LetsBuyIt Blog

After many rumors and a long time of waiting (since July 22nd, 2007) it has been made public by Ryan Hayward on AdSense Blogspot now that Google launched its AdSense for Feeds in beta. With your Google AdSense account, it is now possible to push for Google advertising in your feeds in order to earn money with your blogs and feeds now. It is similary customizable as the other AdSense applications however this is only the beginning. The efficiency is questionnable as we are using feeds in order to minimizing the time spent for reading news and blogs hence we doubt that that Click-Through-Rate will be very high.

To find out more on how to integrated AdSense in your Feeds (interesting for publishers) click here for more info.

We found plenty of articles on the Google Blog but has this been existing in the other countries since 2005 as stated here on the Google Blog dated May 7, 2005 or is the date of the blog post just wrong?

It comes as no surprise that Google is trying to monetize its Readers now as well because Google is struggling to monetize their other projects such as YouTube, which just recently had to stop its project of live-streaming (article here) because investors are having a hard-time accepting those massive investments with no nice returns.

We are reading a lot of stories about the new search engines lately and after Cuil claimed that it wants to be the new competitor of Google we found it was time to test it. We searched Letsbuyit.com on three different often mentioned search engines namely SearchCloud, Cuil, Searchme and Google to see how relevant/useful/advantageous the results are for us in 2008:

SearchCloud

The fact you need to click twice to execute a search is a negative point. Secondly we find that the search result only returned articles about us from 2001, which didn’t really impress us. Unfortunately we are not convinced that this is the future despite offering that grid function (whatever that is for?!)

Source: SearchCloud Screenshot

Cuil

If Cuil wants to be the new competitor of Google.com then we hope for Cuil that they have endless updates up their sleeve because to get Google down on their knees because of Cuil is rather unrealistic as of now! The page set-up is definitely interesting because you receive so much preview text however the order and relevancy to Letsbuyit 2008 is not obvious and the summary text for letsbuyit.com is very out-of-date! Maybe they have indexed trillions of pages but for Letsbuyit definitely not the most current nor relevant!

Source: Cuil Screenshot

SearchMe

The visual search engine SearchMe definitely gave us the most up-to-date results with the screen-shots of our latest website and blog design, which means that their indexing is up to scratch! We still like it the best because it is most relevant to our 2007/08 relaunch. To compare visual search engines with text-based search engines is questionable, we agree, but still our most favorable search engine result!

Source: Searchme Screenshot

Google.com

Google did quite well with the pages shown on the first page but still too many articles about the former Letsbuyit.com of 2001. Also not very favorable for us yet and definitely improvable!

Source: Google Screenshot

Our Conclusion is that in order to have the most favorable Search Engine Ranking without having a website is to create your own search engine and beat Google at its game ;).

I have taken a fancy to Visual Search Engines and have now come across Cluuz. Cluuz creates links between search result terms and different keywords and puts them in relation. To test it I searched for “Letsbuyit” and got the following results with two different visualisation effects. Sometimes I don’t quite see the links or relationships nor how they have been created but it is visual nevertheless. I like it. What do you think?

The Chart Search

Flash Search

The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, an independent council of the European Commission, has decided that Search Engines like Google and Yahoo can no longer safe user-specific information for 18 months but need to delete or make user data anonymous after only six months. The Search Engines would need to revise their datamining procedures drastically to comply with such a law in case the European Commission follows the advice of the council and passes such Act.

We have previously written about the cloud search engine Quintura. Just recently we have discovered a demo video of the new search engine called SearchMe! SearchMe visualises the search results with screenshots of the respective website and you can flick through the result pages similar to the image viewer of the Apple Iphone. SearchMe is still in beta but if the technology works out fine, it will sure be quite a good product because I find this navigation fantastic. The question is whether the search results will load fast enough and also whether the algorithms and search results are good enough but it will definitely be a refreshing change on the boring search result pages and give the competitors quite a headache.

Check out the new version of the visual Search Engine, called Quintura. Besides giving the normal text result on the right, Quintura also visualises the keywords, relevant to the search, in the form of a cloud. The visualisation definitely needs to be improved but an interesting concept because the widget can be embedded on your website for free. Interesting concept to visualise search results, although it is not the fastest. Read more on Techcrunch.

(Source: Quintura)

A new search engine tool has been available for a few weeks now : SearchCrystal.
This online tool is a “meta search-engine” - it uses the results of a lot of different search engines, and displays them in a graphical and analytic manner: by cluster, spiral, lists or also categories. User can then use drag and drops and menus to specify the way of displaying the information so that the analysis is more relevant.

Let’s see what it looks like by default when we search for “LetsBuyIt”:

This tool can be very interesting when trying to get a complete panorama of the presence and representation of a brand or service among the main sources of data (Google, Ask, MSN, RSS feeds or even flickr images).