USAToday.com Gets Enhancements?

USAToday.com announced this week its new redesign to enhance the "community" user experience. With bigger photos, exclusives and blogs and user contributed comments, member personal space/blogs/avatars, tagging and search functionality. It's a great idea and a step in the right direction but there are kinks to be worked out including delayed rollovers and ads flying everywhere that make this seem more tabloid. One thing that is very evident is drawing readers to the print edition. I still prefer to get my fingers dirty even though my generation loves online content.

Here's what Forrester's Charlene Li has to say. It also links to what Steve Rubel's and Michael Arrington's take.

Search 2.0: Reverse Engineering

Over the past year, I’ve read about and been exposed to Google and quite a few enterprise search, business intelligence, taxonomies and ontology offerings (and ed cals). Now the overall goal is how to use information you already have more efficiently and in a more organized fashion to deliver better results for your company, partners, customers...etc. But today in the Wall Street Journal, Kevin Delaney wrote how some businesses aren’t looking at which keywords in searches to utilize but rather what keywords are being punched in to determine what products and services to sell. Imagine that? Giving people what they want! This is done doing my favorite activity, "reverse engineering."

This is definitely a good read and has about half a dozen useful links including:

Microsoft service for historical search volumes with breakdowns by age and gender: http://adlab.microsoft.com/ForecastV2/KeywordTrendsWeb.aspx

I could list it all out but I don’t want to steal Kevin’s thunder. If you have today’s paper, check out page B3. I can’t link to it online without a subscription but if you want to pay for it, go to WSJ.com, type in “search” into the search field.