On todays live Podcast:
How are Google blog search results ranked? Is Google reading your e-mail? The head of Live.com leaves. Do fancier search interfaces make search easier? Who uses a blog search engine?

Make sure to join us tomorrow live at 12:00pm EDT, 11:00am CDT, 9:00am PDT (that’s -0600 GMT for those around the world) right here on TechnologyEvangelist.com

Total Run Time 30:24 | Direct Download | Non-Explicit

Show Notes:
Ms Dewey
Revvu.com

Cariann Higginbotham: Coming up on today’s Search Thursday Podcast for April
26^th, 2007. How are Google blog search results ranked? Is Google
reading your e-mail? The head of live.com leaves. Will Live, live? Do fancier
search interfaces make search easier? And who uses a blog search engine
anyway?

[Music]

Recorded live with audience participation.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I am Benjamin Higginbotham and with me here is Ed
Kohler, both from technologyevangelist.com and we have got those participating
in TalkShoe with us today, hello everyone in TalkShoe. The topic today is
Search Thursday, I will get my list of stuff up, Ed being our resident Web
Guru and SEO/SEM guy, this is your day.

Ed Kohler: All right.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Excited?

Ed Kohler: Very.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, let’s start off with how Google blog search
results are ranked? How are they ranked and why it is need to be different
than a regular search result?

Ed Kohler: A blog search is some what unique, because information on blogs is
very time sensitive, in overtime – in the longer term Google blogs or blog
searches also end up in the normal Google search engine. So, if someone wants
to just go to Google and search for whatever, someone happen to write a blog
post about it, if it is relevant to the search result, that’s going to appear
there, but Google, Technorati and couple of other blog search engines out
there, they are trying to figure out way to create a search engine that
can find relevant results and they are very timely. So, if there is
something that’s buzzing on the web at any given time whether it is a
celebrity entertainment news or the launch of some new tech product or
whatever it may be, how do you sort those results? Because, you don’t have the
time to work with that you have with normal web searches also, they need to
try and figure out other factors to look at.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, but not all blog sites are newsy type sites,
actually how many of them really are? When you look at the blogosphere,
doesn‚Äôt feel like it’s there many, there are like super ultra newsy, just few
core top bloggers, such as Engadget, Gizmodo, Schobelizer stuff like that.
Every other blog feels like, it is just kind of personal blog, of evergreen
content.

Benjamin Higginbotham: If you look at, say top one hundred blogs on the web.
Those blogs are where they are, because they are generally keeping up on
whatever the news of the day is relevant to what they do, lot of those are
tech blogs and ton of them are political blogs, it is a very hot topic and
entertainment gossip blogs are also very large like TheSuperficial or
GoFugYourself those type of sites, have you check that one out,
GoFugYourself, they focus on ripping on people’s red-carpet appearances. So,
if someone came out with a  particularly heinous dress or something
like that, that’s what they are all about. So, it is a market that needs to be
covered. Someone has to do it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And define “needs to be covered”, I guess, I don‚Äôt
know. It is not something I would, normally in my daily things of what I want
to add. All right, so…

Ed Kohler: You know what? If you look at something like
BoingBoing it has over 10,000 links to that site over any period of six
months, so they are writing continuously, they put up may be 20 stories a day
or something on there, but they are also 10,000 blogs or something that over a
given six months link to that site, so even though they, so there are a lot of
sites that are just engaged in whatever topic, just interest them. So, I think
it is actually a pretty significant part of the blogosphere
that‚Äôs commenting on news of the day. Even someone who has a
personal blog, may be they are following politics, like that and they write
something on their blog about Barack Obama or something like that. Well
if somone just want to see what’s the most recent buzz about Barack Obama for
example. How do you find that?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Good question, that’s a very good question. Does this
need to be broken out in the search engines then as “everything else and
blogs” or does it need to be a dropdown or something like that?

Ed Kohler: That’s something that the search engines are experimenting about
with right now. For example, Google, they have created a separate blogs,
specific search engine at blogsearch.google.com and they don’t link to that
from the main Google’s search results, but they do link to it from the news
category. So, they put some blogs within the news category itself, that they
have decided our legitimate enough new sources that, those are currently human
approved. For example on Technology Evangelist, I believe appears in the
Google news results, so if we write about something that happens to
be newsworthy, it will appear within there and then there is a subsection
of Google news that’s specifically blog search results. So, if you go there
that’s what you are going to find, so on any given topic they are trying to
just percolate it up, whatever is the most relevant, but then they have to
figure out, you have this fire hose of things people writing about all day
long on blogs, millions of blogs, so how do you figure out which ones are the
most important. So, they have been trying to figure out a specific set of
criteria to use for blogs. So, for this they are using some of your
traditional web type stuff like page rank, for example which is really just a
measure of how many other sites link to your website. So, overtime they found
that’s a pretty good measure of credibility of a site, but there are some
things that are unique to blogs that they are trying to figure out, like
things that you can use blogs that you wouldn’t be able to use with
other types of websites, for example, subscriber stats.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, yeah absolutely which is ego thing for the
blog writer too?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, well it is a pretty darn good measure of credibility, if you
are continually writing good quality content, your subscriber column will
increase. It turns people who write something rarely, but it is very good when
they write it, because they might not have as high of a subscriber
account, but it is one factor you can look at to decide of something is good,
because you are not going to be able to get that subscriber account up
overtime, if you are not creating good content. So, but that’s one of the
things that now the Google reader has their own reader being Google reader,
they get a lot of subscribers account information, I think there are about 30%
market share already. So, that’s pretty serious information they can get from
that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I know that, when Google reader started giving
subscriber information to Feedburner, was it Feedburner?

Ed Kohler: Yeah.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That was our stats just sky rocked and we had readers,
we never knew we had, we jumped like 40%?

Ed Kohler: I think we jumped more than 30% for us, but I think that just says
something about our audience too, they are more in that kind of scene.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, so speaking of Google, is Google reading my
e-mail? We have got Google gmail, Google gmail is redundant, we have gmail,
they are adding the ads and they are whatnot, so what’s going on with that?

Ed Kohler: Well, this is something where, when Google is ranking a search
results, you can look at how many people are linking to a particular article
or you can look at the credibility side based on the number of links to or the
number of subscribers there are to that blog, but there are some
things that you might not be able to tell from that and so Google they have
access to tons of information so may be there are other areas they
can look for some, they can figure out that comes out metrics like, it could
help them figure out what’s particularly buzz worthy, because blog searches
are really about buzz. So, when there is a, on problogger.net, they had an
article it was written by Alistair Cameron and he is a blogologist…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Dude, I want that title so bad!

Ed Kohler: That’s how he defines himself, but he was looking through some
recent filings by Google and noticed that on the recent pattent, they
mentioned something about how they could look at links taht are being passed
around in chat and in e-mail. So, Google has, huge number of people are using
gmail and Google chat now, so if there are certain things getting passed
around a lot, through that, may be that’s another way you can look at to find
out that something is relevant.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s freaky, thinking that they are looking at all of
my emails to figure out what kind of links are popular and reading everything
in addition to the new feature that they just released, I think it is…

Ed Kohler: Yeah, Web History.

Benjamin Higginbotham: The Web History and we have to go in and turn it on and
I thought this is humorous , so I am like OK well, then it will “you have to
enable Web History”, I figured well then from that moment forward will track
my web history. No, no, no by turning it on, then you are able to see what
your Web History is. So, they have that data and have a feeling that, if you
go in and hit delete, because you can delete your web history, it is not
actually deleting it, I have a feeling that you are setting your little marker
to one, so you can‚Äôt see it.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, exactly. Their goal there is of course that Google makes
money by getting people use their site and they getting user site by providing
relevant search results. When you go to Google and you run a search, you tend
to find what you are looking for and they are going to use, any information
they can to make that happen and of course it is not just relevance of the
search results, but the relevance of the ads appear along the side of search
results. So, if they can just learn more about your behavior, that could help
them keep you happy. If your clicking on ads, they are happy too, if you are
finding relevant stuff.

Benjamin Higginbotham: This is a tricky, tricky area, because they have got
lot of personal data about lot of people and as long, the thing is they can do
some good stuff with this data and just because they have the data, doesn’t
mean that they are big bad or evil, but they also have the potential to do big
bad/evil things with this data, too.

Ed Kohler: Yeah.

Benjamin Higginbotham: It is a power thing, data is power and they have got it
all.

Ed Kohler: Right, there is some blackmailing opportunities, tons could happen
with that. So, if you haven’t checked it out, make sure you check out your web
history to just see what’s going on there. I was trying to thing what type of
content chat, passing things for chat through e-mail might help provide better
relevancy on, I don’t think it is technology, I think it is more of the things
what people are like to e-mail or chat about, but wouldn’t blog about, like
with the stuff that we write about, people blog about it all the time and I
think they probably get pretty good metrics on that, but things like
somebody gossip type stuff, where there is less blogging about that stuff, but
people talk about it lot more, they pass it along like blu buh bla blu.

Benjamin Higginbotham: May be there is a market there?

Ed Kohler: It is still a hot story.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, celebritygossipevangelist.com?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, there are plenty of them out there.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, Google doing really well here in search, Microsoft
not so much, the head of Live.com has left.

Ed Kohler: Well, like a lot of people nearly, if you want to spend more time
with his family, so he came down to…

Benjamin Higginbotham: I am sure that’s exactly what it was.

Ed Kohler: So, I just pulled up our search results, our stats for Technology
Evangelist, just take a look at how things are breaking down there and the
number one refering search engine for us so far this month is Google –
surprise, surprise.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah.

Ed Kohler: It is up to 80% of our traffic and the second is Yahoo 6.4%, that’s
a pretty significant drop off right? And number three Google UK, so and then
looking down from there it is Google Spain, Google France, Google Ireland,
Google New Zealand, Italy, on and on…

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, the top five results four of them are Google? Is
that what you are saying?

Ed Kohler: The top five are Google, Yahoo, Google UK, Google Canada and then
MSN. MSN is at 1.72% and then right below that is live search at 0.5%, so we
are at 2.25% from MSN properties.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Wow, that’s amazing that Google has that much of the
search market.

Ed Kohler: They are really kicking ass.

Benjamin Higginbotham: No kidding, so what happens to Live.com now?

Ed Kohler: Well, it is a trick, you have there are a lot
of resources involved in running in search engine are extraordinary, jut
from spider in the web, just from that one side of it, which is one area where
I wonder, why don’t search engines just get together and have one index of the
entire web and then people just build. Seriously, why does Google build an
index and yahoo does the same thing?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Can we all just get along?

Ed Kohler: Why don’t we focus on that issues that matter? Have one company
solve the indexing issue and then have people duke it out over the
interface and their algorithms are used to actually sort that information.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Hasn’t Google pretty much solve the indexing issue? Are
they pretty much it?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, they are doing pretty good job in it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: What was that first number again 80%?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, well I don’t think that the other sites are losing because of
indexing. I think they are able to find everything that they want to find. It
is not like you go to a different search engine and they just don’t have the
results, it is just more of the sorting of them or the speed where it is not
the index underlying that, it is other issues that are making the big
difference here. So…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Mocheeks brought up an interesting point in Ustream and
that is, “why does Google even need to exist, may be need a new more organized
Internet” and I think part of the allure of the Internet is that it is so
unorganized and that you can put anything anywhere, now not to say that they
aren’t problems with the Internet, but even if you were to restructure it, I
just don’t see a way getting around a search engine and when you think about
this, even when you are going to a library there was a card catalog back in
the day, which is been replaced by a computer, you can simply search for
stuff. So, I don‚Äôt know, I think no matter what you do, you are going
to have a search, even on your personal computer you have got search.

Ed Kohler: I actually went to library the other day? An actual library.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Why? Like with real books and everything?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, I am planning a trip to Croatia. and I want to pick up a DVD
and travel in there and so I got to my first library card since college and
then realized, it is a lot of work doing this, I mean physically you have to
look something up and you have to go physically find the thing rather than
just looking up on Amazon and about two seconds and hitting “buy now” and it
is on the way.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I was trying to see, if I could find my library card, I
don’t have it.

Ed Kohler: No?

Benjamin Higginbotham: No, yeah you are probably right and e-books even
easier, so if I got my e-reader, I have got this one book, I just download the
PDF straight to the e-reader off we go.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, I think the big problem with organizing the Internet, is that
the Internet is so unstructured, I think that’s my issue, I see with that
Mocheeks is, everything everyone that builds a web page, they are not thinking
about the structure, the organizing of the web or some sort of altruistic
librarian type personality, they are setting up a blog on bloggor and they
just start writing or they hire web design from then makes incredibly over
flash built marketing site for them or whatever it may be. So, the site that
make sense of all of this unstructured data is the one that’s going to succeed
and that’s real challenge here is, there is no structure to the web, there are
some rules you can find, but every website is significantly different and
making for sense of that is the trick.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well that’s brings us to the interface, because we have
the algorithm, you are saying basically that all of the search engines can
find any thing that you are looking for, then the difference between the
search engines really is the interface and how much easier or harder does it
make your search based on the interface? A Google versus MsDewey for example.

Ed Kohler: Well, there are two things is that the interface and the
algorithms. So, it is how you present the information, which would be the
interface and there is the algorithm which is how you rank the contents that
appears in there. So, on the interface side, I spent a little time
looking at few different ones that are out there all the web has been testing
a system where you can auto-complete searches, where as you type it
automatically starts to provide search results with every letter that you
type, it is drilling down, we were testing that one, the other day and wrote
about that on Technology Evangelist. So, that’s significantly different than
what you would see on Google today and then snap.com.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Oh snap!

Ed Kohler: If you haven’t check that one in a while that’s a very different
interface, where you run a search and brings a screen out in two panes, on a
left side it has the search results and on the right it does large screen
shots of each of the pages and you can tab through using the arrow keys, it is
a preview each of those websites. So, I don’t know, they are different, but I
haven’t seen getting any traction yet, but if they come out with a
particularly interesting feature that people seem to like, there is no reason
that Google wouldn’t just add into their system as well.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Did you play with MsDewey before the show? I think it
is MsDewey, isn’t it?

Ed Kohler: It is M-S-D-E-W-E-Y.com

Benjamin Higginbotham: I will add that to the show notes and also here you go
for the chat rooms, there is you go for that chat room and this chat room.
Man, we need a unified chat room.

Ed Kohler: The MsDewey, it is a such a heavy flash application they have
created, you actually have to have this fun animation waiting for the flash
app to load, it is something “gosh”.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah and then did you actually start searching for
anything?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, you can barely see the search results, because they are like
translucent.

Benjamin Higginbotham: But you can see the huge MsDewey on the left side,
pretty clearly.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, she looks great.

Benjamin Higginbotham: But it is fun.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, it is fun, but is that what you go to a search engine for or
is the fun what you are trying to get to?

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, so then that brings up the Yahoo versus
Google versus whatever the portal versus a plain search page, it is just has
simple box to search from, is that why Google is so popular, it is
because that simple little box and there is nothing else around it and it is
just fast or what made Google so popular?

Ed Kohler: Well Ben, it is so popular at the get go was the quality of the
results was significantly better than other sites out there and that was
because they figured out a new way to sort the search results and that was
based on link popularity, where they figured out that you can take a measure
of all the sites they are linking to a given site and use that to create an
authority score which they call page rank, which isn’t named after web page,
it is after Larry Page, not to go there, but that takes incredible amount of
resources to actually figure out all of this interlinking of every webpage on
the Internet, but once they did that, that made a huge difference in the
quality and it is become de-facto way of doing search results. Now, everyone
is taking on that kind of strategy, but their always looking at the next big
now.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, I have lost my show notes. In the mean time
I am going to go back to Ustream’s chat room and Mocheeks brings up Robert
Cringely, the irony, because we work actually with Robert Cringely. On
February 22^nd had a really interesting podcast about the
possibility of a new organized Internet. It might be good topic for a show, I
agree, do you think that’s even possible, kind of jumping back a topic, do you
think a big organized Internet is should we just essentially scrap that we
haven’t start over?

Ed Kohler: Do you mean on the hardware side or on organizing the search in the
web? Because, I don’t think search is going to change, I think as far
as if you talking about the bandwidth on the web‚Ķ

Benjamin Higginbotham: No, I think just the way the entire‚Ķhonestly, I haven’t
read the article or at least I don‚Äôt remember it, I think the way entire
Internet is structured from the way webpages are hosted to the way they
are organized and then because of that that’s the way you search through them,
from a DNS perspective, from how you find them all the way up through the
actual site itself.

Ed Kohler: I can‚Äôt see something like that happening, it just that seems,
people are just going to do what they do and so it is up to search engines to
figure out a way to make sense of it all and I think they do a pretty good job
of that. Obviously, web masters themselves can do a better job of making their
content search engine friendly, so don’t build your site out of just images,
make sure there is something that’s search engines can read, because they
don’t read images at least not yet, so that’s a problem, but on the blog
search side, one thing that I don’t think they have figured out yet is, how to
tie someone’s topic authority to the blog search results. So, let’s say you
have site like TechCrunch, whatever Errington happens to write about, because
his site is such a high ranking site has a high number of subscribers to it,
high page rank, it automatically look like he is an authority on the topic
whatever it is that he writes about, but there are things that he could write
about, he actually knows nothing about. What if he threw up some post on there
about comparing travel search engines or something, but didn’t know anything
about that. Now, all of a sudden he is the authority on the topic, so that one
still probably close enough that he’d probably do a decent job of it, but
as we can get the point there of, if you has start to write more about
celebrity gossip, he would still rank very high for that type of content, but
it is way outside of his core competency, at least as far as I know.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Are there blog search engines that do that today? I
mean Technorati doesn’t really do that.

Ed Kohler: No, you can add some tags into your site that help them I guess
figure out little bit about what your blog interest are in general, but now
they are just looking at the content of each post and the terms that they find
with in those posts. So, if you are looking for a blogs about a specific topic
you can search by tags to find people who’ve tagged blog with the term
technology or may as Minnesota or whatever it may be. So, that could help you,
if you are searching on at a topic level, just to find blogs that may interest
you, that’s one way you could go about it, but ask.com one of the things they
try to do is, they try to create a hub in network type system of the web,
where they figure out what were the sites that everyone links to and what are
the sites are the real big linkers within the web, as a way to try to figure
out who are kind of authorities within a topic. So, if you are to search
within the topic of search, show me information about search, well almost
everyone who writes about search, some point references searchenginewatch.com,
so overtime they can figure out searchenginewatch.com, they are like an
authority on this issue, because they look like hub when you look at how the
web works.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, Mocheeks brought up a point that’s related
and unrelated at the same time, I am also going to give him a quick little
advertising, because he participates all the time. Working on a user driven
site that let’s people vote on who’s product reviews are more valuable are
not, like digg for get reviews at revvu.com and actually we have been there
and seen that site, what about doing something similar to a combination of
digg, like you digg a certain entire blog, not just that article on the blog,
but you digg a blog in a category. So, for example technology and you digg
Technology Evangelist four million times and then you digg TechCrunch two
million times and that would mean that Technology Evangelist, of course I am
putting this above there , but then we have more authority in that particular
tag and then you could go to another tag and say I have this less authority in
this particular tag and you could even break those tags down. So, we could say
we have high authority at technology, high authority in Apple and Microsoft,
but not so much authority, in Sony PSP or something like that. Would something
like that work?

Ed Kohler: Well, the closest thing I can thing of that, that exists today
would be Technorati’s tagging system, where you can go into a specific
category and within there you can sort the blogs by popularity being measured
in the case of Technorati by how many sites have linked to that site over the
past six months, so it is a pretty good measure of that and what’s probably
may be a little bit better about that is you are getting more of a
passive measurement, where it is not waiting for people to seek out the
site and pull for something they are just voting based on their daily actions.
So, it is a same kind of thing happens at Google, where sometimes people will
say, “well Google, they are into this Web 2.0 stuff, they are not using all
those user contributed systems of voting for sites and stuff to improve their
rankings”, but the main thing they use to rank websites is links and that’s
people voting with actions on their own website, so it is something where it
is less pro-active, really just stepping out there, but they are do it all day
long, so they are taking that measurement that are exist and using that
instead, gets to same place.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, so who uses the blog search engine?

Ed Kohler: This is what I am trying to figure out, because it doesn’t seem
like anyone does. Technorati doesn’t seem to be growing all that fast, I don’t
know, does anyone out here on a regular basis use Technorati or Google blog
search or Yahoo’s blog search tool? I don’t.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I don’t think, once in a while I use Technorati to
search for things like HDTV and just add that as an RSS feed into my Google’s
search results, I’d probably narrow down a little bit more than that, because
I would return about two point something kagillion results.

Ed Kohler: I guess one thing I do use Google blog search for is, I search for
certain key words that interests me, so if anything hits those terms,
they will come in, but I am not actively going out to the site, I just
subscribe to the search results then they show up in my reader, but I guess I
am using it everyday in that sense, if there is mentions of Technology
Evangelist, new blogs that have linked to us, I am just curious to see who is
linked to us. So, I subscribe to an RSS feed of the search results and
then get to see what’s new and that’s really easy.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Actually the Ustream chatroom is coming back saying, “I
do, I do, I do”. Now, how do you use it? Do you use it by actually going to
the website and searching or do you do what Ed and I do which is search
for general term and then just subscribe to that and put that in your RSS
reader?

Ed Kohler: Looks like Mr. Topfs is also using the back links jack which that’s
one that we use on Technorati and  just finding out who new has
linked us, for example it is ego search I guess, but it is a good way to find
out who is talking about you so you can engage them, hop on their
blog leave a comment, see what people are saying about you, find out if you
are an idiot or if you are smart or not.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, it helps you also amplify the conversation, which
we have our own term for that which is jamplification and that’s good, it
actually moves the conversation from blog to blog but at least you are
still talking about the same thing and I don’t know, I just find it
interesting, because sometimes they will write and link to us and say “Ben is
a genius, this was a brilliant post‚Äù and other times it will be like
“Ben is an idiot, what was he thinking?”.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, the rest of the time.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And they are saying don’t use it as often
as normal Google search, but difference is that it concentrates on blogs,
that’s absolutely true, but is this going back to the original topic of, do we
want these blog results tied back into Google search results like the regular
search results or do they need to be broken out?

Ed Kohler: I think Google will tie them in overtime, because I think what they
will do is, they will look at the context of a search and if it is something
that’s particularly buzz worthy, they are going to put a couple of blog search
results at the top, like they do with Google news search results, where their
goal is to, this was the term that was coined a few years ago by Danny
Sullivan, he calls it invisible tabs where instead of having a zillion tabs at
the top of the search box where you decide today, I want to run a search for
news or for web search or images or whatever. You can’t have 400 tabs for all
of the subsections of Google search. So, instead…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Try me.

Ed Kohler: You could, it would be ugly, but why not just based on what someone
searching for, figure out what type of results they may be looking for, so if
they search for pictures of Shih Tzus or something like that, may be
you can give him couple of results from image, at the top of the results
rather than just going straight to web results or if they are searching for
something that’s particularly buzz worthy on the blogosphere or in the news
category why don’t you lead with those before you get to the web search
results and just do it all one page and give people the sample in different
options there.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well that’s what the Ustream chat room is talking about
for using Technorati, he is using to see what their current topic of the day
is and what’s being discussed heavily as you can use those search engines for
that and if you could tie that directly into your Google search engine, you
are just going to get, my only concern is, as we did a interview with
Aaron Landry? Not entirely sure when it was, but it was about that text box
and that one little text box doesn’t give you enough input to actually narrow
down your search enough to what you are really, really looking for and trying
to figure that out, I just wonder if we are thying to throw too much stuff
into that little input text box.

Ed Kohler: Well, I think people are getting better at running searches, I am
seeing some information on this where the number of words per search, people
are using is increasing overtime, where people realize that Google or any
other search engine, it is not a mind reader where if you put a one word
search into there, it is not going to get, you going to have hard time getting
that good results out of that, so…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Video.

Ed Kohler: Yeah right, try walk into the library and saying “video”, “OK sir,
could you be more specific”, so people will figure that overtime, but they
figured out just based on the instantaneous feedback they get from the search
results too, it is like “oh, I need to refine this”, so people seem to have
figure out how to that themselves where for Yahoo, they have experimented with
providing suggestions for in refining your search results, along the side of
page, I haven‚Äôt seen Google playing around with that too much, they only
exception being if you spell something incorrectly they will say, “I must give
this a try” and that I think is very powerful tool, but the refining is tough
because, it is hard to know what people were really thinking when they did
that initial search results, so just leave up to them to add another word,
they will figure it out themselves, seems to be the approach that Google has
taken.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Ed Kohler, thank you for joining us today I believe you
are off tomorrow, because you are in Iowa.

Ed Kohler: Iowa, yes.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Lots of corn there, so I would be doing Freestyle
Friday with Aaron Pecha who we will be bringing back into the studio and
Freestyle Friday, we are need to talk about just about anything we want to
talk about, so join us back here live on technologyevangelist.com. you can
watch us through Ustream or listen to us through TalkShoe, you can also join
the conversation through TalkShoe, if you dial into the conference bridge,
that’s at 12 o’clock Eastern, 11 o’clock Central, 9 o’clock Pacific or that’s
negative 06.00 hours GMT for 11 o’clock, I don’t know, how that
is actually relevant to anyone, but there you go. Hey everyone thank you
so much for joining us, those in Ustream, thank you for hanging around there
in the technical issues in the beginning, we appreciate that and we will talk
to everyone tomorrow.

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