So what does that actually mean? The site presents a montage of images, video, animations and other visual resources culled from search results, and overlays it with real-time narration, using text-to-speech technology. The result is information as a watchable experience.

For me, the actual experience of watching the content is eerie and unsettling. I’ve never liked the way text-to-speech technology sounds; it’s strange and unnerving to my ears and brain, sounding almost, but not quite, human in a way that could mean trouble, like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

My first search was for “Tok,” the rural Alaskan community where I live and work. The text-to-speech voice sounded nearly human, but with mispronunciations and odd inflections that are inherent in the technology. Qwiki pronounced my community as “Tawk” rather than the correct pronunciation, “Toke.” Right away, this interfered with my ability to appreciate the visual montage.

The audio was accompanied by a flowing stream of imagery that seemed at first to correspond with the narration. But on closer examination, many images had nothing to do with what was being said, other than being from Tok. For example, when the narration mentioned Tok School, the images that appeared were of a gift shop and an RV park. Another image of a burned-out old gas station showed up, and I immediately wondered how I could remove such a photo, and replace it with something more representative of the community. Ditto for an image of a coffee shack that isn’t even in Tok, but is over 200 miles away, near the community of Glennallen.

My second search was for “karaoke.” I found the experience of this information less off-putting. However, the images in the presentation, while colorful and interesting, seemed less familiar. Many turned out to be of displays and equipment common in Japan.

My third search was for “social media.” The narration was a bit convoluted and the visual presentation consisted of a single static screenshot of Flickr.

My final test search was for…me. Here’s what I found (login required). And here’s what it looked like–apparently I have one of the dirtiest minds in business–or at least that’s what was displayed during the entire presentation!

Qwiki may give us a new phrase to replace “Googling ourselves.” We can now “get a Qwiki” and “give a Qwiki.”

Currently, Qwiki covers over two million reference terms, which feels sufficient for pretty good results when searching for a not-too-uncommon term. You can also search for people and places.

For me, the visual and audio dissonance of Qwiki was initially disturbing, but I tried to look past that and appreciate that I was “experiencing information.” Presentations are short–about 30 seconds–which is just enough time for narrative content from a paragraph or two from a Wikipedia entry.

Conceptually, Qwiki is a fascinating step forward in the presentation and consumption of search results. Since the site is in its alpha phase, it’s available only by invitation, although you can request one at Qwiki’s website. You’ll probably start itching to fix what isn’t working, but Qwiki doesn’t yet have a Wikipedia-like system for collaborating on editing information. However, the company is very open to input on ways to improve the experience.

Give Qwiki a try, and let me know what you think of it. What implications do you think it will have for the future of search?

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Semantifi was one of the cooler companies I saw at the DEMO Conference this week. You can use the company’s SEC filing search app query “Best Buy Amazon sales last 2 years” and within seconds, you get a table comparing quarterly sales data for each company, as well as an automatically formatted graph (pictured below).

Stamford, Conn.-based Semantifi wants to provide access to structured datasets by enlisting people to “unlock the deep web” and use its web-based tools to create search apps. What Semantifi means by an app is a dataset that has been imported by a user, with the user teaching the system which cells are categories and a little bit about how they relate to each other. Semantifi has seeded its site with search apps to better access government and financial data.

Semantifi, which has raised $3.5 million in funding, is trying to enlist users to organize data, but it’s also striking partnerships with publishers; for example, Zacks Investment Research is helping create apps to query financial data. Publishers can turn their content and data into a platform and choose to only allow paying subscribers to access their apps.

How might a regular user to participate? CTO Vishy Dasari showed me how to create an app from Amazon product data (taken from a chart provided to affiliate partners) to answer queries like “silver digital camera under $400.” If that’s the question you’re looking to get answered, it would take you many clicks within Amazon’s own site search and results pages.

Meanwhile, FindTheBest‘s (FTB) first notable feature may be its founder and CEO, Kevin O’Connor, who also co-founded the ad network DoubleClick, and is now returning to entrepreneurship after a 10-year hiatus. “On the Internet, you can find any piece of information, but when you actually want to compare things and make a decision it’s very difficult,” said O’Connor in a telephone interview. His Santa Barbara, Calif.-based, bootstrapped company wants to help users make comparisons by giving them detailed charts made by its in-house researchers and contract workers.

FTB determines what new topics to tackle by looking at search data. That part sounds a bit like Demand Media, but rather than articles or videos, the company creates living databases that look a lot like a Kayak search results page — big chart in the middle of the page, sliders on the left to tweak what the chart is showing, and options to dive deeper and compare a few top items.

The company has created comparison apps to evaluate the best ski resorts based on things like snowfall and personal preferences for terrain difficulty. There are also some more unexpected examples within the 400 created so far, like a comparison app to find the best California medical marijuana dispensaries. O’Connor pointed to another app for kidney dialysis centers, created after the company determined that 200,000 people per month are actively searching for the term. Our readers might be interested in an app that compares 400 technology company acquisitions.

FTB stands out for how manually it’s created. If the hope for the so-called “semantic web” is to think more like a human, we should stop trying to conjure magic software and hire some people. The company has 15 full-time employees, eight interns and 20 outsourced workers between its research and product teams, O’Connor said. Any user can edit an app, but the change has to be approved by FTB editors.

Since new search destinations almost never gain market share, it will be important for both these companies to bring users in through searches on Google and elsewhere. They’re both actively working on search engine optimization. If you search Bing for “housing starts unemployed last 60 months,” a Semantifi page is one of the top results. O’Connor said FTB is focused on attracting searchers for long-tail queries, then exposing them to a broader range of comparison information than they might have known was available.

These aren’t the only companies focused on helping people create web databases. I recently wrote about Needlebase, a fascinating side project of the travel company ITA that Google just acquired, and Google also just bought Metaweb and its open database Freebase. Other competitors include Wolfram Alpha, Socrata and Factual.

These startups answer Tim Berners-Lee’s call to turn “raw data” into “linked data.” He made a passionate plea at TED last year to bring data online in order to mash it up “for multidisciplinary purposes, like combining genomics data and protein data to try to cure Alzheimer’s.” Having what you’re doing blessed by the creator of the web is a pretty good start.

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Microsoft is still a distant second place compared with Google, which accounted for 65 percent of all searches. Even if Microsoft’s Bing-powered search and Yahoo’s search results are combined, the two still only account for about 26 percent of search volume, according to Nielsen. However, Microsoft’s share of search has been climbing over the past year: The survey showed its traffic has increased by more than three percentage points — a relative increase of 30 percent — while Google’s has stayed relatively stable. Meanwhile, AOL and Ask.com have a minuscule two percent of the search market.

Nielsen’s data is somewhat different from some of the other measurement firms that track search traffic, such as comScore and ad-serving firm Chitika (which said that according to its numbers, Bing passed Yahoo earlier this year), because Nielsen measures only what it calls “genuine intentional searches” — in other words, what people type into a search box — rather than “contextual” searches that are automatically generated by search engines based on a person’s browsing behavior.

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Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Woodley Wonderworks

For companies that offer information or communications services and are looking to implement feeds as UIs, here are a few additional features to offer to users, to add value to raw, time-based feeds:

• Aggregation. This isn’t new, but Twitter clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic allow users to pull in multiple feeds from micro-blogging tools or status updates, and to post to multiple destinations. Box, meanwhile, gathers information from Salesforce.com and NetSuite into its feed. Seesmic just re-implemented its desktop client to accommodate plug-ins for other feeds or functions, e.g., local information from Foursquare, and is also building out a marketplace for such plug-ins. There’s opportunity in promoting and pre-packaging collections of feeds to give users different views of information.
• Filtering. Facebook prioritizes the default view of its news feed via the user’s prior behavior and the network activity around items, among other things in its algorithmic secret sauce. Trending topics is a popular device for exposing users to information that might come from outside their network. Ceding active control of filtering, sorting and searching to the user is also powerful: That’s what made TweetDeck the choice of Twitter power users.
• Other utilities. Third-party Twitter clients have succeeded by adding usefulness and efficiency to Twitter’s feeds. Twitter’s search was ineffective, and it didn’t originally integrate URL-shortening. In the spirit of Tufte, I’d suggest there’s opportunity in offering features that better present quantitative and qualitative information atop feeds. Color-coding or bolding feed items based on popularity or importance would be simple, but there’s probably something like TheBrain that would illustrate relationships between items better than a threaded conversation does.

Read the full post here.

Turns out that Google might consider a similar approach says OStatic. The search giant isn’t ruling out deals with OEMs to get Google’s Chrome browser pre-installed on computers, and knowing how Google has worked in the past, they’d likely pay a pretty penny for the privilege. As it stands today, around 88% of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google payments that ensure Google is the default browser search engine in Firefox. Google can afford to make those payments because the cost is offset, and possibly exceeded, by the advertising revenues created in this situation.

On a related note: I just checked our last 30-day history of browsers used to view the site. I suspected they would have fallen off dramatically and be around 1%. Surprise, surprise: Chrome was used for 4.78% of all visits here in the last month, even more than Opera. Maybe Google should hold off on spending money to spread Chrome?

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