There are a few reasons behind my seldom apparitions on the Web – some of personal nature (relocating home and office to larger premises) and some professional. While the personal reasons allow for some flexibility in scheduling tasks, the professional activities know no “excuses.” I must admit it is quite tiring to manage work and private life, and sometimes it is difficult to “think” when the schedule is crowded with so many tasks. So consider this a cry for help.

I need your feedback to help me with a project I am working on right now for Pamil Visions’ newest customer Fairtilizer. I already managed to finish an extensive competitor analysis and sure market analysis and the next task is “user and visitor feedback” to determine what changes need to be applied for the landing page (screenshot below) to become more effective. Under normal circumstances this would be a time-consuming task requiring research, web-based surveying and data analysis. At this stage such an in-depth endeavor would be more than the client needs – the homepage will be redesigned anyway. But your feedback will still help giving the design company an idea of what to improve or change. It will also help Fairtilizer better understand what their visitors think when they first see their current version of the site.

So if you have some time, please take a look at the screenshot below, and then answer as many of the following questions as you can. In exchange… you know you can count on my help at any time you need it.

1. What do you like about the design at fairtilizer.com?
2. What do you most dislike?
3. How would the site be more effective?
4. What do you think of when you first see the Fairtilizer logo?
5. What does the name Fairtilizer bring to mind?
   • A county fair
   • Cow manure
   • A rich alluvial plain
   • Other
6. How would the header be more effective?
7. What three things do you expect from your online music destination?
8. Which is more important: the artist on the music site or the community/ networking aspect?
9. Would you rather visit or use an online radio station or are building playlists and music news more important?
10. Do you think the online music industry needs a change? What kind of change?

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The Trinitarian Formula of Search

In the name of Google, and of Microsoft and of Yahoo!… Amen!

This is what the search world looks like since a few years. We fail to talk about something else when it comes to search engines. Even when pretty faces like Powerset and hakia dare to come on stage, they are still reported to the holy triad of search, still compared, still dissected and still judged based on what we already describe as “the top three search engines.” No one can compete against the three, they say. No one can even dream to come close to such market reach and popularity.

Too Lazy to Think

Under the slogan “too lazy to think” the three search engines at the top of the pyramid find other ways to “improve” their quality. The PR game makes the war look like a calm sea; while the little search engines (that could) strive for attention.

Maybe Powerset and hakia do have cutting edge algorithms or AI that will revolutionize search as we know it, but does this technology surface? No, because both are afraid that one of the mighty giants will use its financial power to “purchase” this technology from someone else. Alas, Google has a history of crushing its competitors by buying them. Microsoft is less aggressive and more innovative, despite the general public perception, while Yahoo! almost always fails to invest in the right services…

So here we are, in the middle of the media war, being tantalized by one or another little search engine wannabe, to compare its results to Google’s, Microsoft’s or Yahoo!’s. What these little entities forget is that we truly are searchers and we are indeed Google users. I am not saying Google fans! If the results of a comparison are not visibly superior what will we do? Dash the search engine that failed us and never go back.

How many users did hakia lose because of its online comparison tool? Mahalo, which manages to give the impression of “social search,” has a similar comparison tool. Unlike hakia who dares tilting at the windmills like Don Quixote once, encouraging its users to compare its search results with Google’s, Mahalo disguises its “comparison tool” under a “metasearch engine” approach displaying results from Mahalo, Google, Yahoo!, Live Search (Microsoft), Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Flickr and YouTube. However, as far as the search war is concerned Mahalo is not even in the game. The only entities with some chances are still Powerset and hakia. Things get complicated though…

Microsoft and Yahoo!

Microsoft tried to consolidate its position and offered Yahoo! a lame $ 44.6 billion. Sure, Yahoo!’s value is higher and the game ended bad for Microsoft. Yahoo! gained some free PR coverage from this, then the waters calmed…

Microsoft and Powerset

Microsoft knows that without better technology its position in search is unsure. Rejected by Yahoo!, Microsoft had to focus its interest on another search engine able to provide a technology that would somehow “shake” Google. Here is where Powerset enters the game.

Yahoo! and hakia

Hakia’s only real competitor is Powerset. Threatened by Powerset’s success, hakia forced itself in the Yahoo! family, only one week after the deal between Powerset and Microsoft was announced. The news read “hakia Leverages Yahoo! Search BOSS to Accelerate its Semantic Analysis of the World Wide Web”

The logical questions follow: is hakia hoping to attract Yahoo!’s attention and close a similar deal as Microsoft and Powerset with Yahoo!? Then why not aiming for Google?

Google and… Who?

Could it be that Google is not interested in semantic search? Google has over ten years of experience in search. It would be only logical for them to implement semantic algorithms if the need were real. There already are some semantic elements implemented in their algorithms, but the technology is not entirely based on semantic analysis. Google still provides search results based on keywords and keyword phrases, site popularity, interrelations between sites (links) and etc.

Only one year ago (February 2007), at the Annual American Association for the Advancement of Science, Google’s Larry Page announced the ability to build artificial intelligence:

We have some people at Google [who] are really trying to build artificial intelligence (AI) and to do it on a large scale… It’s not as far off as people think.

This is at least a hint that Google does not feel threatened by Microsoft’s merger with Powerset and the very reason why they are still ignoring hakia. Of course hakia is aware of the problem, or else why would you think they’d resort to Yahoo! ‘s BOSS in their efforts to make a mark in search?

There are enough signs that Google will change its search algorithms and the way it displays search results in the future, but the change will not go into the direction of “semantic search.” Google’s approach will probably be social.

This is where Mahalo could fit in the game, but Mahalo is far behind other newer social search engines from a technological point of view. This leaves us with newcomers like Delver under scrutiny, if Google’s new search interface will not deliver the expected results.

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Unlike Mahalo, Search Wikia and other so-called social search engines, Delver has truly the potential of delivering results ranked according to their social relevance to the user.

Delver is social because it allows users to retain information found through search by simply clicking on a “keep it” button in the immediate vicinity of the result of a given search query. They can also add other users as “search buddies” creating a network of people with common search interests. As the profile widget looks now, in the future messaging between Delver users will be possible as well, converting the “social search engine” into a networking and communication platform.

The engine scans content from MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Hi5, FriendFeed and del.icio.us, mixes it well and delivers a mish-mash of more or less relevant links, photos and media. Irrelevant? Yes. For example, the term “web 2.0” delivers results about spider webs, webbing and other links that have nothing to do with “web 2.0”

But let’s not rush in with the negative criticism: the engine is now in public Alpha, meaning that it is counting on its users to refine the algorithms, to add new services (Facebook, popular blogging platforms, etc) and to expand its reach.

The engine is relatively new on the Web – it’s been around, in private alpha, for a few months already, enough to attract Google’s attention. There are no official statements from Google concerning a possible acquisition or merger, but when Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management states that “social is the new black” – we can easily conclude that Google has their eyes on startups like Delver, if they are not creating their own.

There was recently a lot of buzz around “semantic search engines” – which apparently will be the “new black” – not according to Google’s experts, though, who consider “social” the new black and “social” a feature, not a destination.

Joe Kraus is firmly convinced that the users expect all sites to be social. This will eventually lead to an evolution from “social sites” to a “social web.” I suppose we didn’t need Google’s “visionary thinking” to know that that’s the future direction of the Web, but it’s good to know that Google doesn’t sleep when its competitors “evolve.”

Obviously, data portability plays a crucial role in the evolution of the “social web” and there are already a few services that enable the users carry around their “profiles” – ex JS-kit’s Portable Visitor Profile. Most of these services are known as “widgets.” These “widgets” add content to otherwise static websites.

According to Google’s Joe Kraus, there are three main key helpers to the creation of the social web: OpenID for identity, OAuth for API, and Google’s Open Social for building cross-site apps.

In the short term the “social web” makes more sense than the “semantic web;” Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the future, but of course the evolution of the web technology as we know it points clearly into the direction of a “semantic web” with integrated social features.

Although still valuable the search engines of today (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) are old school. In the absence of the “social” feature, even the “semantic engines” like hakia and Powerset (they both have a type of “social functionality”, however unrefined) will still fail to deliver the best results.

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