Yahoo Top Searches 2007

It’s that time of year again for the major search engines to release their top search queries of the year. Yahoo traditionally goes first, and today’s the day. And once again, people can’t seem to help but type “Britney Spears” into every search box they come across.

The top queries of the year on Yahoo are:

1. Britney Spears
   
2. WWE
   
3. Paris Hilton
   
4. Naruto
   
5. Beyonce
   
6. Lindsay Lohan
   
7. Rune Scape
   
8. Fantasy Football
   
9. Fergie
   
10. Jessica Alba
    

And this year Yahoo is expanding the list to include top ten searches by category. They’ve included Delicious searches (not tags) as well in the list. Delicious users are clearly a more tech savvy and interesting group of people than the population at large, based on their searches. This expanded data is good to have, I think, because it is a very accurate reflection of mass culture, particularly U.S. culture, during the year.

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Six Apart Sells LiveJournal To Russia’s SUP

Six Apart has sold its hosting blogging platform LiveJournal, which it acquired in January 2005, to Moscow-headquarted SUP (pronounced “soup”), the company said this evening. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SUP previously acquired licensing rights in October 2006 permitting them to manage LiveJournal in Russia, where the platform dominates blogging culture.

“This allows Six Apart to focus on their remaining three brands (Vox, TypePad and MoveableType)” CEO Chris Alden told me this evening. LiveJournal, created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 1999, was the lone service not built in house. “We have very ambitious plans for our remaining brands going forward” he added.

Since the 2005 acquisition, Live Journal has grown from 5 million to over 14 million accounts. But overall unique visitor and page view growth has been static for the last year. In October 2007 Comscore says LiveJournal had 13.8 million worldwide unique visitors generating 475 million page views. That’s up only slightly from the 11.1 million visitors and and 408 million page view per month a year ago.

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Google’s fuzzy logic for image search gets clearer

Google continues to make forays into the world of images, on several different fronts.

Image recognition in Google searches is taking shape. Although not highly publicized yet, there is a way to search images for certain elements such as faces. For example, if you do an image search for “USA”, you get a slew of maps. If you do the search “usa imgtype=face”, the search does indeed turn up pictures of people.

According to Google’s Sergey Brin, it will be possible for the computer to soon automatically search images for patterns, such as that of an elephant, in a picture.

While identification of physical objects in pictures will go a long way towards helping categorize the trillions of images on the web, there are aspects of classification which are abstract, and subjective. For example, the picture on the left can be categorized as 1. sky, 2. bird or 3. soaring.

A new Google project called Google Image Labeler has popped up for improving the relevance of image search. At any particular time, two random users who have signed up for the experiment, are paired up. Over a period of 2 minutes, both are shown a set of images for which each provides as many labels as they can think of. When the pair has a match, each of them get a certain number of points depending upon how specific the description is.

I tried out the application in guest mode (see the pictures below). Interestingly, each picture starts out with a list of “off-limit” terms which are actually the first ones that would come to mind. The purpose of these might be to look beyond the most obvious categorization. For example, in the map example below, the descriptions “map” or “Australia” were off limits.

While the Image labeler seems like a pretty entertaining project at this point, Google’s objective is to probably use the real human fuzzy network data to refine its automatic image filtering, rather than a simple grand scheme to use free cpus to classify all of the web’s pictures.

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Finding your location without GPS

Google introduced a new "My Location" feature in version 2.0 of Google Maps for mobile that will help alleviate my map reading and orientation problems. It offers GPS-like positioning by using cell tower ID information and algorithms to approximate location. It's not as accurate as GPS (within about 1000 meters on average, according to Google), which is supported on less than 15 percent of phones sold this year. But, it's free, faster and consumes less power compared to GPS-enabled devices, Google said. Google makes a point that the location data is anonymous--the data is not personally identifiable but it does go into the great Google bit bucket to be mined. My Location is supported on most smartphone devices--unfortunately not on... more

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Google confirms JotSpot will replace Google Pages

Last week people start talking about some interesting clues that suggested Google Pages would be replaced by something Google purchased a while ago called JotSpot. JotSpot is a tool that people have been using for quite a while to help them create collaborative websites like intranets, project management tracking, and customer extranets. It turns out that during an event hosted by Google in partnership with the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce, Scott Johnston spilled the beans on some of Google's plans for 2008. Among them was confirmation that "Google Sites" will replace Google Pages. Google Sites: Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration...

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Fotolog’s $90 Million Acquisition Completed

French Internet company Hi-Media, operator of one of Europe’s largest ad networks and micro-payment services, completed its acquisition today of Fotolog. The $90 million deal was first announced last August. Since then, Fotolog has added two million more members for a total of 13 million, and claims 3.9 billion page views a month. Fotolog trails behind MySpace’s PhotoBucket and Yahoo’s Flickr.

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Social Site Rankings (October, 2007)

LinkedIn, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Imeem, and AIM Pages are all growing more than 100 percent year-over-year.

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Circular Money: Facebook And Yahoo Advertise Their Advertising Platforms On Google

If you need any further proof that Google flat out owns the online advertising space, just look to the right. Both Yahoo and Facebook are using Google Adwords to advertise their competing advertising platforms.

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Yahoo Offers Contextual Advertising In PDFs; Yes, PDFs

Yahoo and Adobe have teamed up to give publishers the ability to offer contextual advertising as part of their PDF document downloads.

Users upload their PDFs to Yahoo’s ad network and then Yahoo hosts the document for download and serves up contextual advertising in a panel to the right of the given document’s content.

According to CNet, sites participating in the current closed beta include IDG’s InfoWorld, Wired, Pearson’s Education, Meredith Corporation and Reed Elsevier. No word as yet as to when it might be broadly available, although if it is eventually rolled out as part of the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) it will be a US residents only service.

On one hand contextual advertising in PDFs probably falls into the “why didn’t they think of that before” category, but on the other hand there’s probably a reason this is a new concept, because I can’t see there being a stampede of people wanting to use the service. It will be interesting to see however whether the ads convert, and it may provide an additional revenue stream for ebook sellers and similar online users and creators who regularly provide PDF downloads to visitors.

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Straight Out Of Left Field: Google Experimenting With Digg Style Voting On Search Results

If you saw this one coming, give yourself a very large prize. Google is experimenting with Digg style voting features on search results that allow users to vote up or bury search results they see.

The program, part of Google Labs, works like this:

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.

At the moment the results of the program will only be stored per user and not applied to the general search index, so that sites buried (”I don’t like”) will not appear in future results for the user, where as sites voted up will stay up. Google Labs notes that “this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks,” still, who would have thought that Google would even experiment with Digg style social voting.

Screen shot below directly from the programs site here.

via Googlified/ Paris Lemon

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