I arrived home yesterday from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.  I flew the Red Eye home (upgraded ) I found a large number of technologies converging around the concept of an improved user interface to the computer.  This for me was the most important aspect of the show and seemed to signal the direction of technology going into the next 2-4 years.

One of those interface improvements included a search engine that had a mind mapping interface capability (among several other views and tools).  I’m going to be covering these technologies and the impact and usefulness of these interfaces over the next few weeks and want to set everyone up for the topic.  After seeing what the show offered, I believe that this will be an extremely important transition in computing, possibly as important as the introduction of the mouse or even the color monitor.  Regardless, I think that these new interfaces will be nothing less than extraordinary.

In the meantime, after traveling for a week (and all the pre-travel prep), I have several mundane things to take care of this weekend including transferring and renewing my license tags, and finding a new insurance broker for my home owners insurance. 

Plus, if I have time, I am going to reboot this blog and with a new theme as this one is feeling a good bit stale these days. 

Page Popularity for Site: 30% [?]

Maven Mapper’s Information is undergoing a review of many different Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing Services, service providers and consultants. 

Today we are reviewing DiscountClick Online Marketing Services.  DiscountClick provides a suite of SEO and SEM services from link building services to SEO consulting to Natural Search Engine Optimization and PayPerClick Management.  Their SEO promotion includes an optimization consultation to analyze a clients company, their website and competitor websites.  From this point they will build a strategy with a targeted cost point to generate results and return on investment.

They also offer a Search Engine Optimization Tutorial guide that can help companies and potential clients gain a better appreciation for the importance of Search Engine Optimization and the work and art combined to create successful Search Engine Marketing results.

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A new search engine is coming.  Its called Megaglobe. They have been building indexes for several months now, and are currently accepting site submissions for inclusion in the index.

If you want to insure that your site gets index, it takes just a second to enter your URL and submit it for submission to be searched by Megaglobe bots behind the scenes.

I have been monitoring this site for a while and am interested to see the end result as it rolls out in the near future. . .

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Google’s blog search functionality may be starting to eke past Technorati. Google now offers users the option to get to its Blog search functionality from the main page on Google. Users can search blogs, by clicking the more button above the search box and then selecting Blogs, which is the top option in the drop down box.

Google launched the blog search option in September of 2005, but apparently didn’t realize that linking to it from their own home page would be the thing necessary to make it successful. This is a rather startling mistake in that Google is lauded as being a very smart company, but took over a year to figure this out.

Now that they are past that lesson straight out of the obvious book, they are making up time and picking up searches from key age demographics among searchers in the age group of 18-24 year olds, while Technorati’s shows a strength among searchers that are over 45 years in age.

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Sproose has launched a web search beta tool that enables users to vote for the quality of web search items.  The system is simple enough to understand.  A user goes to Sproose, establishes an account with an email address, performs searches anytime in the future, and can vote on any individual search result giving it a rating on a scale of 1 to 5.

This Social Search Engine takes the voting results and immediately adjusts its search engine ranking accordingly.  The concept and design is simple enough to be immediately understandable and potentially useful if the user base grows past the critical mass necessary to avoid skewed results.  Other social media sites like Digg.com have felt the impact of ‘digg’ gangs that attempt to manipulate results.  That has not caused a serious problem for Digg and I suspect it will ultimately not cause a serious problem for Sproose either.

You can try the tool at the Sproose home page.

The key to the success of this system will likely be a two fold combination consisting of 1.  Simplicity in design which they have and 2. General Awareness of their tool, which they are working on already in small part through their sponsorship of this article and Maven Mapper’s Information.

Page Popularity for Site: 8% [?]