First up was AllTop. Described by its creators as an “online magazine rack” of popular topics. I would describe it as a melange between Google and RRS – RRSoogle if you will. Just type something into the search engine, Sony PSP Go for instance, and then pick the category (eg Games). What come up are a list of relevant websites to that topic and their top five headlines. In their own words Alltop “collects the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic”.

Alltop’s pretty handy if you just want a quick overview of what’s going on in a specific category, in my case, the technology world (or my other passion – Italian football). It’s updated every hour, so the news is pretty fresh, and you can even “recommend” adding sites to the Alltop feed.

Another interesting site I stumbled across was TinEye – a reverse image search engine. Now, that might sound ridiculous. It did to me. My first reaction was: “Who has any use for a reverse image search engine? Come to think of it, what is a reverse image search engine?” But it’s actually quite inventive. TinEye works when you give it a URL location of an image, or upload an image of our own (like the Republic logo, for instance). Then the site goes to work, finding all examples of use for that particular image. The benefit of all this is that it gives you a great snapshot of how your brand is being remade and used across the internet.

TinEye is still in beta mode, and only has access to just over a billion images, but it’s the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. And the general consensus on the web is that it could be a big step in image search.

It even works on your iPhone and has a function called TinEye Music, which finds out more about an album simply by taking a photo of it. Photograph any album cover and TinEye’s image identification system will recognize it and give you links for that album on iTunes, allmusic, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Pretty clever stuff if you ask me.

So, there you have it: Alltop and TinEye. Two ridiculously named search sites that are ridiculously useful. We’re off to search for more interesting sites. And before you say it, it’s not that sort of interesting!

One of the best ways to do this for a brand, is to step inside the business and bring it to the outside. This happens day in and day out on Nokia Conversations, which works tirelessly to bring the myriad untold stories to the people who want to read them. This not only helps break down the barrier between a brand and its customers, but gives us as editors something to write about when typically there might not be. It also gives users a reason and an excuse to visit a brand’s website more regularly. And Google loves this.

We hear all the time about Search Engine Optimisation (Snake Oil) but with little real understanding of what it means. To us, it means simply having something worth searching for. For that, it must be both interesting and relevant. Typically, that which is either interesting or relevant is also previously untold. New. In other words. The days are long gone when you could create a site, stuff it full of “optimised” “content” and hope for the best. Today, a site needs to be living and breathing, updated daily, continually developing and evolving and backed up by a solid editorial strategy. The best way for a brand to do this? Open up. Tell the stories that don’t normally get told. Allow the outside in, and crucially, allow the inside to venture out.

See, Google (the search engine, not the company) likes it when sites are updated regularly, when they offer something new or previously untold. Those same tales will initially be read by the very interested few. Quite quickly some of them will write about them elsewhere (linking back to the original in the process) and the few will turn into a few more, when the whole process will start again and ultimately, the few more turn into many. All the whilst Google (the search engine, not the company) loves it even more as the more links pointing to the same story, the higher up the results page the story will go.

It can’t be faked, it must be real, genuine, interesting and engaging. To do that, brands need to get comfortable with the concept of opening up and telling those stories they wouldn’t previously consider telling, in an environment where people aren’t just welcome but actively encouraged to share, comment and react. It’s the very antithesis of the traditional closed corporate mindset. Sure, brands could put any old stuff up on their site and hope for people to come. But if people aren’t searching for it, they won’t find it. Telling quality stories, that reveal something more about a brand, in an open and honest way is a great way to be found.

And that’s how Google is changing corporate culture.

For those who didn’t know, Wikia Search was an attempt to bring Wikipedia’s user contribution model to a search engine. Results could be rated, inserted and edited: a nice idea, but not popular: it was getting just 10,000 unique users per month. So slightly less than Google, then.

Wales said Wikia Search was shuttered due to the economy, but I suspect the problem lies deeper than that. The difference between Wikia Search and any big social network is that search is simply about getting to the page you need, fast, and you’re not going to beat Google for speed. But you’re on Facebook because you want to be there: anywhere that your friends take you from there with Publisher links is a bonus.

A social media enabled search presents all sorts of problems: not least that self-editing could be even more abused. Is there a way to offer speed and convenience combined with the peer review nature of search? Google’s SearchWiki is halfway there, letting you rank your own results, but it’s not shared. We’re not sure there’s a better solution yet but we’ll be using it when we find it.