Archive for category Search

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

Jul 2

Posted by Davis in Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Search, Site Of The Week, Technology, TiVo, Web 2.0 | Comments off

When I Grow Up I Want To Enter A Demolition Derby

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

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

May 22

Posted by Davis in Search, Site Of The Week, Technology | Comments off

Watch Out For The PaparazziThis week’s winner of the site of the week contest was Every Stock Photo. Every Stock Photo is a site that is especially helpful if you happen to be a blogger, because it allows you to search Flickr, StockXchange and other photo sharing sites, for images that are available under the creative commons license.

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

My Recommendation To Google – Let Users Ban Sites From Personal Search Results

May 18

Posted by Davis in Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Marketing, Netflix, Search, Spam, Technology, TiVo, TV | Comments off

Mr. T Working at GoogleOver the last few years, Google has become essential to how I surf the web. Whether it’s their minimalistic advertising or their superior search results, Google has become a daily staple in my internet diet.

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.

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Weekend

May 1

Posted by Davis in Search, Site Of The Week, Technology, Web 2.0 | Comments off

This week’s site of the week(end) contest was really close, but in the end the Hype Machine ended up winning the honor, despite a last ditch write in campaign to try and give Viva Radio the spot ;)

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

Google’s News Search Gets Smarter

Apr 30

Posted by Davis in Media, Search, Technology | Comments off

Google Gets Smarter At FilteringGoogle Gets Smarter At Filtering Hosted on Zooomr

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.

Because It’s Better To Have Loved And Not Lost Then To Have Loved At All

Feb 14

Posted by Davis in Search, Technology, Web 2.0 | 8 Comments

People always have pretty mixed feelings when it comes to Valentine’s day. If you happen to be married and/or in love, then it’s a great opportunity to stop and appreciate your significant other for a day, but if you happen to be one of the estimated 27 million households living by yourself, then Valentine’s day is the dumps.

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.

Lycos Sues TiVo, Netflix & Blockbuster Over Personalized Search

Jan 12

Posted by Davis in Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Netflix, Search, Technology, TiVo | 2 Comments

The Mercury News is reporting that on January 3rd, Lycos filed a patent lawsuit against TiVo, Netflix and Blockbuster over their use of recommendation technology. The article doesn’t give the exact patents that are alleged to be violated, but a quick scan of Lycos’ patent filings shows patents 6775664 and 6308175 as the most likely canidates.

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.

Tracking The Past, Present And Future Of The Blogosphere

Dec 11

Posted by Davis in Search, Technology, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments

One of the things that Economists love to follow are economic indicators. There are basically three forms of indicators that people use to help determine what is happening in the economy. Past, present and future. Each one plays an important role in helping Economists know what’s going to happen, what’s happening and what really happened in the economy.

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.

Ms Dewey No Fan Of Rental Bling

Dec 8

Posted by Davis in Search | Comments off

Steve Bass has a funny post out highlighting the response you get if you put the term Blockbuster Video into the web search engine Ms. Dewey. The engine gives smart alec video responses based upon the terms you type in and Blockbuster Video is no exception. It also uses a lot of generic responses for search terms it doesn’t know, but there are plenty of keywords that trigger unique responses. The whole thing is a little too gimmicky for me to use as a fulltime search engine, but it’s entertaining nonetheless and reminds me a lot of the Stewie Live website, in the way that certain easter egg responses are coded into the keywords. (try typing in Ray Gun for a good example :) )

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.

Google’s Image Labeler Helps To Refine Image Search

Sep 3

Posted by Davis in Search | Comments off

One of my favorite scenes in Ghostbuster’s, is where Bill Murray is interviewing a really hot undergrad for an ESP test and even though she gets all of the answers wrong she still gets rewarded. Meanwhile some poor guy gets electrocuted every time he answers. That’s almost how I feel about Google’s new image labeler game. Basically, Google matches you up with a random person and then shows you images that are contained within their search results. Both players start tagging the photo as fast as they can until you both end up matching a tag. Once my tag matches my partners tag, then you go on to the next photo. It’s a lot of fun, but frustrating and humbling to say the least. Search Engine Watch has a write up on the service and asks if this game will really be a threat to Flickr. I think that this does start to poach a bit on Flickr’s turf, but at the same time it’s really only an image refining tool and doesn’t offer the social aspects that Flickr does.

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.