Search Results vs Answers

Sometimes we do a web search because we want a bunch of results to look through, and this usually works pretty well. But sometimes we just want the answer to a question: we know there is exactly one correct answer to the question, and we just want that—not a bunch of useless “hits” and ads (aka sponsored links) cluttering up the page.

When the iPhone 4S went on sale recently, Steve Wozniak—co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs—was at one of the Palo Alto Apple stores waiting in line, and was interviewed about several things, including the Siri intelligent assistant software on the new iPhone. He made a really interesting comment about the current state of web search: he said that what we often need is not search technology but answer technology.

Rick Webb posted a typical example of search results for “gold price” on Google and also on Wolfram|Alpha (WA). The Google results are familiar—and not entirely useless—but the WA result is an answer (assuming that the search term means ‘what is the price of gold?’). The technology at the heart of Siri uses the WA services, among others, to find and deliver very specific responses to user input. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but it is pretty amazing considering how relatively immature the field is right now. This is clearly the future of web search, especially on mobile devices.

Wolfram|Alpha is a “computational knowledge engine” that can provide an amazing breadth of data, sometimes cross-referencing several databases and calculating complex results on the fly. If you haven’t yet checked it out, start with the tour and see  for yourself what this technology can do. Also, see the examples page to get an idea of the range of subjects where you can put WA to work for you. It’s free.

Asana project management and collaboration

I discovered Asana today, a free web-based project management and collaboration tool that looks really good. I haven’t worked much with it yet but I did create an account and set up a sample project, and at first glance it seems like a versatile tool for managing tasks and teams. You can create multiple project workspaces, assign team members, track activities across tasks, set projects to private if you don’t want something shared out, and much more.

There are other collaboration products out there that I haven’t paid much attention to, but there were favorable comments about Asana on the Hacker News forum so it might be worth a look if you have a need for something like this.

There’s an overview video on the front page and you can get more details on the Asana product page or their company blog.

Diaspora documentation

Diaspora is a fairly new open source social network, similar to Google+ but claiming much better privacy, user ownership of all data and no exposure to advertisers. More info can be found on their What Is Diaspora blog page.

I recently got an invitation to join Diaspora, and the one thing I immediately noticed was a lack of documentation on the site. It’s not hard to grasp the basics but a little overview of the features would be helpful. One of the members had posted a link to the Diasporial.com site which I found to be really useful for learning how some things are done there. The tutorials page is a good place to start.

Web Intents

Yesterday’s post on Webmonkey about Google and Mozilla (makers of the Firefox web browser) teaming up on a new set of APIs (Application Programming Interface) for connecting applications and websites. It’s called Web Intents and provides a way for sites to pass data between each other.

So just what are Web Intents? Well, the easiest way to understand them is by example. Take the sometimes overwhelming proliferation of buttons on web pages that allow you to do something with the current page, whether it’s Like, Tweet, +1, Read Later, Add to Instapaper and so on. Rather than adding a dozen little badges to your site, Web Intents creates a bridge that connects your site to any website your visitor wants to use. Web Intents define an API for your site to use and another API for the receiving site to use. Plug them together and transferring data becomes a quick and easy process, both for users and developers.

From Tantek Çelik, creator of microformats, who refers to Web Intents as Web Actions:

“[W]eb actions have the potential to change our very notions of what a web application is from a single site to loosely coupled interactions across multiple, distributed sites…. In that regard, web actions have the potential to become a building block for distributed web applications.”

Vimeo Pro

Vimeo recently introduced Vimeo Pro—video hosting and delivery customized for your business. They offer custom websites (portfolios) that you can brand to showcase your videos. I use Vimeo for hosting and offsite storage of videos and I’ve been really impressed with their service, the devoted user community, the Video School tutorials and a talented base of creatives posting their work on there. If you’re looking for interesting and entertaining video work or ideas on how to improve your own videos, spend some time browsing on vimeo.com.

Vimeo Pro is different from Vimeo Plus—the Plus account is for individuals and Pro is targeted to businesses. With Vimeo Pro you get 50 GB of storage and 250,000 plays (you can buy more if you need it) for $199 per year.

A blurb from the Vimeo Pro FAQ:

Included in Vimeo PRO:
- Commercial hosting option (new!)
- High Definition video (up to 1080p!)
- Advanced Analytics
- Unlimited customizable video Portfolio sites
- Unlimited HD embedding
- Fast, Priority uploading
- Super-customizable and brandable video player (new!)
- HTML5 support with the Vimeo Universal Player
- Full mobile, tablet and connected TV compatibility
- Unlisted video review pages (new!)
- Third Party video player support (new!)
- Optional original file storage
- much, much more

And don’t miss their latest Video School lesson: Tripod Tricks!

Google+ growth

The chart below shows impressive growth numbers for Google+ — although I don’t know what it really means at this point, if anything. Could be a lot of people are just looking for an alternative to Facebook, but 10 million is a pretty big user base in just a couple of weeks time.

I joined G+ this week and have been poking around a little, mostly out of curiosity to see what they’ve built and how the technology works. I never used Facebook and I don’t know if G+ will be any different, but they are doing some interesting things there with the ‘Circles’ model of security and permissions. You can see the Circles concept demonstrated in a YouTube video here.

Watching the developments with Facebook and Google+ I wonder if a single platform needs to “win” this game or if several different ones will find their own audience and grow independently of one another—if so, what if some of your friends or family are on one network but not the other? Maybe some form of integration among the networks will evolve. I don’t imagine the principal players will want to go along with that but it might be an opportunity for a third party middleware service to do something.

Chart came from this Betabeat article.

Google+

Google’s ‘social’ platform/Facebook competitor: plus.google.com

Pronounced Google Plus but not to be confused I suppose with their +1 button recommendations system they recently introduced.

Google has a detailed blog post describing the service. Interactive (Flash) Tour of Google+ is here.

Website Planning Guide

A helpful post over on Smashing Magazine about planning a web site. There are some good principles to think through, including:

• Needs & objectives assessment
• Alignment with marketing
• Roles & responsibilities
• Content
• Site design & structure
• CMS (Content Management Systems)
• Ongoing maintenance & updates

I’ve had people ask me “how much will it cost to build a web site?” That’s like asking a home builder “how much for a house?” — there are so many variables involved, and it all depends on what it is you want to accomplish with your site. It could be anything from a simple one page ‘brochure’ site to a complex database-driven e-commerce machine.

Some content options to think about when considering what your site might need:

• Articles
• Blog posts
• Advertising
• Discussion forum
• Images
• Documents (usually PDFs)
• Audio
• Video (embedded from YouTube or Vimeo, or self-hosted)
• Flash animation (I don’t recommend it)
• Content feeds/integrations from other sites
• Photo gallery
• Twitter stream
• Facebook ‘friends’ list
• RSS feeds
• E-commerce
• Forms for contact, quotes or something else
• Physical products (how many?)
• Digital content (what kind and how many?)
• Email newsletter
• Event calendar
• Event registration
• Search
• Social media sharing links (Twitter, Facebook, etc)
• Personnel directory

Planning and building a web site is much easier when you’re clear about what it is you want from the site.

Google Web Fonts

If you’re looking for some expanded design options for your web site, Google’s Web Fonts gives you access to a growing collection of free open source fonts that you can easily link to in your CSS style sheet and display on your site. You can create detailed previews of all the fonts first to be sure you know exactly how your site’s text will look when you’re done.

Since it’s all done through a standard style sheet link you can specify alternate fonts that all users will have on their computers in the event that the Google fonts are ever unavailable or for whatever reason you can’t connect to them. CSS provides a reliable method for fallback, so I don’t see any risk to trying these out on your site.

Here’s the link that goes inside the <head> tag on your web page to load a web font (the Open Sans font, in this example):

<link  href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans"
rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" >

And here’s a sample CSS entry where you need to define a font face (body, p, H1, H2, etc). You can—and should, as a practice—specify other fonts in the event that the primary one is unavailable.

font-family: 'Open Sans', Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;

I just implemented it on this site using Droid Sans for the body text and Open Sans for the post titles and primary navigation along the top. I like the looks of it.

Apache Web Server leads all others

According to Netcraft’s June 2011 Web Server Survey, the open source Apache web server software is far and away the leading platform today. It’s a powerful statement for the viability of FOSS (free and open source software) when the majority of the web is running on it.