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.

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.

Kottke has an interesting post about the state of blog search which, in his words, “sucks.” I’d generally have to agree. I’m working on some notification/ping issues with FatMixx, which I’ll have more about later.

Over at the Ask Jeeves blog, they mention a company bocce tournament and how they “couldn’t remember the name of the little ball.” Huh? They didn’t think to Ask Jeeves???

Via John Battelle, I learned that Yahoo launched blog search tonight. About time. Not sure if I posted this here, but Google launched their blog search a while back (I may have just added it to the micro blog/links to the right).

Dan Wood pointed out InquisitorX on his blog. Inquisitor is a search plugin for Safari on OS X that adds some neat capabilities to the search box, most importantly the ability to search different sources from the same box with simple keyboard shortcuts.

Dan really likes this app:

Inquisitor: Must-Have add-on for Safari

Check out Inquisitor. A Safari add-on that replaces the Google search in Safari. Wow. Real-time search results. A gorgeous UI. Also you can configure it to search other sites using different keyboard shortcuts. This is what I’ve been looking for. There’s also an online version.

If this is what “Web 2.0″ is about, then sign me up!

Watching the adoption of podcasts has made me think about RSS and text. Apple’s implementation for audio podcasts really is quite solid. I know a lot of people who love podcasts because of their iPod. iTunes is, in a lot of ways, the ideal tool for enjoying podcasts. It’s built into the same app that manages your portable device and your music already, making it trivial to get things organized and synchronized between devices. When the video podcasts come out (with the video ipod), I expect it to be even more compelling, especially among the subway/T riding crowd.

This got me to thinking, though, that simple RSS for text really doesn’t have the sexy integration that iTunes has. I don’t really know what’s missing or what might be better, but I want to toss out the idea that maybe we haven’t done the best we can with regular web content and RSS. Of course, it doesn’t help that the most popular aggregators like My Yahoo and Google don’t show anything but the headline.

For example, some podcasts (like ESPN’s) are a best of sort of thing, involving editorial decisions. Other successful podcasts, like the Battlestar Galactica podcasts) offer complete content that augments other content.

What’s the equivalent for text content? Would you syndicate the front page of a site? Do composite items? Standardize something like FeedDemon’s Newspaper feature?

I’m sure there’s something better… just don’t know what it is. All I know is that it’s going to be something simple.

Jason Kottke is complaining about Technorati on his blog. I think, at the end of the day, he’s absolutely right. I had hoped at some point to be able to use Technorati’s data and technology for this research project I have going on at ESPN.com, but quite frankly the data has been so inconsistent that I’ve been forced to start looking around.

I’ve been doing a comparison of PubSub and Technorati and just want to second Kottke’s observations. PubSub has more results, seems a bit more timely, and is consistent. Technorati, well, when they’re working works alright, but seems pretty limited in their functionality. The main limitation of PubSub is that they don’t expose traditional search functionality: you can’t look back at what people have been saying, you can only get notified in the future about posts that match your terms. It’s great for watching your blog or for links to ESPN.com, say, but sucks when you’re trying to research blog reaction to the latest speech by Bush or blog reviews of the Mighty Mouse.

Just one other thought. The problems all started with the redesign of the site, really. It used to be hit or miss but nowhere near as bad as it is now. My Sports Buzz posts on FM suck now because clicking “Read Blogs” more often than not gets you an error message rather than actual blog entries. What good is the fancy redesign if the basic functionality is broken?

Especially since it seems like a parlor trick when it actually does work. I think they cache the results to successful queries which means that if it’s a common search or a common tag, you’ll get results. Do anything the least bit unusual and you’ll get an error page. So, it’s unclear how timely the results actually are… I do notice that the tag queries seem more reliable than regular search terms, but I suspect that it’s easier to index and catalog them (the users have already done the hard work of choosing which words to associate the post with…

Update: Have to second Kottke’s note about IceRocket. I’ve been playing around with them for the past hour or so and they’re pretty solid. On the surface, they’re competing with Technorati on what I see as key features (allowing users to directly ping them rather than relying on the blo.gs cloud) and with link counts (what Technorati calls authority), and some other details. The implementation of “linking blogs” looks especially interesting and I’ll be implementing this on FM soon, I think.

At the end of the day, del.icio.us isn’t about storing URLs, it’s about finding new things on the web that you wouldn’t have found otherwise, using common ways of thinking to identify peers that you want to share with. In other words, you might be interested in other things that someone else tags the same way. The point is to share and gather from a wide group of people also surfing. (this is a horrible explanation, but it’s the best I can do at 2:15 AM)

Well, Yahoo unveiled My Web 2.0, their social bookmarking service that combines some features that only a Yahoo or Google could pull together. It looks less useful to me than del.icio.us, but I think that’s because the target use is different than the del.icio.us case. I thought I would point it out, though, in case any of you end up liking it better than del.icio.us. It has APIs, too, so there’s something else to play around with.

As most of you know, WordPress is the software that powers FatMixx. While other big blog packages have had their annoying user annoyances (MoveableType licensing, anyone?), WordPress has been pretty solid all around. Good community, clear licensing, and great features. Well, like Google as of late, the shine is coming off the WordPress folks.

They were apparently hiding a link farm on the WordPress site. While I think it looks worse than it is, it’s still pretty bad what they did. Using invisible links isn’t very cool, and it’s unnecessary if he had just said, hey, I’m helping a company out in exchange for some cash to keep this going. I’m not super upset about this, but I’m just kind of bummed to have another one of the “good guys” marred. I realize no one is perfect, but, man, it still sucks when you find out they’re not.