Work(ing Title)

For those of you prepping to head out east for the Olympics next year. I don’t see China as an option in the Live Search for Mobile client yet, but then again my phone wouldn’t work over there.

We’ve launched our Live Search Maps site in Chinese ! Not only that but we have street data for China! The first public release supports most basic map and local search features across China with details for 114 cities, plus a Public Transit feature for 11 cities, but without Driving Directions and Public Collections; we will enable Public Collections in the QFE, and add Driving Directions in a future release. Enjoy! CP…(read more)

(Virtual Earth Blog)

When it came time to ask someone to refine the idea behind the Defrag conference, Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoo) was tapped to provide an explanation. The first ideas Jeremy felt were the reasons for Defrag to exist were Open Source, Social Everywhere, Web Services, and Web platforms. Open Source got left out of the discussion a bit, but the remaining three were very interesting.

The point was made the MySpace and Facebook typify sites that are built as destination sites without much real function. In contrast, MyBlogLog attempts to incorporate social software around online activities people already participate in.

This argument makes plenty of sense up front. Providing rich socialization ability in the online locales where users already spend a lot of time is both obvious and logical. Personally I get all dizzy at the thought of a Facebook-esque news feed built into my Flickr homepage. However the question of a tipping point is worth exploring; If enough users all show up, does a site need a real purpose? There are plenty of popular bars that have lines out the door and tonnes of people inside, while the only function of the place is to buy overpriced drinks.

Yahoo’s investment in Hadoop, in conjunction with the in-house growth of Yahoo Research’s Pig, represent a shift in development priorities towards something Jeremy calls, “infrastructure software.” The social networks, even in their first-generation ‘outpost’ modes, are showing us that software needs to leverage grid/infrastructure computing, as distribution is handled by the users.

The movement towards developing software to run in the cloud is clearly a mandate for anyone who wants to have an audience moving forward. When you combine the idea of relocating social software and building the tools for developing infrastructure software, the end result is an extremely democratized method of software deployment. The human experience of finding software through your social grid is more capable than traditional marketing and distribution. This is incredibly similar to the painful evolution of the music industry, and I think what application developers need is something like a Radiohead vanguard to follow.

This morning’s Defrag keynote opened with a panel discussion on where the business of search and discovery has come from, and where it needs to go.

Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley) made a strong opening analogy by explaining that search is currently an, “experience in orienteering;” the journey to your information begins with a few words, followed by a long period of sniffing out clues. This process repeats until hopefully you find what you were looking for.

Obviously this creates a demand for a major upgrade to the human experience of search. One of the natural solutions is natural language processing, where Microsoft is doing a lot of great work (TellMe, Windows Speech Recognition, and Ford Sync).

Another of the interesting factors in the evolution of search is a pitch for building more topic-specific indexes. Steve Larsen (Krugle) argued a compelling case for vertical search indexes, “In a code-writing search index, Python is never a reptile and always a language.”

This feels like a workaround for the lack of NLP implementation/effectiveness, but as opposed to most instances, that sort of design sounds extremely valuable. I think I might rather have a half-dozen different search engines that I use across a day, assuming they are each much more targeted toward the information I’m looking for. I think this type of strategy could allow for a lot of smaller-scale growth in the search market.

Bradley Horowitz (Yahoo) gave an explanation of Flickr’s Interestingness system which brought up the powerful difference between explicit and implicit discovery systems. Explicit systems (voting, rating) are ripe for gaming and rigging, which obviously prevents an honest view of the landscape from emerging. The Interestingness recipe watches views, comments, and favourites across all the system’s photos. In addition though, it weights the value of those actions based on the relationship the author has with the viewer (your brother marking your photo as a favourite is different than a stranger doing the same). Intricacies like that help develop a more honest result set.

The beauty I see in these implicit designs is their invisibility to a user’s actions. Rather than putting the request on the user to think consciously about the value they place on something, the software simply listens and reacts. As Bradley put it so eloquently, “The system changes in the user’s wake.”

When the discussion got to addressing the uncrawlable information trapped behind paywalls and corporate firewalls. Jeremie Miller (Search Wikia) made the comment that as people define knowledge by what is discovered through search, knowledge that doesn’t make it into the index may cease to exist (so far as many people are concerned).

Honestly I’m terrified by the social implications of such a reality; the rift between those with access to the indexes and those without can have dire effects, not to mention the concerns around who controls those indexes.

It has become clear that the new fighting ground for voice recognition is search on mobile phones. Developing an application that has great user experience, and can be deployed onto a variety of handsets across a number of carriers…you may as well start working on turning lead into gold.

Both Microsoft and Google have woken up to the value of leveraging the voice user interface for their local search offerings (it’s what the bloody phone was designed for anyway). Live Search 411 and GOOG-411 have been put through their paces, and the results of the Ars Technica review are very promising for the humans.

While Google’s service was less quirky slightly faster, the functionality of Microsoft’s won their hearts:

"Microsoft’s LiveSearch411 is the perfect service for anyone traveling or planning to travel, and I highly recommend it. I also loved that it remembered my last search, because I’ve been disconnected or had to redial 411 countless times in the past. Further, it offered to share my results with another phone user, which is a great option for those traveling in groups that are trying to reach the same destination from different cars or starting locations. LiveSearch411 was also able to find destinations in low-population and obscure areas, which is probably when 411 is needed most during a road trip."

This morning Microsoft launched Tafiti, a proof-of-concept for using Silverlight to develop search applications for the Web. The site is intended to showcase the ability of Silverlight to support cross-platform research on the Web by employing saved searches and data visualization.

Search results are segmented out according to data type (blogs, news, etc.) on the left, while valuable elements can be dropped onto the shelf along the right (these results can be saved for later use as well as shared with other users).

Tafiti also features a tree view for visualizing search results, with a stylized scroll bar along the bottom. The bar can be used to increase or decrease the amount of foliage on the search tree.

There is a First Look: Microsoft Tafiti video on Channel 10 now, which gives some insight into the idea behind Tafiti, as well as a walkthrough on how the app is intended to be used.