Google Blends Desktop And Mobile Ads. How a 19-Year-Old Earned $5 Million to Revolutionize Search. Where might you want to search that Google can't reach? The social slice of the Web, plus everything that an individual has password-protected hovering in the cloud, has been largely off-limits to traditional search engines. Well, until an Israeli high-school graduate took a hiatus from Army duty to spend three months at Y Combinator, bombed on a few projects, and then struck gold in his last 48 hours at the start-up incubator. Daniel Gross, along with co-founder Robby Walker, 27, created Greplin, a user-authorized search that can access Facebook, Twitter, Google Documents, Salesforce, and more. The site launched in late February. Inc.com's Christine Lagorio spoke with Gross, age 19, about his struggles, raising nearly $5 million in investment after just six months at work, and his unique lack of college experience.
Tell me how Greplin came about. I'm originally from Israel. In my three months there, I built several things, none of which caught on. I got a weird reaction. Search Engine Land: Must Read News About Search Marketing & Search Engines. Google Revamps Its Search Engine to Fight Cheaters. Sortfix tries a different approach to improving search – suggesting better search terms. It’s interesting that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington kicked off a debate today about the current problems with search.
Because it’s clear that while few players feel able to take on the might of Google, there remaina a few startups out there trying to attack the problem from different angles. One of them is Israeli startup SortFix, who I met on a recent trip to Tel Aviv in Israel (more on that soon). Previously, SortFix tried concentrating its search functionality directly through its website and through its iPad app. But now SortFix has created a FireFox extension for Google which makes use of SortFix’s algorithms to generate suggested words to improve your search. It’s still in beta but you can try it here. The effect is like having a smarter person sitting over your shoulder saying “hey, if you add this extra word to the search terms you may get what you want”. These suggestions can be added in or taken away to improve the results. SeeqPod Founder Returns With Another Search Startup, This Time For Mobile Apps. Kasian Franks, an engineer and researcher mostly known for being the technical founder of music search venture SeeqPod (more about its tumultuous history here), is back with another startup in the search space.
This time, he’s set his sights on the world of mobile applications – obviously quite the booming space. Meet Mimvi, which aims to combine its proprietary search, recommendation and personalization technology and thus enable consumers to rapidly discover mobile apps and content across all devices and platforms. The Mimvi website allows you to search for apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry as well as web applications. Enter a keyword, e.g. eBay or fart, and you’ll get a list of relevant search results you can download per platform.
In the future, Mimvi will also return results for iPad, Windows Mobile and Nokia applications and even for the upcoming Chrome Web Store. Only interested in one platform? Mimvi also operates dedicated vertical search engines for them, e.g. CloudMagic Brings Fast Search-As-You-Type Functionality To Gmail, Google Apps. While Google is testing search results that update as you type on its own, startup CloudMagic is bringing that functionality to Gmail and Google Apps – and other cloud-based services in the near future – by means of a Firefox and Chrome browser extension. Installing the extension results in an extra search box in your Gmail interface that allows you to rapidly search for anything in your inbox, with results updating as you type and the ability to preview messages from a thread in a tab or open entire conversations with a single click.
If you’re a Gmail power user like I am, you need to hear no more to realize how useful that functionality is. It’s entirely free, so nothing should stop you from installing either (account credentials are stored locally, and not on CloudMagic’s servers). This basically means no longer having to open another tab to search for e.g. a telephone number in Gmail I’d like to pass on to someone else by email. Magic? Nah. SpeakerText | Home. SpeakerText Crowdsources Micro-Tasks To Automate Video Transcripts (100 Beta Invites) One of the big problems with video on the Web is that other than the title, description and some meta tags, it is mostly invisible to Google and other search engines.
One way to make video more SEO-friendly is to add transcriptions, but that can get expensive. An angel-funded startup called SpeakerText is (re)launching today with a very clever way to automate the transcription process and attach the full transcript as part of the video player in a drop down window. You can see an example of how this works below. And if you publish a lot of videos and want to try it out yourself, we have 100 beta invites (use the code: techcrunch). Once a video is transcribed, it appears in a collapsible window below each player.
Not only is all the text visible to search engines, and thus should help drive more search traffic to individual videos, but the text is all time-stamped. So you can click on any sentence and it will jump to that point in the video. Yahoo Search Assist Gets More Local, But Google Gets It Right. As you type into a search box on Yahoo or Google, a list of suggested keywords pops down below to help you complete your search faster. Today, Yahoo turned on a local component to its keyword autocomplete feature. The search assist now serves up different keywords based on your location. So if you type in “Santa” in northern California, “santa clara county” might be the first suggestion, but if you type it in southern California, “santa barbara” might be first. Location is often a very relevant way to filter search, so this makes Yahoo’s search assist smarter. But, as with many things Yahoo, it is lagging behind Google with this feature. Google’s search assist also factors in your location.
I’ve been trying a few sample local searches, and in every case, it takes Google fewer characters to come up with the right answer. I tried the same test with various other keywords. Preempting Search. This post was written by Alex Rampell, the CEO of TrialPay. Rampell is a regular contributor to TechCrunch – see his previous guest posts here.
Google: 65.8% Yahoo: 17.1% Microsoft: 11% Ask: 3.8% AOL: 2.3% (Search Engine Market Share, source: Comscore, August 2010) Outside of a tectonic shift in search results/quality – think how offering 100x more email storage encouraged people to switch webmail companies back in 2004 — people are not going to ditch Google as their primary search engine. And Google isn’t taking any chances – by paying Dell $1B for their search toolbar to be pre-installed on new Dell PCs, or pushing Android (who’s the default search engine?) For Google’s enemies, the best way of hurting the search goliath is not to build a better search engine, but rather to give people a reason to stop searching for a wide class of goods and services by preempting search on Google.
What can preempt Google search — or at least the money-making parts of it? Vertical Search. Search. Explore. Experience – Apture. Apture Highlights Brings Instantaneous Search To Any Web Page. Apture, the startup that lets online publishers enhance content with rich media pop-ups from a variety of sources based on the context of linked words and terms, is launching a nifty new plug-in today that brings instantaneous search to content on the web.
Called ‘Apture Highlights,’ the browser extension aims to plug the “search leak” that the company says is taking place with content on the web. Apture highlights a search leak as when a users is reading content, wants more information about a keyword or phrase and then opens another browser tab to search for the information on Google, Bing or Yahoo. The downside for the content publisher is that the user disengages with the actual content by leaving the page. Apture Highlights allows you to highlight any word or phrase on a page and instantly bring up search results in a window.
The startup brings results from 60-plus sources including YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google and more for extra context around content. Is Search Now A Strategic Industry in China? Editor’s note: This is a guest post penned by Michael Cole, Managing Director of RightSite.asia, China’s largest online marketplace for commercial and industrial real estate. Cole has also successfully launched, grown and profitably exited from media ventures in China. After a modest amount of time observing China’s economy it becomes clear that the government likes to arrange organized competition in industries it considers strategic.
Thus the country gets three major airlines—China Eastern, China Southern and Air China—as well as three major mobile phone networks in China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom. Now, with the recent announcement of two major new search engine companies, it appears that search is joining transportation, phone networks and Internet service providers as a strategic industry to be managed more directly by the government. And maybe China will soon have three search giants to match up with its telephone and airline triplets. Welcome to Infoaxe! Infoaxe Records Your Browsing Sessions, Lets You Search Your Web History. Infoaxe is coming out of stealth mode today with (yet another) alternative search engine / social bookmarking tool, focused on indexing your own browsing history rather than the entire web or what you proactively indicate is important to remember for later.
Installing the infoaxe toolbar (works with IE and Firefox) basically enables users to ‘record’ public web browsing sessions with just one mouse click, after which they can search through their personal history from the toolbar itself or the infoaxe website. Also, the tool generates additional search results based on your ‘web memory’ alongside what you find on the web using traditional search engines (see demo video below to see it in action), and renders your delicious bookmarks searchable by sucking them into the indexed data. Next to the twist on search, infoaxe also allows you to tag and share web pages, essentially competing directly against delicious, ma.gnolia and other social bookmarking services.
OneRiot.com - Realtime Search for the Realtime Web. A few weeks ago, a small team from @WalmartLabs visited the offices of OneRiot in beautiful Boulder, Colorado. OneRiot has developed some pretty nifty technology that analyzes social media signals from popular networks like Twitter and Facebook to deliver ads that are relevant to consumers’ interests. As our teams debated the finer points of Big Data, Fast Data, and machine learning technologies, it became clear to us that we could find no better colleagues than the guys at OneRiot. As a part of Walmart, we're continuing to work with the intensity of a technology startup. Today I’m pumped to share the news that, within 30 days of that first meeting, we have closed a transaction to acquire the key assets of OneRiot.
The technology team at OneRiot will move to Silicon Valley and become part of @WalmartLabs in September. As I have written before, here at @WalmartLabs we’re doing some amazingly interesting and impactful work at the intersection of social, mobile, and retail. GinzaMetrics Aims To Bring Simplicity To SEO Software. There’s no doubt that SEO can be a confusing, yet incredibly important task for businesses both big and small.
Enter Y Combinator-backed GinzaMetrics, which is unveiling its “pro-sumer” SEO software today. GinzaMetrics’ software, which is in private beta, is aimed at being an easy-to-use application that lets companies bring SEO in-house instead of paying agencies do it, which can be costly. Not only does GinzaMetrics save money for companies, but it automates reporting and analytics involved in SEO and promises the same results as an agency. GinzaMetrics, which can be set up in five minutes or less, allows site owners do per-page SEO instead of just driving traffic to the frontpage. Within the application, users will be able to access ranking data, see how each individual keyword performs on organic search.
The software tracks Google and Yahoo! (Bing is coming soon), every day for the top 100 results on the user’s selected keywords. 10 Search Engines to Explore the Invisible Web. Not everything on the web will show up in a list of search results on Google or Bing; there are lots of places that their web crawlers cannot access. To explore the invisible web, you need to use specialist search engines. Here are our top 12 services to perform a deep internet search. What Is the Invisible Web? Before we begin, let's establish what does the term "invisible web" refer to? Simply, it's a catch-all term for online content that will not appear in search results or web directories.
There are no official data available, but most experts agree that the invisible web is several times larger than the visible web. The content on the invisible web can be roughly divided into the deep web and the dark web. The Deep Web The deep web made up of content that typically needs some form of accreditation to access. If you have the correct details, you can access the content through a regular web browser.
The Dark Web The dark web is a sub-section of the deep web. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Social Media Search Tool | WhosTalkin? 10 things that will happen in Search in 2010 | Royal Pingdom - F. Posted in Tech blog on December 30th, 2009 by Thursday Bram The world of search is moving quickly, with promises of big advances in 2010. From augmented reality to personalized results, here are ten trends and changes you can expect to see in search in the next year. 1. Augmented reality gets real With the growing numbers of smartphones out there, the ability to take a picture with your phone’s camera and get information about what you see is on the horizon. 2.
When you search for keywords that are part of current news, you’ll be able to see tweets and other updates from the last few minutes in your search results. 3. If you’re logged into your Google account while you’re running searches, you can receive customized search results based on what you’ve searched for and clicked on in the past. 4. When you’re searching for a location, you could probably use a map. 5. Rupert Murdoch has been threatening to remove News Corp. content from Google (which includes sites like the Wall St. 6. 7. 8. Manuals Search Engine - Flock.