You are where you live ... an on-line demo of market demographics that shows how they expect to sell to you, based on your zipcode.
10:59:41 PM #    comment []  trackback []

A personal example of why semantics are needed for web search. A few nights ago, my father-in-law and i went googling for information about the squadron he flew with in Morocco, almost 50 years ago. When we found a few pages, he wanted to look further and find some of his former buddies. But how do you look for men who served in the VQ-2 squadron in Port Lyautey in 1954-1955 and flew in P4M Mercators? Even though all of these are highly distinctive terms by themselves, there's no easy way to tie them together to get what you want. Instead, you look for one at a time, and then grovel through the results, looking for just the right terms to try to narrow the number of results without making them zero. And you can't count on people describing themselves the way you're looking for them: "I flew with the ECM unit in Morocco in the early 50's" would be a reasonable description, and impossible to find.
9:28:19 PM #    comment []  trackback []

Wordtracker is an interesting attempt to translate linguistics into money through the medium of search engine hits. It looks like it works by finding connections between what you think your web site is about, and things other people are searching for (they boast a database of 30M actual queries). Of course, it only works if the connections can actually be made based on words: if it's conceptual, forget it.

They have a ticker which purports to show the top search terms today. Why would people be searching for "google", "yahoo.com", "www.hotmail.com", etc?

9:17:36 PM #    comment []  trackback []

Apropos of yesterday's post about GoogleMass ...

David Weinberger tells an interesting story about domain names and people's names. [Scripting News]

8:39:14 PM #    comment []  trackback []

Robert Harlan was sentenced to death in 1995 for kidnapping, raping and murdering 25-year-old Rhonda Maloney. He also was convicted of shooting and paralyzing Jacquie Creazzo, a passerby who tried to help Maloney. But his sentence was overturned on Friday because "jurors consulted Bibles while deciding to impose the death penalty." from the Rocky Mountain News

7:59:38 PM #    comment []  trackback []