me about a half a second to change my default search engine. It may be that this isn’t seen as a big enough annoyance to do anything about or it could be too late and is considered an industry standard now, but to show one search result and then take a user to an entirely different page (albeit temporarily) feels an awful lot like a bait and switch tactic to me. What do you think, would Google be better off banning these ads from their search results or is content from newspapers so valuable that it would do more harm than good to blackball offenders like Forbes and ZDNet?

When e-commerce started to become a reality, some were nervous about trying new companies online, but I had no reservations about being one of the first ones in online. While I still miss my Webvan and Kozmo.com deliveries, no one can say that I didn’t do my part to support the shift from bricks to clicks. Given my preference for the online experience, it would be easy to conclude that for traditional retailers, I’m a lost cause. Yet, recently I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the biggest weaknesses of the online experience. For as fast as all those ones and zeros move, when it comes to instant gratification, you still need to wait a few days to receive most purchases.

While I do tend to plan ahead, there are times where I’m willing to pay a premium to have something right away and while it’s easy to transport media over broadband connections, when it comes to physical goods, you typically have to wait for UPS or the post office to stop by. This is a huge advantage for traditional retailers, but it’s one that I don’t believe that they are leveraging enough. Certainly, they do their best to draw traffic into their stores, but if they want to court the internet generation, they’ll need to use technology to better highlight this advantage.

Recently, I was in the mood for a little bit of world domination, so I set my sights on a lengthy game of Axis and Allies. For those who aren’t familiar with the game, it’s a complex simulation of world war two that is a ton of fun and can take all night to play. While there are digital versions of the game, it can’t fully replicate the real world experience of the board game.

It may have only taken me 10 seconds to find a copy of the game online, but when it came to finding out which local retailers carried the game, it was almost impossible to find. After a half a dozen phone calls to all of the usual suspects, I finally tracked down a copy that was over 40 miles away

In this case, I was so motivated to play the game that night, that I begrudgingly made the long journey to get it that day. While real time search has seen huge improvements over just the last year alone, when it comes to searching retail inventory, it’s almost unheard of to be able to check availability before driving to a store (let alone to be able to get that information in real time.) Yet, many companies employ expensive sophisticated inventory management software, that allows them to know exactly what’s sitting on their shelves, what’s being delivered via truck and what needs to be ordered pronto, just so that it can be restocked in time.

Despite this wealth of information though, unless you’re an employee inside of one of these companies, the data more or less doesn’t exist to the public. While there may be some competitive reasons to keep sensitive inventory data out of the hands of the public, I think that retailers are missing a golden opportunity to use that real time inventory data to draw online adopters like myself, back into their real world stores.

In the case of my situation, I would have gladly paid 50% more for the game, if I could have found it within 10 miles. Instead of being to forced to compete by heavy discounting, local stores could compete using their greatest advantage, the instant gratification that the internet simply can’t provide.

While i don’t expect that we’ll see this void filled in the near term, I do think that the firms who sell real time inventory solutions could easily become the next Google, by negotiating to list their client’s information online. Not only would retailers be able to charge different prices based upon distance or availability, but they could allow consumers to reserve and purchase the item before they even got in their car. If one of these real time inventory firms could get just a handful of major players to participate, it wouldn’t take long before real time inventory software went from being an efficient. but expensive luxury to a lucrative revenue source for their clients.

For those of you who are still not satisfied with the current crop of movie recommendation services, you’ll soon have a new choice available to you. Last week, I signed up for the private beta of Jinni and have been pretty impressed so far. Jinni is a new interactive movie rating website that is trying to do for movies, what Pandora has done for music.

While the site doesn’t stream any of the films that they recommend, they do offer convenient links to places where you can find the films online (Netflix, Blockbuster, Hulu, etc.) Apparently, the company has been live for a few months now, but I only just found out about them last week after seeing a review of the service on Read Write Web.

The site includes reviews, photos and even trailers for each film in their database, but their movie filtering software is the real bread and butter. Most of the content you’ll find on their movie description pages is pretty much available on any of the other movie sites, but their “movie genome” information is exclusive to them.

Through a process of human and computer intervention, they’ve categorized every film in their library using information from the movie’s plot, mood, genre, time period, critic reviews, story type, and attitudes. Viewers are then able to filter their search results by using these definitions.

For example, a search for the term bank brings up 134 movies, but if I filter this list by looking only at the “witty” films that include a heist in their plot and are set in the 21st century, I’m able to narrow my search down to just three films, Criminal, Inside Man and High Heel’s and Low Lifes. Since I haven’t seen any of these movies, it’s hard for me to tell how effective this really is, but by narrowing down broad based searches, it does enable me to discover movies that would have gotten lost in the volume of other search results.

On Jinni’s website you can find more information on the actual genome mapping process.

“The starting point of the Movie Genome is manual tagging by our team of film professionals. Each title has around fifty genes, among thousands of possibilities. Then, using advanced machine-learning technology, Jinni’s system learns from the manual tagging to begin automated tagging. This creates a level of consistency that creative human taggers can’t reach – especially important for similarity matches and recommendations, which won’t work unless you compare apples to apples and battles to battles as often as possible. Users who vote on genes, as well as the Jinni team, constantly check and improve the machine tagging.”

After playing around with the site, I was really impressed with the user experience, but I’m still on the fence about whether or not Jinni’s approach is the right way to go. On one hand, by creating “genome” fields around each film’s “DNA”, they’re able to accomplish a lot more with the data, but on the other hand, by restricting rating population to just their staff, it also limits the number of films that they are able to catalog. As an example, if I do a search for the plot Psycho, I get 270 results, but the same search on the user driven site Spout, gives me 509 movies. Now I’d be willing to bet that Jinni’s quality is better then Spout, but by not allowing their users to tag films, they may be giving up quantity through their process. Some people prefer quality over quantity, but I can’t help feeling like they are missing out on the wisdom of the crowds by excluding users from participating in the genome mapping process.

In addition to their movie filtering technology, Jinni also allows you to share more information about your own movie tastes and they provide personalized recommendations. While I haven’t tested the quality of their movie recommendation service yet, I do plan on putting them through my own blind taste test to find out how accurate their ratings really are. In the meantime, if you’re interested in trying the service, feel free to apply to their private beta or you can leave me a comment and I’ll be happy to share one of my invites with the first 10 readers to respond.

With access to four tuners and 1.5 terrabytes of storage, I thought that I had the ultimate DVR setup, but after seeing Snapstream’s Enterprise DVR in action, my home entertainment system suddenly seems wimpy. This DVR isn’t meant for the home market, but I can’t help being envious of its capabilities. I don’t know how much Snapstream is charging, but if money grew on trees, I would be all over this in a heartbeat.

With 10 tuners, you won’t need to worry about programming conflicts and with 2 terrabytes of storage, it would mean that you could record 10 different channels, 24 hours a day for at least 8 days before you would have to worry about archiving. Even, if you did need to save old content, the software allows you to back up your videos onto DVD.

While the specs started me drooling, the search capabilities were what I found most impressive. By taking advantage of the closed captioning system, SnapStream is able to search the transcripts of any program you record. This allows you to record a lot of junk and filter it for the information that you care about. Unlike the DVR in your living room, this isn’t limited to one monitor. SnapStream has designed the DVR to act as a server, which allows multiple users to search and stream videos from anywhere connected to the network.

In the video demoing the product, Snapsteam CEO Rakesh Agrawal mentions that they have PR firms, political organizations, schools and pro sport teams as customers. While I could see how all of these organizations could benefit from access to this type of technology, I was surprised to see Wall St. missing from this list. Being able to keep track of when an investment is mentioned in the media, would be a powerful tool for money managers. When you consider that Thomson is booking a billion a year in profits, by selling market data to businesses, you have to imagine that there is a market for searchable video intelligence. SnapStream may be tapping into a niche market, but it can be a lucrative one, if they attract motivated buyers. By helping businesses make better use of DVR technology, they are filling a market void and creating demand for an entirely new DVR product category.

SnapStream’s professional DVR may be well outside of my tax bracket, but it’s still exciting to see the company innovate. Considering the stiff competition in the consumer DVR market, it makes sense for them to diversify into the professional segment. You can read more about SnapStream’s enterprise ambitions in Brent Evans’ recent interview with Agrawal.

Last week DivX released their 10-Q and while I was able to find the time to tune into their conference call, I didn’t get a chance to read through the actual document until this past weekend.

In the filing I didn’t find any bombshells or new lawsuits, but there were a few details on some of DivX’s recent acquisitions that did reward my curiosity. According to the filing, DivX made two purchases over the last quarter.

“In May 2007, the Company made an equity investment in a private corporation that aggregates and distributes art via its web community and facilitates an open forum where artists can exhibit their artwork and build community around that art in an effort to drive commerce. The Company’s investment consisted of $3.5 million cash for which it received certain shares of the private corporation’s Series A Preferred Stock and entered into an advertising and marketing agreement. The Company has preliminarily allocated approximately $650,000 of the investment to the advertising and marketing agreement, based on its estimated fair value, and the remaining $2.9 million will be carried as an investment.”

DivX doesn’t name the actual artwork site in their filing, but since I already knew that they had purchased a piece of DeviantArt, this one wasn’t hard to figure out. Originally, I had thought that they were only partially behind the $3.5 million investment, but according to the filing, it looks like they put in all of the cash. DivX doesn’t disclose how much of a stake they got for their money, but they do disclose that it is less than 20%.

Without knowing the details behind the acquisition, it’s hard to determine whether DivX received good value for their money, but from a strategy standpoint, I really liked the acquisition. There are a lot of websites that can build a lot of traffic, but the question is at what cost. Newspaper websites get a ton of hits, but take away their print business and the business model can’t support the cost of writers, editors, staff, etc.

The great part about user generated content is that because it’s built around community, the customers are the ones that provide the content. In the case of DeviantArt, they’ve built a very positive environment around people who love art and by connecting artists together in this way they’ve been able to develop a community where creativity thrives.

If DivX wanted to sell art they could have spent $3.5 million on Google Adwords and bought the traffic, but they weren’t interested in selling art, they wanted access to the artists themselves. Through their investment, they will not only get access to DeviantArt’s traffic, but they’ll get the right kind of traffic visiting Stage6, content creators who are looking for venues to showcase their digital creativity. The acquisition won’t do anything to bolster their bottom line, but it does further connect them to the larger web community.

The second acquisition in the 10-Q was a little bit harder to figure out. It’s related to improving the search functionality of Stage6, but DivX didn’t release a lot of details on whose technology they actually purchased.

“In July 2007, the Company acquired all of the assets of a limited liability corporation engaged in real-time digital video processing for the purposes of producing enhanced video search and discovery services. The total purchase price for the acquisition is up to $4.25 million comprised of an initial upfront cash payment of $2.0 million, which the Company made in July 2007, and subsequent cash payments up to $2.25 million upon the achievement of certain technology related milestones. The Company will account for the acquisition as an asset purchase and periodically review for impairment.”

Without knowing whose technology they bought, it’s hard to get a feel for how powerful their new search will be, but I’m glad that they are taking steps to improve their search functionality. Search on Stage6 is one of the many areas that is still in “beta” mode. Sometimes you’ll find what you want, but it’s usually more by luck than query. I’d describe the issues in greater detail, but Neillithan has made a video that addresses the deficiencies better than I ever could.

As Stage6′s media collection continues to grow, relevant video search will be crucial in helping to make sense of it all. Searching by tags and keywords works for now, but it’s far from perfect. I don’t think anyone has perfected video search, but EveryZing is the furthest along and even they still have high failure rates on their speech to text functionality.

One of the frustrating parts about finding details is that they rarely answer more questions than they raise. While I was pleased to find out more about DivX’s search solution, without knowing who they actually acquired, it’s hard to determine how important this could be.

I have a theory about who DivX may have picked up, but I have to qualify it as even more speculative than my normal unreliable gut feelings. It’s really nothing more than a wild guess based upon the criteria that they lay out. Still, I’ve never been one to be shy about speculating even when I’m probably wrong, so here is my wild guess on who DivX may have acquired.

Of all of the companies that fit this criteria, Veatros seems the most likely candidate to me. Their site went offline in July, but before it went down, I know that they were looking for strategic partnerships for their search technology. One of their former employees, has his resume up on LinkedIn and I thought it was interesting to see him leave around the same time that a DivX acquisition would be taking place. According to his LinkedIn profile, he describes Veatros as having the fastest video search ever developed.

“Startup technology company spinning out of the University of Kansas with the fastest video search technology ever developed. Veatros technology can identify a video clip of as little as 2-3 seconds in length from a database of tens of thousands of hours in real-time.”

Susan Gauch is the owner of Veatros and she would certainly have the expertise to implement video search on Stage6. Veatros is really a side project for her, during her day job,she is an accomplished professor at the University of Kansas. Her entire career has been dedicated to researching and improving search. Her research has already been referenced in several video search related patents.

There’s no way for me to be sure if my guess is right, but if it’s not Veatros, then I would suspect that it would a company with similar characteristics. Irregardless of who the mysterious LLC turns out to be, improving their search is something that I’m glad to see DivX focusing on. Better content filters, mean a better experience for anyone visiting their site. If they can personalize video search, then the content on Stage6 will keep getting better.

Neither one of these acquisitions is a major move on DivX’s part, but it does give us some insight into part of DivX’s growth strategy. The video search investment makes sense from a tactical standpoint, but the DeviantArt purchase is far more interesting.

The passive nature of the investment raises the possibility that DivX is developing a venture capital arm to their business. They’ve already incubated Stage6 and with steady cash flow coming in each quarter, Divx is in a great position to make private investments where they see opportunities. It’s too early to know how aggressively DivX will pursue this aspect of their business, but if they continue to invest in emerging technology, things could certainly start to get interesting.

Update – It looks like my wild guess turned out to be right, but I may have been wrong about how they plan on implementing it. DivX released a press release this afternoon confirming that Veatros was in fact the company that they had acquired. In the press release, DivX says that their plan is to integrate the technology into their connected platform. Interestingly enough, they don’t mention Stage6 once in the release . . .

After Lycos filed their lawsuit against the trio, ChoiceStream (the company that created Blockbuster’s suggestion service) filed a separate lawsuit, to have the patents thrown out.

In their lawsuit against Lycos, they argue that the patents are invalid because of obviousness and prior art. Because Choicestream filed their own lawsuit in the Massachusetts’ court system, TiVo, Netflix and Blockbuster sought to have their case transferred there as well. I’m not familiar enough with the legal subtleties to know why Lycos originally opposed the motion, but with Lycos’ headquarters in MA, the judge found the request reasonable enough and granted the motion.

While this development in the case, is only a minor footnote in the larger dispute, the legal filing did contain more background on the case, as well as a few interesting side details.

It turns out that Choicestream may actually end up playing a pretty important role in how this gets resolved. In the legal filing the judge writes,“ChoiceStream has employees in Massachusetts who possess information relevant to this action, and Lycos has indicated that it ‘may need to take some discovery from ChoiceStream.’”

I haven’t read ChoiceStreams lawsuit against Lycos yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did end up owning some prior art. A year ago, they filed an application for their own recommendation patent, so it will be interesting to see what ends up coming out at trial.

It also appears MIT’s Media Lab could be called to give testimony. Part of their research was used to reject some of the original claims on one of Lycos’ patents. Believe it or not, they’ve actually been publishing research on “information filtering” since the late 80′s.

While it appears that this case is heading for trial, there is always the possibility of a settlement. Even though Lycos filed their lawsuit on Jan. 3, they didn’t actually serve TiVo, Netflix or Blockbuster until April 30th because they were engaged in “settlement discussions” with the companies. Since they now appear to be squabbling over who gets home court advantage, those talks have likely cooled off, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see either side at the bargaining table, especially if things start to look bad for them.

On top of the number of unique hits, their average visit was over 9 minutes long. To help put these numbers into perspective, the site was able to generate 3 times as many unique visitors as Google finance and was able to capture 4 times as long of an impression as About.com.

Considering that they charge $40, for all three reports, this looks like a good racket to be in on. What I can’t understand though, is why anyone would pay anything, when the credit agencies are required by law, to provide you with a copy of your report anyway. All you have to do is go to ANNUALcreditreport.com, input your information and in less than five minutes, you’ll have easy access to your credit history. No messy credit card charges, no auto renewal, just one free copy on demand, from each agency, once a year.

When you log into the site, you’ll have the choice of looking at any or all, of the three credit agencies. If you are considering taking out a loan or making a big purchase, I’d definitely check all three. If all you want to do, is keep an eye on your history, instead of paying FreeCreditReport $12.95 to give you unlimited access, set appointments on your calendar, to check a different agency, every four months. This enables you to keep a quasi-close eye on your credit, without having to pay Experian $150 a year, to make sure that they don’t screw up.

If you haven’t checked your credit score in a long time, I’d take advantage of the real free report and make sure that things still look OK. There is a lot of identity theft out there and it’s important to fix things quickly, so that it doesn’t threaten your access to capital in the future. There are also many interesting little details in the report, that make it worth checking out.

When I looked at my most recent report, it was really fascinating to look at all of the different addresses, of places where I’ve lived. In total, they are tracking 23 different locations for me, but I know that they are missing at least 2 places where I lived off the grid. Since I will be moving in 2 weeks, it should put my count at 26 shortly. Some people prefer to stay put in life, but my philosophy has always been that a rolling stone gathers no moss.

While AnnualCreditReport doesn’t get the sexy “free” domain name or the marketing budget of a company like Experian, it is a much smarter way to keep track of what businesses know about you. You may not be able to stop companies from reporting on your every move, but you at least have some rights for making sure they get the details right.

One trick that I learned to use, a long time ago, is to immediately hit *0 and sometimes it will take me to a live operator. Other times, it will disconnect my call and send me back to zero, so I always try this early on in the call and phone back, if I need to.

Mashing buttons into my phone, in order to get to the right department for a company, is a little annoying, but not as bad as the voice activated systems. Half the time, they can’t understand me and if you don’t use their keywords exactly, it’s easy to get reset back to the beginning of the menu. The other half of the time, the system will understand me just fine, but I don’t want to share my password and the last four digits of my social security number with other people in my vicinity.

As technology continues its march forward, this has been one area where consumers have been forced to take a step back. Luckily, this week’s winner of the site of the week can help consumers take back control over phone queue hell.

NoPhoneTrees.com is a website that is devoted to tracking telephone numbers of live people at various companies. I’m not sure the total count, but they have contact information on everything from the California DMV to the Xbox customer support line.

In order to test the site, I decided to use it for a few companies that I’m a customer at. While I was able to get a hold of live agents who could assist me, a few of the times, I ended up in the wrong department. While it’s nice to have a hot line directly into a company like Schwab, it doesn’t really help me all that much, if my account information isn’t available to the person I’m calling.

With a little bit of research, I could probably track down the numbers directly, but having so many in one localized place makes it more convenient to go back to on a regular basis. Congratulations to No Phone Trees for making consumer’s lives easier and on winning this week’s contest. If you’d like to nominate a web page for site of the week, feel free to send me an email. The nominations for next week’s contest are listed below, please vote in the sidebar.

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Web 2.0 Name Generator

Fun Distraction

I have to admit that the first time I heard about Profilactic, I was a bit skeptical. After all, I already belong to 50 different social networks, but only have time to interact with half of them. While I like checking out new sites, there are also a lot of things that I sign up for, but forget about later. I didn’t know it at the time, but having to manage so many different social networks, is actually what makes Profilactic so useful to begin with.

When Shawn Morton told me that the site was going to be a place where you could create a profile to show your friends, I thought he was crazy. I mean after all, just about every web 2.0 site has someplace for you to write a quick bio. In my case, I’ve even got a blog where people can find out all kinds of information about me. I couldn’t see a reason why I would need to create a profile on a web 2.0 site, just to showcase my other profiles.

What I didn’t understand about Smorty’s plan though, was that he wasn’t talking about a static profile in the traditional sense. The site is not about what you’ve done or accomplished, it’s about what you are doing now and who are today.

Before I saw Profilactic, I could only think of someone’s profile as a quick bio with some links. I never thought about a profile being multidimensional, but what Smorty built was a dynamic profile that could display all of your day to day social activity on one website.

While conceptually, I couldn’t understand the appeal, after seeing it in action, I now have a different appreciation for how powerful Profilactic’s tools really are. Everytime I Digg a story, it lets people know. When I upload a video to YouTube or fav a photo on Zooomr, I can include that in my feed. Whether you are a MySpace fan or a Facebook user, Profilactic can take your identities there and fuse it into a more cohesive picture of your interests. It’s like Digg Spy, only for all of your social networks.

For every story that I blog about, there are at least 10 that I miss. Everyday, I find great content, but don’t have the time to give it the attention it deserves. Sometimes I will comment, sometimes I’ll bookmark or Digg the site hoping to come back and write about it later. Sometimes, I just find strange tidbits that I’m not really sure where to file.

Normally, these stories would fall through the cracks, but Profilactic allows me to set up a feed, so that people who are interested, can see other parts of my online life. Not everybody will be interested in what I’m doing, but for those who care about what happens away from DavisFreeberg.com, you can now track the various sites and links that I come across online.

As a blogger, I’m probably more interested than the general population in expressing myself online, but I recognize that a lot of people would rather listen in the shadows than stand in the limelight. While I can appreciate being able to build a central profile to share with my friends, there are also a lot of people who have no interest in sharing information about themselves.

While on the surface, you wouldn’t think that Profilactic would appeal beyond the exhibitionist crowd, it’s ability to track other people’s social movement is actually very appealing to my voyeuristic side. The data feeds that you can create allow you access to information that would normally be impossible or pretty time consuming to get at. While I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing, if you want to cyberstalk someone, I know of few resources that offer more information about what someone is up to.

Intellectually, I know that nothing I do online is a secret, but sometimes it’s easy to forget how much information you really give up. Forget about needing someone’s social security number, with Profilactic, the user name is what’s most important. In an information age, this is both exciting and terrifying. On one hand, I could see this being very useful for keeping tabs on certain key people or even as a social network filter for certain topics or companies that I am interested in.

On another hand though, I’m not sure how comfortable I would be, if someone I didn’t get along with, was using it to track me. While I like having the ability to watch other people’s social activity, when it comes to actually being watched, I feel differently about it. It’s not fair to have a double standard, but it’s part of my human nature I guess.

Even though all of the data that Profilactic uses is public, I’m not sure that I’d want an ex-girlfriend to be able to watch all of my social activity or see that I had set up an account on HotorNot.com. People already freaked out when we saw tools introduced, that could notify you if your MySpace crushes became single. Profilactic can take this to a new level.

If you actually think about the amount of information that you give away online, it’s a little bit scary. If I upload a photo to Zooomr and geotag it, someone will know the date, time and location of where I was when I took the photo. If I bookmark a recipe, then it would be easy to guess about what I’m having for dinner and whether it’s taco night with the guys or a romantic dinner. While most of this information is pretty harmless, in the context of a bad relationship, it could be a little awkward.

It took me a while to reconcile the part of me that sees Profilactic as an excellent data mining tool with the part of me that is concerned about it being a not so good date mining tool. Eventually though, I realized that all of this information is already out there and that part of being in a social community, means that for better or worse, people get to see what you are doing.

If I’m not comfortable with Profilactic, than I shouldn’t be anymore comfortable with Digg, Del.icio.us or Pandora, but all of these sites are valuable resources and sometimes sharing what I’m doing is the best part. When you combine these various web 2.0 services with Profilactic’s ability to filter and aggregate this activity, you can get a much more comprehensive look at someone’s personality. If I have a problem with something showing up there, than I probably shouldn’t have dugg some drunk stripper orgy story to begin with.

At the end of the day, Profilactic’s technology may be a little unnerving, but only because it shatters the false illusion that you actually have privacy and anonymity to begin with. There is a saying that if you can’t beat them, join them and in this case, I’d rather take advantage of the social networks than to hide from them. If Profilactic can make finding and sorting this information easier, than I am a fan, even if I do end up embarrassing myself once in a while.

This week’s winner of this site of the week contest was Indeed.com. Indeed is your typical job search engine, except on human growth hormones. Instead of of restricting their search to one job site, they aggregate many different jobs listings into one easy to use interface. This can be helpful in many ways.

If you are looking for a highly specific position, you can put in certain skills or keywords that describe what you are looking for and instead of focusing on one set of search results, you can compare a more diversified pool of options. I learned long ago, that different businesses react to technology in their own unique ways. Some businesses would rather advertise in the paper than on Monster.com. As a job searcher though, why pick one site, if you don’t have too?

I also liked Indeed.com for the data mining features it provides me as a blogger. There have been plenty of business decisions leaked through careless job listings and it’s something I check regularly on many of the companies I follow more closely.

A quick look at the results for TiVo, reveals that they have a partnership with Solectron and that they are looking for more people in their call center. I’m not exactly sure how their relationship with Solectron works, but I did think that this was interesting, even if it wasn’t front page news.

One downside to Indeed.com is that I did not see any Craigslist listings on their engine. I’m not sure if this is related to licensing agreements or their business model, but the more sites that they can include, the better the results will be for job searchers. A lot of people think that content is king, but when there is so much information out there, sometimes it’s the companies that can make sense of it all, that succeed.

Congratulations to Indeed.com for winning this week’s site of the week contest. If you know of a good site, feel free to contact me and I will be happy to consider it for the pool of nominations. The nominees for next week’s award are listed below, you can vote in the sidebar.

Darwin Awards

Stair Fall (h/t to TDavid)

Cat With Bow Golf

I love the creative commons license because it allows me to use other people’s photos by giving them attribution for the work. The photo I used above for example, was originally taken by Grant Mitchell on Flickr. Some artists would prefer to lock down their content, but if someone wants to use Mitchell’s photo’s, he doesn’t mind sharing his content with the rest of the community.

All of my own photos have also been licensed under creative commons. Some artists might worry that other people will use their photos for free, but my opinion has always been, that there isn’t much value to my photos anyway, if other people don’t have an opportunity to see them to begin with. If someone wanted to use one of my photos in a marketing campaign, I’d probably request some type of payment, but if someone wants to share one of my photos with a larger audience, I certainly wouldn’t want to stop them from presenting my work.

Flickr also has a creative commons filter that you can use to find photos, but by default, their search field includes a lot of all rights reserved photos and it’s frustrating when you find a great photo, but someone doesn’t feel comfortable letting you use it.

Another perk of using Every Stock Photo, instead of Flickr directly, is that you can search more than just one service, for photos that people are willing to share. Currently, the site indexes over a million creative common photos, from a number of different sites.

Every Stock Photo is a great resource, but there are a few ways that they could improve the site. I’d like to see them add more sources to their filter. Right now the service relies pretty heavily on Flickr, but looking through the search results, I didn’t see any hits from Photobucket, Zooomr or Webshots. Because Flickr already offers their own creative commons content search, by adding extra sites, it would significantly enhance the value proposition of using Every Stock Photo’s portal instead.

The site also doesn’t offer much in the way of sorting photos. One of the cool things that you can do on Zooomr is sort photos by how awesome they are. Zooomr and Flickr both use an algorithm to figure out which photos are good and which ones are junk, but Every Stock Photo doesn’t seem to take interestingness into account. This makes it harder to find the best photos on the site, unless someone has specifically tagged the photo for the term that you are looking for.

Overall though, the positives of the site, more than make up for the negatives. There are a lot of people out there willing to share their photos with the rest of the world, but sometimes finding people open to sharing, can be more difficult than it’s worth. Every Stock Photo, helps you get around this problem by making sure that every photo you see, has already been approved for people to use on their own sites.

Congratulation to Every Stock Photo for winning this week’s site of the week contest. The nominations for next week’s site are listed below, you can vote in the sidebar. If you know of any good sites that should be considered for nomination, feel free to contact me and I’ll be happy to check them out.

Area Code Database

Queendom: Land Of Tests

Bootleg Subtitles

Last year, I signed up for Google’s personalized search program and after a year using the program, I’ve got to give it mixed results. This program has been a little bit controversial, because it allows Google to tie your search results to a unique profile.

Overall though, I don’t tend to worry too much about Google abusing this power and having access to filtered personalized search results, along with trend analysis on my queries, more than makes up for the small piece of my privacy that I have to give up.

In looking through my search stats, it wasn’t surprising to see TiVo and Netflix as my top two most requested results, but I was shocked to realize that I’ve searched Google over 22,000 times, in just the last year alone. The bulk of these searches were made during prime time television hours, which I found to be a little bit surprising. I’m not sure what it can tell me about my internet usage, but with 15,000 of my search queries coming during prime time hours, it highlights how much of an impact TiVo and the internet have had, on my television watching.

While Google’s personalization technology has largely improved my search experience, there is still quite a bit of room for improvement.

What I like about Google’s recommendations, is that it learns which sites I have a bias towards and will rerank my search results, according to my own personality. The downside to Google’s personalization program is that there is no way to tell Google, when they get a search woefully wrong.

The more powerful that Google has become, the more that people have tried to game the system. Whether it’s blackhat SEO tricks or coordinated Google bomb campaigns, it’s important to remember that Google’s results aren’t always unbiased. They can give a higher weighting to sites that you have already been to, but there is no way to tell them when a site is really search spam.

There are a lot of times that I am searching and an About.com article will pop up near the top. Now I know some people like the site, but I think About.com has to be one of the most worthless places on the net to find information. It is an ad factory that is highly dependent on Google for their profits. Google should give me a nuclear button that I can hit, that would permanetely ban About.com listings from any of my future search results. If enough users started banning a site, they could adjust their alogrithm to take into account the liklihood, that the result was really search spam.

Google’s About.com results are so bad, that someone actually took the time to write a Greasemonkey script, that will strip out the About.com results from Google, at the browser level. While this does offer me a way to remove About.com from my internet life, it’s really not a mass market solution and it doesn’t solve the countless other lame search results, that pollute what you’re really looking for.

I’m glad that Google is out there innovating and I see a lot of positive benefits to using their recommendation engine, but Google needs to do a better job of harnessing the power of their readers, to help make our search results even more relevant. Giving users the ability to blacklist a site from Google would be extreme, but with the SEO firms able to automate massive amounts of fake content, it is going to take the help of the masses, if Google wants to take control back.

The Hype Machine is one of the more controversial picks to win site of the week because, one of the many things that the site lets you do, is search and listen to pirated music on the internet. Hype Machine takes the position that they aren’t pirating themselves because they do not provide downloads to listeners, but they are rather just pointing streaming links to .mp3′s that other bloggers have loaded onto the internet.

Regardless of whatever ethically grey issues people have with the site, the Hype Machine is a great tool for finding new music and they really do encourage their listeners to support the bands by buying their music, if they like it. In addition to being able to stream many songs, you can also download an mp3 a crappy DRM infected file from either Amazon or iTunes, directly from the site. If you aren’t willing to pay for a DRM file, then the Hype Machine also lists upcoming performances for each band, so that you can support your favorite bands by seeing them live.

Hype Machine is a lot like TechMeme, only for .mp3s. They have a pretty extensive list of bloggers that regularly blog .mp3 files and whenever one of the bloggers adds a song, it automatically gets added to the front page of their site. Unlike Techmeme though, the hype machine actually tries to strip out the duplicate links to try and keep the site clean.

One bad part about the Hype Machine is that they only have .mp3′s and don’t do podcasts. Most people using the site are probably looking for music to begin with, but it would be neat to be able to see which podcasts were being talked about. It would help listeners better figure out which ones are worth taking the time to listen to and which ones we should take a pass on. There are of course other sites that specialize in podcasts, but personally, it’s a feature that I think that the Hype Machine should have.

Getting access to a bunch of great songs is cool, but one of my favorite parts of the Hype Machine is that they let you monitor the music by creating RSS feeds for bands or songs that you are looking for. This is a great tool for finding b-sides, covers or new music by your favorite artists. It also helps to serve as a good reminder to keep coming back and checking out the new stuff that shows up.

Congratulations to the Hype Machine on winning this shortened site of the week contest. The nominies for this week’s contest are listed below. You can vote in the sidebar. Voting will close on Friday morning, so get you votes in early. If you have a site you’d like to nominate for the site of the week, send me an email to Davis AT davis freeberg . com and it will be considered for nomination.

The Freesound Project

All Star Skate Park

Ratepoint

Ever since Google first introduced their news service, I have been hooked. There have been very few days where I have not visited their site. It is fantastic technology. Over the years, they’ve added new sources, introduced news alerts and have added personalization options, but the entire time it has remained ad free.

I’ve always read a lot of papers. I haven’t read all many most of the classic books, but even when I was in high school, I was a voracious reader of the press. I’m not sure why there was the appeal, but current events fascinated me and the internet has only added to that.

It used to be a lot harder to pay attention to specific things, but over time, tracking and personalizing news has only gotten easier and easier. Google News has been a big part of this. It’s multi-dimensional approach to the news, offers unique insights into current events and as far as searching mainstream news goes, it offers the best results.

I use Google news every several many times a day to track various companies and interests. Even though, I love the site, it does have one weakness, the minute the AP publishes anything, it becomes impossible to determine fresh content from syndication. During these news tornado onslaughts, I pretty much just give up on trying to use Google and go back to my other sources. Fortunately though, it appears that Google may have finally come up with a way to fix this problem.

When I logged into Google news tonight, I was treated with a nice treat. They have instituted filtering options that lets you list AP coverage as as one item, instead of 300 different publications. This is going to be very useful and I think it’s a great development. I’m also hoping that it will help to clean up some of the press release spam. I am not sure that other papers will like it, because I’m sure that they will lose some hits from the listings, but it does help to distinguish one voice from another in their news results and it should allow smaller publications a better chance to be heard over the din of the professional news media.

It’s bad enough not having that special someone in your life, but having to spend an actual holiday being reminded that your social life is a complete and utter disaster, is enough to drive anyone into a druken frenzy of chocolate gorging by the end of the day.

If you do happen to be dating someone though, it doesn’t make the day much better. Because Valentine’s Day is the holiday of love, it’s pretty much a mandatory event (or at least it is, if you plan on spending President’s day with your sweetheart ) Because businesses know that they’ve got you caught in a love trap, they take full advantage of the situation by extracting as much money from your pocket as they can. On any day of the year, you can go into a florist and pick up a dozen roses for $12, but on this one day, singles are helpless against the profit gouging from the florist cartels and grudgingly pay whatever the market demands, if that’s what it takes to please their lovebird.

Between the high prices and the overall misery that Valentine’s day causes, it would be easy enough for me to just write the whole day off and ignore it, but that’s not really my style. With so many unhappy people trying to find love and with so many people willing to pay so much to fill that void, I’d rather use the day as an opportunity to figure how to cash in on all that grief.

There are a couple of ways that one could try and make a play on Valentine’s day. It would be easy enough to try and invest in a florist and wait for them to report results from their busiest day of the year or you could try buying a chocolate company and use the proceeds from your stock sales to help offset the $50 gouging you are going to take when you buy your spouse a box of chocolates today, but legendary investor Peter Lynch always said that it’s safest to invest in what you know and for me that means internet dating. Online dating services, as one would expect are raking in the dough. Some are better then others, so in the interest of providing my readers with “hands on” investment analysis, it would only make sense for me to do a little “due diligence” to offer my personal insights on the best opportunities in the online dating world.

Match.com – There are essentially two ways to build an internet dating service. You can structure your site to appeal to a targeted niche audience and build from there or you can keep your site as general as possible and try to build the largest dating pool for customers to dip into. When it comes to Match.com, they are the big gorrilla in the dating world and this critical mass continues to propel the company forward. With more listings then any other service, their success continues to drive the company forward and last quarter, the company reported that not only were listings up by 7%, but that revenue was also up 17%. Investors can’t make a direct play on Match.com because it’s owned by IAC/Interactive Corp (IACI), but even beyond Match.com, I like what the company is doing and with Barry Diller being wiling to “buy anything that walks” investors should be looking at IAC more like a VC fund then a diversified internet company. With IAC trading at slightly less than 1.5 times their book, there may be quite a bit of value locked up inside of the company, even if Match only plays a small role.

Consumating – I first came across Consumating a year ago when CNET bought the company for an undisclosed amount. I’ve never had much luck actually dating off of the site, but the community makes looking for a date a lot of fun. The site uses a number of advanced social tools to encourage communication with other members and the community they’ve built is a blast to be part of. People love to use Consumating to play games and there are a constant stream of “Consumeetings” where you can meet people in a low pressure environment. From an investing standpoint though, Consumating isn’t quite ready for prime time just yet. While good for consumers, the lack of monthly fees makes this internet dating play less then ideal for those trying to capitalize on the lack of love in the world. I can understand why CNET would want to build their community out first before tyring to monetize it, but even once the community grows, Consumating isn’t going to be an easy site to monetize. With $2.5 billion in retained losses, CNet is an attractive takeover target right now, but between their widely publicized issues with stock option back dating and questions about them bleeding traffic, make this is one love story that I’m not sure that I want to be part of.

Yahoo! – Yahoo! (YHOO) has been offering personals on their site for years, but anyone who has ever tried to actually meet someone through the service knows how bad Yahoo! really is at finding love. The ads are poorly written, the layout is confusing and searching for the right match is more work then it’s worth. Fortunately, for Yahoo! though, the company does have a dating gem in their portfolio. When most people think of Flickr, they think of photo sharing site, but for single people who are interested in meeting the sensitive artist type, there is no better place to find love on the net then through Flickr. With regular community organized meet ups and plenty of social tools built into the site, there are a lot of Flickr users who take advantage of the passive nature of comments and faves to do a little flirting on the site. Yahoo! isn’t necessarily making a boatload of cash from the activity of course, but it’s still a nice compliment to what they do overall. The p/e on their stock makes the company look a little expensive right now, but given all the doom and gloom about the company and with their stock price down about 6% from where it was trading at last Valentine’s day, there may be an upside if Yahoo! can turn things around and tap into the Google love they’ve been missing out on for the last few years.

Spark Networks – Spark Networks (LOV) is one of the few pure plays on the internet dating scene that an investor can make. With a market cap of only $188 million, this is a high risk/high reward type of stock. The company runs a number of international dating sites, but their flagship brands are American Singles and Jdate. In the last quarter Jdate had about 75,000 paying customers and brought in revenue of $7.2 million. For all of 2006, JDate did $28.3 million in revenue which was up 9% from the prior year. When you look at American Singles, the numbers aren’t quite as strong. For the fourth quarter they brought in $4.7 million, which was down about 30% from the same quarter a year prior and had about 68,000 customers at the end of the year. In addition to American Singles and Jdate.com, the company also has another 92,000 customers that belong to other various sites in their portfolio. While I like the pure play exposure, the international angle and the small market cap, Spark Networks may be a little too high risk for my blood. In looking at the numbers it’s hard to tell whether this is a growth or a value play and without seeing a clear indication that the business is back on track, investing in their stock may be a bit like going out on a blind date, you’re never quite sure what to expect. If the company can reignite their subscriber growth, there could be love in the air, but without seeing more significant growth, I don’t feel any sparks when I look at this stock.

PlanetOut – PlanetOut (LGBT) is really more of a publishing company then a dating portal, but no internet dating list would be complete without a way for my friends in San Francisco to invest. While not really my cup of tea, the site provides a place for people from alternative lifestyles to meet. In looking at the financials on the company, there isn’t really a whole lot to like. The stock has an $80 million market cap, so in order to invest you need to be comfortable with penny stocks. Over the last year, the company has seen their gross margins absolutely whacked, SG&A has continued to climb and is now causing the company to bleed money, and unlike many of the other internet dating sites, this company is saddled with a healthy amount of debt for their size. If PlanetOut were to cut their staff by 50% or boost their subscribers by 100%, then I could get on board this stock, but given their current status, there isn’t much room in my own portfolio for this type of alternative investment.

Lavalife – Of all the ads that I see for internet dating sites, Lavalife is the best. They are clean, entertaining and unlike all the big breasted ads for True.com, they attract a core audience that tilt the demographics into my favor. Lavalife is owned by a company named Vertrue (VTRU) and while they boost a healthy 3.1 million paying subscribers, other parts of the business are under pressure right now. The company makes up the lionshare of their revenue from marketing income and with recently things have gotten really tough. Nonetheless, with a current p/e around 19 and a forward p/e of less then 15, this stock is poised to make a run. If Verture can continue to grow their dating business and are able to shore up their marketing revenues, this stock should be love at first sight for investors getting in now. While there is still a healthy degree of risk to investing in a company like Vertrue, of all the dating sites profiled, they appear to have the best risk/reward equation for finding true love in my own portfolio.

It’s easy to get upset about not having a date tonight or bothered by the high cost of having take a girlfriend out, but if you look at Valentine’s day from a capitalist point of view, plenty of profit opportunities exist. While the Beatles are famous for saying that you can’t buy me love, I think it’s still worth giving it a shot.

Patent 6775664 was originally filed on Oct. 22, 2001 and describes a search method that uses a user feedback system to provide “collaborative feedback data for integration with content profile data in the operation of the collaborative/content-based filter.”

Patent 6308175 was filed on Nov. 19th, 1998 and according to the patent, it covers technology whose “filter system compares received informons to the individual user’s query profile data, combined with collaborative data, and ranks, in order of value, informons found to be relevant. The system maintains the ranked informons in a stored list from which the individual user can select any listed informon for consideration.”

Whether Lycos is trolling for patent royalties or whether they feel that they have a legitmate claim on their hands is really irrelevant. The last thing that Blockbuster, Netflix or TiVo needed was another patent lawsuit. TiVo is currently embroiled in a high profile lawsuit against Echostar and faces a countersuit that has yet to go to trial. Meanwhile, Netflix has sued Blockbuster over violations to their patent on online renting and in turn Blockbuster has countersued claiming anti-trust violations on Netflix’s part. Interestingly enough, Blockbuster recently filed two patent applications themselves, that seem to cover their business model for the total access program.

Why Lycos waited this long before trying to enforce their patent remains unclear, but they are seeking an injunction to force all three companies from being able to offer suggestions to their customers.

Suggestive search is a key technology for all three companies. In the case of TiVo, it’s a unique feature that other DVR providers can’t offer, but in the case of Blockbuster and Netflix, their use of suggestions can save them millions of dollars by recommending movies that utilize low cost archive content over the top new releases. If Lycos is able to convince a jury that they own the rights to this technology, it will have a chilling effect on the technology industry. Many web 2.0 companies use suggestive search to improve their user’s experience and if Lycos establishes patent protection for this popular consumer feature, it will make it even more difficult for consumers to be able to find personalized content that is of interest to them. Whether Blockbuster, Netflix and TiVo chooses to fight this battle on behalf of the rest of the tech industry, or whether they roll over and settle the lawsuit remains to be seen, but at such a crucial stage in their history, dealing with another patent lawsuit will be a costly distraction and should cost them plenty of time and money.

Interestingly enough, I’ve found that the blogosphere also has it’s own unique set of indicators. Staying up to date on all the recent news may seem like a tough job, but by using various aggregators, it’s really not all that hard to track whats going on in the blog world.

As far as future indicators go, I’ve found Digg to be my best sources for breaking news. The blogosphere is large, it’s diverse and it’s sheer volume can make it impossible to track. Because it depends on citizen participation, you never know which post will be breaking news and which one will be another story about that damn Penguin movie.

Digg is great because people naturally submit their stories to the site and if it starts to get traction, then you know that you’ve got breaking news on your hands. If you want to know what the next scandal in the blogs will be, then all you have to do is go to Diggs upcoming stories and look for something taking off fast. Sure enough within 24 hours that story will be pretty hot. The problem with Digg though, is that because they reward breaking news over quality reporting, they get a lot of stories wrong.

For gettng a better snapshot of what’s currently happening in the blogs, I turn to Tech Memeorandum. Techmeme has great technology that can tell which stories are important by looking at the number of blogs that are linking to a particular source. Because it depends upon several bloggers to find something of interest, it’s not always going to be the first to a story, but because it leverages authoritative opinions, you get a better sanitized news filter both in terms of quality and accuracy.

When I look for trailing indicators, my first stop is Google news. By the time the mainstream media has picked up on a story you pretty much know that it’s important. Because journalists can dedicate greater resources to uncovering details, you also get a better picture of what’s really happened. In many ways Google news is very similar to Techmeme except that they only include the major press and there isn’t always a lot of variety from the coverage of one story to another, especially once the AP gets ahold of a story.

Overall, as a certified news junkie, I find all three of the sources to be an invaluable resource for tracking what goes on in the digital world. While each site serves a specific niche in how I use it, all of the sites still offer functionality beyond their core strength. Digg has a top stories tag that gives a nice snapshot of what stories were the hottest over the past week, Techmeme just launched a really cool new feature called, Techmeme river that keeps track of the past stories that hit it’s main page, and even in the case of Google news, it’s search feature is very good at finding breaking stories on specific topic, if you are actively looking for them. Despite the additonal functionality however, I’m glad that each site has it’s own unique strength that it brings to the blog world and by better understanding these strengths you can make better use of these tools to find the information that you are looking for.

If you ask Ms. Dewey about Blockbuster video, at one point she must have been burned by late fees because she makes it pretty clear that she’s no fan. Her response is hilarious and is heavily bleeped out, so watch out because it’s not safe for work unless you want everyone in your office thinking that you’re watching Matt Damon on the Jimmy Kimmel show.

The game itself wasn’t really made as much for players to goof off with, but is actually a research tool for Google. I’m not sure how exactly they are filtering the results, but the idea is that if people always identify certain photos with certain things then it will improve the ranking on that image. I’ve played the game a few times and have had various results with it. My first partner only seemed to want to make one tag while I started tagging as fast as I could. I figure that if I list ten items it’s a lot easier to find a match if my partner lists ten items as well, but this guy must have thought that he only got one guess and I just couldn’t come up with it in the 90 second time limit.

The second time I played I must have gotten someone who thinks very differently then me because no matter what I put down, it was only the more obscure terms that would match. For example, there was a photo of a group of guys standing around smoking. I tagged people, guys and smoking, dudes, sunglasses, gang, group, etc. but the tag that matched up was wife beater because one of the guys had a tank top on. The entire game itself really makes me think about how I use language and how search is restricted by the searchers own language barriers. Words can be tricky things and even the most well read individuals can still have trouble coming up with the most accurate description of something. In the case of Google’s image labeler, I think that it will help results, but I don’t know that accuracy will be the final result. Instead I think that it will have a bias so that the most popular tags gets associated with the right photos and not necessarily the most accurate ones. When I saw a photo of the Aurora Borealis come up, I tagged it such, but it was really northern lights that my partner and I agreed upon. On one hand because we agreed, maybe northern lights is a more refined search, but Aurora Borealis seems like a more accurate description to me. Nontheless, the game will definetely improve Google’s image search by having a human look over the photo and recognize things that their search tools just can’t. In the end it’s a great way to kill time and it’s helping to improve the Google search results.