FriendFeed Friday Tips #3: Take Advantage of Advanced Search

By popular demand, I've been asked by other FriendFeed users to highlight how I use the popular social lifestreaming site. So far the series has covered the "Hide" function, and the bookmarklet. Today, I thought I'd take a look at how to maximize the site's advanced search capabilities.

Considering almost ninety percent of the FriendFeed team has a Google pedigree, it's no surprise they made aspects most associated with Google, such as scalability and simplicity a priority. Also a big thing at Google? Search. FriendFeed's search function indexes in real-time, and can be diced every which way, including by service.

1. Where is Basic Search and What Does It Do?

Every FriendFeed page features the default search box in the top right corner of the page. By default, FriendFeed's search button searches through your activity and that of your friends. Searching a keyword will look not only at shared items, but also their comments, nicknames, and user names.

The upside of this activity is that you can find results extremely fast. But one downside is that if you try to search for any time you might be mentioned (called ego-searching), you still have to wade through all your own activity. So far, FriendFeed doesn't let you exclude a specific user's items, including yours.

2. Where is Advanced Search?

FriendFeed's advanced search is only available from the search results page itself, but you can find it at http://friendfeed.com/search/advanced.


The advanced search option, waiting for queries.
3. Advanced Search > By Service

The advanced search capability essentially lets you limit your search results, either by service, by person, or by group. For example, you can limit search results to be from Del.icio.us bookmarks, or from within Disqus comments, by using the pull-down option. Again, by default, you are searching your own friends, but can branch out to choose a specific user or show everyone.

4. Advanced Search > By User

Searching by user is especially good if you want to see everything on a specific topic that one user has done. Want to see how often Drew Olanoff mentions ReadBurner nowadays? Search for ReadBurner and where it says "one person", enter his nickname, drewolanoff. FriendFeed has amusingly given the nickname "scobleizer" as the example, as you can see in the above screenshot, but any name will do.


Searching "drewolanoff" for ReadBurner mentions.


"drewolanoff"'s ReadBurner content is displayed.
One downside to this search is that it can also returns comments from friends that mention the search term on their shared items, even if the specific person you're searching on didn't say it.

5. Advanced Search > By User > By Service

Now, combining #3 and #4, you can search a specific service by user for a keyword. Going back to "drewolanoff" and ReadBurner, I can select Twitter as a service, and only show the times that Drew mentioned ReadBurner on Twitter.


Searching "drewolanoff"'s Twitter entries for ReadBurner mentions.


"drewolanoff"'s Tweets on ReadBurner.
6. Some Fun Ways to Use Advanced Search

The most fun with advanced search is probably when using it to search FriendFeed's public feed, or "everyone". While FriendFeed is well known for its noise, you can cut through the noise of even the public feed with advanced search.

Want to find out how many other electronica fans like the music of Underworld? Search for the term "Underworld", select Last.fm or Pandora as services, make sure the "Everyone" option is checked, and hit search.


Looking for future concert buds...


Wow! Fellow Underworld listeners!
Want to see how many people are sharing YouTube videos of Bill O'Reilly? Search for Bill O'Reilly, select YouTube as a service, and again, choose everyone.


A popular topic on YouTube these days...


Once a clown, always a clown.
Like pictures of sunsets? Search for sunset on Flickr or SmugMug.


The world's best sunsets, one query away.
For many people just getting started with FriendFeed, using the advanced search tool could be a fast way to find peers.

7. Using Boolean Searches With Advanced Search

Given our expectations that all searches act like Google searches, I expected boolean searches to work. Searching for "Cat OR Dog" highlighted comments and shares with cats or dogs, while searching for "Cat AND Dog" only showed items where both appeared in the thread. Oddly, the words "and" and "or" were bolded in the results, which Google would ignore.

Searching for text in quotes also limits results to the specific phrase. Searching for "Monkey's uncle" with quotes would get one set of results, while searching for "Monkey's uncle" without quotes also returns a tweet, "At Uncle Billy's with monkey woman". Not very nice. :-)

Summary

Although FriendFeed's user base is still well behind that of the more widely-known services, the team has already gained a good reputation for indexing data quickly, and the search function is sharp, especially when you consider that the database has to index not only the many millions of updates across three dozen services, but also all the comments being left, in real time. The advanced search functionality can let you hone in on just what you're looking for, and cut through the noise.

Scooped: Who Brought the Story to Techmeme First?

When Gabe Rivera opened up search on Techmeme recently, the three-year-old site's archives became an extremely interesting playground to see trends, strong sources for news, simple ego-searching, tracking how companies have been viewed over time, and even to see which blogs are the first to bring the news to the big stage. I did some quick searches on a number of company names, products and other terms to see which sites were the first to have the terms included either in the title or summary of the piece.

Techmeme search only searches main items that reached the front page of the tech news aggregator, and does not include the "Discussion" links. Of the terms I searched for, none debuted on Techmeme prior to September of 2005, so if a service was already well established (See: Yahoo!, Google, Digg, etc.), saying who mentioned it first and made Techmeme after the site debuted doesn't add a ton of value. In the terms I looked for, it was interesting to see such a wide variety of original sources.

Also of note: Popular items that had more than 1,000 total results, including iPhone, made it impossible to find out who got on Techmeme first, as results only go to 1,000, similar to Google and Yahoo!'s limitations.

To try out your own terms, head to http://www.techmeme.com/search/, put in your term of choice, and report the results here. This is merely the tip of the iceberg for sure.

Term: Alert Thingy
Source: TechCrunch
Date: April 16, 2008
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/16/look-out-twhirl-alert-thingy-adds-twitter-support/

Term: Apple TV
Source: MacDigest
Date: January 9, 2007
Link: http://techdigest.tv/2007/01/macworld_2007_l.html

(Note: Engadget first covered it when it was called "iTV", on Sept. 12, 2006, here: http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/12/apple-to-release-itv-video-streaming-box-in-2007/)

Term: Assetbar
Source: louisgray.com
Date: February 8, 2008
Link: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/02/assetbar-proposes-solution-to-twitter.html

Term: Disqus
Source: VentureBeat
Date: August 8, 2007
Link: http://venturebeat.com/2007/08/08/disqus-to-launch-new-features/

Term: Drobo
Source: Michael Gartenberg
Date: June 5, 2007
Link: http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/gartenberg/archives/2007/06/drobo_changes_t.html

Term: FriendFeed
Source: New York Times
Date: October 1, 2007
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/technology/01feed.html

Term: Google Reader
Source: Official Google Blog
Date: October 7, 2005
Link: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/feed-world.html

Term: Hillary Clinton
Source: CNET News.com
Date: November 1, 2005
Link: http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5924424.html

Term: iPhone
Issue: More than 1,000 results

Term: iPod Touch
Source: Engadget
Date: September 5, 2007
Link: http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/05/ipod-touch-gets-official/

Term: Jaiku
Source: Scobleizer
Date: April 8, 2007
Link: http://scobleizer.com/2007/04/06/leo-laporte-leaves-twitter-for-jaiku/

Term: LinkRiver
Source: louisgray.com
Date: Feb. 13, 2008
Link: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/02/linkriver-enters-life-streaming-fray.html

Term: Megite
Source: TechCrunch
Date: Feb. 4, 2006
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/02/04/a-look-at-the-memeorandum-killers/

Term: Newsvine
Source: GigaOm (Formerly Om Malik's Broadband Blog)
Date: November 9, 2005
Link: http://gigaom.com/2005/11/09/introducing-newsvine/

Term: Obama
Source: Valleywag
Date: Dec. 28, 2006
Link: http://www.valleywag.com/tech/tail-wagging-dog/lagging-presidential-candidate-turns-to-robert-scoble-224623.php

Term: Porn
Source: Wired
Date: September 22, 2005
Link: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68934,00.html

Term: Profilactic
Source: Mashable
Date: April 23, 2008
Link: http://mashable.com/2008/04/23/onaswarm-lifestreaming/

Term: PSP
Source: Pro-G.Co.UK
Date: Sept. 16, 2005
Link: http://www.pro-g.co.uk/news/nid/1220/1474/

Term: ReadBurner
Source: louisgray.com
Date: Jan. 8, 2008
Link: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/01/readburner-in-stealth-mode-looking-to.html

Term: RSSmeme
Source: louisgray.com
Date: Mar. 17, 2008
Link: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/03/did-readburner-acquisition-cause.html

Term: Seesmic
Source: TechCrunch
Date: October 8, 2007
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/08/loic-le-meurs-new-startup-launches-seesmic/

Term: SocialThing
Source: TechCrunch
Date: March 10, 2008
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/watch-out-friendfeed-socialthing-is-even-easier-to-use/

Term: Summize
Source: ReadWriteWeb
Date: March 16, 2007
Link: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/summize_search_heatmaps.php

(Note: Summize pulled a 180 following this post. The first time they reached Techmeme in their new incarnation was when Paul Stamatiou covered them on May 10, 2008, here: http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/05/09/review-summize-twitter-search)

Term: Techmeme
Source: TechCrunch
Date: May 8, 2006
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/05/08/techmemeorandum-is-now-techmeme/

Term: Technorati
Source: The Blog Herald
Date: Sept. 14, 2005
Link: http://www.blogherald.com/2005/09/14/google-blog-search-reviewed/

Term: Tesla
Source: Gizmodo
Date: Aug. 26, 2006
Link: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/clips/lexus-self-parking-car-video-and-review-196551.php

Term: TiVo
Source: PVRblog
Date: Sept. 13, 2005
Link: http://www.pvrblog.com/pvr/2005/09/tivo_72_os_adds.html

Term: Toluu
Source: louisgray.com
Date: Mar. 24, 2008
Link: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/03/toluu-offers-gateway-to-friends-rss.html

Term: Twitter
Source: Ben Metcalfe Blog
Date: Oct. 26, 2006
Link: http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/index.php/2006/10/26/ev-williams-buys-back-odeo-and-twitter/

(Note: As Gabe Rivera notes in the comments, Twitter was originally called Twttr, and Biz Stone's announcement in July of 2006 brought the service to Techmeme.)

Term: Wii
Source: MTV.com
Date: Apr. 27, 2006
Link: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1529658/20060427/index.jhtml

Term: Yahoo! Buzz
Source: Valleywag
Date: February 15, 2008
Link: http://valleywag.com/357006/screenshots-of-yahoo-buzz-a-digg-competitor

Just a start. But Techmeme search gives a good glimpse into who's breaking the news in Tech, or who's got enough juice to be the first to reach the popular site with a new story. Can you find some more good examples? Does this data teach us anything at all?

Making My Blog Search Legit With Lijit

Blog widgets are seemingly a dime a dozen these days, but offering a strong search function on your Web site is a must, regardless of how cleanly you've laid out your archive pages, or how well you've implemented tags or labels. A little over a week ago, after seeing Lijit growing its presence on many other blogs I follow, I integrated the service into my site, letting users find older stories I've written on topics they find interesting, and opening up yet another box of stats for me to play with, including most frequently used search terms.


Looking back in my e-mail archives, it looks like I first signed up for Lijit back in June of 2007. If I remember correctly, I think I implemented it, but later, it got pulled in some blog redesign. This time, it's likely here to stay. On May 16, I undoubtedly polluted the Lijit user database, signing up again and getting a second account. Oops.

Acting as a front-end for Google Blog Search, Lijit places a simple search box on your blog, letting visitors search your archives, but also, it pre-populates if somebody arrives on your site from having completed a search elsewhere. For example, if I do a Google search for "FriendFeed Tips", and click on FriendFeed Friday Tips #1: Five Ways To Use the Hide Function, Lijit helpfully asks, "Looking for more about friendfeed tips?" and gives what it would provide as the best links in my blog, as well as through content delivered from other services I use around the Web, such as MyBlogLog and Del.ico.us.

Search results from Lijit are displayed as a pop-in window in the Web browser, not asking you to leave the site, but instead, showing you the results, surrounded by Google AdSense. Of interest, Duncan Riley said on FriendFeed yesterday that not sharing the revenue with the bloggers themselves was "not cool", but I hadn't given that much thought before implementing.

The most visible benefit of using Lijit is showing site visitors what the most popular searches are, either on my blog, or used to find the blog. As of today, the top ten terms are: FriendFeed, Twitter, Blogger, Lijit, Techmeme, BlogRize, MyBlogLog, ReadBurner, FriendFeed to Watch and Duncan Riley.


Also very helpful is the ability to filter what is displayed. I've mentioned before that there's a core element of Web perverts who like some pages in my archives, so I get all sorts of odd traffic from dirty keywords, which I don't want shown, so I can hop into my Lijit page and add these unwanted terms to the filter.


Meanwhile, as Lijit is watching my site traffic for search activity, it's also monitoring standard blog tracking tools, including page views, how many visitors are coming, and where they are coming from. Combining the two facets of the service, from search to statistics, Lijit can tell me which countries search for what most frequently, what is the city that offers me the most visits (Mountain View, CA), and from what country did my most recent search terms originate. I can also see which pages proved most popular after search terms were entered.

So it works. Good stuff. And while I underplayed Lijit's integration with other services like MyBlogLog, Del.ico.us, Flickr, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Disqus, Digg, YouTube, etc., this element may become more important in the future, as site visitors can do more than search just my blog, but they can search all across my network, essentially acting like FriendFeed in reverse, not looking for one site to track my activity, but instead a search point to analyze all my activity around the Web. I'll be watching this to grow over time, and hope to report back and say if site visitors are doing more than searching my blog, but searching my content as well. I've enabled a dozen different sites to pull from, so have at it.

Banning by Computer, Repairing by Hand, Google KOs TechWag

For many blogs, Google traffic sends the overwhelming majority of visitors. TechWag, a technology blog authored by Dan Morrill, claims Google constitutes upwards of 80 percent of traffic. Or it did... because earlier this week, Google identified his site as harmful, and instead of sending people to his site, would-be visitors are instead warned that by visiting TechWag, their computer could be harmed (See why). As a result, traffic has, as you would expect, evaporated.

Dan walked through his site, contacted his hosting company, and resolved the issue, before April 16th. But by the 19th, the issues still have not been resolved. As he writes in a post today (We are not a Malware Site), "Google is going to take its own sweet time cleaning up the disaster in their index. It does not matter how fast you clean it up... what matters is how fast Google can clear an erroneous flag in their database."


Google Warns Visitors to TechWag.com
Dan estimates it took five hours for Google to block his site, and another five hours to resolve the initial issue. But Google's Webmaster tools claim resolving the block will take "several weeks", and they "unfortunately ... can't reply individually to each request."

Google's not being evil, and was well-intended to steer would-be victims from what could have been seen as untrusted code. But the disparity of time taken to block and that taken to fix is going to have a real toll on Dan and his site. And while I may not be the biggest fan of ads on blogs, Dan does have them, and if he was looking to get any kind of paycheck off this week's activity, he's going to be sorely disappointed.


After Clicking the Link in Google...
As he writes, "Come on Google, if you are going to kill off a web site, at least have the courtesy to respond at Internet speed. Taking two weeks to check to see if we are “ok” is absolutely unacceptable."

Why can I read his site? Because I trust him and TechWag. It's a great blog. (Also I use a Mac, so I'm not too worried...) Too bad most visitors from Google are likely going to be scared away. I dare you to take the risk. Go to www.techwag.com and sign up for his RSS feed. It won't hurt. I promise.

Limelight Networks Searchme Spider Picking Up Speed

For the better part of this year, I've seen some odd traffic to my site from Limelight Networks, a content delivery network similar to the more well-known Akamai. Multiple times a day, I would see a visit, with no originating page, drop in on the site, look at a page or two, and then, just as quickly, it would leave. Later, this pace quickened, to the point that if I saw a visitor came in with no referrer, I assumed it was llnw.net. But, in the last few days, the rate has dramatically accelerated, to the point where this spider from llnw.net is more than 10 percent of my total traffic, and it rates as the number one domain accessing my site, ahead of even Comcast.

So what the heck is it doing?

Well, it's not 100% clear. The assumed spider drops in and advertises itself as Linux UNIX, running Mozilla 1.8.1.11, and displaying a monitor with the odd square resolution of 1300 x 1300. It generally looks at one page, takes off, and then comes back in a few minutes to get another one. No real rhyme or reason, and it's just as happy to suck down old pages as new ones.

So, is it caching my blog so that customers of Limelight Networks can access the pages faster? Is it taking a graphical snapshot, in the same way that www.archive.org has done to show how Web sites looked over time? I'm not exactly sure.

One theory, voiced in the forums at Webmaster World, titled "Unusual Traffic from Limelight Networks", says the activity is from a robot called "Searchme", a LLNW client. Going to www.searchme.com shows this as a possibility. Searchme, Inc. says, " Searchme delivers more meaningful and targeted search results to its users," and that its "intuitive category suggest technology provides users with a dynamic and rewarding search experience by delivering relevant results that are tailored specifically to their unique areas of interest."

But... alas, no search engine and no demo, yet.


LLNW.net keeps hitting the site, every few minutes.
While I'm sure my site and others get hammered all day long from Google and Yahoo! spiders, they don't trigger my Web statistics software to think they're actual people, as LLNW is doing. It could be because their spider acts so human-like that the JavaScript code I use to track accesses is fooled. But regardless, the activity is picking up steam, and at this pace, I wouldn't be surprised to see LLNW take in one of every five visits here, even if they are "junk" visits.


LLNW.net is grabbing 13% of my traffic, beating out even Comcast!
The question is, if it is Searchme who is pushing this spider, and if they are indeed planning to reveal their work at some point, will the world have the need for yet another search engine? I have no idea. But if these oddities are any indicator, something's going on worth watching.

For those of you who have blogs and Web sites that track this detail of activity, are you also seeing the LLNW traffic, and has it increased over time? Also, has anybody ever seen Searchme in action who can let us know what they're doing?

I Can't Quit the Google Search Drug

If you had asked me if I was using Google search more frequently now or less frequently, compared with my past history, I would have guessed less, as I so heavily use my RSS feeds, bookmarks and news aggregators to navigate the Web. After all, for all my constant talk about Google Reader, I've been relatively silent about Google's core offering - search.

But, according to my Web history, Google shows me that my search activity has not only not decreased, but it is growing dramatically, more than doubling from the beginning of 2007 to the end of the year. By December, Google reports I was searching their index more than 50 times per day!


My Google search usage doubled in 2007

Despite my support of Google and their many products, I haven't seen much need for me to turn on full "Web History", for the company to follow my every page visit, click and download. It seems a bit much. But while that data's not tracked, as long as I'm logged in with my Google ID, Mountain View knows when I'm making calls to their database, what I'm looking for, and if my searches were successful - leading me to click on either a search result, or one of the company's ads.

All told, Google reports I used their search engine more than eleven thousand times last year. And my addiction to simply entering a term into the Google search box in Safari and return got more intense as the year went on. While in the first quarter of the year, I had only racked up 1,930 searches, by the fourth quarter, we tallied 4,116 over the same rough time period, more than doubling.

Why the increase? I'm honestly not sure. My guess is that I'm getting lazy in my URL typing, preferring to enter a keyword and hitting return, knowing Google will get it right. Often, I'll put a pair of words together, or a full story title, to be sure Google's #1 result is accurate, rather than guess at the URL and search the destination site itself.

But Google is, without a doubt, my gateway to the Web, at all hours of the day.


If awake, I'm likely searching Google...

While the above graph is quite small, you can see Google can pretty much tell you when I'm awake, and when I'm not. I made about 600 to 700 searches at every hour between 9 a.m. and midnight last year, with the exception of noon, which dips down, likely as I'm at lunch. Google also reports that I only search half as much during the one a.m. hour, sleep until 7, and search at half the rate from 7-8 a.m. I can't argue with those statistics. They're undoubtedly accurate. But the consistency from hour to hour through the year was astounding. I'm hooked to this Google drug, and constantly need a fix.

Millions and Millions of Search Results... Ignored

When you put a common term into a search engine, you're likely to get hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of search results, whether you use Google, Yahoo!, or any other leading engine.

In fact, to some, the vast number of search results is used to see which search engine crawler has done the most thorough job at indexing the Web - and it's assumed that with the most results has the superior algorithm.

But did you know that regardless of how many results there might actually be for a query, both Google and Yahoo! will only let you see the first 1,000?


Sorry, can't go past page 100. You've reached the end.
This artificial limit is excused as saying the limit has been put in place to reduce software and hardware resources, and that 1,000 results is good enough for most people. So you'll never, ever, get past page 100 on Google or Yahoo!, even if a search for "Google" on either engine shows more than 1 billion results.


But it's retrieving that data somewhere, right? If Google has a mountain of results available for a term, and only delivers the top 1,000, then some database somewhere knows what are the results for positions 1,001 to 9,999 and beyond, to the tens of millions. Yet users have no recourse if they want to peer into that index. There's no option to "Show all results" or "Display the top 10,000 results". Google and Yahoo! have arbitrarily decided that 1,000 is good enough for you, and that's that.

Do you feel lucky? Some have said Google overwhelmingly optimizes for the first results, and as the company writes, "We try to make your search experience so efficient that it's not necessary to scroll past the first ten listings."

But isn't it likely that there are projects out there where it would be helpful to analyze the top 5,000 results? Or 20,000? If you were an SEO firm, there are obvious benefits to this, or if you're doing any kind of artificial intelligence research, Google would be one of the best data pools out there.

So why are they doing this? It looks like even Google, who is assumed to have one of the most redundant, robust systems known to man, is trying to save money and resources. They write, in an explanation, "It would heavily tax our system to provide these results for everyone."

While that's understood, then what data is propping up Yahoo! or Google's claims that they have the most thorough results? Could the last step from Google's algorithm state (multiply results x 2), solely to have the biggest number available? After all, if you could only see the first 1,000, why not report you got eleventy trillion? There's got to be a way to get to the rest of the data.

(Also see: Search Engine Roundtable, Instant Fundas and FirstStop WebSearch for more...)

Google Discovers Search! (In Reader)

This evening, as I settled in to catch up on the hundreds of RSS feed items I'd missed in my post-Apple keynote and otherwise distracted haze, I saw a new box atop my Google Reader window pane. Simply and quietly, the Google Reader team integrated search functionality, quite likely the most obvious and most requested item in a list of potential enhancements for what's already the world's best online feed reader.

More than six months after I pleaded with the Google Reader team to add search, saying, "If your job is to search and archive all the world's information, then how does temporarily displaying news items that go away permanently, without offering an ability to search them, fit into that mission?", Google's coders have responded in a big way, not just adding the core ability to search all feeds, but also to search within specific feeds, or folders.

As Matt Cutts and the official Google Reader blog note, the service has added search across your entire feed items history, and it operates in an extremely familiar way - just like GMail. Results are given with the total count, and organized from newest to oldest, in reverse chronological order. (See the below screenshot)


An example search for "Google Reader" within Google Reader

Given how Google Reader has eclipsed BlogLines, NetNewswire and other feed readers in quality, is rising in popularity, and clearly has the development resources to dedicate to the project, the only question I really have is this: "Why is the service still in the Labs?" It makes zero sense to me how Google can make a service so good that its become my default start page across all Web browsers, yet not see it fully baked enough to take out of its development stage. It's high time the company pulled it out of the petri dish and pushed it toward full-fledged evolution. After all, I've been calling for it since mid February. Where is Google's confidence?

False Alarm: Wii Got Our Wii

It appears the Web can solve all problems, great or small. Shortly after I had noted three local Best Buys and Wal-Mart were fresh out of their Nintendo Wii stock, I took to the Net to bail me out. By 7 p.m. this evening, my wife and I were proud owners of a brand-new Wii, and we've already logged three hours of family fun.

Before leaving the office, I thought I'd give the search one last go, searching for "Nintendo Wii Availability" on Google. That led me to a Wiichat forum, which offered an array of Web links to inventory data for all the major retailers, including Target, Gamestop, Circuit City, and CompUSA.

A few clicks later, I found that Gamestop on Stevens Creek in San Jose had 1-3 units available. I called, expecting the data to be wrong, but after the store clerk first denied having any Wii in stock, he relented, saying I could get it if I showed up right away. Less than 20 minutes later, I found myself purchasing one of the few Wiis around, complete with two new controllers, the included sports pack, and two additional games: Paper Mario, and "The Bigs", a major league baseball game.

It was a little bit of an investment, but after a quick day trading of Apple earlier, I'd already more than made up the cost. (More on that later)

Long story short, the Wii looks right at home next to our plasma TV, aside our TiVo and Apple TV. It's a venerable array of technology entertainment nerddom. In minutes, Kristine and I had our two controllers out and were dueling one another in bowling, tennis, baseball and golf. The fun was enough to make us consider moving our furniture around to dedicate more real estate to gaming. After all, playing on a Wii is quite active, not just mindless staring at a screen.

There's no question this new toy has the potential to consume a great deal of our free time now, eating into "home work", blogging and all things social. But it's given us another dimension of fun competition, as we stretch for every backhand and groan at the sight of a digital 7-10 split.

And we wouldn't have gotten our Wii if not for the combination of Google, and resourceful fandom, which led us the right way.

Google Is 95% Of My Search Traffic

My SiteMeter stats have made one thing clear over the last several months - my traffic from Google and Google Images is growing rapidly, and no other search engine, including Yahoo!, MSN, Live.com or AOL, are even making a dent.

There's really no second place. Instead, there's Google, and then there's everybody else.


Google traffic to louisgray.com dwarfs all competitors.

In the last few months, referrals from Google Images have largely taken over the #1 position from Google's standard searches. Over time, the ANtics comics have drawn a tremendous amount of traffic from curious baseball fans, and the occasional odd post on The Simpsons and adult material have delivered the lion's share of the rest.

Using the Summary Web logs analysis application, I reviewed the site logs from January 1 forward, and saw the massive gap between Google and everyone else to be more than I had ever anticipated. It turns out that thanks to Google's unique combination of Google search, Google Blog Search, Google Image Search and Google Reader, the company is delivering almost 96% of all referrals from search engines to my blog. AOL, MSN, Live.com and Yahoo! don't even crack one percent apiece.

A lot of people are concerned that Google's position is a bad thing for consumers and for competition, and it's clear the competition isn't making a good show in this race. But if the other players even had serviceable offerings, this would be a different story. The sad truth is that they don't. If they want to stick around, they should either dramatically enhance their offerings, or forget competing with Google, and stick to other tools they do well - whether it be start pages, instant message tools, news or social media. As it stands today, the verdict is in, Google has won, and they've won big.

Technorati Down Again, Google Sure to Benefit

It's happened again. Blog search engine and tagging leader Technorati's site has gone completely unresponsive. See here, here and here. It's not exactly the first time Technorati has fallen off the radar, as the site has shown an unacceptable level of instability for the last twelve to eighteen months.

For a cog so crucial to the blogosphere as Technorati not to have a robust, redundant infrastructure is something of a surprise, and the company's struggles here have been well documented to the point it's likely driving more users to Google's Blog Search and other alternatives.

Dave Sifry, the company's CEO, has been an incredibly open friend to the blogosphere, and has visited this site on more than one occasion. We'd love for him and Technorati to pull through, but at what point should we recognize we're being abused, and should just simply turn away?

Google Could "Pull a Netscape" on Technorati

The hottest topic of discussion on the blogosphere today is Technorati's new revamp. The blog search engine pioneer is branching out and trying to capture what the company calls "the live Web", capturing video, photos, blogs and hot topics. And much as Google's recently announced Hot Trends feature highlights rising topics for discussion, Technorati has long tracked the "Top Tags" or "Top Searches" from their front page, and today's launch takes their story up a notch.

But amid all the positive press, from TechCrunch, Mashable, Robert Scoble and others, is a minority current saying that Technorati, in this age of Google, just might not be relevant any more. In his usual blunt fashion, Steve Rubel says simply, "Blog Search is Dead and Google Killed It".

There is no secret that Google is the search leader. Statistics on my personal blog and elsewhere show that Google and all its derivatives drive 85-90% of search traffic, dwarfing the also-rans, including Yahoo!, MSN, and the rest. Now, it could be argued that Google is to search what Microsoft was to the Operating System.

When Microsoft embedded Internet Explorer into the Windows operating system, it spelled the deathknell for Netscape Navigator. Customers felt the free browser that came standard was "good enough", and the act of downloading or paying for Netscape was too much to take on. Though Microsoft was charged with monopolist practices and nearly broken to pieces, they won and Netscape died.

There's a strong chance Google could be doing the same thing to Web upstarts by adding new search functionality. As Rubel writes, Google's integration of blog search negates the need for dedicated, vertical search like Technorati, IceRocket or Feedster. The Google Blog Search is "good enough" for 90% of the users, leaving only us technogeeks who demand the upper crust of technology innovation. And while Google is expected to "Do No Evil", their adding of free Web-based e-mail significantly challenged Yahoo! and others, their integrated RSS feed reader has removed the need for downloadable feed readers, and the company continues to expand.

Technorati could very much become the next Netscape, evaporated by a big monolith with an unparalleled brand and scads of cash in the bank. So while CEO Dave Sifry asks you to Come check out the refreshed www.technorati.com, it probably isn't going to have a radical change in the company's fortunes for the long term. I love Technorati's widgets. Every single blog post I have lets you see "blog reactions" in Technorati, and the Technorati Authority tag separates the leading blogs from the newbies and also-rans. But Google's blog search functionality is "Good Enough" for me in most cases, and will be for the majority of Web users. I can root for Technorati all day long, but the threat from Google to pound them the way Microsoft did Netscape is very real.