Kozlen Communications

I stumbled across an interesting piece of information today about a neat trick for Google image search. If you add &imgtype=face to the end of your search your results will only be of people. It makes me wonder if, eventually, you’ll be able to upload a picture of someone and Google will do an image search to find all photos of that person. Sounds a little creepy, doesn’t it.

In an effort to take down YouTube, NBC Universal and News Corp. (who owns Fox) are teaming up to create its own online video site. Today the partnership announced that Oxygen, Fuel TV, Speed Channel, Sundance Channel ,and the TV Guide Channel are the latest content providers to sign distribution deals with the video joint-venture – expected to debut this summer. The still-unnamed site has inked content pacts with almost 20 networks and TV and movie studios so far.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced that Apple TV, the company’s new set top box that brings iTunes entertainment to television sets, will begin carrying clips from YouTube. The addition of YouTube’s content could help sell more units, but will also like add fuel to the fire in Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube.

Mahalo, a new search company, is hoping to take down Google, putting men up against machines. While Google uses its computers and finely tuned algorithms to index the world’s Websites, Mahalo hopes to use humans to find the best results for the Web’s most common searches.

Mahalo – which means “thank you” in Hawaiian – has already put together results for more than 4,000 search terms they believe people search on the most. They hope to complete 10,000 by the end of the year – well short of the billions of queries Google receives each day. Ask.com tried using hundreds of editors to compile results, but abandoned the approach a few years ago citing the use of computers was quicker and easier. However, as Search Engine Marketers figure out how to manipulate computerized search results, the company believes the integrity of their results will bring searchers, and eventually, a piece of the $6.8 billion U.S. search market.