Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
Now that is the definition of going mainstream!
According to a new book by data geek Bill Tancer, porn searches have dropped from 20% of the total to 10% over the last decade. That has got to be good news. Full report on Yahoo!.
I’ve written quite a lot about search this year, and the general theme of these posts has been that within search there are a few promising areas for startups in which Google doesn’t deliver a great service.
One of these could be video search.
It isn’t one I’ve mentioned before because I’m a little unsure [...]
In response to the launch of Cuil last week I wrote that a post entitled What a new search engine should be about in which I suggested some areas in which a search startup could make some headway against Google (natural language queries, mobile and social search were the areas I mentioned).
I stand by that [...]
There has been an awful lot of chatter about Cuil in the blogosphere over the last couple of days. The biggest memes have been (not very positive) reviews, the way the launch was bungled because the site is still buggy, and the way the launch was fantastic from a PR point of view.
For me [...]
Details on Justin Hileman’s blog here.
I think this is smart. Search results could be improved a lot by feeding in intelligence of what other searchers have found useful.
Microsoft’s long rumoured aquisition of Powerset which finally completed today (rumoured value $100m) shows the potential importance of natural language query processing to the search process. This quote from a Techrunch interview with Naam, the founder and CEO of Powerset captures why:
Naam says 5% of searches contain elements of natural language that keyword based [...]
I have been hearing and thinking a lot about personal data stores recently. Three small examples: personal data stores are at the heart of VRM which I have been blogging about recently, yesterday I was learning about Y-Combinator startup WebMynd which is a clickstream history play (if you are reading please get in touch) [...]
One of the things I like about blogging is that it forces me to think about a topic in detail every day, and often that takes me down paths I might otherwise never have found.
Today I started reading a Fred Wilson post on how well delicious search is doing. He doesn’t source the data [...]
More and more people are saying that search is broken, and social search - i.e. employing the wisdom of the crowds to generate search results is an obvious way to try and fix it. Behind this link there is a CNN video of the Wikipedia guys talking about how many people share the opinion that [...]
Jason is the Founder and CEO of new “human powered” search engine Mahalo. He was previously founder of Weblogs which he sold to AOL.
Jason is talking about the environmental crisis on the internet as over aggressive marketers have come onto the web and polluted it. Look what has happened to email - same [...]
