By Larry Mrazek on Friday, July 18, 2008 7:50 AM

I'll be moving this blog to a different platform over the weekend. We'll be using BlogEngine.NET, which is a snap to setup and has support for social networking, etc ... plus it is open source. New blog will be at: blog.lcm-res.com.

By Larry Mrazek on Monday, July 14, 2008 7:25 AM

If you're needing to track a brand, do some in-depth CI, you may want to add Summize.com into your search toolkit.

Summize searches Twitter, featuring both a simple and advanced search. Advanced allows searching by person, places, attitudes, dates, as well as simple keywords, providing good options if you have a precise search. Those searching for common brands or keywords will possibly be overwhelmed by the non-relevant links returned ... but if you're monitoring a large brand, you'll possibly be running all of your content through additional analytic software.

Summize also provides an API, which could be usefull for companies looking to integrate these searches into their portals.

By Larry Mrazek on Thursday, July 10, 2008 7:17 AM

Just read about a new release from Yahoo ... they've created a new web service platform that allows developers to access their search index and content, allowing much deeper integration into your applications than services like Google Custom Search.

Read more about the release at: http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000599.html.

I think this is a good move for Yahoo, if it is successful, perhaps it will push other search engine companies (Google?) to open up their indexes to developers. At the very least, it might encourage some innovation in the search engine arena.

I've listed a couple of search services that use Yahoo's BOSS API (taken from ... Read More »

By Larry Mrazek on Wednesday, July 09, 2008 8:12 AM

AltSearchEngines just posted a great summary of semantic search, which will be part of "Web 3.0" services.

Read more at: http://altsearchengines.com/2008/07/08/top-down-and-bottom-up-semantics/

By Larry Mrazek on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 8:07 AM

As the bandwidth of the typical Internet user increases, search engine companies are beginning to create new ways of visualizing web search. The SearchMe  (still in beta) interface presents results as a series of screenshots of the actual websites; see below for an example of the "st. louis market research" search:

SearchMe also allows for the creation of  "stacks" (basically bookmarked sites in a visual way), which you create by dragging a "site" from your results screen to be grouped with other sites. This is a nice feature, and could be useful for researchers browsing topics and other sites.

Other nice features are the highlighting of terms on the search results.

Overall, I've been initially impressed by this technology; I'll be using it more over the next f ... Read More »

By Larry Mrazek on Monday, June 16, 2008 7:31 AM

Link of the day goes to yesterday's article from the NYT ... read more at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/business/14nocera.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin.

By Larry Mrazek on Saturday, June 14, 2008 1:26 PM

TechCrunch has a great analysis of the failed MSFT / Yahoo deal, and how the Google/Yahoo deal compares.

Read more at: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/14/hey-microsoft-how-bout-we-do-that-first-deal-you-offered/.

I agree with the author ... Yahoo should have swallowed their pride and taken Microsoft's deal ... it would have been good for the company and shareholders, and would have at least provided a bit of competition to the Google behemoth.

By Larry Mrazek on Thursday, June 12, 2008 2:50 PM

Truveo announced today new features, and performance enhancements for its video search engine, including improvements in video playback, linking related videos, sharing, rating and usability.

Truveo, although not as well known as YouTube and other video sites, indexes over 100 million videos from thousands of sources, including HULU and others. Truveo also has developed an API for developers and users to create new uses for their video content.

By Larry Mrazek on Wednesday, June 11, 2008 3:16 PM

Twingly, a new blog search platform that promises "spam free" results, just went live. Check them out at: http://www.twingly.com/.

Try running a search on their "regular" blog search engine, then repeating the same search on the "spam free" search, which is currently in beta. I've found a significant difference (and in most cases, improvement) in the results when using the "spam free" search on Twingly.

I hope that Twingly continues to develop and improve their product ... Google and Technorati certainly need some competition.

By Larry Mrazek on Wednesday, June 11, 2008 1:51 PM

As I get used to my new laptop with Vista  (not as bad as everyone has indicated ...), I found the following page extremely helpful in setting up a local instance of IIS 7 on the laptop for development purposes.

Go to: http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2007/05/21/tips-for-classic-asp-developers-on-iis7.aspx.

It really helped me get everything running quickly, with only a small amount of pain and suffering.