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Visual search engine Viewzi has been in private beta for quite some time now, but they’ve just announced they expect to launch to the public this month.

Since it’s visual, a wordy blog post just isn’t going to do this news justice. So I’ve created a screenshots for your viewing pleasure. Be sure to leave your reaction in the comments!

Viewzi main search page

Viewzi’s search menu offers several options for viewing results

Video search displays results from popular video sites. Some of the videos are played in fast forward right in the results page. In Viewzi, mouseover an individual result to see the title of the video.

Web screenshot results show search results in a cover-flow style. I like this because you can easily see which pages are educational, shopping or parked domains.

Photo view is similar to video view, displaying image search results in several rows.

Simple text view combines results from Yahoo and Google and looks similar to traditional text-based search results.

Four source view displays website screenshot results from Google, Yahoo, Ask, and MSN. To remove one of the sets of results, just click on the search engine name that you do NOT want to see displayed. Mouseover a result for a larger view.

Celebrity Photo View is not just an image search for photos of celebrities. Instead, it’s the name for the way the results are displayed, which looks like a photo album or scrap book and features a slick drag and drop feature.

mp3 View shows results of mp3 files related to your search. You can even listen to the files in your browser instead of opening additional applications which can use up valuable memory on your computer.

Google Merchant Search has quietly launched as a test program to compare products and services in shopping comparison engine fashion. Google Merchant Search is a test feature, apparently in the UK, and is not available for every search. You may see it when conducting some searches but not others.

Lead gen providers like Bankrate.com in financial services, one of Google’s largest customer segments, can’t be too pleased with Google offering a free service that competes indirectly with theirs.

Our friends over at SearchEngineLand had the story first with “Outing Google Merchant Search” as if GMS were in the closet.

Here’s the view from Google and their FAQ for Google Merchant Search.

What is Google Merchant Search?

Google Merchant Search is an easy new way for you to find products or services from providers who match your needs.

What products or services are supported through Google Merchant Search?

The service is currently only available for secured loans from financial services providers.

How do you choose which providers to show me?

Our search results are based on the criteria you provided in your request; we compare your request with our list of participating providers, and show those that are most relevant for you. Participating providers pay Google when someone requests a quote through this system.

How does Google connect me to the provider?

You submit your contact details and request a time to speak to the provider. A Google operator will call you at the appointed time, then connect you with the provider. Because we do not share your contact information with the provider, they won’t be able to contact you again about your request unless you decide to give then your contact details.

How much does it cost to use Google Merchant?

This service is free for the user (the person searching for services). Please note that when calling the free phone number from a mobile phone, operator or carrier charges may apply.

Yahoo announced today the general public availability of their SearchMonkey program. This is a program that has been in beta testing with limited partners. It allows the partner to provide Yahoo with structured data that provides advanced information about a web page. This information is then used by Yahoo to influence the presentation of organic search listing results for that page.

This is a very powerful concept in that a modified search listing can surely influence click through rates. Imagine your search listing with an image and several related links built in. Let’s look at a quick example:

You can see additional examples in my interview with Yahoo Chief Scientist Andrew Tomkins. The interview was published this past Monday and focuses on SearchMonkey.

The basic process for creating SearchMonkey applications is straightforward. SearchMonkey supports multiple formats, including microformats, RDFa, eRDF, XML feeds, and APIs such as OpenSearch, so publishers have many options for exposing the data.

In addition, developers can build sophisticated applications into the search results. An example of this is the notion of an InfoBar. With an InfoBar, you can actually put an active control in your search listing result. When users click on the control, you mini application will run and can present additional data that displays inline right on the Yahoo search results page.

Here is what it looks like:

The InfoBar provides a very powerful mechanism for managing complex interactions with users right on the Yahoo search results screen. This should have significant value from a branding and click through perspective.

Here is a summary of the development process:

1. Application Type – Decide what type of app you want to build (Enhanced Result or Infobar) and enter basic info such as application name, description, and icon.
2. Trigger URLs – Decide the URL patterns that will trigger your app.
3. Data Services – Data Services are the structured data on which SearchMonkey apps are based. They can be created using data available in the Yahoo! Search index (via data feeds or page mark-up such as microformats or RDF) or by using APIs or page extraction.
4. Appearance - Use PHP to configure how structured data should appear in the application.

Commentary

Note step 2, the one in which your application gets activated. A critical part of the program will be determining when and where you would like your enhanced result to show up.

One key element of the program is that creating an enhanced result, or an InfoBar, does not mean that all users will be exposed to them. Users need to enable the enhanced listings on a publisher by publisher basis. In addition, users can change their minds later and remove your SearchMonkey application from their results.

I spoke to Amit Kumar, Director of Product Management at Yahoo, this past Tuesday, and he indicated that in the future that select SearchMonkey applications may get exposed to all comers. Applications that are adopted by lots of users, and not remove by many at all would be more likely to make this leap to general availability. This however, is not a certainty.

Amit also told me that Yahoo is going to setup a Gallery of such applications for users. This will be a place where the user can go to select an application and enable it. It will be interesting to see how much exposure the Gallery gets. This will play a critical role in the rate of adoption of these types of results. The publisher can, of course, promote their own application, and try to drive people to sign up for it.

Another thing that Amit emphasized during our conversation was that the effort level for developers to engage with SearchMonkey is quite low. The platform makes it really easy for them to engage. This could play a critical role in broadening adoption.

One thing I learned in my interview with Andrew, and also from his presentation at SES New York, is that building SearchMonkey applications will not help you improve your rankings. The program is not intended to be used for that purpose.

Personally, I’d like to see a stronger move towards exposing some of the applications to all users. This maybe a difficult thing to implement at some level, and it makes it far more susceptible to spam. But it would certainly accelerate the exposure of these types of applications to the general public.

The early action (in terms of users) will likely be driven by early adopters. Then we will need to see how widely it penetrates the market, and how aggressively Yahoo pushes it forward.

That said, this is exciting stuff. I have long been a believer that search engines should get more information from the publishers, in a structured format. Yahoo has taken a big step in that direction with this program.

Recently, Yahoo announced SearchMonkey, which will allow developers access to open source to create applications for search results. Well, today is the day that developers finally get their hands on the tools to make that happen.

There are two types of applications developers can build using SearchMonkey – Enhanced Results and Infobars.

• Enhanced Results take the current standard results and give them a makeover with a richer display. Links to results must remain intact (don’t mess with those search results!).
• Infobars will appear below search results and can display information such as metadata about the result, related links or content, or links for user actions (i.e. adding a movie to a Netflix queue).

The process for building SearchMonkey applications is very straightforward:

1. Application Type – Decide what type of app you want to build (Enhanced Result or Infobar) and enter basic info such as application name, description, and icon.

2. Trigger URLs – Decide the URL patterns that will trigger your app. For example, for the Enhanced Result above, the pattern would be “acmemovies.com/*”

3. Data Services – Data Services are the structured data on which SearchMonkey apps are based. They can be created using data available in the Yahoo! Search index (via data feeds or page mark-up such as microformats or RDF) or by using APIs or page extraction.

4. Appearance - Use PHP to configure how structured data should appear in the application.

Need incentive? How does a contest with $10,000 in prizes? Submit your application by June 14th to enter. The contest has four categories: Best Enhanced Result, Best Infobar, Most Innovative Use of Structured Data, Best Data Service, and Grand Prize (best over all categories).

And if you’re in the Bay Area, catch the SearchMonkey Launch Party tonight at Yahoo’s Headquarters in Sunnyvale.

Yesterday I published a post on the Search Engine People site titled 50+ Sites to Help You Bury Negative Posts About You or Your Company!.

While the tactics mentioned may be enough to push some negative online mentions of you or your business to the second page of the search results or lower, in other cases they will not. The question then becomes; what else can you do when the initial tactics themselves aren’t enough, and you’ve got a negative piece about you ranking in the search results for an important phrase. Burying your head in the sand and hoping it goes away isn’t really a viable option. The answer … LOTS can be done!

Lets start with our goals … they’re progressive.

Progressive Goals:
Goal #1: First … bump the listing below the fold asap
then
Goal #2: Bump the listing off the first page of the search results for the given term(s)

With goals in hand, we can now consider tactics.

Tactics:
To Achieve Goal #1:

a. select the strongest 3-5 of those 50+ sites, where strong is a subjective assessment based on many factors. My personal assessment would be:

1. Digg
2. Twitter
3. Stumbleupon
4. MyBlogLog
5. Linkedin

b. establish a profile on each, where the profile name is the term/phrase the negative piece ranks for
c. get lots of friends on each of those sites … the more the better. It works best if you take an active role and participate. Each friend will result in an internal link back to your profile on that site, making it stronger.
d. within each site, you can see which profiles are the strongest in the offending engines’ eyes … the search engines themselves with rank them in order of importance given a simple search query (eg. site:twitter.com). Try to secure links from the strongest profiles first … they pass the most value.
e. join groups where possible too … often these will pass link power to your profile as well.
f. possibly create a social profiles menu on your site(s), and link to each of these profiles.

To Achieve Goal #2:

a. determine how far down you actually wish to push the piece. Beyond the first page will take a great deal of time and energy.
b. assuming you’ve already bumped the offending post below the fold, you need to select the number of sites you will need to use from the 50 + listed in the 50+ Sites to Help You Bury Negative Posts About You or Your Company! article.
c. follow the steps outlined above for each
d. within each (where possible) include links to all your other profiles on the other sites

Following these steps should be enough to push most negative mentions to the second page. If not, or if you don’t have the time and energy, do engage the services of a professional with experience in the space. Aside from the obvious value … its not a bad idea to take out profiles under your name anyway, just as a pre-emptive measure.

Please note … these tactics are by no means comprehensive or advanced. They’re just a relatively quick and efficient means for burying negative online mentions. Much more advanced tactics exist, which I will not delve into here.

Other great reference posts about reputation management include:
Glen Allsopp - What Is Online Reputation Management
Andy Beal - Free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide
Todd Malicoat - Reputation Management Emancipation PRoclamation - 10 Ways to Own Yourself Online
Lee Odden - Basics of Online Reputation Management
Marty Weintraub - 9 Essential Tactics for Reputation Management in Social Media
Andy Beal - Buzz Monitoring: 26 Free Buzz Tracking Tools
David Wallace - Using Social Media to Help Manage Online Reputation

IAC-owned Ask.com has agreed to acquire Lexico Publishing Group, the owner of Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com.

The move will help Ask.com fulfill its recent strategy to focus on reference and providing answers to questions. More than half a billion monthly worldwide searches consist of dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia queries, according to comScore.

The acquisition brings to Ask.com 15.6 million monthly unique users, growing 29% year-over-year, giving the combined entity more than 145 million unduplicated users worldwide, making Ask.com the ninth-largest Web property in the world. A full 88 percent of Lexico sites’ traffic comes from direct navigation, where users type in “dictionary.com” or other site names in their browser.

“We think it fits in very nicely with what we have at Ask.com,” Doug Leeds, chief strategy officer at Ask.com, told Search Engine Watch. “We’re going to take some of the things that make Ask.com great, like related search and binoculars, and bring them to Dictionary.com.”

The Lexico sites will also be redesigned to include the three-paneled Ask3D functionality for its search results, he said.

For dictionary.com, the move brings users closer to their next or previous destinations, which quite often is a search engine, Leeds said. The addition of Lexico’s reference sites will improve Ask.com users’ experience as well, since more than 30 percent of all searches conducted on Ask.com are in the reference category.

Terms of the all-cash transaction were not disclosed. Once the deal closes, the 16 employees of privately held Lexico are expected to join Ask.com’s team.

The Google news team has improved the “clusters” in their search results. Clusters are similar news stories that are grouped together. Previously, clusters were formed for 3 days, and then the individual news stories were kicked out the house to make it on their own.

Now, those clusters will exist for the full 30 day indexing of the news stories.

Writing on the Google News Blog, Lucian Cionca commented on how this change affects the big picture for Google News: “I think this brings us a step closer to our goal of making news universally accessible from as many sources, perspectives and languages as the world can offer.”

Related Reading:
Google Finally Copies Microsoft, Adds ‘Related Searches’ to Google News
Windows Live Search Offers Google News Alternative
Google News Unveils Two Updates to Comments Feature

Google Adwords has a strict no advertising rule for hard liquor as they call it. You will not find ads for terms like rum, gin or vodka. Well…. vodka searches now add a twist. Google has started to promote their vodka sellers with the top entry.

Before you get to the search results is a Google CheckOut promoting various vodka sellers. Now that does seem like they are contradicting their own rules.

One hopes this was an oversight, since there are none for rum or gin as yet. Maybe vodka is just such a good checkout seller that it has reached some number where it automatically gets the CheckOut promo.

Hopefully someone at Google will publicly address this one. Right now I guess every vodka seller is signing up for a Google Checkout account. Not bad mistake if it generates new shopping cart customers.

Who won Survivor last night? Powerset doesn’t know.

Okay - maybe that’s an unfair question for Powerset since the aptly-named Parvati Shallow only won Survivor Micronesia last night. It might be easier to ask “Who is Parvati? The answer: in Sanskrit, “parvati” means “Mountain’s daughter” one of the names for Shiva’s wife, the Universal Mother.

So what is Powerset? That’s a much more intelligent question to ask.

Powerset is the much-hyped beta natural language search engine metaphor-challenged mainstream media call the Google Killer. That means you can type questions in a search box the way you normally ask them. (Think Ask Jeeves 1.5)

That doesn’t mean natural language search or Powerset can kill Google, or even commit assault and battery on Google.

Powerset launched with a smart concept: better search results than Wikipedia’s own search box. So the play is a “non-Google Custom Search Engine” for Wikipedia. Let’s see about what Powerset can can do..

“What is Powerset?” we asked. Powerset separates results by combining the primary keyword (Powerset) with related verbs and nouns from Web pages and Wikipedia. Here’s the answer we weren’t looking for from Powerset itself.

Factz from Wikipedia: we found the following about Powerset
Powerset opened : community and Powerlabs.

Results for Powerset opened community

Powerset (company) In a form of beta testing, Powerset opened an online community called Powerlabs on September 17, 2007.

Results for Powerset opened Powerlabs

Powerset (company) In a form of beta testing, Powerset opened an online community called Powerlabs on September 17, 2007.

Results for Powerset displayed advertise

Powerset (company) (Powerset is not currently selling or displaying any advertising.)

Results for Powerset searched language

Powerlabs Let’s roll, is a prerelease of Powerset’s general natural language search.

Wikipedia Articles: results 1 - 10 of 78

1. Powerset (company)
Powerset is a company based in San Francisco, California that is developing a natural language search engine for the Internet.
2. Power set
In mathematics, given a set S, the power set (or powerset) of S, written , P(S), or 2S, is the set of all subsets of S. In axiomatic set theory (as developed e.g. in the ZFC axioms), the existence of the power set of any set is postulated by the axiom of power set.

6. Powerlabs
Powerset Applications Currently, Powerset has released two applications: Powermouse and a beta of its search engine.

Only when you click on the expand snippet (powermouse) miniviewer button, do you find the answer you’re looking for (sort of):

Powerset (company)

Powerset is a company based in San Francisco, California that is developing a natural language search engine for the Internet.

The company’s stated desire is to build a search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo which would act on a user’s questions, as opposed to keywords. For instance, a user who wanted to find out which U.S. state has the highest income tax would enter “Which state has the highest income tax?” at Powerset, as opposed to “state income tax” at Google. The advantage to the user, aside from using questions similar to what one person would ask another verbally, is that a natural language search engine would, depending on its underlying programming, return a result that is more relevant to what the user seeks

Powerset is limited by the poorly-written Wikipedia entry. The comparison to Google doesn’t work. If someone’s searching for the state with the highest state income tax, they’ll type in “highest state income tax.” No one would type in “state income tax” in Google if they’d type “Which state has the highest income tax?” in Powerset.

At this stage in beta, Powerset can be considered a search engine survivor.

But unless the technology yields better results — and fast — people will think of Parvati and Powerset as “shallow” contestants.

It’s a match made in heaven, or at least Mountain View, California. Adsense for search is now integrating Custom Search. Now you can control those search results users conduct on your site and make moolah at the same time. Here’s what you can look forward to:

• Site Search: Choosing this option will keep users on your site only.
• Improved indexing of your pages: Google hopes its recent indexing updates will prove to benefit your Site Search users by providing better Adsense for Search results.

Vertical search: You can allow your users to search outside your site, but still set some boundaries. Examples include forums, blogs, or a network of sites.

• Tuning search results and ads with keywords:Control search results by setting a context. If your site is about cats, then enter “cats” and “cat food” as keywords and when someone searches for bowl, then results for cat food bowl will come up instead of other types of bowls or the sport of bowling.
• Selecting ad location: Choose where ads will be placed in relation to the the search results on your site.
• Quick and easy updates: You can now use the ad management feature in Adsense to control the settings for your custom search engine ads.

Here’s a video from the Googleplex explaining the update: