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A New Search for MySpace
garzpacho writes "Businessweek is reporting on MySpace's new strategy. They're going to pit the large engines against each other in a bidding war to provide the popular social networking site with a new search engine. From the article: 'Search is a driver of traffic and advertising revenue for other major Web destinations, but it's a largely untapped source of growth for MySpace and other Fox Interactive Media properties such as online gaming site IGN and sports site Scout. Given MySpace's power, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are expected to compete fiercely for the right to be the search engine of choice for MySpace and the rest of Fox Interactive. News Corp. won't say how much money it expects to derive from a deal, but industry experts say it could conceivably boost MySpace's annual revenue several times over.'"
Although there are millions of active users on Myspace, most are teenagers with little buying power, that are therefore less likely to click on the adverts that gain the search engines revenue. Also, most searches will be for "html help" or "free layouts", not very lucrative markets.
Free Myspace / general CGI Proxy
Even if google doesnt "win" you can always insite:myspace my searches.
Thats if they dont hide content from other search engines, if they do then its their loss.
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
(end of post)
This could be the begining of a trend where content providers start to demand more share of the monies to be made of the internet - obviously now only second-tier providers with aggregated content/large-scale hosting have the leverage but perhaps in the future....
I am going to bid for this contract-
I have developed a search engine that plays music when you load the homepage, is inaccesable between 6-10 pm due to a lack of bandwidth, reeks of emo-cutter desperation, and has little icons of music notes moving around the whole page so the links are hard to find/click. I am thinking we will be a good fit....
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
Maybe companies selling razor blades might be able to find a nice niche?
MySpace has got to be an absolute nightmare for any search crawler to dig through. The markup on all the pages is absolutely horrible. Maybe a partnership with Google could help convince them that their pages are built for 1996, not 2006, which is extremely sad for a site that's only been around for two years. Structural markup would make it a lot easier to find the relevant info.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
MySpace has such a huge amount of traffic these days, but it had been unclear to this point how that traffic was going to be translated into revenue. Pitting competitors is a great maneuver for MySpace, and whatever engine wins the bid (especially if someone"lesser" than Google) can expect a huge boost themselves.
This is also lucrative in that the demographics are very clear for the MySpace crowd, and should allow for highly-targeted ad campaigns for content providers. Kudos on a good move by MySpace!
Touting MyEclipse AJAX Tools
What percentage of users would really use the MySpace branded search? Are they going to offer more intelligent indexing of MySpace content with real-time updates or is going to just be a rebranding of an existing search offering? I'd hope for the former but we'll probably get the later. When you see this much money flying around it would be nice to see some improvement of the product(s) for the end users.
Always be polite.
I say we use jet engines to put our servers into low orbit. They won't have any problems dispelling heat up there. Which necessitates running many miles of CAT5 cable from low orbit to the surface (with staggered relays to boost signal strength). What does this result in? BAM, instant space elevator! I am a genius!
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
Is it "whacky article title day"?
First "Using jet engines to cool servers" and now "A New Search for Spock", ummmm... I mean, "A New Hope for Myspace", ahhh, that is "Searching for Bobby..." eh, nevermind.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Great. So now it will be easier for the NSA to datamine myspace.
...Myspace overrun with Dora the Explorer and Sponge Bob...
...am I supposed to put something here?
We're building a site based on other people giving us all our content in the form of their :
a) vying for attention/hookups
b) vying for attention due to need for depression therapy
c) People looking to hookup for action (legal or not)
Then we're going to double dip it up by charging a search engine to be the best place to search for hookups and emo-kids...
Something about the phrase "coming and going" leaps to mind but I can't put the whole analogy out there that easily. heh
Will Myspace stock drop the next time Merck develops an Emo proofing anti-depressant for kids?
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Will it have to be written in coldfusion, then rewritten in .net?
Culture + Technology
I don't care what MySpace get up to. They send me spam. Accordingly, they should rot in hell.
...laura
...was generating several million dollars a year in profit before News Corp. bought it. However, it's not nearly enough to move the needle at giant News Corp., where money is measured in billions.
Web is different. You can't compare its revenue power or ROI with other media types. Currently web has comparatively high ROI and also very high competition. Competition is hard, because it's too hard to bind people to web sites. Web is one step further of the fast consuming in media, after TV (first we had books, then monthly magazines , then daily newspapers, and later hour divided (PT1, PT2..) TV).
People switch services way too fast in here. Another site is one click away, and with a decent infrastructure as fast as the other.
That's why google is very keen on producing web based services, like mail, spreadsheet, data storage. Because then, people will have harder times to switch a service, compared to search engine, which is very fragile in that send.
However if we check myspace's position in that race, it's only binding for teenagers, and teenagers are not good users to be trusted. They go for trends, and it would just take months not years to get lure users to outherspace.com (just a dummy site) from myspace.com.
Currently earning billions would need years of activity on web, and with hard to beat services. And community site is not one of them.
1) Dumb
2) Dumber
3) Dumbier
4) Dumbest
5) Stupid Beyond Words
++troll;
I don't know about you, but I think that if they're trying to get major search engines – especially Google – to index MySpace, then that's definitely a good reason to avoid those sites (if you don't already). It's already trivially easy to find all sorts of information on those sites, because so many people just post sensitive personal information without realizing the danger they're putting themselves into; by combining MySpace's information with Google's search technology – or whoever wins – they'd basically be saying "child stalkers of the world, HERE YOU GO!" and handing the bad guys everything they needed on a silver platter. I can only hope that these people get their act together and realize the threats of social networking sites before something bad happens...
DISCLAIMER: I will admit I personally can't stand MySpace anyway, so there probably is at least some bias here – but either way, those sites definitely aren't doing very much good for society, at least as far as I can tell.
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
> Structural markup would make it a lot easier to find the relevant info.
Are we still talking about MySpace?
Given that most mySpace users are minors, I'd feel better if a government agency participated in hearings to choose the right search engine for mySpace.
Advertisers flock to sites like Myspace for the same reason they advertise on MTV.. any income teens have is by nature discretionary and whatever budget deficits they may encounter are quite often picked up by mom and dad.
Hence why any site on myspace is covered by at least 8 advertisements.
Although there are millions of active users on Myspace, most are teenagers with little buying power, that are therefore less likely to click on the adverts that gain the search engines revenue
Teens, schmeens. Fox is going after the fat-walleted 40ish pedophiles who are using MySpace like it was their own web-based rolodex. I was recently part of a tech-and-law-enforcement seminar, and was blown away by how easy it was to (a) locate your underage victim of choice, and (b) find out exactly where s/he would be when (softball/cheerleading practice at Acme Field, Tues and Thu from 3:30 to 4:45, etc.) If you're a perv, than MySpace is a virtual, virtual smorgasbord.
Fortunately, from what I have recently learned, the Good Guys are stepping up to the plate and starting to educate kids about exactly how NOT to fill out their online profiles and other narcissistic blog droolings. The aim is to make it tougher to find people.
Now, Fox is going out of its way to create search mechanisms to counter such obfuscations, presumably. Fascinating.
Gee, I wonder what Fox Interactive's Sister Company Pundit Bill "Who's Looking Out For Your Kids?" O'Reilly what have to say on this topic...?
Just to shed a little light on the awful markup..
To customize your MySpace profile at all, you need to basically type up a full stylesheet to ovverride the existing one. Not only that, but you have to type it into your "biography" infobox, where it'll load with your normal text and be chomped by the browser. As soon as your browser is done completely spacking out at the multiple nonstandard chunks of info being thrown at it from directions not normally expected, it digests it all into something almost, but not entirely, unlike a webpage.
Now obviously, the kids on Myspace by and large aren't web designers, and even if they take that HTML 101 class in middle school, they aren't going to be the type to slap together a stylesheet from scratch, much less hack one out to Myspace specs. These are the users more comfortable with something like Geocities or Livejournal use, where you can intuitively point-and-click your way through a few templates and customize them to your heart's content. However, Myspace is pretty much uncostomizable unless you use a stylesheet.
So, the kids who want to customize but can't stomach the various CSS tutorials long enough to misuse that information for evil, turn to a few services that have come up which generate a myspace stylesheet for you point-and-click style, but also insert ads for themselves into the code, which is usually dodgy code to begin with. And that's alongside Myspace's normal pervasive ads, which are annoying and usually badly scripted.
Then we get to the music and video gadgets MySpace uses, these bloated chunks of Flash that load more bandwidth-and-resource-sucking garbage, usually immediately on page load. Add to this the Google Video, Youtube, Imageshack, and about 47 billion other third-party content hosts, each with their own scripts, cookies, and bugs to add to the page, and their own bandwidth to suck. And on top of all that, Myspace is constantly pushing the bounds of its own resources, so if your page does manage to load at all, some important bits might not show up.
And this all doesn't even begin to take into account the natural result of non-web-designers designing webpages with no templates or handholding. The overloads of stupid gifs (and I love my own animated gifs so very very much, but have some limits, people!) horrible auto-loading music and video (I admit to embedding MIDIs into web pages in the early 90s, I'm still paying for that karmically. For example, this morning I woke up with my ears infested with fire ants. Lesson=learned!) and neon-green-text-on-bright-yellow-background-itis.
So basically, the site is broken by design, broken by its lack of resources, with a broken implementation further broken by its users.
Other than that, it's sound as a pound.
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Try searching for ONE group that might tickle your fancy. Any term you put in, no matter how obscure, will get you THOUSANDS of hits.
There is no easy search for "Mazda RX-7". Maybe you're looking for a group specific to Mazda RX-7 owners. You'll get thousands of results regardless. There's also a useless 'region' field in groups that often is filled with bogus or wrong information. Give me quoted(strict) search string availability, please.
A robust search engine for myspace will be a lot of work. If a college kid can do it, they may have themselves a new job.
I have a question... I'm new to this, so bear with me, but seriously, I don't see how this is such a big problem for MySpace...
If google can have huuuuuuuuuuuuuuge databases to contain all the websites (that they've cached), and allow billions of people to search their huuuuuuuuuuuuuge databases, why is MySpace having problems allowing millions of people to search their MUCH much smaller databases?
Am I just missing something here? How many machines does this really take? Think back 5 years, when Google was a baby... they weren't NEARLY as slow as MySpace, and they had TONS of data.... I would think MySpace has as big of a budget as Google had in their early years.... why is this such a dilema?
Is my math just way off here? I really don't know what's involved...
arl with a k - a blog of mine.
Your friend, Al-Qaeda.
Try moving the radio button from "The Web" to "Myspace" and searching for a known username.
You'll see that the current MySpace search can't even find its own members' pages.
I thought the NSA had set it up already.
I don't care what MySpace get up to. They send me spam.
You mean you signed up for their daily newsletter? Try unsubscribing.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
MySpace is no different from anywhere else that teens hang out with minimal supervision.
At the mall you can SEE the person you are speakign with. If some 40 year old tells you he is 18 and understands you , when you are face to face with him a the mall a couple red flags might go up.
Also the very basic social stigma, in real life, if you approach a 13 year old girl, you will get soem strange looks (trust me, I love skeeball and try to give away my tickets at the arcade, when a 30 year old man walks up to a kid with a fist full of tickets and a smile, people take notice. BTW the smile is from playing skeeball...)
Basically, what it comes down to is that you are WRONG. Myspace is not like other places teens hang out without supervision. (well unless you mean othe online places teens hang out.
Ok so iam going to be honest here i my self have a myspace and i see no use for this service to search for stuff on the site is worth less there is so much crap filled on the pages even my own page is full of HTML and its a mess. It is purely for money and has no true value maybe if some one would explain it to me more clearly then i might like it more but, from my point of of view as a myspace user it is worthless and purely driven for profit i mean dosent the site allready make enough money. And Also i must add that some of the users posting replies in sound like they them slefes use myspace and it is not full of EMO ness most of you have no idea what that is and most people who say they are emo are not cutters get your facts straight the is alot of sterotyping going on in this thread. Iam just standing up for my generation which is more then likely the worst one in American history but give us a break please we will lead America one day and fight the wars and also control Microsoft one day.
The current "search function" of myspace is so bad that it is practically unusable.
You're far better off using google with site:myspace.com in addition to your search parameters.
Do not be alarmed. This is only a test.
http://www.sitespaces.net/index.php?viewpic&picid4 71.jpg
I run sitespaces.net for my company. We had switched from adbright to google in March. This was a screenshot from a few weeks ago. %0.03 CTR.
Social networks are super for attracting visitors and bolstering your other services or products. They're not so great for generating actual revenue from advertisments.
I don't think it's any different with the larger sites. If the big search engines are smart, they will know this.
At least Yahoo can check the stats on the site before committing. They know for sure if it was profitable or not.
In reality a big search engine would most likely ask them to pay for results ala alexa.com and google web services rather than pay for the privilage.
Social networking is full of people who simply ignore adverts completely, more than any other type of website.
They want their users to have to use a search engine. So that's why my friends list isn't sorted by name.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You are right - without rent and food to pay for many teens today have a completely disposable income. However, many do not have bank accounts or credit cards, thus find it difficult to purchase online without the help of mom and dad. Sure, they may be clicking through the ads, but more times than not they are busy buying the newest clothes from Abercrombie at the local mall. Fact of the matter is if you take all that money that is spent by teens (especially younger teens), most of it is spent in local markets and not through the internet. The 4.8 billion number is definitely substantial, but what is this number in comparison to the total amount spent online by all walks of life?
Actually most college students these days don't even need MySpace, they just Facebook instead. Much more useful. MySpace is much less college and much more mid-high-no schoolers now. Came back from college just the other day and heard someone talk about their MySpace for the first time in 10 months, was a little strange hehe.
Why should Google or Yahoo pay to improve their site? They need a search feature regardless. Even with the added radio option to "search the web" how does this benefit already well-known search engines?
If and when some old dude hits on you, arrange a sting operation with local law enforcement.
I've always wanted to troll those myspace sting operations with sometype of guerilla indie film project. We would find a questionable underage teen. Use our underage troller (a kid under 18... to even make it more funny may even make it a girl too).
Then the troll kid will pretend to be a 24 year old guy and then hit on the girl and then rush in and then we'd rush in with our camera crew and film the shock on the MSNBC guy and law enforement crew on how they were duped.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Didn't we already hear that the NSA will be providing myspace searchfunctionality?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Advertisers love to target their products to people who are interested. MySpace is a business where every customer tells you their demographic data and all the stuff they are interested in. They also use it to share their interests with their friends. What could be more ideal from a business perspective?
The article says MySpace doesn't make much money. Maybe that's because, despite having so much data, they show HORRIBLY targeted ads. I regularly get ads that offend/disgust/annoy me. Firefox's Adblock seems ineffective for this.
I'd have more fun using MySpace if their ad targeting was better, and who knows, I might buy something. I hope Google or somebody can get the situation turned around.
you left out ... and get busted for obstruction of justice part.
Seriously, leave the police alone; those sting operations are doing one job: clearing the dangerous scumbags off the Web and street. The reason those operations are important is that they target perdators actively seeking out children and not some closeted freaks, so if it's not an undercover officer that the perv hits on, it will be your sons or daughters!
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Step 1: Use a third party search engine for your website Step 2: ???? Step 3: Profit!!!
nothing
I've been wondering why Slashdot doesn't have a deal with google (or yahoo, like sourceforge did). Native searching is almost useless, and searching via google is a blunt tool. The google web appliance would be an improvement.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Seriously, leave the police alone; those sting operations are doing one job: clearing the dangerous scumbags off the Web and street.
Are you so sure? Police have been known to abuse their power from time to time and take down innocent people.
Not that all police are bad (I've known quite a few good cops in my time... well to be fair i've known a few good ol' boy cops... and i've known one bad cop), but something tells me we'd be better off solving murders and violent crimes rather than setting up people with theoretical crimes.
Most of these people have not actually committed a crime that has hurt anyone but only have shown that they are willing to do so. Perhaps the person is goaded into these actions by the stingers and that what irks me...
Of course then again... Plenty of teens egg others on... But that is other people's problem. I'm more concerned about not living in a state where police make people into criminals rather than go after the ones that are murdering and stealing.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I admit (ahem) that I have a MySpace page. I signed up for it with a unique e-mail address "myspace@blahblah." It forwards to a regular address. I get a lot of spam at the regular address but none, zip, zero going to the MySpace address. It may be that you're getting spam *because of* MySpace, but that might be due to something you're doing wrong. MySpace itself, though? I don't see the evidence.
Breakfast served all day!
Myspace's servers are soo horrible. This new search engine thing might work if they could get their server problems fixed. Sometimes it takes 10 minutes to login.
That guy, Tom, who still pretends to run the place? He's the new Aunt Jemima or Betty Crocker or Ronald Reagan: a cartoon, owned by a corporate entity to make you feel like you're dealing with something homey.
All bullshit.
Your Myspace page is now the property (read the TOS) of one of the kings of the Republican conspiracy.
vertinox: clearly, I my comment covered only the sting operations only; I by no means advocate giving the police a carte blanche.
But also, understand that there is a difference between pervs that have images in browser cache and pervs that are actively soliciting what they believe to be children.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
MySpace suffers from some horrible design decisions at many levels.
For example, to post a comment, read a friend's private blog, change your options, etc., you need to be signed in. When you're signed out, clicking a link that leads to one of these pages will take you to a login form instead. But after you log in, you're redirected back to your homepage, not to the restricted page you were originally trying to load! Every other site seems to get this right, but MySpace drops the ball.
And thanks to the multiple clicks it takes to get *anywhere* on that site, you're better off hitting back, back, reload to get to the page you wanted, rather than trying to navigate there from your homepage.
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