Interesting talk about how the Google team scales out Google Talk. It’s an informal talk that gives a high level overview of their scalability features and practices.

Check out this simple yet effective explanation of how Google works. Covers a lot of the secrets that Google uses at a high enough level that even lay people will understand. The programmer in me sees lots of cool innovation there, and a lot of stuff that the open source community is slowly recreating as commodity components.

(via The Big Picture)

I got another rich ad from Google Adsense on FatMixx. These are clearly widgets, not just plain old rich ads.

Why is it a widget? Because you can embed it. Check the “Share” tab out:

In fact, I’ll embed it here:

Hopefully that works. That’s a great advertising model.

Update: Hmmm, the embed tag doesn’t work… wtf? I’ve checked the code again and I don’t think I embedded it incorrectly… anyone have any ideas?

Update 2: I see what might be wrong. Should be fixed in a sec.

Update 3: OK, so Wordpress bit me in the butt again… this time, the dynamic_replaces in the wptexturize function replaces the x in 300×250 (see the different x?). That value was in the URL, so that broke the URL and kept the embed from working. I hate these fancy replaces WordPress has, and may finally just give up and turn it off. I do like the extra typographical flourishes, though… Just wish it would detect whether it was in an HTML element or attribute or script block. I fixed this by replacing the x in the URL with %78, the urlencoded value for a lowercase x in utf-8.

You may or may not know that yesterday was “A Day without Google,” a simple campaign started by AltSearchEngines.com to get people to try one of the alternative search engines not built or run by the big players (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.). I didn’t participate, honestly, but I’m struck by a couple of common themes coming up in the various reviews by folks who did.

There seems to be a shift or a surge in prevalence, if not popularity, of search engines that want to be “experts” rather than curators or guides of the Internet. For example, take the experiences of Josh Catone yesterday with two natural language engines, Lexxe (lek-si) and PowerSet. Both of these engines prefer that users ask normal, English questions that the search engine will answer. Ask.com is probably the most popular of this breed of engine, though they probably don’t match Lexxe or Powerset feature-for-feature.

Here’s what Josh, who writes for Read/WriteWeb, said about his experiences with the alt engines:

As an example, last night I caught part of a fascinating documentary about Israel’s 1967 war with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Later, I couldn’t remember the name of Israel’s prime minister at the time, so I fired up Lexxe and asked: Who was Israel’s prime minister during the 1967 war? Lexxe suggested that it was Yitzhak Rabin — I knew that wasn’t right. The second result, however, mentioned Levi Eshkol — which is, it turns out, the correct answer.

…

When I tried my first query in Google this morning, the first result I got was Wikipedia’s Six-Day War entry, which would lead me to Eshkol. And the fourth result highlighted text on the search results page mentioning Eshkol as prime minister.

This is a trend that’s a lot of investors and entrepreneurs are moving toward. While we focus on the power of natural language as a usability step, it’s making a couple of other leaps that I think are much more significant. These search engines are taking the next step of actually being the repository for knowledge from the Internet rather than a guide to the knowledge on the Internet. In other words, Google will do it’s best to help you find a site that can answer your question. Lexxe and Powerset will attempt to answer your question.

That’s a pretty profound difference, in my mind. A couple of things come to mind here. First, my gut instinct is that a site that tries to be an expert on everything, which answering any question implies, will likely be an expert at nothing. While I know that enough people and enough special algorithms could replace us, the fact of the matter is that there’s an enormous amount of knowledge and facts out in the world. It’s unclear to me (and, really, beyond my imagination) to believe that one search engine will be able to actually answer questions in the near future. I’m not the first to think of this, obviously, as smarter folks like Jakob Nielsen have been talking about Answer Search Engines since 2004.

Second, the tour guide-like functionality that Google and Yahoo and things like DMOZ provide is different and in certain cases better than getting instant answers. Google does a particularly good job at bridging the answer/guide gap by using special treatment in their OneBox area. It’s a smarter guide, but one that’s not trying to answer every query, just the ones that they’re particularly good at.

The third thought that comes to mind flows from Google’s OneBox. Jason Calacanis, the entrepreneur who brought you Weblogs, Inc, publisher of blogs like Engadget and TUAW, just launched his next big venture, Mahalo. Mahalo is a “human-powered search” engine, which has “guides” that create search engine result pages (SeRPs) by hand. Here’s his description:

Jason McCabe Calacanis today launched Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine, at the Wall Street Journal’s D Conference. The site is currently being launched in Alpha with the Internet’s 4,000 most popular search terms completed. The Santa Monica-based company hopes to reach 10,000 search terms by the end of the year. At that point it will enter Beta, and launch shortly thereafter.

In other words, they are manually creating the search results pages for the top 10,000 keywords. At some point, I believed that this was an open, wiki-style project, with direct compensation, but it looks like the first set of guides are employees. They just launched their Greenhouse project, which aims to allow anyone to try creating a SeRP to earn a small fee.

The interesting thing here is that Mahalo is explicitly targeting the curator function, to create a reviewed list of results, including a fact box. Here’s the SeRP for iPhone, for example. While it’s not what you’re used to from Google, it provides a decent mix of guide-like results (here are the top sites that talk about the iPhone) and answers (when will the iPhone ship, etc.). While you can’t ask your question as a question, I actually like that because it avoids all the annoying extra typing. I suspect given another generation of net savvy users, a majority will soon get the index approach.

This was just on my mind today after reading about the Day without Google. I personally think the curator function is the most important, but I know how much people love Wikipedia and getting answers from the Internet. I guess we’ll see how it all plays out.

Got it! Ads on FatMixx are showing the NBA’s playoff video “ad” again. I have some screenshots of what I was talking about earlier. It’s a little embedded interactive app. If you click on the controls, you can navigate to one of 4 features: Recap video, Preview video, Stat Leaders, and the Playoff schedule. If you click just in the window, you get taken to the NBA playoff package on NBA.com. Very slick, and great production values.

Here are the screenshots:

This is neat, but I wonder what the practical upshot is. Google Adsense as a Widget delivery vehicle? Is this content or advertising? Does it employ the same targeting algorithms? What keywords do you buy to deliver this ad? How much is the NBA paying? This is an interesting development.

Quick note: I was checking out NYC17’s comment on my “Why I Left ESPN.com” post below and saw something I hadn’t seen before: The square Google Ad placement before the comments was a video ad that let me watch highlights from last night’s Spurs game. I didn’t embed it, and it wasn’t a traditional ad (I didn’t get redirected to NBA.com or another site). I just got to navigate a menu and play back the highlight right there.

That’s a pretty cool setup. Ad as content…

Does anyone know anything more about this? The only thing I can find online (after a quick Google) are passing references in various Adsense Video coverage (which is different).

I wish I had taken a screenshot. I’ll grab one if I see it again.

Google unveils Web History, a feature that uses your Google Toolbar to record all of the pages you surf to while using that browser. That’s unbelievably scary, but according to Google it’s a feature. All this takes is one National Security Letter to one company to basically track everything an opted-in user does.

How long before someone gets burned a la Julie Amero? Hey, your browser went there. Google said so.

think they need to work on this feature:

My favorite service in my original comparison, Measure Map has since fallen into my “ugh” list because of how horribly, terribly poor it is. As they opened it up, the application failed to scale. They seem to miss stats left and right and the reports are more or less unusable. It seems directly related to load as it seems to get better at very weird hours. Guess you don’t ask usability experts about scalability or something. Granted, looking at my blog, you probably wouldn’t ask me about usability. I do happen to know a few things about scaling big web sites, so it makes sense.

You might ask Google about scalability. Instead of just asking, though, they found a way to get Google to buy Measure Map. Awesome. Now, Google has two poor performing web analytics services. At least Measure Map isn’t ugly and is tailored toward blogs. Google Analytics, as I wrote before, is much more business oriented and also had its own scaling issues.

I kid about the Google and poor performing analytics thing, of course. Google should be able to help the (former) Adaptive Path folks figure out how to make their service perform. Now, if they could figure out how it was going to make money…

Yesterday a buddy at work noticed something very odd on Ain’t it Cool News: McDonalds ads, one rich media (flash) and the other the large rectangle text ad you see in our comments section. Think about that for a second. McDonalds is a company that isn’t really selling anything online and that usually does brand advertising (e.g. advertising on ESPN.com because their target demo visit the site heavily). Yet, they’re distributing advertising targeted to Ain’t it Cool via Google’s system.

I’ve been seeing more an more mainstream ads in general, marking an important shift in their advertiser base. Everything from semi-fringe companies/brands/people like William Shatner:

to large companies like McDonalds and Microsoft:

Sorry, I didn’t get a screen shot of the McDonalds ads… they’ve disappeared today.

It looks like Google may truly be making the best advertising marketplace out there. This will be pretty significant, especially if they’re not matched by Yahoo or the other ad networks out there.

I’m no lawyer (though I like to play one on the Internet), but I wonder if Google’s blog posting today on Google Video will create (or draw attention to) any legal exposure for them. They highlight the awesome video of those two Chinese kids singing and another cool video of a guy juggling a soccer ball in Amsterdam.

Both of these clips feature nearly the complete audio for a copyrighted song. Google is hosting the video on their site. Isn’t that bad for Google?

I think Google Video is a great idea, and I’m all for it. In the current IP climate, though, aren’t we going to encounter copyright issues? And wouldn’t the recording industry have a legitimate point in this case?

What’s the answer? Compulsory licensing? Who pays then, Google or the video producer?

I’ve been following the progression of the Google Print lawsuits with some interest because it’s the first foray of new technology companies taking established online practices into a traditional offline business. A quick summary of Google Print is on Google’s web site, but simply put, Google wants to index all of the books in the world so that you can search them as easily as you search the web today. It makes sense, and really, especially from a technical standpoint, it’s exactly the same problem they have searching the web.

I remember writing a research papers in college and using the computerized system there. Books were only searchable as far as the subjects they covered, which really depending on a summary and the keywords that someone assigned to them. In other words, you never really got a hit if a book that was really about the history of American rail technology had an interesting chapter or subchapter that talked about unions, for example (I was doing a paper on communications technology and union organization). Google Print ought to be a huge boon to researchers of all types, whether they be academic or bloggers trying to learn more about a subject.

We’re seeing this collision of old vs. new so often now… Music libraries should be searchable (iTunes), video should be on demand (TiVo, OnDemand, iTunes, etc.), and books and magazines, too. Google is pushing the boundaries on the integration of paper and plastic into the digital realm with Google Print and their search for subscription content (allows magazines/premium content services like Insider to get indexed without giving away content). It almost makes me feel like the dystopian view of the future may not pan out… Instead of getting bombarded by more and more advertising, maybe we’ll hit a balance where we get ads and we pay for some ad free private viewing/consumption.

Another interesting observation: Google has been defending the program on their company blog. By the way, those of you that are trying to set up corporate or organizational blogs, the Google model is one approach to look at. Even though they don’t allow comments.

Google just launched Google Reader on Google Labs. Reader is an online RSS aggregator similar to BlogLines and NewsGator. The main thing I noticed that I really like is that they went label/tag based instead of folders, similar to GMail. If you’re used to the GMail organization paradigm (and I love it, by the way), this will make a lot of sense to you. It has some support for podcasts and enclosures, so that will be interesting to watch as well.

Update: Import doesn’t seem to work right in Safari.

It’s official, Google has released an IM service to the masses. The official client is only for windows but the server seems to only be using the Jabber protocol and numerous clients exist (including my favorite Mac one!)

Give it a whirl. I’m online right now and will be at work. I may use iChat because it apparently lets you do audio. Very cool, and especially cool that Google chose to use an open protocol.

Between this, GMail and my favorite portal site (google IG), maybe it’s time to put some money into Google, too (I currently have a little cash in Yahoo). I just cancelled my premium Yahoo email account (well, converted it to a normal web-based, free account).

Update: Google has a list of other clients on their site. Also, since it’s Jabber, I wonder if someone could convince them to peer servers? Or, say, allow specialized, bot-like IM programs? For example, you could IM espn@espn.com and ask for scores or news about your favorite player. Oh, the fun you could have… Looks like that Jabber book I bought a month ago (Programming Jabber) might come in handy.

Google announced their new personalized home page, similar to My Yahoo. I’m a big fan of Google’s simple, clean designs and their personalized home page follows in those footsteps. I like it. Yahoo, on the other hand, always seems cluttered to me. There’s just too much going on and a lot of it has to do with the infrastructure of the page. What I mean is that the boxes and the background and everything else just end up being too much. So, give the Google version a whirl. They also allow any RSS feed and have neat hookups to their email service among other things.

Another random Google result ranking for this site. Josh’s post about Maurice Clarett is the 18th search result for “Maurice Clarett” and is the 6th result for “Maurice Clarett Combine,” a term someone just used to arrive at FatMixx. I’ll never understand how Google does it’s page ranking, but all you folks looking for an opinion about Maurice Clarett, welcome to FatMixx. Thanks, Josh.

Oh yeah, traffic is, in general, down from our heyday a few months ago. Not sure why or how, but clearly, we’re not as interesting as we used to be. You can always see the stats by clicking the little rainbow box to the right.