MSN's popular searches currently include one for Skull Worship.
Have the cannibals taken over at Microsoft?
No. Well; probably not. We may have a US game show that's asked a question about Skull Worship (ah, Indiana Jones - I think you're to blame for this one) and the MSN-using / game-show-watching demographic overlap has gone out and searched for the answer.
Or... it could be one of the search suggestions at Indy Search.
The suggested 'winning' searches may have been enough to move the needle on MSN's over all search volume. That would suggest that Indy Search is being a hit for MSN Live and for Lucas Films.
Of course, if you're cynical you might wonder if this is a 'paid for popular search' - but that honestly that seem unlikely. There's probably not a strong enough tie between skull worship results and the film's search positions in MSN yet.
As a PS; a good place to go look for the 'Big US Game Show Effect' is Google's Hot Trends.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Microsoft promotes Skull Worship
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Google's Music History is All Messed Up
One of the funky things Google does is let you display your current music tract as part of your status in Google Talk. Google aggregates this data to produce Google Music Trends. If they had launched that feature last month then there would have been a privacy blog post about it.
This "music history" is also stored as part of your Google Web History. It's nice to be reminded of what you where listening too (though a shame it doesn't work with the likes of Last.fm) but a song isn't a web page and Google's Web History isn't very good at coping.
For example, you can try and mark a song as a favourite/bookmark it and two things will happen; 1) all the songs in your history list will be bookmarked and then 2) Google won't remember and will reset the bookmark star back to blank.
While you have songs marked as a bookmark, though, you can start to get really silly. Try changing the name of a song. 
However, when you try and save your edit the Google bookmark system does't cope. It throws bad request errors back at you. 
Just imagine a Google Music system which let you associate favourite tracks with certain web pages - when you browse onto the page you could have the option of the associated track playing. If that sounds crazy then remember there are iGoogle Gadgets which let you control iTunes. What about a Google Talk that let you associate music with Contacts? You could have a 3 second clip played in response to a talk request or even have an entire track played in the background when you begin a conversation. Heh. That would either drive you insane or drive up your electronic music collection.
Friday, January 05, 2007
How Google Reader could influence organic search results
Certainly it seems safe to suggest that Google reader could - and perhaps should - influence personalised search.
I think I was one of the first to break the news that Google Reader had been updated. I'll note that because it'll rarely happen. This isn't a "news first" blog. This is my rants and raves blog. I saw the chance to be quick with news and so I took it.
Some time later the brain begins to work. I do this often. Sometimes the penny can be slow to drop. I knew all this already. 
What we see on the trends report on Google Reader is that Google isn't just recording which RSS feeds I subscribe to (which is an indication that a human just voted for the quality of the site) but it is recording what percentage of the articles I read.
If I ignore an RSS feed then Google could notice.
If I ignore AdWords what happens? The quality score goes down and the advert begins to slip in position. It wouldn't be impossible for Google to note which RSS feeds got read (implying good content) and which did not.
Anyway... here's an idea. Do you know what would be cool? Being able to integrate your subscribed RSS feeds in reader.google.com to Google News. When I'm searching Google News and I use keywords which have also recently been mentioned in my Google Reader then it could let me know.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Google update Google Reader and Google Trends
Google have updated Google Reader so that it interfaces with Google Trends. It's great!
The new feature allows you to review which of your feeds you find the most popular. It offers a tag cloud (or in Google terminology a label cloud) of your most popular folders.
In the screen grab you can see how I've gone from being aware of Google Reader to being a power user in just a few days (ever since I decided to ramp up the blog, in fact).
It'll be a race between Philipp Lenssen's fine Blogoscope and Ionut Alex over at the equally fine Google Operating System to see who breaks the news to the masses!
Update: Google Operating System wins!
My Google Reader has just updated with Googiflied, another fine news source (the young Haochi Chen), who also seem to have broken the news. Haochi credits Googler Mihai Parparita with the first post on Google Reader's magic. Ah well. We're not at the stage of micro-second blog reporting. Scoop races are just a came for SEO geeks like myself!
