Animas Weblog

I was just typing an email (in GMail) to a family member about driving through Albuquerque, NM on the way to Colorado for Thanksgiving. I found the following AdWords ad alongside my email content:
Albuquerque New Mexico
Breathtaking satellite images of
Albuquerque on Windows Live Local
local.live.com
Curious, I followed the link to this Windows Live Local page […]

In this session, Horowitz made reference to the difficulty of machine object recognition. He worked on this before (possibly at MIT). He talked about humans’ potential to look at a picture of something and not only identify it, but to describe subjective and emotional characteristics of what they see, something computers could never […]

Has anyone noticed the checkout icons showing up in AdWords ads? Most of these advertisers for [nonprofit information] also appear to use checkout, however unlikely that may seem. It looks like CharityWatch.org is the only exception. This must be a mistake.

I had the pleasure of attending an “Executive Search Summit” in San Jose this past week, put on jointly by Efficient Frontier and Yahoo!. It was a great event for large paid search advertisers such as Expedia and Amazon. Hopefully I will post some thoughts about aspects of it.
Here is a riddle from […]

In lock step with this Search 2.0 post going up, Yahoo announces Yahoo! Search Builder, and Microsoft talks about their integration of some social apps from Windows Live. Search Builder is Yahoo’s version of Rollyo, including algo tweaks. Great to see some “traditional” search engines mobilizing their resources on social ideas.
Thanks to RustyBrick […]

Many of these Search 2.0 companies would just become another Onebox or search tab on Google, with all the benefits of integration with the rest of the Google product family. Rather than a startup taking a minuscule early adopter user base and trying to collect a statistically insignificant amount of data, Google can scale this across its well known brand and huge marketshare, making it seem like less of an early adopter idea, improving both the quality (filtering out statistical anomalies) and adoption.