December 19, 2006

SimplyHeadlines.com emerges from "stealth mode"

SimplyHeadlines, which calls itself “the Newspaper for the Extremely Busy,” emerged from stealth mode earlier this month with the launch of Version 2.0.

SimplyHeadlines is a free, personalized daily email newspaper featuring news from thousands of diverse sources such as the New York Times, iVillage, Men's Health, Bloomberg, BBC and Defamer, among others. Unlike similar services, users can also add non-news related items, such as local weather, personalized stock quotes, keyword news clipping, comics, sudoku and other features to make SimplyHeadlines their customized, personal newspaper.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 11:42 AM | Permalink

October 27, 2006

Google Enhanced Google Alerts & Adds Blog Search Alerts

The Google Blog announced that they have added Google Blog Search email alerts to the Google Alerts system. So like you were able to add alerts for Google News and other Google properties, you are now able to add alerts for Blog Search results. Google has also enhanced Alerts to "show results from multiple sources (including Google News, the web, and blogs)."

You can either conduct a search at Google Blog Search and click on the "Blogs Alerts" link on the left hand side of the page to subscribe via email to news alters. Or you can go to Google Alerts to set them up directly there.

I personally use RSS, so I had a form of Google Alerts set up via RSS a while back. But the "Comprehensive Alert" is very cool and I kind of wish they had a single RSS feed for just that.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:27 AM | Permalink

September 5, 2006

Netscape Search Inserts Netscape News Above Web Results

What's this? Netscape Search has changed? So says Netscape's Jason Calacanis. What's new? From what Jason says and I can see, the big difference is that there's a new "Netscape.com results" section at the top of the page that shows you top voted stories from the Netscape community news service.

More on that service is cover in my Netscape Aims To Be Digg 2.0, Slashdot 3.0 With Community News Mode post. After the Netscape.com results, you'll get Google-powered results from across the web.

To be clear, this isn't a case of users voting particular stories to the top of search results, say on a query-by-query basis. Rather, from what I can tell, stories get popular over at Netscape.com itself. Then the top stories over there might show up in response to searches at Netscape Search, if they are a good keyword match. In other words, think of it as NetscapeRank. If a story has good NetscapeRank, that might help it rank well in keyword search results.

FYI marketers, it might not take much to pick up that rank. A query on cars gives me three results that have only one or two votes each. More than votes might be involved, of course -- and I haven't seriously poked at this in any details. But there may be opportunities, though the Netscape traffic is far, far less than at the major search engines.

From a searcher perspective, I guess it's mainly useful if you want to be alerted to news results in the course of your regular web searching. Places like Google and Yahoo have long done this already. The difference with Netscape is that you can get your news sourced from a community, rather than an algorithmic search engine.

Then again, use the Google Co-op link for Digg you'll find here, and then you'll sort of get what Netscape is doing, just with Digg as your news source showing up at the top of Google searches.

Perhaps down the line, we'll see Digg follow Netscape's lead and make it possible to search Digg and the web at the same time, something that doesn't seem possible right now at the Digg site.

Finally, search.netscape.com is a long-standing address for Netscape Search. That's still active and redirecting here, where the "old" Netscape search remains active.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:18 AM | Permalink

July 21, 2006

Google Adds RSS To Google Base Results

I wrote about Google adding drop down menus to some search results at the Search Engine Roundtable last night and then discovered something new. At least I think it is new. If you go to a Google Base landing page, like this one for Clinical trials results, you may notice a new button at the top right of the page. The button is an RSS feed icon, that links to RSS results for that query refinement in Google Base. I personally have never seen that feature there before, I asked a few people and they haven't either - so I assume it is fairly new. So if you are an RSS junky, then you can subscribe to result sets that interest you in Google Base.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:28 AM | Permalink

July 20, 2006

Ask.com Adds RSS Smart Answers

The Ask.com blog announced a new feature to its Smart Answers line up today. For example, if you do a search on se roundtable an abbreviation of my blogs name, you will get RSS feed results at the top from my blog. The Ask blog says that the initial list of sites included "was selected based on the most popular feeds chosen by our users in Bloglines."

Currently, I am not sure why it does not work for the query Search Engine Roundtable when it works for the abbreviated version. Note that it does work well for Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Watch Blog but it does not pull the SEW blog RSS feed, it pulls the SearchDay feed.

Here is a screen capture of the first query:

More details at the Ask Blog.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 1:56 PM | Permalink

April 24, 2006

Google Alerts Now Available In Hebrew

Nathan Weinberg points to a Google Blogoscoped thread that shows that Google News Israel added the Google Alerts feature. Google Alerts is a way to subscribe to a news search, and be notified of new news results via email.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:46 AM | Permalink

April 3, 2006

Review Of Online Feed Reading Services

The State of Online Feed Readers over at TechCrunch has Frank Gruber taking a look at several online feed reading services, along with a big hunking chart o' features. Interestingly, the popular My Yahoo service doesn't get a nod for review, not being robust enough with the features it offers. Top speed honors go to Google Reader and FeedLounge, with Bloglines and Rojo best for feature sets overall. But me, I'm firmly a software-based feed reading person. I'll be sticking with RSS Bandit, which I reviewed on my personal blog here a few weeks ago: Reading Feeds With RSS Bandit. Of course, maybe FeedDemon 2.0 will tempt me away. Niall Kennedy recently gave it a rave review here: FeedDemon 2.0 raises the bar.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:56 AM | Permalink

January 3, 2006

Watching the Web, Even While You Sleep

Anyone who monitors web sites for changes knows what a pain it is to manually revisit and hunt for new information. But there's no need for that—automated web site tracking tools can do the work for you and alert you when anything new turns up. Gary reviews several of these tools in today's SearchDay article, Tracking Changes on Web Pages.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:36 AM | Permalink

December 28, 2005

WebSite-Watcher: A Key Tool for Tracking Web Page Changes

My friend and librarian colleague, Phil Bradley, points to a blog post by Marshall Kirkpatrick that looks at tools and services that alert you to page changes. I'm planning my own review of a couple of these tools and other alert services in early in 2006 so stay tuned. For now, a few brief comments:

In my upcoming reports I plan to focus on a couple of tools not included in Marshall's post that are great for tracking web page changes. Often a small change to a web page can detect something big has happened or will happen.

First and by far the best (nothing comes even close), is client software called WebSite-Watcher (WSW).

I've been using WSW for years and it's essential. I couldn't work without it. Why do I like it? Here are a few of the MANY reasons. More later.

+ You buy it, you own it. No monthly charges + Stable, rarely crashes. + Updated versions on a very regular basis. + Can monitor pages up to once every minute. So, Phil's request for a service that monitors pages once an hour is not a problem. + Pages are highlighted to show where changes (new content has been added, old content removed) have occurred. + Keywords: only show a page has a changed page if certain keywords are included on it. + Works on pages that require a login. + Also will handle RSS and ATOM feeds + Notification of changed pages via email, with changed page attached. + Easy to add new pages, one-click and you're done. + Archiving of pages not a problem with this free add-on tool + I could go on but we'll stop here for now. A two week trial (free) is available.

The other service I'm currently testing is a web-based alerting service from noted web-developer, Marc Fest, of QuickBrowse fame. It's called Trackle. While it's not nearly as powerful as Website-Watcher but Fest always creates useful tools. Can also monitor pages on an hourly basis. So far, I'm very impressed. Free trial.

+ Marshall discusses WatchThatPage.com. Not a bad service though it can be a bit tricky to get it all working right and the price is right (free). However, the fact that it's a donation ware site scares me a bit. If I'm going to invest the time and effort to import and organize lots of sites for tracking, I want to know it's going to be around for a while. That said, it has been online for several years but as we all know, things can change rapidly.

+ Kirkpatrick also writes about TrackEngine. This is a service that I haven't used but several colleagues tell me it's quite impressive. The biggest downside is that tracking many pages can get expensive.

As I said, look for more about alert tools and services soon.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:23 PM | Permalink

December 2, 2005

Yahoo Adds RSS Alerts Delivered via E-Mail, IM, or SMS

The other day Danny blogged about Yahoo adding an RSS viewing option to the beta version (that I like a lot) of Yahoo Mail. However, that was not all the new stuff Yahoo released the other day. In a blog post, Scott Gatz points out that via Yahoo's very robust Alert Service you can now have alerts for (for ANY RSS feed) delivered to you via e-mail, SMS (text messaging), and/or Yahoo Messenger. Very cool and for me, very useful, especially the SMS alerts.

I also use Yahoo's keyword-based news alerts delivered via all three services all the time and will soon be adding some RSS feeds to the mix. Gatz has a solid overview of thenew features, how they can be useful and some screen caps here. I've also posted a screen cap of some of the other alert services Yahoo offers here. They range from Amber Alerts for missing kids to air fare price changes to sports scores. Kudos to Yahoo on this RSS alert service.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:15 PM | Permalink

October 12, 2005

Yahoo Blog Search Gets RSS Feed

Yahoo dropped me a note to tell me one of my complaints about its new blog search service has been solved. You can get an RSS feed of blog matches now! In fact, it was supposed to be there from the start but just wasn't working right a launch, Yahoo says. OK, let's do the how to:

Do your search at Yahoo News for something -- say yahoo itself!
Go over to the right hand side of the page, find the Blogs box, and click on the More Blog Results link.
Look at the bottom of the page that comes up next, full of blog results. Find the Topic Tracker box. That will let you subscribe to the search in My Yahoo or you can use the orange XML box to get the RSS feed.

That's it. Thank you, Yahoo!

Postscript from Gary: On a related note, in my post about Yahoo's changes to News Search I added a bit about being able to search to only blog material from the outset. It basically involves appending your terms to a specific url. Postscript from Gary 2: Forget the messy url, see this post about a Yahoo "blog only" search box.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:10 PM | Permalink

Some Interesting Stats on RSS Usage

With the major search players finally getting into feed and blog search in a big way, a new study from Yahoo and Ipsos suggests that the majority of users still aren't even aware of the technology, let alone using it. People who are using RSS tend to be younger, savvier internet users who use it to track news, entertainment and other sources of information, rather than blogs. More on the survey and its results in today's SearchDay article, Study: RSS Still Not Widely Adopted.

Postscript: See also More Use RSS Than Have Heard Of It at ClickZ for some nice charts, in particular the RSS products most used by RSS savvy readers.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:09 AM | Permalink

September 23, 2005

Yes, Google Does Alert You To New Blog Finds

ZDNet's David Berlind rants that Google Alerts don't include blogs, so he can't get an email update on news found via the new Google Blog Search service. David, you can have an RSS feed of anything you want on blog search. I explain that here. It's not even that hard. There are links to keyword-based feeds at the bottom of each page. So you want the latest from blogs via Google -- there you go.

Want to get huffy about something? Stick to the bigger problem that for the blog RSS alerts I get, there's still a ton of spam and off-topic material, not to mention it misses stuff because it's not an full-text index of actual blog posts yet. Of course, it's only been out for less than two weeks, so I'll cut them a little slack for now.

Berlind's just flat wrong when he goes into this part:

I can understand if Google feels as though the blogosphere isn't a part of "news." But isn't the blogosphere part of the Web? Or is the blogosphere not the Web? This problem with Google Alerts is nothing new. For example, Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny made hay about the exclusion over two years ago.

Google, of course, does index blogs as part of its web index. In fact, anyone who has half an ear to the blogosphere knows the conventional wisdom that blogs have supernatural ranking powers that can push ordinary web pages aside in Google web search.

It's not quite like that, but blogs can, do and have existed in Google web search. So if you have a Google Alert to monitor the web, and a new blog page shows up in the top rankings, you'll get that alert. The real problem with watching web search is that it's not really time sensitive. If the top results don't change a lot -- and they really generally shouldn't -- then there's nothing to alert you to. News search, blog search -- these change often, since new material is purposely flowing in and given a deliberate relevancy boost, as it makes sense for that content.

As for what Jeremy was making hay about, let's be clear. It wasn't an exclusion of blogs from web search. It was the exclusion of blogs as part of NEWS search. Not web search, got it? Blogs have always been part of web search.

This part is fun:

I'd do a fact check with Google to find out why the Blog Search isn't included as a new type in Google Alerts (doesn't it make sense for Google to do this?), but, as an employee of CNET Networks, I'm included in Google CEO Eric Schmidt's blackout.

Yeah, that sucks. They're stupid for doing that to News.com. Bad, bad Google -- and example of why this will keep blowing up in their face as well as why it hurts the communication process. Of course, Berlind probably wouldn't be so ticked it he hadn't been banned. More to the point, he can certainly fact check in other ways. Hmm, maybe even by reading the FAQ.

Postscript: Dave Winer says I'm wrong and unfair in my post above:

Google doesn't include blogs in Google News, or at least that's what they claim. However, a lot of the supposed non-blogs they include are in every way blogs.

Yes, Dave -- I know that. David wasn't writing about how Google keeps blogs out of news search. He acknowledges in the story that blogs aren't part of news search -- as I wrote in my summary. In fact, he even says he "understands" why Google doesn't include blogs in news search.

Where David was wrong, and what I was correcting, was his suggestion that blogs aren't in WEB search. Blogs, of course, are in web search.

Postscript 2: And now David Berlind's not happy and STILL incorrect again. Since he feels so taken to task that he wants to take me to task, I'll answer what he said:

First things first. Sullivan never bothered to call me before questioning the integrity of my coverage when, in referring to Google's blacklisting of journalists that work for CNET Networks, he wrote "Of course, Berlind probably wouldn't be so ticked it he hadn't been banned. " Had you called Mr. Sullivan, or if you've read anything I've written in my 15 years as a hi-tech journalist, you'd know that I've never and will never take vendors' personal treatment of me into consideration when writing about them. This is true in both respects. My coverage cannot be swayed to the positive by currying favor, nor can it be swayed to the negative by treating me negatively.

OK, first, I didn't need to call you because the key fact in your story about blogs not being in web search was wrong. I could see that. It would be like calling you up and saying, "David, you said 2+2=5. I disagree with this. How are you doing the math." What were you going to explain to me? How further wrong they were?

Question whether you were ticked at Google? Of course you were. You should be. They have a stupid policy of not talking to CNET, and it means you can't get direct answers from them, when you should. Could you verify the facts another way, if you really cared. Of course you could. You didn't. And did that ticked tone come through in your story? It did from where I sit. Rather than using the standard CNET line that all your collegues I talk with regularly with at News.com about having tried to ask for a response and not getting one, you went with a brand new "I'm on the blacklist" tone.

As for Sullivan's explanation of why I was wrong about Google Alerts, I think the fact that he provides a workaround instead of factual evidence that I am wrong to ask the question I asked actually supports my position. Instead of discussing Google Alerts, as I did, he discusses Google's new blog search and how to set it up to satisfy my needs. So, let me fall back to the original facts, and the original question.

It's not a workaround. You want to be alerted to new blog finds. RSS feeds at Google give you this. You want it fast? RSS is faster than web alerts. You can't get it via email, no. The Google Alerts may not be working right. But the point is, you want blog content from Google, but you with "15 years as a hi-tech journalist" don't seem to know that Google's new blog search offers exactly what you want. Did you read any of the coverage of Google's blog search launch last week? This type of alert is what you want. Numerous people including myself mentioned it exists. It's right on the blog search result pages. Is there some additional road map you need?

And back to the original incorrect fact, you were wrong before and you're yet WRONG again:

Google Alert says it can watch for me: News and the Web. Not that I agree (it's the subject of huge debate), but I understand the reasons that a search engine company might fall on the side of saying blogs are not news. But, there's just no way anyone can say that they're not part of the Web.

No one is saying that. Google isn't saying that. They've never, ever said blogs aren't part of the web. In fact, they said the exact OPPOSITE when some people worried that blogs might get pulled from web search back in 2003. From my story then:

By the way, one thing NOT in the cards for future index changes are any plans to pull blog content out of Google's regular search results. Google made a special point of stressing that blogs are staying, during my interview with them last week.

Google offers you a web search alert. Blogs, as I wrote before, are part of web search. Here, do this search for your name. Plenty of blogs there for your name. Go sign up for a Google web alert to that, and if some new blog (or anything) in web search shows up, you'll see it. Suggesting that because it doesn't say "web & blogs" is like saying you aren't getting oxygen because the canister of air doesn't say "air & oxygen" on it. There's oxygen in the air. There are blogs in web search.

I don't know how else to say it. Blogs are in web search. They ARE in web search. You get a web search alert, you get blogs in there. If you JUST want blogs, then you have to do something else. That's what you want, I know. But you're wrong to suggest that blogs aren't already in web search results. They are.

I don't know much about ranking algorithms. But, I have a difficult time understanding how I can be alerted to something "as it happens" if that something has to get ranked by an algorithm first. In Sullivan's words, some blogs "have supernatural ranking powers that can push ordinary web pages aside in Google web search." Thanks but no thanks. I'm not looking for the bloggers that have figured out how to manipulate search engines. I'm looking for the ones with the most interesting things to say about Vista (including ones that work at Microsoft). So, the pages I actually want to see are probably the unranked ones. At the very least, this should be a configurable item (like a checkbox that says "filter results based on Google's rankings").

This isn't about knowing ranking algorithms. It's about understanding the basics of search. What does the search engine include, and how does it sort things.

Google web search includes content from across the web, including blogs. Scoring is done by relevancy, rather than currency/freshness. IE, just because you are the newest site doesn't mean you'll be the site at the top.

So you want bloggers that seem to be most relevant for Windows Vista over time. Web search helps there. You want the very latest things being posted? You have to use a blog search engine where the default sort is on currency.

Over at Google's blog search, you can do both. The default is on relevancy overall, but you can switch to getting the most recent. The underlying results so far aren't that great either way, to me.

Overall, sorry you wrote a column where you made a major factual error about what's in Google's web search. Sorry you were upset I felt like I had to comment on a piece written by a major IT journalist who thinks blogs aren't part of WEB search. But that's what you said, and it was wrong.

Postscript 3: Just in case there is any confusion, I wholehearted apologize to David for giving any impression that he somehow wrote a slanted article because of the policy of Google not talking to CNET. I did feel the tone of his piece seemed upset at Google, but upset doesn't mean you can't be fair. In short, I really wasn't trying to imply he was unfair. I can't apologize for the fact that he made a factual error in saying blogs aren't part of web search or that he could have fact checked this in ways other than contacting Google.

Postscript 4: One more wholehearted and unreserved apology. I certainly could have written my critique of his piece without it being so personal or in a better tone.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:19 AM | Permalink

September 22, 2005

Maps & Resources Tracking Hurricane Rita

As Hurricane Rita bears down on Texas, we're obviously hoping for the best. Some new resources for those who want to track the storm's progress are covered below, including very nice MSN Virtual Earth-powered and Google Maps-powered services.

Robert Scoble points to an MSN Virtual Earth-powered map produced by Poly9 for MSNBC. It shows where the storm has been and where it is projected to go, future points in lighter shades of white.

Hover over any future point for a bit more info on forecasted winds. Wondering how the track will impact Galveston? Hard to see on the map, because as a small town, Galveston's not shown unless you zoom in a bit. Basically, find Houston and come down at a 5 o'clock angle until you hit the coast -- or zoom in.

Sadly, if you visit either the actual MSN Virtual Earth site or MSNBC, you don't find any links to this map. How Robert found it, he doesn't say, but it should be a lot easier.

One plus to the exploring, however. MSNBC has another great Hurricane Tracker map that shows the past path and projected route, along with how the storm has grown in strength. Look to the left of the map, and you'll see links for past storms in 2004 and 2005, including Katrina.

Doc Searls points to Central Florida Hurricane Center 2005, or flhurricane.com. As the site says, this is not some official government site but a nice resource run by weather hobbyists.

They've got a Google Maps-based storm track you can follow -- where the storm has been, where it's expected to go, and info when you click on any of the pinned points along the way.

I think it's much nicer with the hybrid view switched on, and Galveston shows easily with only slight zooming. Also check out the legend that explains the storm strength as show with colored dots.

Steve Rubel notes you can now get weather feeds via Yahoo, by the way. I didn't think this was new, but they're adding so much, it's hard to keep track! A page with severe weather alerts is here, Texas here, but these are sent via email only. A Yahoo News feed for "Hurricanes & Topical Storms" is here -- and those who prefer to read online can see the Full Coverage area for hurricanes here.

Hurricane Rita Takes Aim at Texas Coast from Gary yesterday also notes some other news resources tracking Rita. Basically, pick your usual news source suspect, and they're going to be doing something.

FYI, I remarked to my wife when Ophelia came along how quickly we were going through the hurricane alphabet. What happens if we hit Z (or really W, the last letter actually used)? MSNBC writes we move to the Greek alphabet, along with nice background on how storms are named.

Postscript from Gary: More Maps.

From ESRI: A large collection of maps, imagery, and data for both Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Katrina
From Geodata.gov: Hurricane Rita Tracking Map
From the Harris County (Houston area) Office of Emergency Management: Real-time, interactive rainfall map.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:35 AM | Permalink

August 29, 2005

PubSub Kicks Off Football Season With New Service

The 2005 National Football League season is about to begin and the PubSub team has launched another compilation of pre-built prospective searches (simply add to your aggregator). This time queries are available for every NFL team and for many players. PubSub Football is available here. PubSub also offers pre-built searches for baseball teams/players and many U.S. Federal and state government officials. Pre-built queries allow users to harness the power of professionally constructed searches while saving the user time and effort (a good thing). In other words, let PubSub do the heavy lifting so the user can be up and running in a matter of seconds.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:49 PM | Permalink

July 20, 2005

Google Alerts Now Available for Google Groups

Philipp points to a blog post about the availability of Google Alerts for Google Groups.

It monitors the top 50 most recent Google Groups search results that relate to keywords you're interested in. Any new articles posted that match your criteria will be emailed to you, just like Google News alerts.

Google Groups Alerts are sent via email (no RSS) either immediately (as material enters the database), once a day, or once a week. Since so much content is constantly being generated in Google Groups, it would be a good idea to be very specific with your query terms and/or use some of the advanced search syntax that's available when building your query. You can do this by using the Google Groups advanced search page and then doing a copy and paste of the query string into the Google Alerts form.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:53 AM | Permalink

June 30, 2005

Yahoo My Web Tagging & Why (So Far) It Sucks In my Yahoo My Web: An eBay For Knowledge article out today, I cover the promise that Yahoo My Web has for potentially improving search results through trust networks. As for the promise of tagging to improve results, I find myself just as dubious as I've been about tagging.

Where to begin? I could let Gary run lose with a litany of complaints. In fact, he probably will share his own perspectives in the near future. But I'll dive in on the problems as I see them.

Double Duty

Most important, the tags are in the impossible position -- one that even Yahoo admits when I talked with them about this -- of trying to do two things at once that aren't compatible. They are:

Trying to show the freshest content on a topic
Trying to show the best content on a topic

At the moment, neither situation is happening. Freshness is determined by when a document was saved. So if I save the iPod home page under the tag of ipod (link viewable only to My Web 2.0 users), there's nothing "fresh" about it except that I've just added it. The page has been around for ages. The mere act of saving it didn't make it fresh.

In contrast, the new iTunes 4.9 software with support for podcasting is new. If someone adds that, it's a nice way to alert others monitoring this topic to the latest about iPods.

Fresh Versus Best

Tagging at a specialized search engine like Technorati doesn't face the double-duty challenge. Technorati is dealing primarily with feed and blog content. That content by its very nature is fresh in some way. In other words, no one is blogging, "Hey, here's the iPod web site" and feeding it as fresh news via the Technorati ipod tag. People are for the most part -- aside from spammers -- saying something new or offering a fresh opinion about iPods and things related to iPods.

As a result, if you want to tune into the latest stuff about iPods, the relatively specialized and fresh content that Technorati gathers can be found via tags. The new Live 8 area is a good example of this.

In contrast, if you want to find a general good resource about a subject, the tags at Technorati suck. Where's the official Live 8 web site? It's not at the top of the recent blog posts for the Live 8 page. The only reason it's on that tag page at all is because Technorati made a customized, special page for the event. For a regular page, go back to the ipod tag page and try to find the official iPod home page. You won't.

Directories Were For Categorized Best Stuff

Showing a list of the best content on a categorized topic -- as opposed to the freshest content -- is the role traditionally filled by directories such as Yahoo's own Yahoo Directory. Look at the Live 8 category there. It's sparse, surprisingly so (or perhaps not given Yahoo's general abandonment of its directory, but at least it has something at all, unlike the Open Directory). But nonetheless, you have no problem finding the official site and top resources about the event, including Technorati's page!

iPod? When I looked at the Technorati tag page for this, one of the top things listed was someone spamming to sell me sunglasses using a gibberish page which was tagged as being about iPods. Meanwhile, Yahoo's iPod category shows the official site first along with a bunch of resources that look good and are focused broadly about iPods.

Well what about del.icio.us? People are bookmarking general information over there, right, not just fresh stuff! Are they? Whenever I look, it seems like people are busy bookmarking a lot of new stuff.

Looking at the google tag today, I saw bookmarks about the new Google Earth service or the new Google Maps API. How about ipod? Some new stuff, some old stuff -- and the same result you get with Yahoo. Stuff that's "fresh" isn't necessarily so, while the popular view shows me only "recently" popular stuff rather than what I'd call "always popular" such as the iPod home page.

Tagging In The Verticals

How about Yahoo-owned Flickr? Yahoo talked to me this week about how 70 percent of all items on Flickr are tagged, but then it immediately qualified without prompting that because Flickr is a photo service, tagging is much more essential.

Indeed -- if you don't tag a picture, you pretty much have no good way of finding it. Tagging makes much, much sense in a photo space. And I love photo tagging. Check out my Photo Search: Google Picasa 2 Vs. Adobe Photoshop Album 2 article from earlier this year. I tag like a madman with Photoshop Album. I live to tag!

You know what? I'm weird. And people tagging on Flickr? They're weird as well. Weird in a good, organized way. Go talk to people you know who have digital cameras -- not your net happy friends but relatively ordinary people or don't work in some net-related industry. They aren't tagging, not on their computers and not with Flickr. Maybe they will eventually, but it's far more likely it will only happen among the masses in areas where tagging is really useful and essential. For general web search, it's not.

Tagging -- like spontaneity -- has time and a place. For some verticals, as I've written, it may make more sense. That's especially so for relatively little services that aren't going to be spam targets. But tagging web listings in general so far makes me think Yahoo's not going to please anyone.

Stepping Backwards

It gets worse, by the way. Tagging will help you keep all your My Web content you're saving organized, right? But what happens when you've created hundreds of tags for thousands of pages? Are you going to browse pages? Everyone largely abandoned browsing directory categories ages ago because keyword search was like a warp drive to zip you to what you wanted, as I've explained.

If you really do save thousands of pages over time, you're not going to want to rely on tagging to locate things. You'll probably just keyword search. Even more so, that will be essential, as the tags you initially created probably won't hold up as things change over time. Do you retag everything? Chances are, you won't.

Another backwards step example? We've had automated clustering technology for ages that will put content into categories, or tag them, if you prefer that term. Check out Clusty, an example using Vivisimo's long-developed tech.

Yahoo bought two different search engines -- AltaVista and AllTheWeb -- that also had clustering that no longer gets offered. Yahoo's own current technology is even used to create the Yahoo News Tag Soup "tag cloud" that I wrote about last month, tech you can now apply to any site or collection of sites you'd like.

Why not use this tech to organized My Web automatically into tags? At the very lest, it would avoid problems like the "important bookmarks" tag being so large in My Web's current tag cloud, something that annoys Gary to no end.

It might also help with the short term tag cloud bombing problem I'm sure that's going to emerge. Look at this:

That's from the A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0 article I just posted. In about 15 minutes of work, I popped up "rio karma" and "mp3 player" into the cloud. They won't last, but neither was I working particularly hard to make it happen. Tag cloud spamming at the moment seems incredibly easy.

Yahoo says it has defenses in place that will stop this, stuff that will ramp up as needed. We'll see. But just having just having to have those defenses at all reeks of another step backwards. Rather than tags solving the search spam problem, an entire new way to eliminate tag spam is going to be developed -- just as search spam has had to endure an arms race of defensive measures.

One more step backwards example. As mentioned, some people are looking to tags to keep up with what's new. There's another way to do this. You create keyword-based news alerts to monitor new stuff.

The problem with the major search engines is that keyword-driven news alerts they offer aren't tapping into blog and feed content. That could be fixed over night. And news alerts help ensure that if you're looking for information on podcasts, you might get it even if someone "tagged" what you wanted in the completely different "podcasting" category.

I still miss Excite's awesome NewsTracker service that we had way back in 1997. But there are plenty of good replacements that will automatically scan for stuff on the news sites, and I covered a few here recently. Hopefully we'll see the majors come up with ways for you to flag keywords you wish to monitor in blog and news content, in the way Technorati's Watchlists work or as PubSub allows, to name only two such services.

Nice To Have, Just Don't Expect Much

It's important to note that the long term plan for Yahoo ISN'T to use tags to refine web results. As my other article out today discusses, Yahoo is depending on trust data to improve results. That will be applied to the keyword data primarily inherent in the pages themselves, as well as link data. Tagging will have a role, but not the dominant one. It certainly won't take over for organizing.

That's one reason my long term view isn't to worry about it. Tags are there for those who want them, which is good -- very good. They will be useful to some people, especially so when limited to particular communities. When Yahoo introduces popularity sorting, general tags viewed by everyone might even get better. But as long as they have to do double-duty, I suspect they still won't fulfill either role particularly well.

In contrast, an alternative would be for Yahoo to experiment with some type of social compilation of its actual directory, similar to what I suggested about an Open Directory alternative last month. Let me tag the "best" stuff on a particular topic separately from something that's just fresh, new, cool but not the best in the long term. It would be interesting to see how those two different lists developed.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:17 AM | Permalink

May 31, 2005

Yahoo Feed Search & Web Search Feeds Update

Last September, my Yahoo, How About A Feed Search Tab? article wished for Yahoo to make it easier for people to find its feed search service. Similarly, I recently wished that Yahoo's new web search feeds were easier to find. Any plans for these things to change? Nothing immediate, says Yahoo, unfortunately.

Want to search for feeds at Yahoo? Here are the clunky instructions. Go to the Add Content page of My Yahoo! How about a proper home for this?

"Our focus has been primarily on making sure the search is seamless for My Yahoo users. But, we're hearing more people asking for this [a better location]. I think that's something we're going to look at pretty closely," said Scott Gatz, senior director, personalization product, at Yahoo.

And what about an enhanced feed search service, one that actually lets you search for matching posts from a feed, rather than just locate feeds generally based on their titles and descriptions (more on this is covered in the Submitting RSS Feeds To Yahoo story for Search Engine Watch members).

Gatz said work right now remains building tools to help people subscribe to, manage and integrate content into the Yahoo experience, rather than building out a dedicated feed/blog search service. But he left a at least a glimmer of hope.

"We're always listening, and as the consumer need grows, we'll be sure to get there."

Meanwhile, what about those web search feeds that are hard to find. The new Yahoo Publisher's Guide To RSS says of them:

Yahoo! Search ? lets you create an RSS feed for any set of search results. Also, web search results from RSS publishers (CNN.com for example) automatically display a link to the corresponding RSS URL.

However, that's only correct for those who have a newsreader enabled for auto-discovery, which Yahoo's own My Yahoo is not. My Yahoo Gains RSS Feeds For Web Search & Discovering Auto-Discovery article explains this more and provides a workaround if you can't use auto-discovery. But how about just adding a visible RSS feed link to the search results pages, in the way that MSN does and Yahoo does itself for news search feeds?

"When it came to the rest of the search RSS feeds, we wanted to start off simple for those folks with toolbars, Firefox and Safari. We wanted to get our feet wet with that and learn how they are using them before opening it. It way a way to soft launch and get it out there in front of people in the know," Gatz said.

So, a visible link is likely to come. But in the meantime, the soft launch continues. FYI, if you use the Yahoo Toolbar, it has auto-discovery built in, to send a feed to your My Yahoo page, Gatz said.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:05 PM | Permalink

May 20, 2005

New From Yahoo: Guide to RSS for Publishers

The new Yahoo Publisher's Guide to RSS will be especially useful as a one-stop shop for those just getting started with the format but can also serve as a worthwhile reference for experienced RSS types.

The site includes an intro to RSS, how to create feeds with several services (not just Yahoo 360), info about submitting and promoting your feed, a link to sign-up for alerts about new services from Yahoo (RSS advertising), and more.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:30 PM | Permalink

May 19, 2005

Yahoo Gains RSS Feeds For Web Search & Discovering Auto-Discovery

Yahoo is now the second major search engine to provide RSS feeds for web search, after MSN debuted them in January. RSS Feeds for Yahoo! Web, News, Image, and Video Searches from Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny explains how they are available at Yahoo web search results plus news, image and video search.

Jeremy's also surprised no one's figured this out before, since they've apparently been offered for months. The answer is easy. They've only been made available through auto-discovery. That clearly doesn't work that well, given that no one's been auto-discovering these feeds.

With auto-discovery, a browser or news aggregator that's savvy will highlight to you that there's a web feed, making it easy to automatically add it to your reader. But plenty of readers aren't auto-discovery friendly -- such as Yahoo's own My Yahoo.

Want to add content to My Yahoo? Yahoo will let you search or browse for content through listings it has, but these search feeds won't show up in those. The alternative is to paste the URL of the feed into My Yahoo. But auto-discovery doesn't give you the feed URL, at least not easily.

Want that URL? Do your search, such as cars. Now view the source code for the page. Up near the top, you'll see this:

That's the auto-discovery information. The part highlighted in bold? That's the feed URL. Copy and paste that into My Yahoo or any aggregator that can't deal with auto-discovery.

If you use NewsGator like me, get familiar with the NewsGator Toolbar. I've completely ignored this, until now. Do the search you want to monitor. Then copy and paste the URL of the search results page, like this:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=cars&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1

By the way, I always prefer to shorten search URLs to the bare essentials. You don't have to, but here's what that looks like, if you do:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=cars

Next, select Subscriptions in the toolbar, then Add Feed, then paste in the URL. The feed URL on that page will be auto-discovered and added.

See how easy that is? Not. In contrast, at MSN search, you simply need to do a search, then select the feed link that shows up at the bottom of the page. That's simplicity. More on MSN feeds in these posts: MSN Search's RSS Feeds & MSN Search Fixes Country-Specific Feed Bug.

Aside from the Yahoo feeds above, Yahoo offers many other feeds. Gary mentioned this full list earlier: Yahoo RSS Feeds. Also see our past posts, Yahoo Shopping Gains RSS Feeds, Mobile Access to Your My Yahoo RSS Feeds and Yahoo Gains Financial Feeds; A Revisit To Yahoo News Feeds for more on feeds at Yahoo.

In all these other feeds, Yahoo makes life easy by putting the feed URL on the pages itself. That's what should happen with these new keyword search feeds, which I'm sure will come.

For more on discovering feeds, see my past post: More On Making Feed Discovery & Subscription Easier

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:31 AM | Permalink

May 2, 2005

Gmail Web Clips: More On Google's Feed Aggregator, Plus Feeds From Google News

Checking my Gmail account today, I discovered that I'm apparently now one of the few with access to the new Gmail "web clips" feed reading feature I mentioned earlier. Here's how it works and some more details.

You'll see feed headlines shown at the top of the Gmail page, above all the messages in your Inbox, when viewing an email or anything within Gmail. Here's a screenshot:

In that example, "Reuters: Oddly Enough" is the title of the feed currently being viewed. Next to it is a headline from that feed, the hyperlink taking you to the article or post. Next to that is the time the article was posted.

See the words "Web Clip" and the little < > arrows next to it? Those let you move forward or backwards through headlines in the feeds you've subscribed to.

That's it -- a rudimentary feed reader, to say the least. Unless I'm missing something, that's all you can do to view your feeds. You can't click on anything to see all headlines from a particular feed. You can't see a single page with headlines from all sources -- much less headlines and descriptions. All you can do is keep clicking the little arrows.

Odd? Yeah, but I'm sure we'll see it develop. So far, it really seems designed as a serendipitous thing. As you read different email messages, the headlines keep changing -- so it's an easy way to read mail and also perhaps spot a new news item. Or ads! That's because AdSense ads sometimes appear in that area, as well.

Google's Default & Suggested Feeds

By default, you're already subscribed to three feeds:

Why these three? All Google will say is that they were hand-picked with a focus on a good user experience and high quality content.

Want more? Use the Settings option in Gmail, then the Web Clips option. Look below your subscribed feeds, and there's an "Add more clips" link. In turn, that lets you pick from choices in News, Business, Lifestyle, Fun, Tech and Sports categories.

How did the 10 or so feeds featured in each category -- such as ABC News, NPR, Slashdot and Yahoo News: Most Emailed -- get such favored status? Again, Google said only that the choices were hand picked with a focus on user experience.

Google News Gains Feeds

By the way, Google News has some of its own feeds in there:

Google News - World
Google News - Business
Google News - Entertainment
Google News - Health
Google News - Sports

Yes, that's right. You can actually get Google News content through a feed without having to resort to workarounds. But bad news, non-Gmail folks. These feeds only work for those within Gmail. I can't find a published address for them. That's kept hidden within Gmail.

You can get Google News alerts for any keyword you wish to track, of course -- but that's sent via email. In contrast, Yahoo News offers actual news feeds to the public right now, as described more here: Yahoo Gains Financial Feeds; A Revisit To Yahoo News Feeds

Also noteworthy is that the feed reader functionality changes slightly when viewing a Google News feed. A new "related articles" link appears next to the posting time and the "Web Clip" text next to the arrows changes to Google News, as shown below:

Add Any Feed & When's This Coming To Everyone?

What if you want something beyond the feeds Google recommends? No problem. You can easily add any feed you like using the Custom Clips option. Just enter the URL of the feed, and away you go.

So I'm lucky in that my Gmail account is enabled -- how about everyone else? Google says it's just a small randomly selected test right now and there's no clear timing on when it will be rolled out to more people. In the meantime, the clipless such as Steve Rubel will have to read about web clips via the Google help pages that he spotted:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:49 PM | Permalink

April 15, 2005

Yahoo Shopping Gains RSS Feeds

Spotted via Tara at ReseachBuzz, Yahoo Shopping has gained RSS feeds. A full list is here, allowing you to monitor products in various categories. But sadly, there doesn't appear to be a way to set up a feed that will monitor a keyword-based query of your choice, in the way feeds at Yahoo News allow.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:24 AM | Permalink

Gmail Gains "Web Clips" Feed Reading Feature

Blogger founder and former Google employee Evan Williams spots a new "Web Clips" feed reading feature that has appeared in Google's Gmail web mail service. Gmail adds feed reading has a screenshot and details. Not all Gmail users will see this feature -- it hasn't shown up for me yet, for example.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:46 AM | Permalink

March 30, 2005

Keeping Current With Persistent Search Tools

The Wall Street Journal is online with an about persistent search from companies like PubSub. The article is titled: New Web-Watching Tools Pique Interest of Investors.

Providers of persistent-search services like to say it's "prospective," or forward-looking, rather than "retrospective," which is how they describe aggregators such as Yahoo and Google. It often takes most search engines days to add new content from sources such as blogs or corporate Web sites. Yahoo and Google scan billions of sites and download them into their massive computer databases, which can add a significant time lag between when content appears and when it is available for searches. Google does provide a service that will notify users of new Web content, but with less urgency when compared to persistent-search engines.

Btw, one of my favorite tools (one I couldn't live without) is called WebSite-Watcher (Windows only). This very stable shareware monitors both RSS feeds and just about ANY web page for changes. WSW then notifies you when changes occur (you define how often it looks for changes) and highlights the new or changed text. Think about all of the pages on the web where no RSS feed is available but you really need to check on a very regular basis. Sometimes the addition or removal of just a couple of words can signal something big about to happen. TrackEngine, is very similar if you want a web-based solution. Other services include: + WatchThatPage.com + Trackle.com

We're also started to see targeted tools looking for new material in specific areas of interest. For example, DiplomacyMonitor.com, looks for new primary documents from governments around world and posts them onto a single page while at the same time caching the content and making it all searchable.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:58 AM | Permalink

February 8, 2005

MSN Search Fixes Country-Specific Feed Bug

Good news. Earlier I noted how MSN Search's RSS feeds wouldn't bring back results from the main/US MSN Search if you were outside the US. That seems to have been fixed.

Bad news. If you want to monitor the same query at MSN Search versus a country-specific MSN Search site, they may step on each other.

For example, I want to watch the same query for MSN Search and MSN Search UK, as they can give different results. Unfortunately, the results for these two different feeds flow into the same NewsGator folder I use to read feeds, since the title of both feeds is the same.

Huh? Say you want to watch the query "cars" on MSN Search and MSN Search UK. The URLs for those queries are below. The US one is shown first, then the UK one, with the difference bolded on the UK one:

Now you decide you want to subscribe to a feed of these results, so you can see how they change over time at both places. At the bottom of the results is an RSS box you can use to get the feed address. And below, the URLs for those feeds:

So far, you can see the difference -- one comes from the .com site, the other from the .co.uk site. But the titles of the feeds? Those are the same:

MSN Search: cars
MSN Search: cars

As a results, NewsGator puts the content of the feeds into the same place, given the feed titles are the same. Other aggregators might do the same -- or perhaps not. But to be safe, it would be nice if the feed titles reflected that the feeds are different, such as:

MSN Search: cars
MSN Search UK: cars

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:01 AM | Permalink

February 3, 2005

MSN Search's RSS Feeds

When I did my write-up on the new MSN Search site, I'd mentioned that RSS feeds of search results were available but clunky in how to get them. That's because at the time of the write-up, MSN had told me that they didn't have any special links you could use to get them. But that quickly changed once the launch actually happened. Do a search, and at the bottom of the results page you should find an orange RSS box. Use that to subscribe to a feed of that search.

What exactly do you get when subscribing? The top results for the first page of the query you are monitoring. The feed then checks back on whatever schedule you've set with your feed reader to recover any new entries. Say you check once per day. If two new sites rotate into the top results, then you'd get sent a post of each individually.

Important note! If you are outside the US, even if you subscribe to US results, you'll still get those related to the country you are in. For example, I'm in the UK. I can override MSN trying to force me to the MSN UK site as I've written before. But I can't do this within my feeds.

MSN says it's aware of this bug and hopes to correct it in the next few weeks.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:05 PM | Permalink

January 27, 2005

FyberSearch Now Offers Results in RSS

Nathan Enns, the developer of FyberSearch has let us know about few a new services and advanced features. + Results are now available in RSS format. + Domain Clustering: no more than one result per domain name is displayed unless the user specifies. + The keyword density option has been improved. It allows you to view pages that contain your search terms at least "X" number of times.

January 14, 2005

Yahoo Gains Financial Feeds; A Revisit To Yahoo News Feeds

Yahoo gained RSS feeds for news content last fall, and now it has regained them for the Yahoo Finance service, Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny reports in his Yahoo Finance RSS Feeds Return post.

For financial feeds, visit the Yahoo Finance RSS feed tool that's now been created. Enter a symbol, and magically, logos to add the feed to your My Yahoo account or any newsreader through an XML icon and URL will appear. Slick.

Note that the tool doesn't check whether the company stock symbol you enter is valid, so ensure that you have it correct first. Jeremy notes in his post that you can enter multiple symbols separated by commas (yhoo,goog) to make a "portfolio" style feed.

How about a revisit to getting those Yahoo News feeds? OK! First, visit the Yahoo News RSS Feed page. There, you'll find a variety of feeds in various categories such as "science" or "health" have already been created.

Not enough? Need something custom. Scroll down to the search box, enter a term and a feed will load in your browser. Ugh -- that needs to change to work like the Yahoo Finance tool, where you get clickable links.

Have no fear, there's a better workaround. Go to Yahoo News, do a keyword search for what you are interested in. Now look in the right-hand column of the page. You'll see an "ADD TO MY YAHOO! / RSS" section. Use the My Yahoo button that's offered to subscribe through My Yahoo or the XML icon to subscribe through other means.

As a reminder, over at MSN Search, feed support web search results was added this week. More on that here: MSN Search Makes RSS Search Feeds Official.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:28 AM | Permalink

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