ResearchBuzz

Google Maps has a mobile version. This week they’ve begun offering real-time traffic on their mobile map as well. You can download their application for your phone for free at http://www.google.com/gmm/index.html. (The list of supported phones and devices is available at http://www.google.com/gmm/devices.html.

Of course it takes a few minutes to download and install the software. Once that’s done you’ll have to page through Google’s terms of service. Once you’ve accepted the terms, you’ll get a map of the US and Canada. A menu gives you the option to zoom and pan; the keyboard-based instructions for zooming and panning were not intuitive but easy to pick up. Loading as I zoomed in seemed to take an extra bit of time. A couple of times the map seemed to get hung up loading; I wonder if the recent news about the traffic reports has slogged the Google server some.

Anyway, you have the option of viewing a map view or a satellite view (for my phone I found map views were the easiest to see.) From the menu you can get directions, find locations, or view traffic; you do have to be zoomed in a certain amount to view traffic, and when I tried to view traffic I was warned that it might load slowly on my phone. After a while I didn’t really see much of a difference in the map; maybe the area I was looking wasn’t one of the metro areas Google covered (the extreme slowness of map loading curbed both my ability to experiment and my enthusiasm for experimenting.)

I don’t know if it’s my phone, my phone’s Internet connection, or maybe Google’s server taking a load under recent announcements, but I couldn’t make much of Google’s mobile maps with traffic. Your milage may vary; I’m going to try it with a different phone in a week or so.

Several years ago, I reviewed a lot of search engines that launched as technology showcases. To demonstrate what they could do, they’d take a large body of data and proceed to slice-n-dice it. Back then, the large body of choice seemed to be the Open Directory Project. Nowadays it seems to be Wikipedia. FUTEF, in beta at http://futef.com/, allows you to search Wikipedia both by keyword and by category.

Since I have a giant bottle of San Pellegrino on my desk I did a search for Pellegrino. I got 167 results, the first of which was for the bottled water, but in addition I also got results on the front page for locations, people, and a TV station.

(This search wasn’t too bad but with some of my other test searches I got results that were way too widespread. I would really like the ability to search for a keyword within the title of an article, or even better, within the first 50 or 100 words of an article.)

On the left side of the results there are categories by which you may narrow down your results. Some of the categories are too general to be useful (”Living People”) while others are much more specific (”Cathedrals in Italy”, “Maltese nobility”, etc.) Click on a category and the search will rerun with the category search included, and you’ll get a new set of related categories on the left side. This’ll take you a variety of places; I started with a search for bottled water and after wandering through a few category/search result pages ended up at one result for Pellegrino in a page about Gothic architecture.

In addition to the search at this site, FUTEF also offers a Firefox plugin about which you can get more information at http://futef.com/plugin/. There’s also a short blog at http://futef.blogspot.com/ and a very brief about page at http://futef.com/about.html.

You know it’s a search engine because it’s got some kind of weird name you’re not sure how to pronounce. Oyaka allows you to meta-search for both events and tickets; it’s in beta and available at http://www.oyaka.com/.

The front page has a multi-line query box; not sure why, but okay. Run a search that describes an event (concert) or a place (Boston) or the object of an event (Carolina Panthers). You’ll get a waiting page as the search runs (the first time I ran a search it took a long time; subsequent searches seemed to be faster) and then a list of events.

I ran a search for “carolina panthers” charlotte, looking for just home games. I didn’t get any results; Oyaka likes simpler searches. I reran a search just for Carolina Panthers and got a result list that included event name, location, date, number of tickets available, and a link to find tickets. (More about that in a minute.)

To filter by location and date, look in the left nav of the search results. Click on location or date and you’ll get a list of filter options. Click on one and the page refreshes with the new list.

Find an event and want tix? Click on the “Find Tickets” link for any result, and another search will run, providing you with a list of available tickets from several different markets. I saw eBay, StubHub, TicketLiquidator, and Ticketmall. (In the case of my Carolina Panthers search, there was an available popup window that shows the layout of the Panthers’ stadium.) From these results there’s another link that’ll take you directly to the marketplace (not, it appears, to individual auction pages — at least not on eBay — but to the marketplace.)

Though you won’t be able to buy tickets from it, there’s also a mobile version of Oyaka; details are available at http://www.oyaka.com/mobilepg.php. And for some reason you can make blogs at Oyaka (don’t really get that): http://www.oyaka.com/blog/.

I liked the two stages of searches for Oyaka, though there was an occasional wait lag for tickets. An advanced search that lets you do a little bit of preemptive date and location narrowing might be nice too.