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.

By Larry Mrazek on Thursday, June 05, 2008 2:18 PM

Yidio just quitely launched their new search engine (powered by Aol's Truveo). This site searches many of the video site (youtube, etc.) and also searches some local media and news outlets, as well as over 2500 full-length movies.

Searching is simple and straightforward, nothing really special, other than they do search a good library of content.

Yidio could be a good source for the casual user, or for a media monitoring campaign on a budget. Those wishing for more comprehensive broadcast coverage would do well to go to a commercial provider.

Once of these days someone will launch a video search engine that makes one notice ... we just haven't seen it yet.

See more at www.yidio.com.

By Larry Mrazek on Tuesday, June 03, 2008 7:32 AM

A few links of interest before I begin a day of programming ...

Found this link on VentureBeat, it discusses the globalization of innovation going on around the world. While the report states that the U.S. still maintains a lead, other countries are beginning to catch up. Read more at: http://www.nvca.org/.

Also caught a bit on the local news here on the supposed benefits of filling up auto tires with pure Nitrogen instead of regular old air (which is about 78% Nitrogen anyway). Consumer Reports recently did a bit of testing, and found that Nitrogen could have a small benefit, but doesn't spare the motorist from checking tire pressure (you do this, correct?). Read more at Consumer Report's Nitrogen in Tires FAQ.

By Larry Mrazek on Friday, May 30, 2008 8:47 AM

Take a look at NewsTin (www.newstin.com), a relatively new site aggregating news from multiple sources and languages. Currently Newstin features content in Arabic, Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian and Czech.

Newstin organizes information into various topical categories (Top Stories, World, Sports, Business, Politics, Tech, Entertainment), and it allows users to search by keywords as well. Nifty features include the ability to search and read information from other languages (see: http://www.newstin.com/info/crosslinguality_help for more information), as well as featuring a large source list and advanced features such as duplicate detection, so readers won't encounter the same press release multiple times.

I'll be testing the service out in ... Read More »

By Larry Mrazek on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 8:07 AM

Ed Bott discusses some of coverage of Vista's security issues, and tries to place in context of real-world users. Go to: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=455&tag=nl.e622 to read more.