Bill started Overture and is now working on something new via Idealab. He's interesting in Web search technology. But we've just seen the beginning. Search leads to the start of a journey. So they want to improve the post-search part of search.
They've got: user control, user feedback, and transparency.
Demo time!
Search engine called snap. It is, of course, in beta.
User Control
He runs a search. Results have extra columns you can use to re-order the search results. You can use CTR, conversion rate, cost to advertise, popularity, satisfaction, domain, and so on. (This is very, very interesting.) There's a real-time reduction of the results as you refine the query. And re-sort. (Damn!)
He did a search for "camera" and we got structured data back--like camera features. It's a built-in shopping/product finding system.
User Feedback
He searches for "Walmart". He gets feeds of ISP traffic data. He find that most of the time when folks search for Walmart, their next action is to go to Walmart's web site. That's popularity. But you can also see average page views. This stuff is hard to spam, since it's aggregate data of millions of users. (This is really f%*&ing cool!)
He searches for cars and gets another set of great results.
Transparency
Expose how the system works. They'll add an API soon, but right now you can get all the data they have on the sites they know about. You can buy ads based on various metrics too--even transaction data. Stats abound, including Snap's revenue from the site. (Crazy, huh?)
See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.
Posted by jzawodn at October 05, 2004 05:05 PM
Didn't work in Firefox. Doesn't even warn me that Firefox isn't supported.
What's up with that?
Odd, it works for me now. It doesn't, however, if I hit the green arrow submit button, only if I hit enter to submit my form data. In the former case, the front page just reloads.
