Hexolabs is stretching the limits of YouTube.

When you think YouTube, you think "Video." Some people go to YouTube for funny pet antics, some go to it for news, some go to it for vlogs, some go to it for copyrighted content...but it's mainly video stuff that drives people to the site, apart from the ubiquitous "song + photo slideshow" offerings. Interaction to this point on YouTube has largely taken the form of communication between people -- through comments, messages, and video responses -- rather than direct interaction between people and the videos themselves. Hexolabs, an India-based mobile company, doesn't seem to think that YouTube needs to be such a passive experience. They have utilized YouTube's annotation feature set to produce one of YouTube's first interactive games. Who would have guessed that YouTube might ever become a GAMING platform?

Hexolabs' game is called "A Car's Life." It follows the animated adventures of a car travelling through a simple black and white world. To advance to each successive level, the player/viewer must click on the annotation link that crops up on each video; if you fail to click the button in time, you get to watch the car suffer a terrible demise. The button is really merely a link to the next video in the series -- you can certainly watch the videos out of order. In fact, you can "win" the game without even playing if you want. Because the link to the next level disappears very quickly, you may well find yourself tempted to cheat -- the link is fully clickable if the video is paused. Once I knew where the link was going to appear on each level, I personally didn't find it too hard to win the game the "right way." All in all, I enjoyed the experience, mostly because it forced me to change the way I view YouTube. It's amazing how a feature like annotation can create a whole new world of possibilities. As a game, "A Car's Life" is obviously very simple and more of an experiment than a polished product, but for a YouTube game in 2008 it's fantastic. If you enjoy the visuals of the game, you might want to give some Vectrex games from the 80s a try -- for some reason, I kept thinking of "Armor Attack" while I was playing around with Hexolabs' creation. I know what I'll be playing for the rest of the day...

I'm sure we haven't seen the last of gaming on YouTube. It will be interesting, though, to see if game development is something that will be encouraged or discouraged by the corporate overlords. One could argue that gaming on YouTube makes the site less pure as a video destination -- "A Car's Life" is cool because there aren't many YouTube games right now, but if you want to play online games there are tons of sites out there that'll let you do that to your heart's content. Personally, I welcome the chance to do something a little different on YouTube from time to time.

AOL Video's P & G Classic Soaps and Google's News Archive show us that even the ephemeral can be eternal online.

For too long, great content has been discarded hastily for convenience's sake. While many people have stacks of National Geographic magazines in their attic, only the most determined of collectors would dare archive their local daily newspaper. Considering that some of the longest running soaps have thousands of episodes, few of even the most obsessive of soap opera fans are able to relive all of their favorite storylines at a whim. The main obstacle to collectors of the past was a simple lack of physical space; newspaper collectors had only so much attic space and soap opera fanatics could only store so many VHS tapes. Even those brave enough to start such daunting collecting tasks faced serious archival problems related to the natural degradation of physical media. The digital age has made both space and the degradation of physical media much less of an obstacle, but some so-called ephemeral content has been quite difficult to find in digital form. Luckily, AOL and Google are helping to change all that.

AOL Video has featured classic soaps from Procter & Gamble Productions such as Another World and Texas for some time now. Soaps have a very uncertain future when their television runs end. SOAPnet is a cable channel entirely devoted to soap operas, both classic and current, but not every cable subscriber receives it -- I don't, for instance. DVD releases for classic soaps are limited, in part because of the sheer mass of recorded material we're dealing with when it comes to soaps. While best-of collections of favorite episodes might work for sitcoms, it's not a good approach for soaps where the continuity between episodes is very important. There's really no better way to view old soaps than online and on-demand, which is what AOL Video provides as a free, ad-supported service for soap fans. AOL's P & G classic soap collection is not exactly a complete archive of any of its featured series (bear in mind that many episodes of the older soaps no longer exist), but there are hundreds and hundreds of episodes available for viewing. It does annoy me that AOL Video doesn't offer a air date sorting option so that episodes can be conveniently viewed from oldest to newest (that's what new viewers will probably want to do), but I can't feel too angry because without this service some of this content would not otherwise be available. Kudos to AOL and P & G for helping keep classic soaps alive.

Old newspaper content has always been more available than classic soaps, but they've been buried in morgues controlled by the newspapers or stored on microfiche and microfilm in our libraries. What Google's News Archive does is make old newspapers and magazines much more accessible than they ever have been before. The amount of material already available is staggering -- there seem to be many different groups working on digitizing old newspapers, including Google itself. While Google is aiming to make much of this content available for free (monetized through ads of course, with revenue shared with the content providers), some content providers have opted instead to make their archives available on a pay per view basis. Helpfully, the Google News Archive's advanced search lets you limit your search results by price -- if you don't restrict your search to free articles, you may find it hard to avoid being inundated by New York Times PPV articles. There is lots of really interesting content available to be found here, including classic ads, even if you stick with the free stuff, and the archive is only going to keep growing. To me, this project is an example of Google at their best; say what you will about the company's dominant position in the Internet economy, but you cannot deny that they really do strive to make as much of the world's information available freely online as possible.

It's never been a better time to be a scholar, especially if your particular area of study happens to be classic soap operas or vintage advertising. Thanks, AOL and Google!

Blogger has a splogger problem.

One of the reasons I love searching with Google is because I can remember what it was like searching the Web before Google came to be. While AltaVista was a decent search engine, I can't say too many nice things about many of other early search engines that I used to use. Even AltaVista couldn't keep spam from showing up in the first page of results sometimes. Although Google is not unfriendly to "thin" affiliate sites that don't have much content, I rarely come across the machine-generated, keyword stuffed junk that used to clog up the lesser search engines of years gone by while searching with Google. Nonetheless, the junk is still out there, and lately I seem to be running into it more and more often for some reason.

Unfortunately, a lot of the machine-generated, keyword stuffed junk being posted on the Web these days seems to be posted through Blogger. Google Blog Search is a good way to find splogs, no doubt because it indexes most Blogger content very quickly. Try a search related to the financial industry for particularly good (and by good I mean spammy) results. Blogger seems to be a convenient target for sploggers because it is a free service, allows for the unlimited creation of blogs, and is largely monitored by the community. Unfortunately, the very things that make Blogger an awesome blog creation and hosting tool make it appealing for spammers as well. Google seems to take spamming pretty seriously (as they should, since nothing makes search engines look worse than bad search results), and so Blogger has tried to combat the sploggers in various ways, including by requiring new blog creators to solve a captcha. Still, the spam persists; perhaps splog detection is best left for humans. Most native speakers can spot nonsensical machine-generated spam drivel "written" in their language a mile away so it makes sense for Google to offer an easy way to report spam Blogger blogs. I've recently reported a few very obvious splogs I've stumbled across so I'll soon find out if Blogger responds to spam reports in a timely manner.

As someone who has been trying to make money online for many years, I can well understand why spammers do what they do. Still, I can't exactly sympathize with their "plight." As much as I wish I was making a living purely online, I wouldn't want to make a career out of annoying people and junking the Web. I want to write content for the Web because I love the Web. I love being able to conduct a search on most any topic that will lead me to find something relevant to my query. Sploggers, though, don't love the Web; they want to disrupt the search process by putting junk between the searcher and what he wants to find. Some of them still no doubt make good money doing just that, but hopefully Google will be able to make this increasingly more and more difficult in the future.

Google Notebook is great for clipping the Web, but it's not the perfect online notebook just yet.

I've become quite the enthusiastic user of Google Notebook over the past few months. As averse as I am to browser clutter, I've nonetheless installed the Google Notebook Firefox extension. I use my Google notebooks to write to-do lists, take notes on my favorite blogs, clip images and text discovered while surfing, and store ephemeral material of all sorts. It has proven to be one of the most useful Google services to me, but I wouldn't exactly call it "feature-rich." Then again, a notebook app probably shouldn't be the most complex of things. The genius of Google seems to lie partly in their ability to give people what they really need right away. The bells and whistles may be slow in coming, but Google's products are always effective for simple uses right out of the box. Google Notebook is a great example of this.

This philosophy works well because a good chunk of Google users will probably not need (or use) anything beyond the basic features already available. They're happy, and they should be. It's only when you want to do something in Notebook that you can't that you feel disappointed. Ultimately, I do think one should at least be able to do anything productive that you can do with a paper notebook with notebook software; Google Notebook is already far superior to a paper notebook when it comes to capturing material from the Web, and its online sharing options beat sneakernet sharing any day. Google Notebook isn't ahead of its paper cousins in all aspects, however. For instance, calculations are easy to do in a paper notebook, but they should be even easier to do in Google Notebook considering that even Google Search has a built-in calculator! Unfortunately, Google Notebook doesn't seem to have calculator functionality at the moment, so you'll have to do your calculating elsewhere. This is disappointing for those of us who work with numbers in our online notebooks. The lack of a drawing utility in Google Notebook is an even worse omission. Paper notebooks are great for sketching diagrams, maps, and graphs, not to mention random doodling -- Google Notebook just can't compete with that at this moment. I expect those features and more to be included in future iterations, but for now it might be wise not to go completely paperless.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Zoho's notebook solution here because at this point I think it actually captures the whole notebook experience a bit better than Google Notebook. It already has a drawing utility -- quite a good one, in fact. It also incorporates the idea of pages; that might seem unnecessary in a purely online environment, but I have to admit my Google notebooks would probably be easier to read if I didn't add new notes to the top of some of my notebooks and to the bottom of others. On the downside, Zoho's product does look a little busier and more complex than Google Notebook; I don't really mind that. Still, it will pose a continuing challenge for Google to hold on to its trademark simplicity while still adding features to all of its products.

Wikia Search and Google must both deal with the Established Site Effect.

I think one of the main reasons people feel hesitant about embracing Wikia Search is because it turns search into a popularity contest. While people are undoubtedly more effective than any algorithm at detecting spam and irrelevant content, in aggregate they are probably not going to be as effective at discovering and organizing new content. Human-edited search results are naturally going to reflect the Web as Internet users know it already -- established sites will rank higher than the rest simply because more people know about them. What if something new and super-relevant to a particular query comes along, though? Can it displace a less relevant but highly popular site in the search results for that query? I have some serious doubts about whether it can, and it's a big problem because search is one of the primary ways Internet users discover new content. If search just reflects the "same old thing," then that's all many people will ever see. A lot of new but very good content will just languish in obscurity.

It's not like purely algorithmic search engines don't have to deal with this same issue, though. Google attempts to tackle the problem by placing a premium on fresh content (for instance, new blog posts), allowing them to show up alongside the big, established sites. Indeed, the Google algorithm is more complicated than some people give it credit for; it's not ALL about links by any means. I'm not sure if this blog has ANY inbound links to a particular individual blog post, but people still occasionally find my posts when they search with Google. Whether that is a good thing or not is another issue! Still, Google undoubtedly lets established sites have a significant edge over their competition -- as time goes on and the big sites get more and more and more links, it may well become harder and harder for sites to start from scratch, utterly linkless, and still get noticed. Honestly, I found it easier to get people to read my stuff in 1997 as a 14 year old than I do now despite the fact that the Internet user base has grown so much bigger in the past 11 years. Obviously I need to get my infectious teenage energy back if I ever hope to make it big on the Web!

It's one thing to notice that there is a problem -- it's another to actually come up with a solution to the problem. I think Google has a better handle on this issue right now than Wikia Search does, which is understandable considering that WS is the new kid on the block. Google's fresh content and relevancy boosts let even sites lacking in links be seen. If the trend of more and more content being produced continues, though, I'm not sure it will be possible for every site to have its day in the sun. It may already be a necessity for webmasters to diversify beyond search (social media anyone? Sorry, just asking!). When it comes to Wikia Search, I think webmasters themselves are going to have to stake out a claim for their sites personally. The community will ultimately decide what sites should reign supreme for particular queries, but individual webmasters are probably going to be the ones who will be the first to suggest their own sites as being relevant for long-tail keywords. The worst thing Wikia Search could do right now is discourage people from promoting their own content even though self-promotion is another threat to the search engine's usefulness. Will people who have an aversion to self-promotion be able to get their content noticed on WS if their sites aren't already really popular? I rather doubt it, unfortunately, though I suppose Wikia Search could try to give an algorithmic boost to fresh content at the risk of upsetting the community.

I wonder if Wikia Search should really be considered as a continuation of the spirit of the Open Directory which is still an excellent resource. Organization problems have limited the Open Directory's growth -- it just doesn't index enough of the Web to be listed in the same sentence as Google. However, for general queries the results on Open Directory are often on par with or superior to that provided by Google: humans really are excellent at organizing relevant information. Because Wikia Search can have as many editors as it does users, perhaps it will have the manpower to keep up with the Web's ferocious growth, but Google's ability to intelligently index both established and non-established site alike with great speed gives it a definite edge over every human-powered Web index at the moment.

Wikia Search is well worth watching.

I've been playing around with Wikia Search quite a bit lately and have enjoyed the experience immensely so far. My initial reaction to the new project was rather negative -- I don't know about you, but I honestly expect to see good results immediately whenever I use a search engine. If it's a new engine I'm checking out, then I basically expect to see two things: relevant results for my queries (they don't necessarily have to be the best to begin with) and my own web projects in the index. The latter expectation seems not to be realized more often than not, especially since the SEO guru guys have made me terrified of submitting my own stuff anywhere. "You'll end up in the sandbox, man!" Wikia Search didn't impress me at first because my first searches didn't yield me relevant results. Where was the algorithm? Where was the automated sorting through the chaff that would help me find the needles in the haystacks of the Net? It felt a lot to me like using one of the early search engines when you really never did know what you were going to get, especially for obscure searches.

I've changed my tune after spending more time actually using Wikia Search. It is similar to Wikipedia in that it depends on contributions from people in order to work. A Wikipedia without people doesn't have articles; a Wikia Search without people doesn't have good search results. The search engine is still in alpha, but as it develops and grows I feel confident that the search results will get better. What surprised me the most about my experiences with Wikia Search was how fun it was to use it. Wikipedia lets everyday people play the role of encyclopedist; this project lets them play the role of Internet librarian. I loved going through my bookmarks and adding what I thought the best pages in various categories were to the Wikia index. It was really interesting to think from a query-level perspective and to decide what pages answer a given query best. It was also interesting deciding what description to write or quote for each site. People are going to really have fun with this after they give it a chance. In time, People Search Power could perhaps outperform most machine-driven algorithms. For now, though, Wikia Search is a small-scale affair and it doesn't yet have the community manpower to give consistently good results every time.

It must be acknowledged that spam and overly aggressive self-promotion could greatly damage Wikia Search's results. I've already encountered some of it, in fact. At the moment, the search results are very easy to game: one high rating will take a page to the top of the listings for many queries, for instance. There needs to be an active community of searchers to keep this under control; it'll be a big problem if spammers discover Wikia Search before the rest of the Internet community does. On the other hand, the very fact that a page can rise to the top so quickly should drive people to Wikia Search. I can totally imagine webmasters arriving in droves to claim their sites' long-tail keywords; that could become a required ritual for all SEO types eventually. So long as the pages are relevant to the query, then this behavior can actually make the search engine better. Spam unrelated to the original query is just bad news, though -- there's no way to put a smiley face on that.

Should Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft be concerned about this new kid on the search block? To be honest, I think they should. This is a new way to handle search that has some real potential. There is no Google, Yahoo!, or Microsoft search community to compete with what Wikia is building, and it'll be difficult for any of the big search engines to outsource their search results to the public without those results suffering in quality for some time. Just look at Wikia Search right now: a lot of the results are really bad. Google couldn't get away with delivering such bad results and still keep its position atop the search engine charts, but since Wikia Search doesn't have a position to maintain the bad results are OK for now. A set of early adopters are already building up Wikia Search; by the time other people start noticing it it'll probably be much better than it is now. It should be noted, however, that a Google Experimental Search project already has been done which allowed test users to play around with the order of search results and allowed them to rate results positively or negatively. So Google is at least thinking about either community search or personalized search; knowing Google, they're probably thinking of both things. Whether it be a Google killer or not, Wikia Search is quite a cool project that people interested in search should definitely keep watching.