The bet is very simple – content game hasn’t worked (the good news is that it’s not working for others as well). Search has higher CTR (clickthrough rate) and that’s where the monetization might work for Rediff (though the search intent falls under Google’s purview!)

Another thing to note is ads are gone from homepage now. This means better user experience but a drop in short term revenue for rediff. Given they are struggling to retain users, this move looks good.

I appreciate the new design much more. But, like earlier I won’t use it. Also, looking at initial reactions, I doubt if this design will appeal to their existing users. Their focus on search can actually prove fatal.

Did they forget Next button?

Search results do not show a next button, though previous button is present.

Rediff mobile is still the same heavy site. I hope its redesign will follow soon.

Webmeme.In, an Indian technology news aggregator, is my brand new mashup built on top of Yahoo! BOSS. Its a meme, presenting you the hottest Indian tech stories that are buzzing on the web. Want to know more about a story? Just click on it and you will reach the source blog. Sidebar presents the most recent stories from Indian tech blogs. You can also search amongst the tech news right from the site. Try it now.

Most of the stories you see on Webmeme.In are from Indian blogs. At the same time, stories from the top international blogs related to Indian tech industry will also flow into Webmeme.In river. So, you will not miss if TechCrunch is talking something interesting about an Indian company.

Follow @webmeme (top stories) or @webmemeFH (Firehose: all posts) to receive new updates in twitter. You can also subscribe to the RSS feeds.

How it works?

• Data aggregation: I use YQL to aggregate and extract data from all the sources.
• Story selection/Ranking: Recent stories which are generating maximum conversation over the web are selected automatically using APIs including Y! BOSS site explorer, Google Trackbacks and the most important postrank API which tracks almost all of the social media including bookmarking sites, Twitter, Friendfeed, comments on the blog post, etc.
• Related Stories: Related stories are found through similarity calculated over several features like content, tags, links, etc and is easily accomplished using text mining methods present in BOSS Mashup framework.
• Search: Site restricted search powered by Y! BOSS.
• User Interface: YUI. Get your grids quickly through YUI Grid builder
  
• Hosting: Site runs on Google App Engine, my favorite hosting platform.

Have suggestions/questions/feedback? Drop a comment below or contact me.

One of the key problems that is prominent in these trending topics is low relevance as these systems do not consider user interests. Ramanand did a tweet yesterday, wishing for “Trending topics for people I follow” which encouraged me to do this hack:

Twitter Trends hack presents the trending topics in your friends’ stream on twitter. Wanna know why a topic is trending in your network? Just check out the recent hot tweets from your friends. It uses OAuth. No passwords required :). IPL (A cricket league in India) is the buzzing topic in my friends’ stream right now. Find out what is hot for you: Try here.

It took me just a couple of hours to complete the hack, all because of simple Twitter APIs, Tweetapp framework and App Engine. OAuth integration was very easy with Tweetapp. The hack analyzes recent two hundred tweets from your friends, finds keywords out of the stream and those referenced with more frequency are trending topics for you.

This hack is just a proof of concept. It is no where close to a perfect personalized topic trends. In ideal world, I would like to build user interest profiles, consider demographics and accordingly show trends. But, it will no longer remain a hack then

Update (24th April): Twitter has re-enabled OAuth. Try out twitter trends now
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Update (22nd April): An OAuth security issue has been discovered and several OAuth services including twitter have disabled it temporarily. You cannot try the hack right now

One of the notable thing was the spike in site traffic after Scobleizer tweeted the link. Below is the graph showing requests/sec.

Here I coin (:P) a term: “Scobleizer effect“:

“Scobleizer effect is the phenomenon of a popular twitter user tweeting a link of a smaller site, causing a sudden enormous spike in the site traffic. The link spreads rapidly with several users retweeting the same and results in more small traffic spikes.”

Thanks to appengine, I need not worry about scaling.

Retweets are great indication of the originator’s topical influence and the audience’s interest. Recently, after reading a post “Are You Retweetable“, from Todd Sampson (co-founder MyBlogLog), I thought of creating a quick hack, Retweetrank, for ranking twitter users based on the number of retweets.

Retweetrank lets you find rank of any twitter user. With the rank, latest retweets of the user are shown and an RSS feed can also be grabbed for the same. Monitoring retweets can provide a better understanding of audience to the originator while others can see the most interesting tweets of a user.

The top ranked twitter users, who have been most retweeted recently, are listed in the leaderboard. They are the once producing most interesting content across the twittersphere.

Find your retweet rank now.

Retweetrank searches the public timelines of twitter users through the twitter APIs and is deployed on google appengine.

Update (Jan 11): As Ian Kennedy suggested below in the comments, here is a greasemonkey script to see recent retweets for any user in the twitter sidebar.

Matt Harding dancing with Hulis Wigmen in Papua New Guinea, in zero gravity in Nevada, with Bollywood dancers in India
and in front of the Sydney Opera House. [Photo source: The Age]

Matt also visited Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale and shot 33 scenes across the campus. Jerry, Sue, Y! execs and several Yahoos joined the Matt dance. Video.

A few days back I was trekking with my IITB friends at Siddarabetta, about 100kms from Bangalore, and there the idea to dance like Matt stuck us. It was damn funny to dance like Matt, we all were just laughing all the time. Hope you will enjoy watching the  video. Take a peak:

In the background, is a bengali song: Praan composed by Garry Schyman with lyrics adapted from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore. The song also tops my playlist these days

Dancers as they arrive in the above video sequence (L to R): Kuldeep Gharat, Saurabh Sahni (me :P), Kanika Nema, Bhavana Dalvi, Meghana Kshirsagar, Aditya Mishra, Kautilya Jain, Anuj Tripathi, Uma Sawant, Esha Palta, Unmesh Deshmukh and Janak Chandarana.

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• Talking travel with the celebrated dancing Matt
• A Private Dance? Four Million Web Fans Say No

This hack is an extension of Vik Singh’s qna service, which finds answer using the popular phrases in the top search results for a query. I do image search for the best answers and blend them with the regular image search results. The hack is a basic prototype and natural language image search gets triggered only for questions (queries including who/what/which).

Try askBoss: http://ask-boss.appspot.com

Below is a quick comparison of search results obtained by askBoss, Google image search and Y! image search for query: who is batman in the dark knight?

askBoss results: who is batman in the dark knight?

Google image search results: who is batman in the dark knight?

Yahoo Image search results: who is batman in the dark knight?

Try askBoss: http://ask-boss.appspot.com

With Yahoo Boss APIs and a deployment platform like Google App Engine, building a decent search service is pretty easy. I could finish this hack within a few hours by using Boss Mashup Framework and App Engine. Apart form the qna service, other popular Boss API/app engine integrations include 4hoursearch aka YUIL.

Update: askBOSS got covered in TechCrunch and Yahoo Search Blog.

MyBlogLog was acquired by Yahoo! in Jan 2007. Working for the MyBlogLog team has been a great fun for me. We enjoy the benefits of the big Yahoo! infrastructure as well as a startup culture with strong focus on innovation. Even as a newbie, we have opportunity to try out our ideas. This idea of the open recommendation engine clicked me sometime back. We implemented it quickly, filed a patent too and here is the launch. It is just wonderful to have this opportunity to develop innovative new products that tons of people find useful. Many Thanks to Pankaj, Ian and Todd!

I was an intern at Webaroo, contributed to the personalization logic of its products, when they were under development.

SMS GupShup is mobile group SMS service that allows users to create mobile communities and broadcast messages to them, similar to twitter, but more like yahoo/google groups for mobile. Currently, GupShup sends SMS messages only to Indian mobile phone numbers. It is being used by over 300,000 publishers sending around 10M messages per day. SMS to mobile devices is one of the major costs for Webaroo.

Webaroo started with their product for offline browsing, which didn’t strike the market well, even after a couple of years of the launch. With Google gears competition, its life ahead, is even tougher. I think one of the reasons why webaroo couldn’t pick up is due to the focus on caching static content, while google gears, powered easy caching and sync of dynamic content. Remember The Milk and Google reader are my favorite apps which I use over google gears.

Earlier, Rakesh Mathur with other founders, sold Junglee to Amazon in 1998 for about $250 million. Junglee had Stanford professor Jeff Ullman on their board, who was also advising Google folks that time. Interestingly, after making a good money, Rakesh Mathur & team approached their friends Larry Page and Sergey Brin to acquire Google. But the deal could not happen as Sergey was looking for a ten digit price.

Adding to the RWW post, let me try to bring up some minus and plus of todays search era ruled by Google & partly Yahoo/MS.

Things which are still not touched efficiently by the popular search engines:

• Natural language Processing:
  • We would like all questions like “Which is the world’s tallest mountain peak?” to be answered on search: Google/Yahoo could not answer it, but to my surprise ask.com did it! Still, we have to wait for a breakthrough.
  • Ignoring stop words, doing word stemming, etc. can really change the meaning significantly. For eg, searching Apples on google, returns results mainly for Apple Inc.
• Multi-lingual search: Web being driven with focus on US market, problems of the rest of the world (especially eastern world) do not really get sufficient attention. Today’s web search experience does not have multi-lingual features!
  I spent couple of years during my masters at Media Lab Asia, IIT Bombay, under Prof. Krithi, with people working on Multi-lingual search for project aaqua.org. Multi-lingual search works pretty good here. Try searching “onion” or “कांदा“, you get identical results :). Such a search experience on the whole web, will be awesome!
• Treatment of Symantec data: Lot of standard formats have emerged like RDFs, microformat, RSS, etc, but still they are treated in almost same way as other web pages.
• Personalization & Data mining: There are a few signs of google personalizing the results. But, nothing significant yet!
• Multimedia search: None of the search engines is doing a great job here, which is attributed to complex and computationally expensive image processing. But, pretty significant research is up for the same in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. A recent publication in WWW08 from googlers suggested a concept ImageRank, similar to PageRank which can actually work well.

Some of the cool innovations in todays search:

• Improved UI/visualizations: UI innovations are the most prominent amongst all. Here are a few set of examples:
  • Yahoo Search: “Get Smart“

    

    
    

  • Google: “Get Smart, Bangalore“
    
    

  

  
  

  • Get Smart, Bangalore on Guruji.com, India focussed search engine

    
    

  

  
  

  • Searching a name on Yahoo with linkedin enhancement (searchmonkey)

  

  
  

  • MS Dhoni on Yahoo India
    

    

    
    

• Openness/APIs: Google/Yahoo have been pretty open in terms of providing search APIs, applications, etc. Want to experience google search in a terminal: Try out www.goosh.org
• Specialized searches like: local/maps: Local/maps and other focussed searches like publication search, patent search, etc. are doing pretty good. Directions are now available in India also with Yahoo Maps the only provider

What else can be tried on search?

There are couple of things things which I think can work for search, but we need to overcome spam problems for these:

• WikiSearch: Allow users to tag/rank search results. Something like digg/delicious for keywords…
• Push based update notification model: Search results are not uptodate. Even for popular pages they lag by few days. Introduce a push based model, something like blog.gs, it can help?

Update: Nov 20: Google has released SearchWiki, my first suggestion/prediction comes true

Disclaimer: All opinions are solely mine and and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer.