Yahoo Live tries livestreaming

Last night, Yahoo dropped a new service on the world: the livestreaming service Yahoo Live. Conceptually it's very much like uStream and other livestream products. Anyone can set up a channel and embed the live player (though, oddly, not the text chat that goes with it) on their own page.

One of the really cool features of Yahoo Live is its multi-camera viewing panel. In addition to the video feed you tune in to, four other video channels -- of other users watching the same stream you are -- appear below the main video. You can jump to those channels quickly, and change the lineup of the secondary video channels by selecting names from the main video's chat window.

Yahoo is launching the service with an API, allowing people to mash up their own streaming video services. That's very cool, and unusually forthcoming. Most services don't go public with APIs, if ever, until the site has been live for a little while.

Unfortunately, Yahoo Live launched with a serious capacity deficit. I had the service go from functional to "our servers are smoking" several times when the user count broke about 800. Hey Yahoo: this is why the private beta was invented. If you don't want to put Yahoo-sized capacity into a new product, don't pretend that it's ready for a public viewing.

No word yet on how Google / YouTube will react, nor if a mobile version will appear.

See also: Justin.TV, Kyte, Qik, Flixwagon, Comvu, Mogulus and Operator11. Care to lay odds on which, if any, can survive independently, or which will get acquired by Google, Facebook or MySpace?

Track Yahoo Live's progress on the site's blog.

Source: www.msn.com

New MSN search offers up refreshing results

Well it's not perfect, but MSN's newly enhanced search engine offering is definitely offering up its own brand of "relevant" results. That's not a bad thing as long as those results get users to the most useful and accurate information available.

MSN seems to be doing just that with their latest offering based on the test drive that I gave it last night. Although, still in the beta stage as of Tuesday night, MSN allowed users to preview by visiting live.com; A site Microsoft launched back in November of 2005 to boost its "Windows Live" offerings.

The first search that I did was for a college sports team that I take an interest in: "Texas A&M Aggies". The results were not what I was looking for at all. Although there weren't any obvious "spam" sites in the top five, the first few results directed me to sites that were only loosely associated with the Texas A&M University, much less its athletic program. In fact, position #4 was occupied by a site that dealt with southwestern cooking tips!

Still, MSN's new and improved engine offered very Google-like results in terms of featuring authority content sites with fresh content, but also offered a slightly different spin on the top five search results. It's was refreshing to see, because it seemed like the previous incarnation of MSN search was nothing more than a Google emulator.

This is definitely a step in the right direction for Bill Gates as he tries to catch up in what seems to be a hopelessly uncompetitive race between Microsoft and its two main rivals, Google, Inc. and Yahoo, Inc. This is currently a race in which both Google and Yahoo are lapping the software giant, but MSN has not let up on the accelerator just yet.

Source : www.seoproject.com

Google Isn't Always The Best Search Choice

Google has turned into a household verb, but that doesn't make it the last word in Web search.

On one level, it can't be: Web searching isn't even 15 years old, and there's no reason to think that somebody couldn't do it better than Google.

On another level, it shouldn't be: The technology used to figure out what pages people want to see also helps companies calculate what products people might want to buy, and therefore what ads to display for them. Do you really want one company controlling that show?

Nobody's going to win any market share from Google -- about 50 percent of the U.S. market for Web search, twice that of No. 2 Yahoo, according to ComScore's latest data -- on pity alone. Other companies will have to win customers by offering something better, and probably less advertising than Google pushes at you.

A test of three other major Web search sites -- Yahoo, Microsoft's Live Search and IAC's Ask.com -- showed that they can, but it's not easy.

The best opportunity for the competition is probably blog searching. Google runs one of the biggest blog services around, Blogger, but using it to find relevant postings can quickly get you lost among "blogspam," or fake sites set up only to advertise unrelated products or services. This gets especially bad if you use Google's "sort by date" option to find newer posts.

Ask's blog search often did better. For example, a search for blogs talking about the possibility of the Metro rail system tunneling through Tysons Corner yielded about the same number of results at both Google and Ask, but Google's list of recent items was dominated by ad-filled phony sites.

Another blog-search site, Technorati, also provided more relevant links than Google. Yahoo and Live don't provide blog-only search.

Another Google weakness could be in video and photo results, some of which were far off the mark compared with the findings of other sites.

On the design side, some of Google's competitors also offer novel and interesting ways to get to the data you want.
Live's online maps also often prove more useful than Google's, which are deservedly renowned. In addition to the satellite photography available at every mapping site, Live also provides aerial photos in and around many cities. They're taken from a much lower altitude than photos available elsewhere and show the sides of buildings, not just their roofs.

One of Yahoo's best features isn't on its home page: a bookmark-sharing site called del.icio.us that it bought in 2005. Since it lists only sites that people have bothered to save shortcuts to, a search there can produce far less fluff.

All that said, for most of the things we search for on the Web every day, it may not matter which search engine you use. In most of the dozens of searches I tried for such things as the schedule of the Screen on the Green outdoor movies on the National Mall and Jim Romenesko's widely read blog about the news media, all four sites yielded the Web pages I sought.

They all also provided such conveniences as cached copies of pages that I could bring up if Web sites were inoperative or overloaded, and links to limit searches to images or news stories.

Google functioned better with more esoteric topics, finding the little-trafficked Web site of an Arlington neighborhood and an obscure battery-testing program. Ask delivered the least relevant results in these tests, with Yahoo and Live's accuracy falling in the middle.

Google also excelled at finding recent news stories. On Monday afternoon, it found a story about the reversal of a patent-lawsuit ruling against Microsoft within minutes of the decision. At Ask, Yahoo and Live, the same query yielded only older, less relevant stories (in Ask's case, none newer than July 30).

All of the sites tended to be too eager to interpret search queries as sales opportunities. Looking for reviews of a new HDTV, for example, yielded only links to sites selling that set-- not any third-party reviews. A search on how to wash an autographed baseball jersey led only to sites selling -- you guessed it -- autographed baseball jerseys.

Just as e-mail services can have a hard time fending off spam, it seems that search engines struggle to tell when a user doesn't want to turn into a buyer immediately.

If one of Google's rivals can crack that problem before the market leader, then you might see the Web-search market get a lot more interesting.

Ask, which redid its site this summer, is the most creative. It uses a clean, clever two-column layout that keeps your search query and related links visible on the left at all times, instead of having them scroll out of view. It also provides thumbnail previews of many sites it indexes, accessible by clicking on a binoculars icon.

The best feature at Microsoft's Live search, also recently redesigned, is its "search macros." The customizable queries limit a search to a set of sites that use particular terms. One of them, for example, looks for recipes posted at five popular cooking sites.

Source:www.washingtonpost.com

Search Engine Optimization for Universal Search - Back to Square One?

Organic search engine optimization, until recently, had been a fairly straightforward endeavor. The goal was to optimize the content on a website so that it would show up in the organic results on one or more of the major search engines - results that were comprised of nothing but other websites. However, in the middle of May 2007, Google began rolling out its new "Universal Search," something it had been working on behind the scenes for several years. This new search option may have long-term repercussions for every search engine optimization company in the industry if it is something that is preferred by the public at large and if it becomes the standard going forward.

What is Universal Search?

Someone using Google's Universal Search will find that a query brings back results that encompass not only web pages, but also videos, blogs, images, news articles, and other media available online. While Google already had in place options for searching each of these areas individually, many searchers did not notice those options or did not know how to use them, a phenomenon that became known as "invisible tabs."

With Universal Search, there's no need to select a separate menu item - the search will return results that encompass many different types of media. For example, a search for "breakdancing" might bring up not only web pages about breakdancing, but also blog posts about it, videos showing technique, and news articles about it. It would not, however, give you the reason why you were wearing parachute pants and trapped in the eighties.

However, Universal Search hasn't been rolled out fully yet. Currently, certain terms will give Universal results, while other searches will remain the same as before. This is a classic Google move - roll something out gradually, see how it plays in the public eye, and then decide what to do from there. Basically, Universal Search as it exists right now is very likely to change, depending on user feedback.

And if the limited queries that now return Universal Search results do not garner positive responses, it's likely that Google will revert to its previous, webpage predominated results. They obviously don't want to lose market share, and they already learned a valuable lesson not long ago when they released a new algorithm that was poorly received and which was subsequently dialed back.

What are the Benefits of Universal Search?

Universal Search brings several benefits to searchers. A searcher no longer has to specify the media he or she is looking for - one keyphrase search will cover everything. And the results from a search will be more comprehensive in many instances, giving a well-rounded picture to the searcher that may include better information than would previously have been found in a search of just one type of media.

What are the Drawbacks of Universal Search?

The problem with Universal Search is that it can muddy the results, and it can also introduce irrelevant results that a searcher cannot use. A search for "Paris Hilton" (ever heard of her?) will bring up news, videos, and other information about the heiress. But it will also bring up a map of the city of Paris showing locations of Hilton hotels, something most searchers that typed that exact phrase probably did not have in mind. Plus, 28% of Internet users are still using slow dialup connections (1), according to RVA Market Research. Many of these people are likely not interested in videos or other results that require much bandwidth, and such users may turn away from Universal Search entirely - there are, after all, other search engines. No, really - there are.

In addition, there is no way to turn off Universal Search; as it exists right now, it is part of the standard "Web" search, eliminating the ability to simply search web pages and introducing a new wrinkle in search engine optimization efforts. Now, a website is competing not only with other websites, but also with all the other media that will be included in the results that an average searcher sees. And Universal Search makes it difficult for Google itself to determine the relevance between different types of media, since the factors that determine a web page's relevance are much different than those that would determine a video's relevance, for example.

What Can You Do Now to Make Sure Your Site Is Ready to be Found in a Universal Search?

Clearly, Universal Search will change how an SEO campaign is run if it catches on. But this is a real if - users' search habits are hard to change overnight, even if you are Google and you essentially define what searching is and how it works. If it does catch on, you'll need to analyze the industry you are in and figure out which types of media might be most important for you. For example, if you are a real estate firm, images of the buildings and homes you are selling might become a very important part of your site, and so you will want to focus on adding alt tags to each image so that not only does your site show up for certain keyphrases, but your images do as well. If you are a business services firm, you instead might want to focus on news items produced by your company - press releases and white papers - and make sure that those are available to search engine spiders and optimized for critical phrases.

If you are working with an outside search engine optimization company already, now is the time to ask what they plan to do in regard to Universal Search. Your search engine optimization company should at least have an awareness of the magnitude of this new way to search on Google and should be able to present you with some sort of plan of attack, even if they plan to wait to embark upon the plan until they know for sure that Universal Search is going to catch on. If you are looking into hiring an outside search engine optimization company to launch a new campaign, the same holds true - ask your contacts at the firm how they are planning to handle Universal Search. They should at least be familiar with the concept and have a general outline to present to you.

Conclusion

If you thought that it was just Google that was working on what it calls Universal Search, think again. Yahoo, MSN, and Ask, as well as several minor search engines such as A9, are all working on their own versions of a universal search that will display different media types. These versions are currently still in the testing phase, but they could be rolled out at any time. What all this means for you and your search engine optimization company is that the face of SEO will be changing dramatically over the next several months - or it won't. Only time will tell.

Source:www.site-reference.com