Search: Image
Search Reputation Management: Old Man McCain Uses Young ‘Uns Search Thing-a-ma-jig to Find Him a VeePee
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 10, 2008 | Share This
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Ripely aged Republican Presidential candidate John McCain jested yesterday that he would be using Google to study up on potential running mates.
Hey, You, Get Off of My Name!
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 3, 2008 | Share This
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Bo Diddley, the pioneering rock n’ roll genius who died yesterday knew a thing or two about marketing and branding. Consider this: Ellas McDaniel re-dubbed himself as Diddley, had his first hit record with a song called “Bo Diddley” (the first of many times he would work his new name into a song title and lyrics) and made sure that the ubiquitous shave-and-a-haircut beat that was his trademark was referred to far and wide as “the Bo Diddley beat.” The man was SEO before there were any E’s to S.
Now imagine if you popped Diddley’s name into your search engine of choice and the results page featured a big ol’ ad that said “Bo Diddley Music” with a click- through to Chuck Berry’s site. Though Search Engines frown on this when the name is under copyright it does happen and in some cases is part of an overall marketing strategy.
Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article that focuses on the naughty folks who contravene the search engine’s ban on using another company’s copyrighted name as a paid keyword. The accompanying vid however deals with a slightly different and murkier issue, perhaps because author Emily Steel is talking to someone from a company that hopes to get paid for protecting your good brand name from being sullied. Here it is in living Murdoch-vision:
The general practice of buying up terms, phrases and even copyrighted names associated with a competitor is not uncommon, though the effectiveness is open to debate. If your brand is the victim of this kind of keyword jacking it’s a terrible scourge. On the other hand, if your brand has used it to checkmate a rival’s campaign, it’s flippin’ genius.
A good example of this can be found in Reprise Media’s own typically thorough (excuse us while we plug ourselves) Superbowl Search Marketing Scorecard from this past February. CareerBuilder did a series of ads based on the theme of “Follow your heart.” The clever folks at Monster.com bought that phrase and other similar ones and even integrated it into their online ad copy. No doubt many job seekers who may not have been aware of Monster found that they offered an alternative to CareerBuilder that met their needs.
Whether or not you are using someone else’s brand name or campaign is maybe less important than why you’re doing it, and where you’re sending people once they click. Sending a bunch of folks who are looking for Bo Diddley to the Chuck Berry product only works if the landing page you send them to doesn’t make them feel tricked and hostile. Sending them to a page that says “If you like Bo Diddley, check out Chuck Berry’s CD” and includes the ability to sample some tunes could actually create a positive experience for the user.
This also can have some bearing on the price advertisers pay for their ads. Most search engines incorporate landing page content into their quality score – the algorithm that is used to determine the price they’ll pay in the auction. In fact Google makes this very clear in their Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines for AdWords. If your landing page doesn’t feature content that’s relevant to the keyword you’re buying? Prices will go up and in some cases your ads will even be deactivated. Not the kind of ROI most advertisers want.
Ultimately, the question of whether or not companies should be able to buy competitive brand terms comes down to intent – deception vs. comparison:
- Brand comparison is a crucial and age-old tool in the marketing toolbox – saying “if you like x, try Y” creates instant context for people. Think classic campaigns like the Pepsi Challenge and Snapple’s “We’re number 2.”
- But when users click on an ad, they’re expecting relevant content on the other end. If you don’t deliver, you may end up damaging your relationship with your user, and that kind of negative impression can be very hard to erase.
The Next Generation of Image Search
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Written By Drupad Sil | April 28, 2008 | Share This
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A new innovation in image search may soon prevent this picture from showing up for a query of “mcdonalds”. This is a story that’s gotten quite a bit of coverage today, starting with the New York Times. From the Times:
“On Thursday at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google scientists presented a paper describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.”
How is this different from what is currently done? Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand:
“Image search at the major search engines today relies largely on looking at words that are used around images – on the pages that host them, in image file names and in ALT text associated with them. No real image recognition is done by any of the majors. Search for “apples”, and they haven’t actually somehow scanned the images themselves to “see” if they contain pictures of apples.”
In their paper, Yushi Jing and Shumeet Baluja introduce algorithms that can actually “look” at the image itself rather than the associated text, find similarities, and rank the pages in order of similarity to an original image deemed to be the correct result for the query. In the words of VentureBeat’s Anythony Ha:
“The new system proposed in the Google paper ranks images based not on text, but on the common ‘visual themes’ found in each search result. In the McDonald’s example, the VisualRank system would see that the company’s famous golden arches are a common visual theme, and prioritize pictures that feature the arches prominently. Testes of this new system returned 83 percent fewer irrelevant search results than Google Image Search, according to the VisualRank paper.”
This is definitely a cutting-edge development, if it can be implemented successfully. It will help cut back on duplicate images, but more importantly, will reduce image spam, where photos are tagged inappropriately and show up for unrelated searches.
Google Wants to Read Images, Video
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 4, 2008 | Share This
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Google patent applications published this week reveal the company’s ambition to “read” images and video - i.e., to recognize and understand text in them. This has obvious implications for video and image search, and significant implications for SEO and web accessibility, as search engines currently rely on oft-insufficient alt text, on-page keyword tags and other surrounding text to make sense (or not) of an image on the web.
Because Google has been taking pictures for the Google Maps Street View feature, an image-text reading capability means it gets closer to its goal of indexing the entire world, which would be a boon for its local search capabilities. Google explains in its application:
Digital images can include a wide variety of content. For example, digital images can illustrate landscapes, people, urban scenes, and other objects. Digital images often include text. Digital images can be captured, for example, using cameras or digital video recorders… Image text (i.e., text in an image) typically includes text of varying size, orientation, and typeface. Text in a digital image derived, for example, from an urban scene (e.g., a city street scene) often provides information about the displayed scene or location. A typical street scene includes, for example, text as part of street signs, building names, address numbers, and window signs.
The patents also specifically mention indexing images taken in stores and museums (with robots, natch), which again would have a huge impact on local business and also on education. And of course, video search would get infinitely more sophisticated if Google learns to understand text spoken in videos.
One caveat: Information Week notes that Street View privacy issues will get even more complicated. It’s definitely something to be concerned about; though online privacy is really a thing of the past at this point, violations (perceived or real) of offline privacy will really get people up in arms. But it’s a good bet that’s something that will get ironed out if this innovation comes to pass soon, because it would really change search in a huge way.
MySpace Acquires Photobucket for $250 Million
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | May 8, 2007 | Share This
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Yesterday Myspace announced the acquisition of Photobucket, an enormous online photo-sharing site. The announcement was a bit of a surprise, considering that less than a month ago, Myspace placed a two-week ban on Photobucket for “breaking terms of service”. Perhaps more surprising than the acquisition’s announcement is the acquisition price - a mere $250 million. For a website with over 40 million registered users, that accounts for 73% of Myspace’s photo traffic, and that’s the number one most visited downstream site for online photo sharing, analysts are calling Photobucket “a steal”. Considering that YouTube, a site with roughly the same amount of unique users, went for over 5x as much in Google stock, it seems like Photobucket got a poor deal.
On the other hand, comparing Photobucket to Youtube is kind of apples to oranges - it’s more appropriate to point out that other photo-sharing sites, notably Flickr, have gone for much less. Mark Evans writes, “Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield are having yet another round of sellers’ remorse given they sold their photo-sharing company to Yahoo for about $50-million in 2005.”
Comparisons aside, most critics agree that the two sites go well together. Myspace and Photobucket share such a significant user-base that, as Valleywag aptly puts it, “Like a squabbling couple finally realizing they can’t live without eachother — or a parasite fusing with its host…” the deal makes sense.
Futher Reading
- Photobucket Was a Steal v. Google/YouTube (TechCruch)
- YouTube vs Photobucket: Who’s really cheap here? (Fred Destin)
- MyPhotobucket (The next.net)
Windows Live Search: At Least it Looks Pretty
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | September 13, 2006 | Share This
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Live went live this past Monday, and the initial response from the search community is fairly apathetic. People like the Image Search, the customizable features, and the map visualization, but have uncovered a number of errors and inconsistencies that should’ve been fixed in beta. Many features, such as Live QnA, are interesting, but ineffective without a large participating audience, and though navigation is visually pleasing, it’s difficult to find some of the advanced functions. Search results still have spam pages showing up in some #1 spots, a few double listings, and broken URLs – but are otherwise the same if not slightly better. Because the changes are mostly aesthetic, they are expected to have little effect in relation to search rankings.
That’s not to say that Microsoft hasn’t done some good things with the site. After all, according to the official Live blog, this was a usability update rather than a major algorithmic change. Because the changes are mostly aesthetic, they are expected to have little effect in relation to search rankings. Hence, most of the best new features are usability related.
For instance, the customizable ‘Macros’, the clean interface, and the well-positioned related links do a good job of adding features without causing information overload. The GUI improvements are excellent, my favorite being the use of sliders to control search results — it’s these types of visual cues that make an otherwise complex set of options much less daunting.
The navigation scheme, however, is sub-par. The main nav bar is conveniently placed, but inconsistent with the drop-down navigation menu at the top left (the icon rollover). Sub-navigation is different for each search tool, making it difficult to find advanced functions and to find your way back. Until MSN cleans up the navigation scheme by creating a consistent overall hierarchy, visitors are more likely to return for a specific tool and less likely to use Live for every search.
The coolest feature of the new Live is the Image Search Scratchpad. Users can drop images into a notepad area on the sidebar, where thumbnails appear with their description and location. The pad is effectively a visual bookmarks bar, but with pleasing drag & drop elements rather than a ‘click to add’ system. Unlike traditional bookmarks, however, the scatchpad doesn’t apply to different types of search. If MSN expanded the Scratchpad to include thumbnails of ANY type of listing, it would a) be very useful, b) encourage people to register, and c) provide a wealth of information that could inform MSN’s behavioral targeting. Oh, and one more thing - the Scratchpad is gonna have to work with more than just Internet Explorer.
Overall, the consensus at Reprise Media is that the new Live is fun to play with, but unlikely to increase traffic for MSN. It will take at least 6 months to see if the design attracts enough regular users to make Microsoft adCenter a viable competitor to Google or Yahoo!.
Dual Engine Post
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Written By Reprise Media | June 16, 2006 | Share This
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We’ve got Jux2 on one side, and Riya on the other…let’s get this bird in the air:
So meta Jux2, previously famed as the search engine that went up for sale on eBay (and eventually sold for a little over a hundred grand), has made some changes, writes Loren Baker.
A meta engine that allows users to compare results from major search sources side-by-side, Jux2 has just incorporated MSN’s results in addition to Google’s and Yahoo!’s; tabs allow you to swiftly switch between results from the Big 3, or see an amalgam of “best” results from all three on one page, which notes the original engine (and placement) of each listing. Jux2 has also introduced a Firefox extension for its browser toolbar, which allows users to employ Jux2 search features without schlepping all the way over to the site.
“Shake it like a polaroid picture” Riiiiyaaaah…ahem. Start again. Riya’s big draw as a personal photo search site is its very cool facial recognition features; users can upload photos to the site, train Riya to recognize a specific person (say, their grandma) by face, then set it to work adding tags to every photo in their collection in which grandma appears. Now Riya’s taking its bag of tricks and setting it loose on the whole internet.
Barry Schwartz points to a SiliconBeat story that says Riya will soon be a ‘visual’ search engine. After noticing that its users were increasingly trying to use the site to search the web rather than their own pic collections, Riya’s founders decided to head in that direction. The site’s facial recognition tech will be employed to search images for similarities beyond just faces. For instance, you could use it to find online stores selling a product you’re after (or one with similar shape, color, and texture), or even have it help you find a date - “Search for an image of a hot blonde, and Riya will pull up similar looking blondes at Match.com.” So when will the new-look Riya be unleashed? Look for it to be able to crawl the whole web in about three months.
Flickr Out of Beta, Into More Powerful Search
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Written By Reprise Media | May 17, 2006 | Share This
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Online photo sharing site Flickr has moved out of beta and moved into - yes, they’re calling it gamma. It’s accompanied by a major overhaul to the site’s photo organization system and search capabilities.
Search Engine Watch directs us to Flickr fan Thomas Hawk’s rundown, which is actually more helpful than Flickr’s own announcement (”Instead of explaining everything in minute detail, I’d much rather just step back and let you get started exploring…”). There’s a new “person” menu to help users connect with and get to know other photo-sharing persons, and the top menus are now stuffed full of pulldown options.
That’s all just fine, but we really like the direction they’re taking with search - no doubt influenced by parent company Yahoo! Results are now returned according to the most relevant photos to your query (although you can still tab over to “most recent” and “most interesting”), a big step forward for the site’s most frequently frustrating function. The search bar now incorporates full Boolean support (your ANDs, ORs, NOTs, etc.) and the advanced search option includes several new filters, including one that returns photos according to their Creative Commons license - easily find photos to use commercially or to “modify, adapt, or build upon.”
Flickr has also much improved their “Organizr” tool, adding drag & drop and double-click functionality to the “Findr” bar (sadly, they continue their unfortunate war on the letter “e”). For more info, check out their newly minted FAQ section for the Organizr here.
Photo2Search: a Search Snapshot from the Year 2000 the Not-to-Distant Future
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Written By Reprise Media | April 14, 2006 | Share This
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Microsoft Research is working on technology that would allow camera phone users to make quick, useful web searches about “physical-world” objects - restaurants, movie theaters, you name it - just by snapping a photo of them. Gary Price of ResourceShelf, who gave the heads up, says we won’t be doing this “today, tomorrow, or even five years from now but it’s coming.”
The tantalizing tech is being developed by Microsoft Research Asia’s Web Search and Mining division, and it hasn’t been as easy implementing the idea as it was coming up with it. They tried using content based image retrieval (CBIR), which sorts visual data by such criteria as color, texture and shape, but “the precision of CBIR is not sufficient for practical use,” according to researcher Xing Xie. Next up: computer-vision algorithms. At first, no dice; it was too slow. But Xie and colleagues rebuilt the system over the second half of last year, and now they have something that can pore through a 6,000-image database and return matches in about three seconds.
Once perfected, Photo2Search would be as easy to use as pushing a couple of buttons, and definitely more convenient than typing out a text query on a number keypad. Users would take a photo, email or message it to a server, and get back all kinds of associated information to act on, like menus or hours of operation. In the meantime, we’ll just have to wait until the year…well, we’ll just have to wait.
Pixsy Makes Image Search ‘Really Simple’
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Written By Reprise Media | April 4, 2006 | Share This
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Not to be confused with the Pixie on the left, Pixsy flies into an ever-crowded video and image search field today, according to ZDNet. Using proprietary technology, Pixsy forages through a “hundreds” of really simple syndication (RSS) feeds to find the latest pictures (moving or otherwise) from popular partner publishers like PhotoBlog, StarPulse and the New York Times, then organizes them “based on the context surrounding those images.”
Beneath the visage of its mascot - a blue ovoid creature that looks like it just woke up from a three-day bender - users can input a search query of their own or select from about 50 “recently searched” terms. Folks can also look up pics and videos by source, category (these range from “People & Dating” to “Tech News”), or pick from a selection of featured items on the front page. Clicking on a picture or video launches a pop-up box telling you when it was indexed, from where, and why Pixsy thinks it matches your search term (a fragment of context is included). Clicking on a link opens the object’s source in a new browser window.
Eventually, the four-employee firm would like to license out its engine for revenue purposes. For now, Pixsy’s making money from advertising (the usual “Look for [search query] on eBay”-type ads line the left side of the search results page) and “affiliate partnerships,” says ZDNet - providing a lead for a poster seller, for instance, would garner Pixsy a fee. Whether they’ll make good is an open question - their content is theoretically fresher than the competition’s, but there’s a lot of competition. That said, it’s hard to go wrong fulfilling the world’s apparently limitless fascination with freakish images.