Google Co-op & SmugMug - help needed

onethumb

So Google announced Co-Op the other day and I started playing with it. We have a very basic integration up and running, and I'd like to get anyone here who can test and provide feedback involved.

Here's how:

- Login or create a free Google account.

- Subscribe to my profile.

- Go do some Google searches.

Currently the following searches should work:

[word] photos (ex: 'paris photos')
photos of [word]
photos from [word]
find photos of [word]
find photos from [word]


Their functionality is frustratingly limited at this time, but tantalizingly powerful when you think about what this could become. I'd love to hear some ideas on what you'd like to see from integration like this and what would be useful.

I'm thinking we may generate custom queries for Google based on the most popular search terms at smugmug for a given day, so you can see exactly how many photos of some world event are at SmugMug, for example.

I'm also playing around with some Google Maps-related queries, which could be interesting.

Anyway, please do let me know if this is at all useful, what more you'd like to see, etc, so I can relay it to my friends at Google.

Don

rainforest1155

The whole co-op thing doesn't seem to work for me - when I launch a search for:
photos from wittenberg

I get the same results as when I launch an ordinary google search (url in address bar doesn't contain any special parameters).
Same thing for the examples on the google co-op page.

I'm on IE6.

Does this work for anyone except Don?

Sebastian

onethumb

onethumb wrote:

So Google announced Co-Op the other day and I started playing with it. We have a very basic integration up and running, and I'd like to get anyone here who can test and provide feedback involved.

Here's how:

- Login or create a free Google account.

- Subscribe to my profile.

- Go do some Google searches.

Currently the following searches should work:

[word] photos (ex: 'paris photos')
photos of [word]
photos from [word]
find photos of [word]
find photos from [word]


Their functionality is frustratingly limited at this time, but tantalizingly powerful when you think about what this could become. I'd love to hear some ideas on what you'd like to see from integration like this and what would be useful.

I'm thinking we may generate custom queries for Google based on the most popular search terms at smugmug for a given day, so you can see exactly how many photos of some world event are at SmugMug, for example.

I'm also playing around with some Google Maps-related queries, which could be interesting.

Anyway, please do let me know if this is at all useful, what more you'd like to see, etc, so I can relay it to my friends at Google.

Don

Now try "photos near [US City]" and see what you think.

Don

onethumb

rainforest1155 wrote:

The whole co-op thing doesn't seem to work for me - when I launch a search for:
photos from wittenberg

I get the same results as when I launch an ordinary google search (url in address bar doesn't contain any special parameters).
Same thing for the examples on the google co-op page.

I'm on IE6.

Does this work for anyone except Don?

Sebastian

That search doesn't seem to work for me either, possibly a Google bug.

Try 'photos of wittenberg' though.

Don

rainforest1155

Looks like it doesn't work with IE6, but only with FF.
Still you haven't labeled anything on smugmug.com so we can't actually use the co-op with smugmug yet. I believe you have to do something like they've done here - attach labels to specific sites of SM.

Haven't really a clue how this all is supposed to work, but I guess we'll figure it out eventually.

Sebastian

rainforest1155

onethumb wrote:

That search doesn't seem to work for me either, possibly a Google bug.

Try 'photos of wittenberg' though.

Don

Cool, now I begin to understand how this works - it shows up as the first hit.

rainforest1155

onethumb wrote:

Now try "photos near [US City]" and see what you think.

Don

Excellent! Why's that limited to the US as google maps now has all the relevant data for Europe?

Sebastian

rainforest1155

rainforest1155 wrote:

Looks like it doesn't work with IE6, but only with FF.

Works with IE6, too. The problem is that the 'photos from [city]' doesn't work at all.
'from' and 'near' work though.

Sebastian

by the way: sorry for the quadruple post.

Mike Lane

So this is basically google's version of delicious then?

cmason

hmmm, I dont see any difference btw regular google and this? I don't see any references to onethumb?

Mike Lane

cmason wrote:

hmmm, I dont see any difference btw regular google and this? I don't see any references to onethumb?

Once I am subscribed to OT's thing on google, I get search results with a green background when I search for certain things on google. That's the main difference that I see right off the bat.

rainforest1155

cmason wrote:

hmmm, I dont see any difference btw regular google and this? I don't see any references to onethumb?

If yours is setup correct, the resultpage should look like this:

Mike Lane

rainforest1155 wrote:

If yours is setup correct, the resultpage should look like this:

Hey, how do you get the web, images, news, groups, froogle thing with the green bars on the side there?

docwalker

This is really cool. I found 2 fellow photogs in my neck of the woods on the map.

rainforest1155

Mike Lane wrote:

Hey, how do you get the web, images, news, groups, froogle thing with the green bars on the side there?

I knew I should have cropped that part out. That's how the new google result is supposed to look. Someone posted a javascript hack that sets the appropiate cookie getting you 'in' the betatest. Maybe I can dig the blog up again.

Sebastian

EDIT: Here it is - the cool thing about it the header becomes really small leaving more space for the results.

onethumb

So are things like this useful? Would you like to see SmugMug linked results as you browse and search on Google? Or would you not bother to subscribe or stay subscribed?

Is it working for everyone?

Are there specific queries or destination pages you'd like to see?

Don

rainforest1155

onethumb wrote:

So are things like this useful? Would you like to see SmugMug linked results as you browse and search on Google? Or would you not bother to subscribe or stay subscribed?

Is it working for everyone?

Are there specific queries or destination pages you'd like to see?

Apart that it doesn't work for me anymore in IE it bothers me that I have to sign-in to my google account - I never do that for searching on google and being permantely signed in doesn't work, because of my two accounts.
It's use is very limited because of this - but if you could make a deal with google so it works global without having to be logged in I'm all for it.

Of course the keyword then would be 'smugmug' instead 'photos', because I don't think that google would take sides in the photosharing business by connecting 'photos of' with smugmug only.

'smugmug of' and 'smugmug near' (non-US cities should work too) sounds a bit strange in the beginning, but I think I can get used to it.
additional idea:
'smugmug by' - searching for a user

Anything else?

Sebastian

asd

This is a really neat and powerful feature, but the need to be logged into Google will probably make it a lot harder to gain traction. I and several of my friends stay logged in all day (GMail) when we're at work or home, but I know plenty of people who do not and wouldn't be able to use this (or wouldn't care enough to create an account and then leave log in).

Still, I can see some very cool things that could be done with this, both for global smugmug feeds and invidivual per-user feeds (though this might be harder since users would have to take some link that's generated for them by smugmug and start their own content feed on google co-op).

- Search for photos _of_ people/things/places (keywords help..bonus if you can use geodata to infer if a shot is in a city even if it's not keyworded as such...)
- Search for photos _near/in_ places (like above)

For each of these, give more information with the link (the 70000000 text right now is neat but never changes), such as:
- the number of photos satisfying the query
- the number of albums satisfying the query through album keywords
- the number of users who have photos satisfying the query (or maybe provide a link to a random user's homepage - useful only if google frequently refreshes their copy of your xml data).

A search for "photos of san francisco" might give a result like this (ditto for "photos near san francisco" and "photos in san francisco"):

See 1,032,421 photos of "san francisco"
For "san francisco", Smugmug users have: 1,032,421 photos and 2,322 albums
There are 235 mapped photos (map them)
Random user John has 12 photos (see them)
www.smugmug.com/search/?searchType=Image&source=GC2&searchWords=san+francisco

A search for "photos of dogs" might give a similar result, except with the mapped photos link gone.


But this looks like a lot of work to me and I don't know how many people would use it. I'll be interested to see what, if anything, you do!