Uploaded new Draft Analyzer Desktop with

Uploaded new Draft Analyzer Desktop with new import/export features from Excel as well as ability to change a player to a flex position

Yahoo BOSS Shows Impressive Growth

Yahoo BOSS, which powers our web links search section, recently announced that they have reached 10mm queries per day.  Congrats to the Yahoo Search team!!

More coverage on TechCrunch.

KallOut Wins BOSS Mashable Challenge, Socialmention Wins Runner Up

Congrats to KallOut and Socialmention!  KallOut is a pretty cool plug-in that is well worth checking out.

http://mashable.com/2008/10/14/boss-mashable-challenge-winners/

Thanks to Adam Hirsch, Mashable and the Yahoo BOSS Team.  It was great being part of this contest and I look forward to expanding our use of Yahoo BOSS API’s.

My previous coverage is here.

Facebook Rolls Out Microsoft Live Search

More information is available at: http://mashable.com/2008/10/07/facebook-live-search/

Many people have been wondering why Microsoft didn’t do this earlier after they inked the advertising deal with Facebook that included an equity stake.  At this point, the search results are no different than what you get outside of Facebook.  I am assuming this is version one and that MSFT and Facebook will track the searching habits of the users over the coming months and eventually begin building in social features to improve the relevance of search results to users based on what their friends are clicking on.  I am not entirely convinced this will dramatically improve search results, but it will be interesting to see someone try.

Another good post on this is here.  According to the math Mark Hendrickson lays out, MSFT needs every user on facebook to make ten searches a month to increase MSFT’s total search queries by 420 million queries or about 42% of the 1 billion queries already being performed on Live Search.  That is a significant figure.  It won’t happen over night, but improved placement will make it easier for people to use and improved search results will make people want to use it.  It is still so easy to go to Google for a search, so MSFT is smart to bring the search tool to the user.

Voting Begins for BOSS Mashable Challenge

The field has been narrowed down and Player Search has been selected as one of the top 10 finalists for the Yahoo BOSS Mashable Challenge!  You can vote for Player Search here: http://mashable.com/2008/10/07/voting-boss-mashable-challenge/

Overview of the contest:

The BOSS Mashable Challenge pits developer against developer.  How do you win?  Build a kickass mashup – search engine or any other Web app – using the BOSS API and any other data sources/technologies. Yahoo! Search BOSS is a completely open API from Yahoo! Search.  It gives developers access to highly scalable Web, news and image search technology without the need to make large infrastructure investments.  More details of the contest can be found here.

Our submission:

“Player Search is a vertical search engine for sports that searches local and national news, video, photos, stats and more for content targeted to individual professional, collegiate and Olympic athletes.  Player Search leverages Yahoo BOSS APIs for its site search and news search categories as well as photos from Flickr.  Player Search searches the full spectrum of on-line sports content from mainstream sources such as Yahoo and CBS Sports to local newspapers, team websites, and sports blogs as well as the latest video highlights from ESPN, NFL Network, MLB.com and many others.”

Voting (in case you missed the link above!):

You can vote for Player Search here: http://mashable.com/2008/10/07/voting-boss-mashable-challenge/

Thank you to Matt Schauf at FantasySportsBusiness.com and Derrick Eckardt at RotoNation for their posts and support.  Much appreciated!

Thank you for your support!

Ted

Player Search on TechCrunch

Mark Hendrickson mentions PlayerSearch in his article titled Yahoo BOSS used to create Powerset for images and more.

One way to capture market share in search…

…bring your search to users. According to a study completed by ComScore, MSN, AOL and Yahoo had search market shares of 39.4%, 50.0% and 46.2%, respectively, in a certain market as compared to their overall market shares of 10.3%, 4.8% and 27.8%, respectively. What was that segment of users? It was the segment of users that purchased internet access from ISPs that had partnerships with each of these companies.

The moral of the story…if you make it easier for users to use your search engine than it is to open a new browser and go to http://www.google.com (assuming it isn’t already their home page, which it is for me), then you can gain significant search traffic. This is a big reason why Toolbars are critically important and why Microsoft just struck a deal with HP to get their browser/search box installed on every PC by default (Google has done this with Dell for many years).

Google News not as dominate as Google Search

While Google continues to increase is market share in search (68% and growing; second place Yahoo is at 20% and falling), ROI Research for Doubleclick reports that more people use CNN.com to search for news than Google.  users still use many other sources to search for news.

Here are the top ten sites, with the percentage of participants who use them for news search:

1. CNN – 57%
2. Google – 53%
3. MSNBC – 41%
4. Yahoo – 40%
5. MSN.com – 31%
6. Foxnews.com – 25%
7. YouTube – 22%
8. Google News – 18%
9. Aol.com – 15%
10. Google Video – 14%

The report has more statistics, but it is interesting to see how different the market is for news search than it is for general search.

ESPN loses if Google wins

Derrick Eckardt of RotoNation recently came across sports scores included at the top of Google Mobile search results (sports scores searches are dramatically higher on mobile phones than from desktops on a relative basis, so it makes sense Google would experiment with these results on their Mobile version first).

This is great for the user as they save a click (and the time required to load a new page, which is significant on mobile phones) to get their answers.

ESPN clearly loses out as they have the top ranked result and would have garnered this traffic.

Google is clearly becoming more and more of a destination site…to the detriment of ESPN and other sites.

Worst move for vertical search ever…

Kosmix has traditionally been a vertical search for health, autos and travel.  They have made great improvements to the UI of search results and built a solid audience (the companies claims of 15mm UVs has been highly refuted as compete shows 50-100,000 UVs; although that may not count about 1mm UVs for their auto verticals).  I generally liked what Kosmix was doing in vertical search (they have a similar approach to what we are doing for the sports vertical).  TechCrunch is reporting that they are now moving to a general search engine.  Why???  They are now competing head-to-head with Google with no clear advantage or differentiation.  Worse yet, they couldn’t possible provide better search results for general searches.