The Official Zakta Blog

More to life than Google?

Sundar Kadayam — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:59:37 +0000

Google’s pace of innovation has been effectively matched by their growing dominance, not just with the Internet, but increasingly with all things technology, and with plans to go beyond, into other lucrative industries.

Here’s a picture of just how dominant there are in the search engine space: Over 65% of all searches are done on Google-related properties including Google.com, according to comScore.

Seeing this from the lens of the buzz in the blogosphere, yet again, we see Google clearly dominating the buzz compared to other popular tech companies.

In face of these realities, I found it quite intriguing when Doug Arthur, the visionary founder of the INTERalliance organization asked me to speak at their inaugural TechOlympics Expo (400 top high school students from 39 schools in Greater Cincinnati region competed and participated in this last weekend), about “More to life than Google“!

With the help of some industry observers including Charles Knight, I assembled a list of 14 innovative services that I really like. In assembling this list, I deliberately left out the other well-known players like Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Ask, which surely are innovating in their own way. I decided to focus the attention on innovations from small organizations that don’t get as much visibility or publicity, and wanted to see what these smart, young people thought of them.

Admittedly, going in, I was a bit skeptical that they would care about anything beyond Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and maybe a couple of other tools! Boy, was I wrong!

Not only did the students in attendance eagerly respond to the various services I presented, but they also shared with me some others that I was not aware of. What was interesting was how so many of them wanted to get a copy of my presentation to follow up and check out some of the cool services I had highlighted. I was surely not ready for this response and I think it bodes well for entrepreneurs out there who are innovating in their chosen areas. I am not suggesting, for a moment, that all of a sudden, an entrepeneur’s challenge in getting the word out, has vanished. No! What I AM suggesting is that it is heartening that the younger generation is so open minded to absorb innovation. They seem to want newer, better, faster, cooler things and they are not afraid to try it out and give it a fair shake.

Maybe you are wondering what the revelation in this is – especially as my realization seems kind of obvious.

Maybe! But then maybe not, when you consider that what I was sharing was a set of 14 search engine tools that do a fabulous job for different needs! Tools that exist right in the space where Google is the dominant player without any doubt! And yet, here were a bunch of really smart young people, ready to lap up new, innovative, cool services even in this space!

Here is my complete presentation on More to Life than Google.

For your convenience, here are 14 search engine services I like, which show that search engine innovation is quite alive outside Google.

Cosmetic Safety: Skin Deep
Finding Facts: Freebase
Health: Mednar
Images: Cooliris
Jobs: Indeed
Mobile: ChaCha
News: iCurrent
People: Pipl
Real Estate: Zillow
Reviews: Yelp
Shopping: Milo
Travel: UpTake
Video: Clicker
Web: Zakta

Admittedly, I’ve been partial to the search engine innovation listed last, our own Zakta Barring this glaring bit of self-promotion, truly, the other services listed here are worth a closer look. Please visit them and spread the word about them if you like them!

As always, I look forward to your feedback on this.

Zakta delivers “digital curation” platform for the Museum of Advertising

Sundar Kadayam — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:22:46 +0000

The Museum of Advertising, a grassroots organization in Cincinnati, Ohio, launched their online presence today.

The Museum of Advertising is intended to offer a uniquely compelling exploration of the ways in which advertising has reflected and shaped American culture, from 19th century postcards to 21st-century media. The museum also seeks to celebrate Cincinnati’s unique role in the growth, development, and even redefinition of the advertising and marketing industry. Importantly, we envision much more than just a “physical” place to visit. We also envision an accessible, always-on storytelling lab, anchored to virtual participation and user-contribution. In fact, we hope and expect hundreds of “digital ad curators” will help shape, refine, and contribute the stories and learning we will put on display both online and offline. (Source: About the Museum of Advertising)

Pete Blackshaw, co-founder of the Museum of Advertising presents the concept in this introductory video:

Zakta is proud to partner with the Museum of Advertising to deliver a platform for “digital curation“. Using the searching, information organization, sharing and collaboration tools on Zakta, supporters of the Museum of Advertising can now be “digital ad curators”, bringing together the very best advertising information from the Web, in the form of compelling online exhibits.

Here are some excellent exhibits (“Guides”) that have already come together:

Mad Men: Mad Men Era
Super Bowl Commercials: Cars, Beer and Liquor, Technology, Celebrity Ads, Soft Drinks, Snacks
Brand Advertising History: Crisco, Ivory Soap, Coca Cola

We invite people to jump in and contribute to these Guides.

You can also create new Guides for including in the Museum of Advertising site. How can you do this? Just go to Zakta.com and login. Explore the Web using Zakta’s search tools, create a new Guide, invite others you know to collaborate with you, and publish it for the world to see and add to.

Join the growing team of digital curators at the Museum of Advertising now!

As always, we value your feedback. Please let us know what you think.

Zakta Adds Personal and Social Image Search, Video Search

Sundar Kadayam — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 02:49:05 +0000

Over the holiday season, we made a number of improvements to Zakta and added a few new features.

Image search

Now, for all your queries, relevant images from the Web are automatically included in the organized search results on Zakta. You can simply click the “More” link below the image listing to get more images added to your result set.

Video search

As you probably already know, Zakta search results are organized into a single result page. Now, matching videos from the Web are automatically included in your results. Like with Images, you can click on “More” below the last video to get more images into your results.

What is unique about Image and Video searching on Zakta?

Image and Video searching are more powerful on Zakta than elsewhere on the Web. Here’s why:

You can edit the Image and Video results — you can delete them, drag-and-drop t0 reorganize their order as you see fit, and even add annotations and tags to them.
You can automatically create Zakta Guides from the search results that include the Images and Videos in them with no extra effort.
From within the Guide Editor in Zakta, you can incrementally add new Images and Videos to your Zakta Guides as needed.

i.e. Images and Videos are now fully integrated into Zakta’s personal and social search framework for finding, personalizing, and sharing information from the Web.

As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback on this.

We have planned many new and exciting capabilities for this year. We thank you for your support in 2009, and look forward to serving your needs and receiving your support in 2010 as well. Wish you and yours a wonderful 2010!

Zakta is “Cool Site of the Day”, Nov 14, 2009

Sundar Kadayam — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:01:51 +0000

Zakta has been selected as “Cool Site of the Day”.

Please cast your vote for Zakta here – voting is valid only today, November 14th 2009 – and pass the word along. Thank you for your support!

Here is the blog post here announcing this.

Zakta Guides: A Social Media Tool to Organize the Web

Sundar Kadayam — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:05:22 +0000

Have you searched for in-depth information on the Web lately only to get back results that were mostly sales pitches, regurgitations of a single article that wasn’t very informative in the first place, woefully out-of-date pages, or bait-and-switch sites that didn’t even mention your search term? Is there any hope of getting useful and trusted resources for what you are searching for?

Brian Solis wrote about the rapid evolution of search (also here) citing the flurry of activity in the search industry around such capabilities as real-time search, social search and semantic search. In my personal opinion, one big issue that hasn’t received much attention is the one I raise above – what is going to help people with their searches for in-depth information on the Web?

Zakta, our personal and social Web search engine, offers a way that makes Web searching useful, purposeful and fun. As I’ve written before, Zakta helps with these deeper informational searches, by presenting organized information for your search queries, enabling you to personalize the results, save them for later use and even share the search results you’ve found useful with friends, family, workgroups and the world.

A few weeks ago, Matt Hurst wrote on his Datamining blog that Zakta was a new way to organize Web knowledge and might be part of a set of emerging tools for what he calls “web gardening“. I wanted to elaborate on this part of Zakta, by introducing Zakta Guides, the social media tool in Zakta that enables organization of resources from the Web on any topic, and all the benefits it brings to people everywhere and to the authors of Guides in particular.

On Zakta, no matter what topic you are searching on, you can collect the best Web sites, news articles, blog posts, products, companies, services, videos, images, whatever is relevant and useful for your search, and organize and share it in the form of a Guide with others. When other users look for similar information, Zakta presents your Guide (or other matching Guides created by other Zakta users) in their search results. i.e. Others can benefit from the results of your searching effort, and begin their search with what you have found useful.

In turn, other users can vote and recommend your Guide, share it with others, and even suggest new resources to add to your Guide, so you and everyone else can benefit from what others have discovered. Users who like certain Guides can subscribe to them so they can stay on top of updates and additional search results. A really powerful capability in Zakta is that you can even invite other people you trust – friends, family members, co-workers, and associates – to collaborate with you and add to and edit your Guide. In this way, a Zakta Guide enables the best information from the Web to be organized in one place for a given topic.

See these interesting Zakta Guides that people have created so far.

There are Guides on a diverse range of subjects such as these:

Niagara Falls
Lucille Ball
U.S. political satirists from the 1950s-today
Financial Aid 101 (part of a collection of Zakta Guides on College Planning Made Easy!)
Finding a Job in an Economic Downturn
Chess
Ivory Soap Advertising History
Gay Marriage in the United States

When you organize and share the best resources from the Web on a topic you are interested in, you make it easy for others to search on that topic. Likewise, you benefit from what others have shared. Imagine if everyone decided to share what they’ve found useful from their searches on topics they know about using Guides! Just how much more useful the search experience can be for everyone! Jason Falls mused about the game changing possibilities this kind of approach to getting curated search results in his recent post on Zakta. And Jason was right in arguing that this will require that people come to Zakta.

I can cite three reasons why Zakta can be very useful to you:

Help yourself with a personalized searching experience that saves you time with your deeper searches for information. Who wouldn’t want to save time in this ever-demanding world we live in!
Help others by sharing what you know or have found. You will likewise benefit from others doing the same. This is a win-win proposition coming from a search framework that lets people help each other!
You can offer more value to your current visitors, reach more searchers on the Web, and engage your followers better in social networks! This is a big, practical benefit for you, and here’s how Zakta enables this:
- Zakta Guides can be linked from your blog, Web site, or social network page, to offer additional information to new and recurring visitors alike.
- Here’s the big kicker - If your Guides are good, it will be automatically indexed by other popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and others – this means that users searching on the Web using these popular search engines for matching topics will find your Guides in the search engine results page, and benefit from your Guides.

By combining a personalized search engine with a social media tool in the form of Zakta Guides, and a social network to let you connect with people you trust, Zakta makes it possible for people to make a difference in the quality of the search experience for themselves and everyone else. The overarching benefit for the Web as a whole is that Zakta can help organize the chaos of the Web, one topic at a time!

I invite you to dig deeper into Zakta and experience these benefits for yourself. As always, we’d love to hear feedback and what we can do to make Zakta better for you.

What is Social Search?

Sundar Kadayam — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:52:57 +0000

It is hot! So hot that Google legitimized it with their recent update. Buzz is building on social search like never before, as this handy trend graph from BlogPulse indicates:

But what is social search?

According to different industry voices, social search …

“… involves combining social graph information with pure algorithmic search results.“

“… combines traditional algorithm-driven technology with online community filtering.“

“… helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle.“

“… is information retrieval, way finding tools informed by human judgment.“

These definitions are quite broad and varying, and the result is that so many solutions have come under the banner of “social search”. However, one thing common across these diverse set of tools and services is this: they’ve all used collective intelligence (wisdom of the crowds, if you will) in some way to improve what they present to users in the search process.

Here are some that come to my mind:

In the early days of the Internet, DirectHit (later acquired by Ask Jeeves) watched which links users clicked through more for a given search and used that data for dynamically ranking search results based on their popularity with the community of users.
Amazon has been a pioneer in the space of using social/community data to improve the searches for users on Amazon.com – much has been written about their recommendation engine!
Intelliseek’s ProFusion.com engine ( a product I helped design) used an adaptive search mechanism (community usage driven) to determine what are the best sources to pick for a given query in a distributed / federated search environment.
Wikia Search used the Wikipedia model of direct, swarm-editing of search result pages for different queries. i.e. Wikia Search users could interactively change the results on any result page, and impact what other users saw directly.
In reality, Google has always been a social search engine, in a couple of ways. They’ve always tracked what people have liked through who / what they hyperlink to – a core to their famed PageRank algorithm. In the recent years, they’ve also included user and community contributions (in the form of social media) into their search results, with content from Wikipedia and the blogosphere impacting search results in a noticeable way.
Yahoo has tried integration of Delicious (their social bookmarking system) into the search results.
Presently, the buzz is all about including social network data and data from popular social tools like Twitter into the search results. Bing did it. Now Google is doing it too!

My company, Zakta, is also a recent entrant in “social search”, and we refer to Zakta as a personal and social Web search engine. Our aim is to improve informational searches on the Web.What prompted me to write this post was the recent Google announcement on social search. Our small community of users felt that Google was encroaching on Zakta’s turf, and I thought I should help clarify where Zakta fits.

First, Zakta has no turf – Google dominates all Second, we are trying to add value to the informational search experience of users through a comprehensive solution framework, so we don’t get into feature battles with giants that we don’t have a chance of surviving (as it is, I’ve been called “Nuts!” to start Zakta at this time, and having my tiny company enter into a feature race with the giants should surely bring me the label “Stupid” too – something I’d very much like to avoid!).

Here’s a personal framework that I’ve used to understand the social search space myself and to steer the design and development of Zakta.

On the X-axis, I plot the Personal (focus is on the individual) versus Communal (focus is on the community as a whole) continuum. On the Y-axis, I plot the nature of information that users interact with, in terms of whether it is Disorganized (focus has been on mere collection of information) versus Organized (focus is on curation of digital information).

Using this framework, I’ve mapped a handful of social search services and tools that I’m somewhat familiar with. So, admittedly, both this framework and my characterization of these services in this framework are based on my personal viewpoint. I’d welcome comments for improvement, or other viewpoints. I hope you find this framework a useful tool to make sense of what is happening with this growing space that is simply called “social search”.

Now I can put Zakta into this context. As portrayed in this framework, Zakta is a personal Web search engine because it provides tools to deliver a personal search engine experience that puts the searcher in control.

Zakta is also a social Web search engine in many distinct ways:

It enables a searcher to collaborate with people they trust to find, collect, organize and share information on topics of interest
It enables a searcher to connect to others they trust and discover information relevant to their interests from the recommendations made by their trust-network
It enables a searcher to benefit from the contributions of the community of Web users in the form of published Zakta Guides on topics of interest
It enables a searcher to gain from the ongoing relevance ranking improvements that happen behind the scenes that take into account the signals of recommendation expressed by not only the user’s trust-network, but also the community as a whole not just on Zakta, but elsewhere on the Web

As you can see, Zakta is not as much about finding what your social network has been saying. Rather it is all about empowering you personally and helping you benefit from your trusted network as well as the community at large to improve your own Web search experience and discover useful information on an ongoing basis on topics of your interest.

As always, I’d love to get your feedback!

Thank You…Again!

Sundar Kadayam — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:32:55 +0000

Ever since we made our official debut back in September, we have been thrilled with the swell of online support from everyone. We’ve already thanked several bloggers back in September, but we’d like to thank the bloggers and tweeps who have written about us since then.

Once again, thank you all for your support, comments, suggestions, questions and concerns. By taking the time to blog, tweet, and actually use Zakta and interact with us, you are enabling us to improve Zakta which in turn, helps us meet your search needs better and quicker!

Twitter Buzz

Click here to see what people have been saying about Zakta…in real time!

Blogosphere Buzz

Mahendra Palsule, Make Use Of: “Find Exactly What You Want With Zakta Social Search”
Ajay, VisionWiz: “Zakta is a personal and social Web search engine where you can find, personalize, share and discover information from the Internet”
Len Charnoff, Time Saving Tutorials: Has posted excellent video tutorials on using Zakta:

Zakta.com

Zakta.com – Creating A Guide

Zakta vs. Google

Editing A Search-Zakta.com

Eric Ward, URLWire: “Zakta.com Launches Personal and Social Web Search Engine”
High Velocity Media: “Zakta.com adds smartness, social component to Internet searches”
Raju, Technically Personal: “Zakta – Personalized Social Search Engine”
Roger H, Killer Startups: “Zakta.com – A Different Way To Search The Web”
Kaila Krayewski, ISEdb.com: Another New Search Engine Emerges: Zakta

Media Buzz

Feoshia Henderson, Soapbox Cincinnati Media, Locally launched Zakta adds social component, smartness to search

Thanks for spreading the word about Zakta.

And keep the feedback coming! We just can’t get enough!

What’s New: Zakta Guide Walls

Sundar Kadayam — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:18:36 +0000

We made one notable addition to Zakta last week, and that was the ability to browse more Zakta Guides easily from the home page. You can now view different Zakta Guide Walls by clicking the subtle “>” arrow on the right side of the wall. Check it out.

We also announced a special Zakta Guide collection earlier: “College Planning Made Easy“. This brings together many user-created Guides on topics related to Choosing a College, Applying for College, Paying for College and more. We hope that high school students and their parents and school counselors all find this information collection of the best resources from the Web on College Planning very useful.

Our thanks to all those people who’ve been providing us great feedback on Zakta. Your suggestions and contributions are what make Zakta better for everyone. Please keep the feedback coming – we are listening and improving all the time.

Zakta Announces “College Planning Made Easy” Guide Collection

Sundar Kadayam — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:09:48 +0000

College planning can be confusing, complex and stressful, especially if you have no previous knowledge or experience with the process. With so much to learn and handle at this vital time in a student’s life, it is important to properly educate yourself so that you can make the most informed decisions for your particular situation. Thousands of helpful resources are available on the Web, and it can be difficult to determine which are credible and worthy of your time. I know this only too well – I am a parent of a high school senior, who’s applying for college this year!

Zakta’s newest Web Guide collection, College Planning Made Easy, is a collection of the best Web sites, articles, videos and more on a variety of topics related to the college planning process. This has been put together by me and other members of the growing Zakta community.

College-ready students and parents will benefit from Zakta Guides in four main categories: Choosing a College, Applying for College, Paying for College and College Living. It features resources and advice ranging from choosing the right college and what to study in school, to preparing for standardized testing. The collection also offers a variety of financial aid resources, including basic information on how to apply, how much money is available and how the programs work.

If users don’t see the information they’re looking for, they can submit a topic idea to Zakta, who will then evaluate whether it’s a college planning topic others would be interested in learning more about as well. The Zakta team, with the help of other Zakta members, will research the topic and create additional Zakta Guides as necessary, organizing the best, most relevant information available on the Web.

Most importantly, the beauty of Zakta is that it enables people to share their knowledge or expertise with others in an organized, effective manner. Users who have already been through the college planning process or have specific expertise can share their knowledge with others by creating and sharing a Zakta Guide of their own.

As always, we are eager to get your feedback.

What’s New: Zakta Best Bet

Sundar Kadayam — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:33:18 +0000

Last night (9/21/09), we posted an update to Zakta which included many search engine improvements and bug fixes. Thanks to all of you who sent in your feedback to us. It helps immensely!

We also released a notable new feature called Zakta Best Bet.

If you’ve been following our progress, you know well already that we aim to solve the problem with deeper informational searches on the Web with a system designed to do so. In our research, we have recognized that there’s a class of informational searches where it is possible to surface one search result which, with a very high likelihood, contains the information you are looking for. This is what we’ve done with the Zakta Best Bet feature.

For some of the queries, we are able to now surface one single hit and highlight that hit as the Zakta Best Bet for the query.

Try this out:

Microsoft

The Lion King musical

Zirconium

Robin Williams

Wilt Chamberlain

For these kinds of queries, with the Zakta Best Bet, we try to bring to you the one hit that will likely contain exactly what you are looking for.

How do we do this? Zakta Best Bet is a result picked by the choices made by real people but backed by all the same ranking techniques used in traditional search engines. So, while we are not able to present Zakta Best Bet results for every query right now, our results will improve continuously over time.

Please let us know what you think!

- Sundar Kadayam, For the Zakta Team