As promised in last Friday’s post, search for books on Circos launches this week. It’s now live. Circos Book Search is an awesome way to find the right book for your particular mood, needs, or feelings. Our search taps into millions of reader opinions and sentiments to help you find the best novel, bedtime story, cookbook, and more.

Here are some of my favorite book queries:

• Mystery Books that are Great Summer Reads
• Business & Investing Books that are Humouous
• Travel Books focused on Hiking
• Thought-Provoking Literature Books
• The Best Titles by William Faulkner (Want to search for an author? Just enter his/her name in the “Describe it” field)

Have a favorite query? Leave us a comment or drop us a line.

It’s the first day of summer, and we’ve just released some exciting enhancements at www.circos.com.

Here’s what’s new:

• Search for Movies - Find movies based on your personal preferences. If you’ve ever thought, “I’d like to watch a movie, but don’t know what I want…” Circos will give you great ideas. Try Powerful Drama Movies with Morgan Freeman or Intelligent Cult Movies with Great Beginnings. The possibilities are endless.

• International Restaurant Search (beta) - we now search restaurants in cities outside of the US.

• Widgets - turn any Circos search into a Top 5 list you can put on your blog or web site. Simply run any Circos search and click “Get a widget”. Check out our widget for Beautiful New York City Hotels with Spa. Please post one on your site or blog (unfortunately they don’t work in WordPress posts just yet due to JavaScript restrictions)

• Find Similar - for those who love a particular hotel, restaurant, or movie, and want to find others like it. Check out hotels similar to the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

We’ve also released many “under the hood” enhancements to Circos - including many more search terms, new content sources, and improvements to our semantic engine.

We’re putting the finishing touches on search for books - you can expect to see it go live sometime next week, so please stay tuned to www.circos.com.

And finally, if you know a hotel, restaurant, book, or movie brand that is interested in reaching a highly-qualified audience of discerning consumers, please send them our way. We’re seeing industry-leading results for our advertisers and affiliate partners.

At least for Circos it is! Last night we updated the colors of our user interface (among other things) so check out Circos.com and let us know what you think. You’ll also notice the site is faster and the URLs are cleaner-looking.

This was a mini-release - early next month, you can expect to see more significant enhancements. We’ll be adding two new categories to Circos, which are books and movies. The search possibilities for these categories are really exciting - think “contemporary fiction books that are good beach reads” or “Blu-ray DVDs with breathtaking clarity”. We’ll also be previewing a couple of new ways to find information using Circos search. So stay tuned to the site, or sign up for our newsletter (the link is in the upper right hand corner of our site) and you’ll be the first to hear when these go live.

On a different note, we were excited to be written about in Hotels Magazine yesterday. Adam Kirby did a great job articulating Circos’ value to a hotel brand. If your brand is interested in working with us, please drop us a note. The data that we have about brands, based on consumer opinions across the web, is remarkable.

Being a music buff, “This is Your Brain on Music” by Daniel Levitin was a page turner for me on a recent flight to Asia.  I found the description on the multiple-trace memory models to be particularly enlightening.

Here’s what Levitin had to say about why some music evoke certain feelings, while others don’t:

According to the multiple-trace memory models, every experience is potentially encoded in memory… memories are encoded in groups of neurons that, when set to proper values and configured in a particular way, will cause a memory to be retrieved and replayed in the theater of our minds.  The barrier to being able to recall everything we might want to is not that it wasn’t “stored” in memory then; rather, the problem is finding the right cue to access the memory and properly configure our neural circuits… In theory, if we only had the right cues, we could access any past experience… unique cues are the most effective at bringing up memories; the more items or contexts a particular cue is associated with, the less effective is will be at bringing up a particular memory.  This is why, although certain songs may be associated with certain times of your life, they are not very effective cues for retrieving memories from those times if the songs have continued to play all along and you’re accustomed to hearing them…  But as soon as we hear a song that we haven’t heard since a particular time in our lives, the floodgates of memory open and we’re immersed in memories.  The song has acted as a unique cue, a key unlocking all the experiences associated with the memory for the song, its time and place.  (Excerpt from This is Your Brain on Music, page 165-166)

Part of our user interface today uses descriptive words to cue experiences that our users really want.  This is why we show a list of these words in the user interface.  Our belief is that people want to tell a search engine more than just subject matter keywords, but they may need cues to describe the experience they seek because a blank textbox isn’t an effective “cue” for recalling desired experiences (except perhaps, filling out a form), and so searchers stick with the common and over-used subject matter keywords, thereby being deluged with non-specific results.

An example of results from Circos for hip hotels in NYC return very different results from Yahoo or Google.  In Circos, the user is encouraged to select descriptive words such as “hip” to describe the experience s/he wants.   In the others, not really, unless you happen to think of it.

How about mixing descriptive feelings with descriptive needs?  Try this one: romantic, classy hotels in NYC with Molton Brown toiletries, or intimate, vegetarian restaurant with a great wine list in NYC.

These aren’t the kind of queries that searchers do today, because with an experience like this

there’s no cue to activate a searcher’s imagination even if what s/he wants is something more than a plain old hotel or restaurant in NYC.  If you don’t get to ask, you can never get an answer!

Just for kicks, here are a few other queries that I’ve run to help me decide where to go:

Restaurants in San Carlos, CA that serves organic food and has good ambience (for Mother’s Day)

Boutique hotels in Tokyo with helpful staff, good location, service, and bathroom (for my recent trip)

Zen restaurant with ambience and good wine in San Francisco (don’t underestimate the power of just 2 listings… particularly if they’re the right ones!)

What do you really want?  We can already help with hotels and restaurants, and when we roll out other categories from now on I think you’ll find Circos useful for finding things that match your personal needs and preferences.

I’ve been talking with people lately who are looking for hotels and restaurants in college towns around the US - whether it be the college they attend or the college their kids attend.  Here are a few links from Circos that might be helpful:

• For Ohio State fans, try Comfy Hotels in Columbus, OH.
• Stanford students and alums? Try Italian Restaurants in Palo Alto, CA.
• For those who love Michigan State, Friendly Hotels in East Lansing, MI.
• And my alma mater, Northwestern. Here are Restaurants in Evanston, IL with Great Wine Lists.

Curious about hotels and restaurants in your college’s town? Head to Circos and try out a search of your own!

Kevin mentioned this briefly below, but here’s a more detailed summary of our most recent release at Circos.

The new and improved www.circos.com now includes:

• Hotels from over 29,000 cities across the world
• Restaurants in nearly every US city
• Millions of consumer reviews from across the web

We’ve been working hard to fine tune our algorithms over 16 US cities over the past few months, so we’re definitely excited to scale out Circos to a very large set of knowledge on the web.

Try out some of our favorite queries: Hip and Luxurious Hotels in London with Flat-Screen TV, Vegan Restaurants in Portland with Ambience, and Comfy Hotels in Tokyo with Views. Or create one of your own.

If you have comments or thoughts on our enhanced search, drop us a line or comment below.

Also, a friendly reminder that Mother’s Day is just around the corner on May 11. Our team has been using Circos to find hotels with relaxing spas - a perfect gift for moms everywhere.

This week we add 2.8 Million consumer reviews on Hotels and Restaurants from over 29,000 cities to our search index. Check’m out and tell us what you think.

This used to be Ford’s slogan, and I think couldn’t be more appropriate to describe ad trends.  One of the panels at Ad:tech in San Francisco talked about the state of advertising and how it’s evolving.  I found a couple of things interesting.

1. Higher CPM goes to content sites that fit the advertising, not necessarily sites with the most reach.  According to Scott Symond of AKQA, “tier 1 inventory is artificially high.”
2. Search marketing can be used as a response and measurement tool for offline media campaigns, but current players are too stuck on PPC.

I couldn’t agree more.  The driving factor behind these 2 points is that ROI/conversion accountability will be key for media buyers.  Google has clearly caught on to this as they’re trying to improve the quality of their click-throughs.

Referring quality traffic to advertisers is the holy grail.  By quality traffic I mean consumers who have a high likelihood of buying once they get to the advertiser’s site.  Today, during a meeting with an ad agency, we were reminded that if the consumer is new, then that traffic is even of a higher value.

Seems like quality is on a lot of people’s minds these days!

I recently wrote a post about larger traffic doesn’t = greater CPM, and now PubMatic has published a similar report. I’ve included the summary chart below, but you can read more in detail here.

One of the interesting points in the report is that the “eCPMs for social networking sites are among lowest by vertical, though they have increased 69% from $0.22 in January ‘08 to $0.37 in March ‘08.”

I was part of a panel discussion moderated by Nick on the monetization topic at the SNAP Summit yesterday. Along with my fellow panelists, Ren, Eve, and Krishna Subramanian (formerly of Blue Lithium), we discussed that social apps which gave 1) quality attention time to ads AND 2) had desirable user segments (either demographic or behavioral) are going to monetize better than apps that don’t have both.

If you look at different webmail providers as a highly trafficked social app, the eCPM has to be pretty abysmal because of the lack of quality attention and user qualification. Car IQ, on the other hand, has the ability to do both. In doing so, they should be able to extract a higher eCPM because they can facilitate branded experiences with desired segments even without a lot of traffic.

But is eCPM even the right metric? Depends on what the M stands. If M were to stand for “minute,” then the revenue model could be a derivation of the broadcast model instead of the print model, in which case I’d say eCPM is absolutely the right metric. We’d be in a world where whereby advertisers pay for engaged attention from qualified individual as they participate in (related) activities.I believe that’s where social apps will find the rainbow’s end.