Urbanspoon is a new vertical search engine for restaurant info and reviews, which, thanks to an external API, has now been integrated with Berry411 search results. 

I’m a big fan of Urbanspoon, and not just because it was started by my friends and former coworkers Adam Doppelt and Ethan Lowry. Urbanspoon collects the key information and links to all of the reviews for a restaurant in a single page, and allows users to easily vote on and share their favorites.  (It’s currently Seattle only, but additional cities are planned.)

Adam and Ethan really get the importance of mobile access to entertainment info and have already built mobile versions of Urbanspoon pages. The site’s REST api allows Urbanspoon content and links to be integrated with Berry411 yellow page search results.  If you’re in the Seattle area and use Berry411, try searching for your favorite restaurants– thousands of restaurants are in their database already and automatically integrated.

Below are a few screenshots to give you a flavor of how it works; I’m excited about the potential of this sort of integration. 

I’ve designed the backend to also allow other kinds of external info to be mixed in with yellow pages, so if you have any good idea of sources of content please share them with me.

Here’s a nifty trick for real-time 3D in Javascript, via Grant Rodgers.  The solution uses only Javascript, DOM, and CSS.

Windows Desktop Search 3.0 is now available for free download.  For full integration with Outlook, also install the Windows Live Toobar, which will take advantage of WDS 3.0 if you’ve got it.

Windows Desktop Top Search is the same indexing and search technology using in Windows Vista and Office 2007. It allows you to find any document or message on your computer literally as fast as you can type. 

Compared with Google Desktop Search, WDS is better integrated with the Explorer and Outlook and has higher quality previews. 

Windows Desktop search takes of the Windows Find File dialog (with the shortcut key Windows-F) and also fully integrates with Outlook, displaying it’s search result lists and previews direclty inside the Outlook WIndow, as seen in the screenshot below.

A former CIA agent claims that Google and the CIA have cooperated.  

Whether this claim is true or not, the centralized trove of information maintained by Google is certain an attractive target to mine, even more so than the call log and phone monitoring that we know is going on. Seems like a bright NSA analyst wouldn’t have a tough time getting a job and becoming an inside man at Google even if Google wasn’t a willing participant.

Windows established a software monoculture which represented an attractive target for virus writers. Google is establishing an information monoculture which likewise represents an attractive target for subpoenas and other slippier forms of monitoring.  I’m not saying all such monitoring is a bad thing, but I think we ought to be honest about what what is happening and the tradeoffs we’re making with respect to civil liberties. 

Continuing the analogy, just as the Open Source movement was a reaction to Windows, I’m wondering whether there might arise an “Open Data” movement in reaction to the commercialized accumulation of private data.   Will search engine infrastructure become enough of a commodity that users would migrate from Google in exchange for less advertising  and greater control over their search history?

Search engines like Google lock up end users clickstreams where they can be mined by anyone the search engine chooses, but not by end users themselves. At best, there are walled garden user experiences to get at your search history, but no way to export this data to other services or limit access to it.