• Will Hunsinger, CEO of Evri and because of the recent aquisition, Twine
• Carla Thompson, Senior Analyst for the Guidewire Group
• Barak Berkowitz, Managing Director of Wolfram Alpha
• Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land
• Nova Spivak, Founder of Twine and now LiveMatrix.com
• Dag Kittlaus, Co-Founder and CEO of Siri
• Barney Pell from Bing
• Gil Elbaz, Founder of Factual.com

With a heated start to the discussion over the usefulness of the word “semantic”, the most interesting statement was made by Dag Kittlaus, saying his time in the Valley has revealed a surprising lack of creativity around the search topic.

Here are some of the more interesting parts of the rest of the conversation…
Talking about the future of user interface around search Carla loved Siri’s concept, which I covered earlier this year. Barak mentioned that map based search data was a huge change in search UI but it’s only possible to do that with certain types of data.

Most agreed that the future involved a combination of personalization and more relevant data. Most interesting were Bing’s experiments with long running search sessions. Barney described a standard search a user might do when booking a trip, with the user currently being required to go back and forth from the search engine and relevant sites with the engine keeping no context of previous searches. He said, “We’re heading to situations where systems can ‘get’ you.”

When asked if there was room for new search players the panel consensus was that mashups using the abundance of new APIs will provide really interesting new ways to search.

The concept of personalization popped up again in the questions with the panel agreeing it was the future of making search better. Interesting side note, Danny mentioned that all search on Google, even if you don’t login, is personalized as of December 2009.

In summary, going forward the big things in search will be; personalization, long running searches and different ways to visualize and deliver results. Oh, and there’s room for innovation, new ideas and competition.


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I love playing around with Google Suggest (the “search auto-complete” feature). It’s a great time waster, but it also provides some interesting insights into what people often search for. It’s kind of like a mirror of our culture, or at least a fascinating peek into what people consider interesting, or troubling, or worth getting more information about.

I like how the URLs are human-readable (http://whatdoyousuggest.net/#some people). It’s a bit lengthy for Twitter, but very descriptive for sending over IM or email.

I found What Do You Suggest? over at Google Operating System, along with a few great example searches (try music, or for something a bit less vanilla, “is a sinus”).

We know it works, but we don’t know how it works… except a few mythical bigwigs at Google, anyway. Now, I’m not about to tell you that the Wired article reveals Google’s best-kept industry secrets, but it does illuminate.

And sometimes a little illumination is all you need! You might not care about the specifics of fuel injection, but it might be kinda cool to find out how fuel injection was discovered — and that’s what Wired’s Google story does: it tells you how Google came to dominate the market. More importantly, it details the competition that Google now has in the form of Bing, and the methods they will employ to keep ahead of the pack.

Did you know that there have been at least eight major overhauls of the Google search engine? Or that PageRank, though memorable, is all but dead? PageRank and over 200 other signals are used to resolve a webpage’s relevance and importance — and they’ve all been added without any disruption to service! Apparently it was a piece of Wittgensteinian philosophy that led them to derive the difference between ‘hot dogs’ and ‘boiling puppies’ — context is king!

Anyway, if you find yourself with a few minutes to spare this Saturday, give it a read — it’ll make your searches even more enjoyable, trust me!
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I’m not a fan of software patents, and I’m particularly not a fan of companies who use them as a business model. While the concept of patenting software makes sense, in practice it is a complete mess.

I was therefore saddened to learn that Quintura, an otherwise interesting search startup, has devolved into using a patent for their visual search technology as a revenue stream by going after other search companies to pay a license fee if they have a visual search component.

Quintura’s patent was only awarded on December 1, 2009, and already they are targeting Google for a little-known search interface they have called Wonder Wheel, with plans to go after “several companies and services that could have infringed the patent.”

This new direction marks the beginning of the end for Quintura, and it’s a shame. I’m no lawyer, but my guess is that Google (or one of the other companies that Quintura targets) will be able to find evidence somewhere of prior art and invalidate the patent, or will otherwise be able to tangle Quintura up legally in a financial chokehold until they quietly go away. When you’re David, it’s usually not a good idea to throw pebbles at Goliath.

When combined with comScore’s statistics for November and December, there’s definitely a trend in Bing’s favor — though in November, larger bites were taken out of Aol and Ask’s search services. Unfortunately the stats don’t go back any further, but Bing’s growth of 1% in just two months is still significant.

The big question though, at least in my opinion, is how much money the big three are spending on winning over — or retaining — users. I know both Google and Bing have been throwing money and freebies at its users, and Yahoo certainly isn’t going to just roll over and die!

This is certainly possible, but the browser does warn the user to restart immediately after saving the changes. In fact, going to the add-ons screen is the slow way to disable the toolbar — the easiest way is to click Tools>Toolbars then uncheck the Google toolbar. This stops it from sending the information back to Google immediately.

So, while I don’t believe Google is being nefarious, after the news of their recent hacking and some of the reasons it was possible, it’s a good time to talk about how to monitor what sort of information is being sent through tools like the Google Toolbar.

First let’s remind ourselves how Google, or any ad powered web service, makes money; relevant information. You use Google because the information it returns is relevant to what you want to find. Google’s ability to serve ads relevant to your current browsing accounts for the majority of its $22 billion in 2009 revenue.

Their ability to know as much about you as possible increases their ability to be relevant to you and therefore make more money by increasing the chance you’ll pay attention to the information someone is paying them to serve. The price you pay for all the great “free” tools — Google, Facebook, etc. — is every bit of personal data that can be mined from the content and activities coming in and out of those tools.

This is all great stuff as long as you understand the following three things:

• What information you’re sharing.
• The safety of the information you’re sharing.
• Who has access to your information internally and externally to the organization.

I’ll cover two tools you can use to find out information about the first bullet point. The second and third bullets are different for every organization with which you choose to share your information, so be sure to read the privacy policies (even though I know you won’t).


The most popular tool for viewing network traffic to and from your computer is Wireshark. Wireshark is cross platform (Linux, OS X and Windows), open source, and free. It’s also very robust and subsequently not particularly easy to use. It can capture a tremendous amount of useful data and while that information can be filtered and sorted it’s not something the novice will readily understand. It can be downloaded here.

Cleanersoft Free HTTP Sniffer simply shows you the full URL including parameters, source IP, destination IP, source port and destination port. This is useful when you want to see what sort of data is sent behind the scenes over HTTP traffic by plugins like the Google Toolbar. This app isn’t very powerful and you can’t dig as deeply as you can with Wireshark, but it’s great for a quick look to see if there’s unexpected HTTP traffic to and from your machine.

If you care about your privacy or are just curious about what sort of traffic comes in and out of your computer I would highly recommend adding one or both of the above tools to your arsenal.

Today, however, you can score Driver Magician at no charge from Giveaway of the Day. It’s a very good driver backup, restore, and removal utility – and there aren’t a ton of good free programs that offer this level of functionality. You’ve got less than 18 hours to get in on the deal!

If this post happens to overwhelm the main page of their site, you can try heading directly to the download page or a mirror of the file.

Once it’s downloaded, you’ll need to run the setup first and then the activation file. Keep an eye on the activator – the last step will offer to bookmark and permatab GOTD in your browsers.

There are three details to be aware of about your free version (and they probably won’t surprise any of you):

1) No free technical support
2) No free upgrades to future versions
3) Strictly non-commercial usage

As with Driver Magician, the download contains two executable files — the installer and an activator. Run the installer first, then run the activator.

The activator doesn’t do anything shady like install a toolbar or alter your default search engine, but it will open a GOTD web page once activation has completed. It’s a small price to pay compared to the $39.95 you’d normally cough up for Glary Pro.

Download Glary Utilities Pro from GOTD now – you’ve got less than 20 hours to get in on the action!

There’s one downside to the free version, however: it doesn’t support 64-bit operating systems. And that’s kind of a bad thing. The majority of the customers I’ve seen purchase a new system in the last 6 months have wound up with either 64-bit Vista or Windows 7. On top of that, the free version doesn’t support creating a bootable CD — which is a must-have for disaster preparedness.

Fortunately, the folks at Easeus have decided to give away the Pro version absolutely free for a limited time. It works with any non-server Windows version and has a built-in utility for creating bootable media. EPM Pro is definitely a tool worth having, especially if they’re going to let you keep the $40 it would normally cost.

You’ll want to get in on the action quickly. Their web site doesn’t specify how limited the amount of time will be – I’ve pinged Easeus to find out, though, and will update this post once they’ve given us an answer.
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WinPatrol has been a favorite with geeky types for quite some time. It’s an amazing little tool to complement your antivirus software and keep tabs on what’s going on inside your system. It also comes in two flavors: the basic version (free) and a ‘plus’ version with free lifetime upgrades ($29.95).

In what he’s describing as an experiment, WinPatrol’s developer Bill Pytlovany has decided to drop the price to 99 cents for today only.

As is usually the case when someone offers an insanely good deal on an equally insanely good piece of software, expect his site to be hammered non-stop by technicians and admins who want a piece of the action.

The 99 cent deal still gets you a lifetime of upgrades. Head over to the Winpatrol site now , grab the coupon code (or try the direct link to the Yahoo! store if that doesn’t work), and support Bill’s crazy experiment!