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Searching for Norway

Oyvind — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 13:24:08 +0000

Nigeria is the country in the world where most people search for the term “Norway”, except for Norway itself. And Pakistan number three.

www.google.com/trends?q=norway&ctab=0&geo=all&…

What if every video was tagged?

Oyvind — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 14:03:18 +0000

Basketball blog True Hoop writes about Synergy Sports Technology, a company that will record and tag every miunte of NBA basketball played. The C|Net article they refer to, has an interesting point:

In an e-mail interview, Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner and the co-founder of Broadcast.com, said he has been impressed with Synergy but was “only surprised that it took this long” for a service like this to emerge.

True. Why did it? The concept of tagging things is amazingly simple and still very effective. Now coaches in NBA teams can search any tag and combinations of tags and get video of their team up on their screen. Find “3-point lastminute leftside” or whatever.

Tagging tv

Now let us take this a step further. What if you could search for anything a broadcaster (like NBC in the USA, or BBC in the UK) broadcasts? Search for “laughter” and you get every good joke that made people laugh, in a talk show, a movie, a sports programme etc. Search for “shot”, “goal”, “kiss”, “man”, “woman”, “joke”, “sad” and so on.

Is it possible? Is there a business in this? Why would someone want to do this? Sales? Reuse of material in new programmes? I just find it fascinating, and I would like your comments on what this could be used for.

Tagging movies

What if videos had a system where people could tag them? Ok, let’s say that IMDB.com (Internet Movie Database) made a system where every scene in a movie were listed under the movie. And the movie companies let them do this. They were not to whow the actual movie, just a picture illustrating the scene. Then people could add tags to that scene. “Carchase”, “man”, “sun”, “orange”, “horse”, “Kim Basinger” etc. I’m pretty sure that lots of people would tag their favourite movies in no time.

What could we use these tags for later? Sales? Rentals? Dating? Any ideas?

This database then could be used for rentals, and soon internet downloads. Amazon.com has added tagging of the products they sell, but you can only add tags to the whole product. Would it be useful if you could tag chapters in books?

Compare search engines

Oyvind — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 03:00:00 +0000

I tried the Search Engine Experience five times. And Scoble is going to love the results: MSN “won” three times, Yahoo two times, Google zero. A bit surprising, as I try to use different search engines – and of the three I normally find that Google is better. And Yahoo better than MSN.

Search available domain names

Oyvind — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 07:00:00 +0000

and see instantly if they are availabe. See also How to set up a great site for almost nothing. Yahoo Domains still sell domains for $2.99.

Google Groups now has RSS feeds

Oyvind — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 21:03:05 +0000

And lots of them. Maybe this has been for some time, but today I discovered that Google Groups has an XML icon on the bottom of every group page. Like this one from the 43 Folders Google Group:

Clicking it shows a new page with lots of different options; feeds in all flavours.

Great Google! And much better than that crappy feed reader that went beta some days ago…

Famous danes, according to Google

Oyvind — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 18:15:29 +0000

Michael Heilemann of Binary Bonsai is the most famous Dane. According to Google of course. As Michael himself notes in his post at Flickr: “HC Andersen should’ve known about PageRank”. The original list by Per Abrahamsen has 121 names, and some that didn’t make it into the list.

As you can see: Michael Helleman is more famous than HC Andersen. Lars von Trier beats Niels Bohr. Viggo Mortensen beats Søren Kierkegaard. And Brigitte Nielsen beats Karen Blixen. Ah, the joys of pagerank.

Search RSS-articles with Spotlight?

Oyvind — Tue, 24 May 2005 06:25:00 +0000

Try this: Go to a site that has an RSS-feed, like this one. Hit the blue RSS icon in Safari 1.3 (if you are running OS X 10.4). You then get a feed page for the site, like this:

Make a bookmark for the feed by hitting Apple-D. Save it somewhere in your bookmark and close the page.

Now disconnect your computer from the net by pulling the ethernet cable or turning off Airport. Find the bookmark you just made.

Now, see: The page is still there, even if the Mac isn’t connected to the net.

Which means: The feeds you bookmark with RSS are stored on your computer somewhere (If you know where exactly they are, use the comments below to tell me!).

So why don’t the words on these pages show up in Spotlight searches?

Think about it: What if you cold make a smart folder that searched only the stored RSS feeds, and that searched for certain keywords you were looking for?

Say, you’re interested in the “Getting things done” concept by David Allen. If the stored RSS feeds were searchable with Spotlight and Smart folders, you could have searched for “Getting things done” or “GTD” or “David Allen”, and every time someone in your 10s (or hundreds or thousands) of RSS feeds mentioned these search words, the article would be visible in the Smart folder.

And with some folder actions, you could make the dock bounce, or maybe tell Growl to display a message when a new post your interested in comes in.

Macosxhints has an interesting post covering something similiar, about Spotlight not being able to search the Safari browser history. It also has another very good idea: Let Safari save the text of every webpage you surf during the day, and index it immediately in Spotlight. That way you could search for any word you browsed on the net that day, and wham! – reload that page with a click.

That index wouldn’t have to be big: It could just be all the words, and with a url connected to them. For most webpages, a couple of hundred words, taking almost no space on your harddrive.

So to my “Mac OS X 10.4.2 wish list”:

Make Safari RSS feeds I subscribe to searchable in Finder
Give them a special attribute so I can search in only this feeds, and not my whole disk
Make Safari save the text of very web page I browse, let’s say the last 14 days
Let me search this index in Spotlight

This is of course sent to Apple Mac OS X feedback.

Technorati tags: mac / osx / spotlight / safari

Make books searchable in Spotlight…

Oyvind — Sun, 15 May 2005 05:20:00 +0000

…without giving me the actual book. Simon Willison writes: “The thing is, you don’t need a digital copy of a book to be able to search it; you just need a full-text index of it. An index isn’t enough to reconstruct the book, but it is enough to answer questions like “on what pages of Eric Meyer on CSS are float layouts discussed?”

Very interesting. This makes my head spinning!!! Imagine if I could search every book I buy from Spotlight?! Without having the actual books on my Mac? Simon points to Tim Bray’s On Search, the Series, for explanation on how this could work.

This is clearly the next thing Amazon should add to their list: When I buy a book they already have scanned, indexed and made searchable on their site, I should be able to buy a Spotlight searchable index for the whole book for an extra dollar. I would pay that! Everytime.

And Steve Jobs, this is your chance. You have a whole year (or two) before other OSes get search tools like Spotlight. In the meantime, have Jezz Bezos over for a talk, and start putting those indexes on Amazon.com