Yahoo Pipe: Search Engine News Aggregator

My second experiment with Yahoo Pipes is a Search Engine News Aggregator. I frequently visit news sites to read the latest articles and blogs about Google, Yahoo Ask.com etc...A lot of times this will lead me on a hyperlink journey where I read about rumors of upcoming applications and such. This pipe should make it a little easier to go to one centralized place for all of the articles I'd like to read in a given day. I'm going to expand the Search Engine News Aggregator soon to include more Search companies in addition like Quigo or LookSmart besides and search more news sites once Yahoo Pipes isn't so horribly slow!

My First Yahoo Pipe: Dunkin Donuts Locator

Yahoo Pipes is awesome! I started playing around with it the the other day and was immediately impressed with its ease of use and simplicity. It's parsing and aggregating data feeds made easy.

As a quick experiment I set up a pipe called Dunkin Donuts Locator which returns a list of Dunkin Donuts within 20 miles of a location using Yahoo Search. I have ideas for some cool pipes...check back soon.

I'd really like to set up a pipe that aggregates news and other sources to look at impacts on stock prices. Then we can see just how smart Jim Kramer is...

JessesGadgets.com is profitable!

I'd like to take this opportunity to announce that JessesGadgets.com is profitable. After a few sales recently I've covered all of the overhead of this operation. By overhead I mean web hosting fees. Everything else for the rest of 2007 is pure profit.
How did this happen in under three months? I'd like to thank Froogle and Google Base for listing my items and Google AdWords for generating impressions of my products to customers in Colorado, Arkansas and beyond. Revenue targets for the summer are pretty high but I'm confident JessesGadgets will exceed them given the extremely high demand and limited supply of Yankees tickets.
What does this prove? Well...it proves a few things. Most importantly it proves that the market for selling used products online is FAR from saturated thanks to Web 2.0 products like Google Base and Froogle. Why would anyone pay to list their items on Ebay when Froogle offers so many different ways to list them for free? Now that Google Checkout is catching on with Froogle customers and merchants I would be very worried if I were Ebay!

Proposal for new Google Product: Chowgle

Are you like me? Have you ever been frustrated with MenuPages.com or CitySearch? I don't think many people would disagree that there isn't a single food directory repository on the Internet that is unbiased, reliable and anywhere close to comprehensive. I'd like to propose "Chowgle" as a solution to people like me who love to visit new places solely for the purpose of trying the best local fare. I'd like to be able to enter the search term "Boston's Best Burrito" and see "Anna's Tacqueria" as the top result or "Fair Lawn pizza" and see "John's Pizza" as the top result. Kudos to the braniancs who purchased other domain names I would have chosen including Foodgle and Chewgle.
Chowgle will be sort of a hybrid of three existing Google products; Google local search, Google News and Froogle. It will thrive off user submitted content and have an intelligent contextual search tool.

There are three main principles which Chowgle should follow:
1. Chowgle will accept restaurant menus as XML feeds and spreadsheet uploads directly from restaurants (similar to the methodology used to upload product listings to Froogle.) This task will be fairly easy for restaurants, especially ones with websites that show their menus already. In addition to restaurant submitted menus it would be interesting to see if some kind of restaurant website crawler could accurately compile menus.

2. Chowgle will use a ranking algorithm, "FoodRank", to rank search results. Similar to Google the public won't be privy to the details of how FoodRank works but some kind of combination of user submitted reviews, food blog reviews (e.g. Burrito Blog), Zagat ratings etc...

3. Chowgle will of course will use contextual search and suggestions (Ajax) like Google search.

I proposed this idea to Google as a business venture last week. As of March 13th I haven't heard back. I'm guessing I'll hear back any day now!

Innovation Updates

It's been a while since my last post. What have I been up to the past few weeks? I took a week off and instead of working on MyVoteforPrez.com like I hoped to I decided to be lazy. I've been working on a few small projects though. One of them is ZlataPR.com. This is a domain I bought for Zlata a few months ago. She'd eventually like to have a site like TMZ or Perez Hilton which act as sources for entertainment news and gossip. I decided to use the Google AJAX Search API to display recent news articles and videos for Zlata's Hot Topics. For now the site only displays links to other sites and news sources. The search APIs are really easy to use and can be configured without too much knowledge of JavaScript or AJAX which is nice for beginners. I downloaded the Google Web Toolkit today and played around a little bit. I'd love to develop some cool widgets with it when I have some time...need to refresh my Java skills now!