Eating My Own SaaStr Dogfood: Why I Invested in Algolia Search-as-a-Service
Much of SaaStr involves sharing my learnings, mistakes, improvements, etc. as a founder CEO that lived the journey from $0 to $100m in ARR. But do I practice what I preach? I hope so. Let’s take a look together. Recently, I was fortunate enough to invest what I believe is an outstanding SaaS company and service, […]
Surely the computer should do that?
Computer rendering of the Chicago Spire. This is not the current design as of July 12, 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) We have become accustomed to the simple yet all-powerful search box. ‘Advanced’ search options and arcane query syntaxes have largely been replaced by the learned behaviour of throwing some words at Google*, ignoring the sponsored […]
ComputeNext: Google For Compute Resources
I recently had a conversation with a stealth cloud startup called ComputeNext which got me fired up because they are doing something that I have been advocating here in this space, emergence of an open federated cloud ecosystem. Well, they are not building a federated ecosystem per se but they have gone one step further […]
GOutlook. Gmail Back to Earth… in Search of Revenue.
I’ve been long-time Gmail fan, having used it from the very early days, for almost 5 years now. The key reasons why I switched and have stuck with the service ever since were the productivity boosters, first of all: Threaded conversations Labels Search Google did to email what all new product teams should: throw away […]
Universal, Actionable Search: Zoho’s Improved Answer to “Where’s My Stuff?”
Search, Don’t Organize – is the Google mantra, meaning we should stop wasting time filing away information in folders, sorting, labeling it for later retrieval, when it’s so much easier to search / find it. That is, if you know where to search. Did you discuss that project in email? Or was it a Document? […]
Google Maps Experiment with Hotel Prices – Just Remember to Check In
How many times were you looking for the right hotel at the right price, close enough to your conference, customer or just a particular location? Finding the right one typically includes juggling multiple sites – hotel search, price comparisons, many with teaser prices that turn out to be unavailable, maps, reservation systems…etc. Not for long, […]
On Paywalls, Search and the Risk of Irrelevance
So AccMan (Dennis Howlett) has decided to go down a monetization route, in addition to being funded by a vendor content widget, he’s looking at monetizing by charging for a small percentage of “premium content”. It’s an interesting move and one that has been used by a number of traditional print publications for their online properties. […]
In the Future We’ll All Have Online Reputation Scores
In a recent interview with EMC’s Stu Miniman about the future of the web, I predicted that in 20 years, we’ll all have online reputation scores. Little badges, numbers that communicate our level of authority, this sort of thing. And these reputations will have tangible impact. Three different trends come together at some point in […]
Three Designs for Presenting Tweets in Search Results
In a recent post, I described some ways in which tweets should be ranked in search results. A good follow-on question is… How should tweets be presented in search results? It’s an interesting question – how exactly would you want to see tweets in your Google and Bing search results? And it’s an important question, […]
Google Real-Time Tweet Search Identifies the Tech Elite
Want to know if you’re truly in the technology elite? Let Google tell you! Try this: Go to Google Type in your name and the word ‘twitter’ (e.g. hutch carpenter twitter) Look at the results If you see real-time search results at the top of the page, congratulations! You’re a VIP! If not, well, sorry […]
Blogging Those Tweets? Get Rid of the Nofollows
A regular habit I have is to blog My Ten Favorite Tweets for each week. These are my own tweets, and they mostly contain links to interesting things during the past seven days. One thing I’ve always liked is that I can give “link credit” to the sites that I include in these weekly posts. […]
Twitter to Clean Up Trending Topic Searches – Is This that Reputation Thing?
On Twitter’s blog, they announced an initiative to clean up the spammy tweets that often appear for trending topics. As described from the post: Today we’re starting to experiment with improvements to trends that will help you find more relevant tweets. Specifically, we’re working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets […]
How Should Tweets Be Ranked in Search Engine Results?
Anyone remember when Loic LeMeur had the temerity to suggest Twitter rank its search results by the number of followers people have? His post, with 109 comments and reaction from Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble and many others, clearly struck a nerve. Fast forward to the past couple weeks. Both Microsoft Bing and Google announced deals […]
I love you Google Wave
My love hate relationship with Google just switched over to love today as I just got my Google Wave account invite today, and am going to spend the rest of the day playing around with this puppy to see if it will work for the school I work at. As we take a look at […]
Use Your Company Blog to Catch Search Term Typos
If your company or product name can be misspelled, this is for you. At Spigit, a prospective customer related this to us recently. A few months ago, they had heard of Spigit in one of the usual ways – reading, word of mouth, etc. At some point, they decided to learn more. It probably went […]
