Prof. Zicari interviewed Dr. Alon Y. Halevy, head of the Structured Data Group at Google Research, on Google Fusion Tables and the importance of large scale data management tools.
The full transcript of the interview is available on the ODBMS.org Web site.
Researches from the Search Computing project attended the 11th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2011) which took place in Paphos (Cyprus) on June 20-24.
Several works has been presented at the conference:
The conference also featured a SeCo-sponsored event: the First International Workshop on Search, Exploration and Navigation of Web Data Sources (ExploreWeb 2011)
Google announced the release of the Shopping API, a new set of Web Application Programming Interfaces that are meant to substitute the existing Google Base APIs. The new Shopping Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have two main components: Content and Search. Those components are part of a unique CRUD infrustructure for product data management.
On one hand, the Content API enables retailers to upload their product data to Google, and to make incremental updates to frequently changing attributes like price and availability.
On the other hand, the Search API provides access to product data. After creating a new project in the APIs console, a developer can issue JSON queries as the following one:
https://www.googleapis.com/shopping/search/v1/public/products?key=key&country=US&q=digital+camera&alt=atom
This query will return a feed pf products sold in the United States which are all matching the keywords digital and camera. With a registered account, the new Google Shopping API feature a default limit: 2,500 queries/day
The API supports both structured and free text search. Results can be ordered according to relevance, novelty, or price. It is possible to increase diversity in the set of products matching a query by using the APIs crowding mechanism to restrict the number of products with an equivalent property.
The Google Base API will be fully deactivated on June 1, 2011. Some non-shopping data types (such as jobs, real estate, events, and activities) won’t be supported anymore.
Google Base is a free service for submiting all kinds of content for Google to host and to make searchable online. It allows content providers to upload structured data to Google, surface it across Google search properties, and syndicate it via apis, gadgets and gadget ads.
Using the Google Base Data API, developers can programmatically access Google Base. Here’s some of the things you can do:
copy right note: The content was cut and paste from http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/apis/base/ for the only purpose to increase the awarness of Google Base Data API.
Hittery.com lets you create a personal search dashboard. You can simply arrange your favorite search engines on one page. Add, remove, drag and drop searchboxes to your liking. Hittery.com provides two types of search engines: custom search engines and normal search engines.
Custom search engines
These are search engines that only show results from carefully selected websites that publish useful and trustworthy content. For example, the custom searchengine “Health” only searches through 75 trusted medical websites. This way, you will not get results from websites that do not add any value. We have selected and checked over 12.000 websites and added them to relevant search engines. Google provides us with the search technology.
Normal search engines
These are all well known searchengines like YouTube, Google, flickr, digg.com, and eBay. But we also provide you with handy search engines for Jobs, Weather, Traffic conditions, Travelguides, News, Facebook, TV Guides and Stock quotes. And many more.
[Source Hittery]
[Website http://www.hittery.com/]
Have a website or collection of sites you’d like to search over? With Custom Search Engine, you can harness the power of Google to create a search engine tailored to your needs.
[Source Google]
[Website http://www.google.com/coop/cse/]
Yahoo! Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is a Yahoo! Developer Network initiative to provide an open search web services platform.
The main goal and idea of BOSS is to give users, in this case developer’s free access to the Yahoo! Search index. The results can be supplied into the developer’s website or program so that they can manipulate the resources according to their product’s requirements. BOSS allows the results to be returned back in XML, JSON, HTML, text and also allows the comprehensive search feature allowed in Yahoo like pulling the results by pages, searching inside PDF, etc. The ranking of the websites for a search term is same as the Yahoo! Search ranking since both of these are pulling from the same index and same ranking.
[Source Wikipedia]
[Website http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/]
Kosmix is a guide to the Web. The site (www.kosmix.com) lets users explore the Web by topic, presenting a dashboard of relevent videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics. Kosmix’s categorization engine organizes the Internet into magazine-style topic pages, enabling people to navigate the Web even if they don’t know exactly what they’re looking for.
Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Kosmix was founded in 2005 by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman. Harinarayan and Rajaraman were co-founders of Junglee, the first shopping search engine which was acquired by Amazon.com in 1998. They later created Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk.
Kosmix is funded by Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dag Ventures and Jeff Bezos’ personal investment company, Bezos Expeditions.
Kosmix began as a vertical search engine, initially introducing health site www.RightHealth.com as a proof-of-concept for the Kosmix approach to Web navigation. RightHealth is now the #2 health site on the Web, according to Hitwise. In June 2008, Kosmix expanded its focus from vertical to a complete horizontal play.
[Source CrunchBase]
[Website http://www.kosmix.com/]
Google Answers was an online knowledge market offered by Google that allowed users to post bounties for well researched answers to their queries. Asker-accepted answers cost $2 to $200. Google retained 25% of the researcher’s reward and a 50 cent fee per question. In addition to the Researcher’s fees, a client who was satisfied with the answer could also leave a tip of up to $100. In late November 2006, Google reported that it planned to permanently shut down the service, and it was fully closed to new activity by late December 2006, although its archives remain available.
[Source Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_answers]
[Website http://answers.google.com/answers/]
Yahoo! Answers is a community-driven knowledge market website launched by Yahoo! on December 13, 2005 that allows users to both submit questions to be answered and answer questions asked by other users. The site gives members the chance to earn points as a way to encourage participation and is based on Naver’s Knowledge iN. As of December 2006, it had 60 million users and 65 million answers. On June 11, 2007, Yahoo!’s former questions and answers service, Ask Yahoo!, was formally merged with Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers has become the second most popular Internet reference site after Wikipedia, according to Comscore.
[Source Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_answers]
