With that statement, MC Hammer — yes, that MC Hammer — announced his new search engine, Wiredoo, during the Web 2.0 Summit today. The website says that Wiredoo is in pre-Beta right now, but there’s a sign-up form for anyone interested in trying it out when the search engine is ready for real testing.

Hammer explained that Wiredoo’s focus will be on “deep search” and described that as another word for “relational search.” He used simple query examples like “cars” and “homes” and showed how a search for the latter would produce information about neighborhoods, local schools, mortgages, insurance and so forth.

With search heavyweights in the audience, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Hammer chose his words carefully in the short presentation.

“It’s not a competitive attempt to recreate search,” he said, before adding, “[but] you can always make things better. There’s always a next version. Do we really need another search engine? Of course not. But if something can be an added value, then we’ll find a definite use for it.”

Chances are that you know Hammer best for his hit “U Can’t Touch This” way back in 1990. But he’s been fairly visible around Silicon Valley for years now, even visiting Google HQ back in 2005 — see these Flickr photos for proof. You could say that, even after his music career faded, Hammer is too legit to quit. (Hehe.)

Here’s the video of Hammer’s appearance introducing Wiredoo. Or maybe I should introduce the video like this:

Stop! Hammer time!

There’s more discussion on Techmeme.

Infographics (or data visualizations) are all the rage in content marketing today, and Visual.ly is launching with hopes of becoming “the largest community for sharing, creating and promoting data visualizations.”  The site currently offers a search functionality and a submission feature to help users find & share infographics from across the web.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As expected with a name like Visual.ly, the site is aesthetically appealing with quite a few bells and whistles.  A “Twitterize Yourself” section exists allowing users to face-off against other users while cartooning themselves.  The ‘labs‘ section of the site is currently in beta and will be a source to help users facilitate the creation of graphics.  However, the main resources to Visual.ly are the search and sharing aspects, so let’s take a look at how these work.

Searching

Properly indexing data rich images is a tough task to undertake.  Visual.ly is achieving this by leveraging a few different variables – description, tags, titles and sources (both designers & publishers).  A sample search for iPhone currently displays 15 results on Visual.ly:

To compare these results, a search on Cool Infographics, an Infographic repository, provided slightly less results with only 11 items tagged with iPhone.

Descriptions play heavily into the search results and are very reliant on the information supplied by submitters.  For example,  a business related infographic ranks for the query “dog” due to the fact that the description contains the phrase, “to the top dog CEO of a major corporation.”  Niche search results leave room for improvement as well.   On a query for “Chicago” Visual.ly returns tw0 non-Chicago related results, one about the national debt and the other about Whales.  On the other hand, a site search on Cool Infographics returns an infographic about the Chicago Tribune, and an image about population shifts in major cities (that includes Chicago).  A quick Google search shows quite a few more Chicago infographics that are not in Visual.ly’s results.

One item that may be a concern is users can upload infographics and potentially insert non-relevant keywords to help their graphics be found.  For example, a search for “Macs” is currently returning some results for design agencies and other non-Mac related results.  Mislabeling for personal gain could be a problem as there have been previous issues around non-relevant labels for the purpose of link building.

Sharing

In order to have an infographic included in the Visual.ly database, users can share their designs.  Not only can designers gain exposure, but can get feedback similar to Dribbble.  Members can ‘like’ infographics and provide feedback using Facebook’s comment plug-in.

To submit an infographic, users have to upload an image, create a thumbnail, then add a title, tags and a description.  They are then taken to a screen where users add the publisher, website published to, the original designer and the designer’s website.  All of this information is included with links on the infographic’s page.

Content Ownership

One interesting feature of Visual.ly is the ability to claim credit for creating an infographic.  Visual.ly features “published by” and “designed by” variables that show where the infographic resides and the designer/company that created the graphic.   For example, this education related infographic shows that the image was published by The Daily and designed by Hyperakt.  To claim publish or design credit for a graphic, the user must fill out a form with a link to their website that confirms your credit for the graphic:

One item that did seem strange is that if the embed code from the site is used, all of the links are sent back to visual.ly instead of to the original publisher or designer.  Having the publisher and designer link show in the embed code would be a nice touch to help with the attribution of the graphic.

Conclusion

Overall, Visual.ly’s search feature works for broad terms, but is lacking on detailed queries and looks to be open gaming of the results with some simple keyword insertion into descriptions and tags.  While the functionality of adding in publishers and designers is nice, it did seem that more credit could be given, especially with the embed codes.  The idea behind Visual.ly is quite unique and with some simple refinements could become a great resource for those looking for data visualization inspiration and for publishers/designers looking to get more exposure for their work.

It might be called an “anti-search engine” because, like Blekko’s Rich Skrenta, FindTheBest’s O’Conner believes that search results have become cluttered and filled with spam. O’Conner wanted to provide structured, “apples-to-apples comparisons” of places, institutions and products with total transparency.

The site aggregates and then provides structured comparison data across a growing range of categories, including Arts and Entertainment, Education, Health, Science, Technology (and tech products), Sports, Recreation and others.

FindTheBest has been upgrading its UI and functionality and today is considerably more usable than when it launched. It’s getting better and better.

This morning it introduced “Top 10 slideshows” and “buyers guides.” There’s a “consumer reports”-like angle here except that the content are from a range of third party sources and it’s all free.

Here’s an example of a new buyer’s guide for AT&T smartphones:

FindTheBest makes the point that these buyers guides are not generic but highly specific (e.g., California Colleges, Ski Resorts in France). Here’s an example of one of the Top 10 slideshows for laptops (which can be embedded):

Find the Best Laptops and Netbooks

The ultimate ambition of the site is to become “a trusted source for consumers to find reliable information free from hidden marketing schemes.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related Entries

DoubleClick Founder Launches Structured “Decision Engine” FindTheBest.com

Once installed, you simply hit the StumbleUpon logo/button in the lower right corner of the app and you’re presented with a succession of third party app choices. Its suggestions were generally pretty good in my quick examination and use of the app.

App discovery has become more challenging over time as both the iPhone and now Android have seen app catalogs grow. The iPhone has more than 300,000 apps, while Android now has over 100,000. However the Android Market badly lags iTunes in terms of apps presentation and overall usability.

There are a number of third party sites and apps, such as Chomp for the iPhone or AppAware for Android, among others, which attempt to help people discover relevant and useful apps. Apple also offers its “genius” recommendations technology for apps within iTunes.

One way that developers and publishers are getting their apps discovered and downloaded is through mobile advertising. This has become an increasingly popular way to expose people to relevant apps and drive adoption.

Mobile ad network Millennial Media reported in September that 21% of the “destinations” for mobile campaigns on their network were “application downloads.” If the app stores were really working well, however, it would partially alleviate the need to resort to advertising to gain exposure.

FindTheBest is a kind of comparison engine for structured data of all sorts. It’s not an alternative to search per se. In fact it will rely heavily on search and SEO for user discovery. The idea is to provide consumers with an objective way to compare all sorts of information across a range of categories, from colleges to fast food.

Here’s what founder O’Conner said about what motivated him to create the site:

FindTheBest.com was created out of my desire to organize part of the Internet, filter out the excessive junk and present information in a simple, comparable way. While the web is great at making seemingly infinite amounts of information accessible, the Internet can be a little overwhelming in that it doesn’t allow for straight up apples-to-apples comparisons, nor is it transparent enough to allow you to spot those hidden marketing schemes influencing the data you receive.

Here are the current categories that FindTheBest offers comparison data for:

• Arts and Entertainment
• Business and Economy
• Education
• Health
• Reference
• Science
• Society
• Sports and Recreation
• Technology

The metaphor, as the video below suggests, is travel meta search (e.g., Kayak).

After a user does a search or picks a category of interest, she’s presented with a semi-wonky spreadsheet-like display of factual information. Here’s an example comparison for the nutritional information of McDonald’s burgers:

A menu, so to speak, on the left allows users to filter and refine the comparisons — in this case by type of food item, as well as by calories, fat, cholesterol and so on — just as with product or travel search sites. These topic-specific data sets are called “comparison apps” by O’Connor.

O’Connor told us that the data come from a broad range of sources, including government databases, private sources the site’s own researchers and, eventually, users. FindTheBest uses a mix of machines and humans to clean and present the data in a more structured and “consumable way,” with automation being the objective, if possible.

Here’s another comparison of the most recent World Cup champions:

Right now FindTheBest offers 336 “comparison apps” in nine categories. These include 31,372,000 listings and 881,837,794 data points, according to the site.

Even with all that information, if it hopes to become a destination, FindTheBest will need to further broaden coverage. However O’Conner says the site won’t get into products or travel, two areas that inspired FindTheBest and that he believes are relatively well  handled online today.

As you drill deeper into the site you discover lots of rich factual information, much of which is very search/SEO friendly. Here’s a profile-level page for the top grossing film Avatar, for example:

Another search-friendly feature, somewhat buried in the site, is Questions. Q&A is a hot area right now (Ask, Facebook, etc.) and FindTheBest has its own version of that, though it seems mostly intended to attract SEO traffic rather than engage users.

Many if not every fact on the site has an alternative presentation in Q&A form:

Beyond SEO, as a discovery mechanism, any of the comparison modules can be embedded on third party sites or blogs and there are also embeddable category widgets that FindTheBest hopes will spread the word.

While incomplete and rough around the edges at this early stage FindTheBest offers structured factual comparisons, to help support consumer decision-making, that one cannot do right now on search engines. In this way, FindTheBest struck me as something like the more talented offspring of Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of the most obnoxious in recent memory is the blog plug-in tool “snap shots.” Many blogs installed it because it looked “cool” but did very little in the way of adding value.

Bing does a version of this currently, which is relatively helpful but probably not widely used. An arrow to the right of each SERP link enables a small preview window. It would have a greater impact potentially if it showed more of the page and was more prominently called out on the SERP:

Roughly two years ago TigerLogic released a browser-based preview and search refinement tool called Chunk It, directed at consumers. Like most of these tools, few people used it.

Now the company has reinvented Chunkit as “yolink.” The new tool now does new things and abandons its consumer orientation for developers and publishers. From an adoption standpoint, that’s the right choice and gives it a fighting chance. The company just released an API that allows yolink’s enhanced search capability to be integrated into publisher site search and vertical search engines.

Yolink integration exposes more information about a document or page to users and makes that information clickable. You can see the tool in action in different contexts here.

Below is an example of Google Patent search, the current version and then the yolink-enhanced version. Text is extracted from behind the link, keywords are highlighted and users can click on the passage to go directly to the relevant discussion in the document.

While the presentation of the enhanced results and text are not particularly attractive there’s clear value in the service — at least for “power users,” academics and researchers. The question is whether niche search engines and mainstream publishers will see enough value to integrate it for “ordinary” users.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The core data comes from CommonCrawl, a non-profit group designed to crawl the web and provide data for anyone to use. Gil Elbaz is both a founder of CommonCrawl and of Factual, a start-up that creates tables of structured information from data found on the open web (see Factual: Parting The Curtains Of The Invisible Web).

Factual found stats such as I cited above after examining 4 million web sites. In particular:

• 28% of sites have Google Analytics on them
• 12% of sites have AdSense
• 5% of sites have EITHER a Twitter or Facebook link but…
• 2% of sites have BOTH a Twitter or Facebook link

There’s also a chart that shows other interesting stats but without precise percentages. I’ll estimate as best I can:

• About 20% of sites have Flash
• About 19% of sites have an RSS feed
• About 6% of sites have a sitemaps file
• About 1% of sites have a Google Webmaster Central verification code
• About 1% of sites have Quantcast tracking code
• About 0.5% of sites have a Creative Commons attribution

One thing unclear is how the stats break down on a page versus web site basis. A web site might have multiple pages. So when a “web site” is said to have AdSense on it, does that mean each page within the site has AdSense code? Or only some of them? It appears a decision was made on a site-by-side basis, with “site” being defined as all the pages within a set domain or subdomain.

Those interested can play with the data themselves. It’s summarized in this very large table at Factual.

CommonCrawl also gets a bit of publicity from this at an interesting time. Earlier this week, Google released a long internal memo talking about how important it was to the company to be open — except in the areas of search and ads:

In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in.

I’ll likely do my own follow-up post to that memo in the near future. In the meantime, a post I wrote back in 2007 — Google: As Open As It Wants To Be (i.e., When It’s Convenient) — looks at how Google’s claims of being open tend to ring false when open isn’t something it seems to pursue in areas where it is ahead. In part from my post:

That large index gives Google a huge advantage over rivals. It knows more about what’s on the web than anyone else. So why not share? Why not start an Open Index Alliance where there’s a coordinated effort to crawl and index all the documents in the world, allowing anyone to tap into the raw data?

That’s the idea behind CommonCrawl. Maybe as part of being open, Google could get behind the project?

See also Chris Dixon’s post from this week, Google should open source what actually matters: their search ranking algorithm, for related thoughts about Google, search and openness, along with comments from me and others, including the head of Google’s spam fighting team Matt Cutts.

As for ads, see Schmidt: Someday, AdSense Publishers May Know Google’s Cut Of Ad Revenues, from me earlier this year, which looks at how most AdSense publishers have no idea how much money Google keeps back for itself. It’s hard to find an arugment that support not being open about this, in the face of Google’s declared love of open.

There was an iPhone-friendly mobile website that has been taken down to avoid the “why buy the cow when the milk is free” problem. We’ll see if the $19.99 price tag is still too high.

But if you’re inclined to jump at this lower price point . . . act now, supplies are limited. No rainchecks.

If you have opt in to the Social Search feature at google.com/experimental you will notice an error on your Google searches that reads, “The experiment you’re trying to access is no longer available. Go to experiments overview.”

Google has confirmed this is a temporary issue and that a fix will be in place sometime today or tomorrow. Here is Google’s official statement on this matter:

The Google Social Search experiment is temporarily down. We are working on it and expect to restore access sometime Monday or Tuesday.

Mayer replied: “It would be a machine that could answer that question, really. It would be one that could understand speech, questions, phrases, what entities you’re talking about, concepts. It would be able to search all of the world’s information, [find] different ideas and concepts, and bring them back to you in a presentation that was really informative and coherent.”

What Mayer may have unknowingly described is Siri, a “virtual personal assistant” that uses artificial intelligence to determine user intent and then match data or applications that can fulfill that intent. The company will launch its iPhone application soon and already has a deal with a “tier one” US mobile carrier. The NY Times offers background on Siri and some of the technology behind the system:

SRI International’s software venture, called Siri, is more ambitious, in that it allows users to speak or write natural-language requests into the device (“Find me a place to eat dinner tonight with Karen, reserve a table and put it on our calendars.”), which will complete the task independently and inform you when it is done.

In terms of long-term predictions, Siri is actually an easy bet. Dag Kittlaus, the company’s chief executive, said one of the four major carriers would introduce the service early next year, and he said it would also be available as an iPhone app. But over the next two years the technology should be able to complete a wider range of tasks.

I’ve seen Siri in action and found it impressive. The system is not perfect but it brings users closer to transactions and fulfillment of their objectives — at least in a range of use cases — than can Google on mobile devices today. It uses a voice interface to receive queries. You can use the keyboard if necessary but that’s entirely secondary to the experience. 

The way one interacts with it is “conversational” and “transactional” rather than providing a verbal version of a conventional search query. 

I moderated a panel at the recent Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco called “new directions in navigation and search.” The panel, among others, featured Siri CEO Dag Kittlaus. What became clear during the panel is that we’re going to see lots of innovation and change in mobile search and that the present version of the experience could well be regarded as Jurassic in only a few years as the unique attributes of the device (e.g., the camera) become input mechanisms and search tools. Augmented reality is also a part of this, although in its present form it’s fairly undeveloped and limited.

And, as another example of how far things could develop away from the current “query box and blue links” search paradigm,  look at the video demo below of “SixthSense” a “wearable gestural interface”:

Click here to view the embedded video.