Hey all, enjoy Thanksgiving Day (even if your country doesn’t) and eat lots of turkey with no regard for your health. Or tofurkey, or whatever floats your boat. Just have fun today.
I’m watching the parade on NBC with the wife, and I’m shocked at how much Al Roker keeps mispronouncing everything. He was talking with Christopher Meloni, and asked him about his show, Law and Order: SUV. Oy.
Anyway, here’s Google’s Thanksgiving logo for 2007:
I think it’s a lot more festive than last year’s:
Yahoo’s doing an animated Flash logo again:
If you don’t have Flash, they show this image version:
Yahoo’s logo is the same one they ran last year, as far as I can tell.
Ask.com’s doing a full page image again, showing off this giant tasty turkey:
You’d think that at some point, Google would have so much market share that it couldn’t possibly grow any further, but despite having a lock on the top spot, Google continues to claim a larger slice of the pie month after month. This time, Hitwise is reporting that Google now has 64% of the search engine market, up from 61% market share a year ago and up a point from last month. Live Search and Yahoo declined both from last month and last year, while Ask.com was up slightly.
Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
Oct.-07
Sept.-07
Oct.-06
www.google.com
64.49%
63.55%
60.94%
search.yahoo.com
21.65%
22.55%
22.34%
search.msn.com
7.42%*
7.83%*
10.72%*
www.ask.com
4.76%
4.32%
4.34%
Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending Oct. 27, 2007, Sept. 29, 2007, Oct. 28, 2006) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users.
* - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search.
Bloglines did another update today, adding a new Bloglines Top 1000 section, showing off the 100 most popular blogs, along with data on which ones are moving up or down, and sidebars with the new blogs on the list and the biggest movers. You can also go to the preview page for any feed and see its ranking, even if it isn’t in the top 1000, if you know its siteid. For example, this blog, with 54 subscribers, is ranked 22,975.
InsideGoogle is thankfully in 843 place. If you don’t like your ranking, you can claim multiple feeds your site has and consolidate them, so total subscriber count is given credit, rather than seperate Atom, RSS 2.0, RSS 0.91 feeds and so on.
In the first ranking, Slashdot’s 103,771 subscribers makes it #1. Dilbert is 10,000 behind, followed by Engadget. The official Google blog is eighth. Gizmodo is #17 and #74, and adding the two subscriber counts together could make it number 7. There are a good number of site’s that would rank much better if they consolidated feeds.
Also, Bloglines shipped some minor improvements, continuing to improve beta Bloglines. I only spotted them because I live my life in Bloglines, but one of them made my life a hell of a lot better.
They changed the behavior of the “f” hotkey, which loads up the next folder of feeds. Instead of opening the folder, it keeps the folder closed and selects it, loading all feed items from that folder, exactly like I normally do with the mouse. Using the “f” key and “j” key, you can go down through items (”j,j,j,j”), then when you reach the end, load the next folder (”j,j,j,f,j,j,f,j”).
I’m breezing through my feeds now faster than ever before. They seem to have improved the performance as well, though that could just be my imagination.
Another improvement: The title bar now shows the number of unread feed items, as well as the number of items you’ve pinned. Whether you keep Bloglines open in a seperate browser window or in a tab, you will always have a cound of the number of unread items to rely on while you’re doing something else.
Finally, they made the address bar update with a unique URL based on what you are viewing. This way, if you hit refresh or restore a browser session, everything will be right back where you were, still reading the same feed as before.
So, another month, another update for Bloglines. What a great pace for them to be keeping up. Sure, its little things, but if Bloglines gets a little bit better every month, just imagine how amazing it can be in the long run. They really are listening to the users and giving people what they want. Gotta love it.
Crave and Gizmodo are laughing at some of the strange search queries being suggested by Ask.com’s suggest feature, which suggests complete or longer queries as you type in the search box. They’ve got examples like:
“is it legal to”, which suggests completing that with “marry your second cousin”, “own a penguin” or “sell a kidney
“can you” :: “freeze cheese”, “get pregnant in a hot tub”
Clearly, some of Ask’s users have some strange things in mind. Here are some search suggestions I found, with the suggested part in bold:
why did Jeeves retire
why do i never see baby pigeons? (answer: because pigeons don’t leave the nest until they are almost as large as adult pigeons)
why does my eye twitch
why does asparagus make urine smell
why does my belly button hurt
why does my urine smell (perhaps you had asparagus?)
i wanna to be anorexic
how to knock someone unconscious
where is my liver
Also, I noticed there are words that you won’t see in Ask’s suggestions, mostly curse words and some body parts, like fu(k, a$$, a$$hole, su(k, pi$$, peni$, v4g1na, and pretty much anything a parent wouldn’t want their children seeing when typing into a search engine. Plus: “naked”.
Yeah, I used |337 instead of typing the words, because the second I read that sentence normally, I felt like a kid again, looking through the dictionary and laughing when I found something “naughty”. Plus, I don’t need Google’s SafeSearch filter flagging me. I don’t hesitate to use any language, but in a list like that, it feel immature.
Anyway, go to Ask.com and play around with the search box. Let me know if you find anything funny.
InterActiveCorp, the internet conglomerate assembled by Barry Diller, is breaking up into five seperate companies following pressure Diller’s backer, John Malone. Barry Diller is following the most important piece, the new IAC, which will be mostly the Ask.com corporation, meaning Ask.com, as important as it was before, becomes the central focus for the company, great news for Ask fans going forward.
The IAC unit will basically be Ask.com, plus Citysearch and Match.com. Being spun off are HSN (Home Shopping Network), LendingTree, TIcketMaster and Interval International (a vacation time share business). Shareholders are happy, sending the stock up 7.5%, since they’ll get shares in the four new spun-off companies. The new company will be far less complex than the old IAC, with the focus being understandably on Ask and search, and if you ask me, that’s a very smart move.
Valleywag is of the opinion that the news that a major multi-billion dollar conglomerate was breaking up was much bigger news than Google’s non-phone announcement yesterday. If the internet media (which has just been embarrassing the last few days) stopped going nuts over every shiny non-news that comes along, they might even agree.
Meanwhile, Ask.com solidified its biggest revenue stream for the future, re-upping its deal with Google to carry Google ads on Ask.com. The new deal goes five years and will bring in at least $3.5 billion.
IAC’s Media & Advertising group, the division that includes Ask.com and the rest of IAC Search & Media (plus CitySearch and Evite) had a great quarter. IAC reported earnings yesterday, and while the company as a whole didn’t do great, with profits down 4.2%, Ask’s division had revenue of $189 million, up 40%, and income of $27.6 million, up an impressive 74%. The growth is great, and though they aren’t Google-level numbers, profitablility comes first, then big growth, then billions in earnings. At the very least, the money means Ask should be sticking around for a while.
There are a bunch of search engines and other websites running special logos today for Halloween, and here they are:
YouTube’s is simple and very effective, a pumpkin replacing half the logo:
It’s the sort of logo Google used to do, before they started treating this thing as art half the time. Don’t know what I mean? Just look at the complexity of Google’s Halloween Doodle:
Spooky, but it also looks like a lot of work. Remember the days where it was obvious the most important tool for creating a Google logo was cutting and pasting?
Yahoo is running this cute little thing, another one of their animated Flash logos:
If you don’t have Flash, you’ll see this simpler static image:
Even AOL’s getting into it, with their own animated Flash logo:
(reload the page to see any of the animations from the beginning)
There’s also Technorati (it works better on a green background:
And Ask.com, they’ve gone full page with another of their huge exciting designs, using this:
Which came out liks this:
And don’t forget Dogpile:
Finally, Search Engine Roundtable has an animated logo, which you’ll have to go there to see. Here’s a screenshot of it, courtesy of Barry:
Bloglines beta keeps adding commands to the console. Here’s an update:
“echo help” now reveals new commands:
cat
cd
changelog
clear (previously available but undocumented)
ls
Echo, set and show are still available.
Cat has two uses:
cat folder_name
cat feed_name
No idea what they do, though entering cat and the name of a folder (case-sensitive) is not rejected by the system.
cd is Change Directory, a standard DOS command. It has three uses:
cd folder_name
cd ..
cd /
I was able to navigate into folders by entering “cd” and the name of the folder, case sensitive.
I cannot find the proper usage for changelog. It would not display the changelog no matter what I used.
Clear clears the screen.
ls is a list command. In any directory, it will give you the contents of the directory, along with some letters. It’s somewhat like this:
drwxr–r– Google
drwxr–r– Microsoft
Non public folders do not have the r– designation. The “d” means it is a folder, feeds do not have a d in the beginning.
Set has four usages:
set hotkey action
set theme theme_name
set text text_color
set background background_color
I cannot find the names of the hotkeys, but the themes can be changed simply by using the theme name, and the text and background can be changed to any color name or hex code.
Show has three usages:
show hotkeys
show themes
show profile
Show hotkeys doesn’t work now. Show themes shows you the four themes, white, black, old and burnt_umber. Old is green text on black, while burnt_umber is white text on brown. Show profile launches the User Settings page.
Ben Lowery and Bjorn Tipling explain at TechOpus that it’s a javascript Read-eval-print loop running inside the browser’s Javascript VM, and you can call into the Dojo or Bloglines APIs. Examples:
bl.feeds.refreshCounts() will update your unread counts
bl.feeds.load() will reload the feed tree
dojo.require(”bl.login”);
bl.login(”userName”,”password”) to login to an account
If you find anything else, let me know. I’m enjoying using this, though I’ve yet to figure out the cool things I can accomplish with it.
Hitwise’s search market share stats for September, released last week, reveal that Google’s share slipped just slightly last month, falling from 63.98% to 63.55%. Yahoo slipped just about the same, MSN slipped about half of that, but Ask.com gained over eight-tenths of a percentage point, an over 20% jump for them.
Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
First, they added support for logging into Bloglines via OpenID. While I’m not a big fan of OpenID in practice, it is a good idea in theory, so if you’re a big fan of that theory, go ahead and use it.
The other new thing is a new mobile Bloglines, this one in beta. Available at m.beta.bloglines.com, it features some good stuff, like splitting up feed reading into seperate pages, so only a few posts load at a time, and a mobile version of your Bloglines Beta start page, showing you the five most recent posts from your favorite feeds on a single page.
Finally, they’ve added a number of settings you can mess with to improve and tweak your experience. Hitting Settings now lets you choose whether whole feeds get marked as read or just what you’ve scrolled past, which of the three views you want to be server all the time (trust me, its better to let this develop naturally as you use Bloglines) and whether you want feed CSS to be used by Bloglines.
All in all, the third update in less than forty days, I’m pretty impressed. Even at a much slower pace than this, they’re setting the tone that Bloglines is alive and well, and getting the attention it deserves.
Now, if only they could get rid of that pesky auto-drop down on the left side that contains “Mark All Feeds Read”. I’ve had two disasters already with that damn thing.
One think I loved about Quake and other shooters was hitting the tilde (~) key and bringing up the console and learning all the cool things you could make the game do by messing with it, inputting commands. Turns out the developers of the new Bloglines have included in it a console, too, and you can do a few things.
To bring up the console, hit the tilde key on your keyboard. It should be to the left of the “1″ key. You don’t actually need to hit tilde, leaving out the shift key and hitting “`” will also do.
You will see this message first, followed by a command line:
Type “help echo” and hit Enter to see a list of commands. Currently, it will return this:
# help echo
commands:
echo
set
show
type help command_name for specific help
Any command listed there can be further explained by typing help, then the name of the command. Obviously, “help echo” you just did, but “help set” shows you some parameters you can change. Currently, it gives you this:
# help set
set usage:
set hotkey action key
set theme theme_name
set text text_color
set background background_color
You can set certain action keys, different themes, different text colors and different background colors. you can use the show command to see what of those are available to you to set. Type “help show” and get this:
# help show
show usage:
show hotkeys
show keys
show themes
show profile
Problem is, the show command is disabled, so you’ll have to guess at the “set” commands. “set text” works, but it changes the text color of the console itself. For example, type “set text blue” and it will change the console text to blue. You can keep changing it, then switch to black to make it normal again.
You can also use “set background” to change the background color of the console. The console is much more readable with a black background and white text, so do that. Type first “set text white”, then “set background black”.
Trying to set a theme with “set theme” will fail unless you know a theme name, and I haven’t been able to find any. Another command that works is “clear”, which clears console output.
While I discovered the console last week and didn’t have enough time to play around with it, credit goes to TechOpus for discovering the “help” command that really got the ball rolling. If you can find any other commands comment below or use the contact form and we can further crack this thing open together.
My eagle eye spotted that the new Bloglines changed and added a thing or two. What I caught:
So, the first is minor that the left side feed list is now using a bolder font with a smaller font size (so it fits more in the area while remaining readable). The big new one, and important add, is the Edit menu, which lets you edit the name of feeds and folders, change their public status, change notifier and mobile settings, change how new items are treated, copy site and feed URLs and unsubscribe from feeds. Nice.
I have to mention, I’ve never been more productive since I started using the new Bloglines. I just zoom through my feeds like it was nothing.
UPDATE: Looks like they’ve also increased the empty space below the last feed item so that even the shortest items are marked as read without extra work by the user. Nice, again. Anyone spot anything else?
Google has improved the way it tells time. Yes, a minor detail, but they did a neat job improving here. As you can see above, searching google for “time [name of place]” will give you a nice little clock, along with a full description of the time, time zone, and place in question. Ionut Alex has a screenshot of the old implementation, which looked more like an advertisement than a smart answer.
It’s cool that the clock pictured actually shows the current time, as opposed to just being a picture of a clock. The image address is http://www.google.com/chart?chs=40x30&chc=localtime&cht=cf&chd=s:KY&sig=1bhjpAjoJ38HTORPS6ob5rJe240 and is pictured here:
Would anyone like to try figuring out the URL and whether it can be used in some sort of hack?
Ask.com and Yahoo, but not Windows Live, also show you the time when you ask. Yahoo’s approach is similar to Google’s old one, easily overlooked, while Ask’s is large, bold, and actually is a live clock that updates as you are looking at it. Ask’s also appears on searches for any city or place name, not just searches specifically for the time.
All sorts of search syntax will work, including entering the name of a city, country or region, and pretty much any query with the word “time” will do, including long ones like “what time is it in New York?“
In 2002, Ask.com and Google signed their first three-year contract for advertising on Ask’s search engine, a deal worth about $100 million. Now, Ask is renegotiating the current deal, which expires later this year, according to Ask Chief Executive Jim Lanzone, talking to CNet last week. Ask’s recent succesful product launches and possible market share gains mean that the new deal will be a multi-billion dollar deal, a very nice increase. Ask may not renew with Google, though.
The company is Google’s largest global partner, according to Lanzone. “We partner on the ad side and compete like heck on the user side,” he said. Ask’s search advertising partnership with Google expires this year. All Lanzone would say in response to questions following the keynote was: “We are in negotiations today.”
The first three-year contract the two companies signed in 2002 was worth $100 million when it was announced. “This year, whether we renew with them or go with someone else, it’s going to be a multibillion-dollar deal,” he said.
Google paid a billion dollars to keep AOL as a search partner two years ago, and Ask has past AOL, has a healthier brand, momentum and good technology behind it. Whoever gets this deal, it’s going to be a big one. I’ll bet we see a bidding war yet again.
After a long wait, and much worry by fans that Bloglines was a dead project, tonight they’ve launched a new version that brings some great new features under the same rock-solid infrastructure and familiar feel.
The new version is live right now at beta.bloglines.com. If you’re perfectly fine with the old version, it isn’t going anywhere, so you can keep running it. In fact, both versions use the same infrastructure, and items read in one are updated in the other, so you can keep switching back and forth, no problem, and get the feel of the new one until you are comfortable with it.
The first thing you’ll see (after you login with some AJAX-y goodness, is a start page that you can customize with any of your favorite feeds. At any point, you can drag a feed onto the start page and it will be displayed whenever you login, or whenever you return to the start page (which you get by hitting a tiny icon next to the “My Library” link). Mouseover a headline for a preview, or click on it to read the whole article. You can drag the boxes around and arrange them however you’d like.
Reading your articles can work the same way as before. Click on a folder or feed, and the items in it start loading. Unlike before, the items in your feed aren’t marked as read until after you’ve had a chance to read it. The item will be surrounded by a dark border, and that means you’ve read it and the number of unread items goes down by one. If you click on a giant feed, you don’t have to worry about finishing it now, because if you close your browser or go read a different feed, it’ll still be there, unread and waiting for you later.
You can always click “Mark All Read” to dump all the items in the current reading pane, but you don’t need to declare feed bankruptcy, because reading is fast, and you can always pick it up later.
The easiest way to read is probably by grabbing the scrollbar or just hitting “j” to move forward one article. Hitting “j” can become an obsession (next, next, next, next), or pulling the scrollbar is a great way to zoom through the list, with Bloglines marking items as read as you zoom by them. Instead of loading all the feed items at once, it loads a bunch of them, and then when you get near the bottom, it loads in a bunch more. This keeps things simple, especially if you read a bunch in the beginning, then switch to a different feed.
Here’s the thing: That’s only one view of three. See, this view, in which full articles are displayed in a river of news and marked as you go along is called “Full View”, but there’s also “Quick View” and “3-Pane View”.
Quick View is obscenely useful. In feeds with a ton of items, especially feeds where only the title has any important information (like Craigslist feeds), Quick View lets you see them as a quick and dirty list. Straight down, read all the headlines, hundreds of them, in a matter of seconds. Click the headline, and you get to read the whole article as it expands just as it would look in Full View, so you lose nothing. It doesn’t mark anything read until you click on it or click “Mark all read”, so if you need to see the headlines for an entire feed or folder fast, and come back later for detail, Quick View is your new best friend.
3-Pane View is very similar to Quick View, but it works more like Outlook and other email programs. The top pane is basically Quick View, but when you click on a headline, instead of expanding, the full article appears in the bottom pane.this keeps the flow a little more stable, and can be very appealing for some users. The main thing is, you get to decide what works for you.
However, the beauty doesn’t come in choosing the right view for you, it comes in choosing the right view for each particular feed. See, Bloglines remembers that you switched to Quick View for a Craigslist feed and Full View for a TechCrunch feed, and it gives you that particular view every time you load that feed. You don’t have to tell it to do that, it just remembers what you do and delivers it for you the way you want it.
Why is this so great? Because not all feeds are created equal. Some feeds you know write great articles, or have all the meat in the snippet instead of the title, while other feeds are title or nothing, and your reading habits are different for every blog. The three views are dead easy to switch, they differentiate between different sites, and they put the user back in control. As Bloglines learns how you use it, it gets better, and it becomes impossible to even consider going back to anything inferior.
A few other things: Feed management is far easier, thanks to the ability to drag and drop. You can re-order items, create and populate folders, and just move stuff around, all without breaking a sweat. My feeds were getting mighty disorganized (because I’m lazy), and an hour after getting the new version, I had re-ordered them without even thinking about it while I was reading the news.
Feeds no longer run out of room at 200 items! If you have a big feed, they’ll keep giving it to you, so you don’t miss anything if you go away for a few days.
I got to speak with Eric Engleman, the new GM of Bloglines, last week, and he ran me through everything in the new Bloglines. I’ve been a longtime user of Bloglines, and I live in it. It’s where I spend most of my day, how I get my news, and, realistically, Bloglines is the internet for me. Still, in spite of my love of Bloglines, I was afraid it was a dead project, and I actually made an effort to switch away from it to Google Reader, but Reader’s performance dissapointed me.
Now, I don’t have to worry, because it’s very obvious that Bloglines is in good hands. The last year or two, Bloglines has languished, as the small group in charge of maintaining it concentrated on scalability and back-end issues, and the user interface just sat around while the rest of the web passed them by. Eric joined at the end of May, and a lot of what you see here is the result of a renewed effort to make Bloglines a powerhouse and a valuable part of IAC/Ask.com’s portfolio.
If they could do all this relatively quickly, things are only going to get even better, and fast.
The verdict? Google Reader is going to have a much harder time competing with the new Bloglines. This version is faster than Reader (in my experience, even using it in Opera, an unsupported browser), and possibly even faster than the old Bloglines. In the last few days of using the new Bloglines, I’m working faster and easier than ever before, and that’s just amazing.
You’d honestly have to be crazy to not try this, and I’d be shocked if they didn’t get a lot of people switching back. The new version is rock-solid, and while it has quirks, it has no obvious bugs. Without a doubt, you’re looking at the best feed reader on the internet as far as I’m concerned. I can’t stress enough how much I’ve been enjoying using this.
Give it a shot, tell me what you think. You’ll be surprised, I guarantee it.
You can see how Google gains over five points, Yahoo loses 1.3 percentage points Microsoft loses one, Ask loses a third of a point and Time Warner gains a third. The new system counts the top five search sites, the top fifty sites with search technology (like MySpace), major search verticals (like eBay and Amazon), partner search sites, search tabs (Google News, Google Images), local search (maps), and searches on international portals.
A little under 1/6 of Google’s searches come from YouTube and other Google sites. Mapquest gets more searches than AOL Search. MySpace search counts for about 2.5% of the entire market, and should be counted under Google, since Google powers it. Craigslist and Amazon are just under 1% apiece.
One of the biggest challenges search engines face is getting users to take advantage of their advanced features. These great features can be a great way to inspire customer loyalty, but users rarely even know they exist. This problem is compounded by the fact that almost the entire industry copies Google’s white space heavy design, which greatly discourages the promotion of features and fancy UI.
Ask.com took a risk with their Ask 3D interface, tossing white space out the window in favor of features, features, features, and it was a risk worth taking. MediaPost has an article about how Ask’s users are discovering and using the advanced features, and customer loyalty ratings are slowly rising. Of Ask’s 51 million unique visitors last month, 5 million, or 3% of the entire internet, used their search suggestions feature.
Traffic for Ask is at its highest point in a year, up two million users since the rollout in June. The University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index rated ask 75/100, up from 71 last year, while the rest of the competition suffered drops in satisfaction. Although Windows Live Search is seeing gains from its Live Search Club game, Ask is taking a serious look at possibly overtaking Microsoft for third place, a huge deal.
Congratulations to Ask, which has spent years improving relevancy, the interface, and putting the emphasis back on the user, instead of the advertiser. They’ve been doing amazing work, and they deserve some success.
(via Jordan)
My eagle eye spotted that 
Ask.com and Yahoo, but not Windows Live, also show you the time when you ask. 
