Google announced that the Google app now lets you tap the mic and say, “Show me my bills” or “My bills due this week” to get access to important billing information.
When you can’t remember whether you’ve paid your bills—or you simply can’t remember how much money you need to pay—you can now just ask Google. Tap the mic on the Google app (g.co/googleapp) and say, “Show me my bills” or “My bills due this week.” If you have the payment due date and amount in your Gmail, you’ll see a quick summary of upcoming and past bills. Pretty handy, huh?
As others have pointed out, Google has rebranded the Google Search app as the Google app, which is more fitting, considering all the things it does these days. Google Now gives users notifications on a personalized basis, which don’t necessarily have to do with search.
Apple has reportedly purchased Cue, the company formerly known as Greplin, in a bid to compete with Google Now on personalized search.
TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis says she’s confirmed with “a person who should know” that the acquisition occurred, and that the price was between $40 million and $60 million.
Greplin was intriguing in the early days of personalized search, as it let you search across Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. in a way that Google simply couldn’t do. It would give you personalized stuff from your own accounts.
Google has since introduced a lot of features that made it better at personalization, including Google Now and Gmail/Google Drive results from web search.
Greplin eventually rebranded to Cue last year, and added some new functionality.
Apparently Apple, looking for more ways to compete with Google, liked what it saw and snatched up the company. Apple has been giving out its canned statement it always gives for acquisition news: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
Google has been getting more personalized little by little for years now, but it’s happening much more rapidly these days, and not only is it getting more personalized, it’s getting more conversational, in the sense that it’s just telling you what you want to know (or at least trying to) without having to point you to third-party sites quite so much.
This presents both pros and cons for businesses, but which there are more of is debatable. What do you think? Is the direction Google is moving in better or worse for businesses? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Google is adding some new Google Now-like functionality to Google Search. Users will be able to ask Google for specific, personal information, and the search engine will retrieve it from across the various services the user uses, like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google+.
“Ever had trouble checking your flight’s status on the go because it meant digging through your email for the flight number?” asks product manager Roy Livne. “Or wanted to just quickly see whether your package would arrive on time, without having to look up the tracking info first? You’ve told us it would be much easier if you could skip the fuss and just ask Google.”
Users will be able to ask Google for information on flights, reservations, purchases, plans and photos, and get them right from the search interface. You can ask Google if your flight as time, or say “my reservations” or my hotel” to get info on your plans, including hotel/restaurant names and addresses.
“With one tap, you can get driving or public transit directions straight there, saving you lots of steps,” Livne notes.
You can say, “my purchases” and see the status of current orders, or ask “What are my plans for tomorrow?” to see upcoming flights, hotels, restaurant reservations, events, etc.
You can also say something like “show me my photos from Thailand” to see photos from your Google+ account, which will be all the more useful if you’ve enabled instant upload. It will even recognize something like “my photos of sunsets”.
Google actually added this kind of personalized photo search back in May.
The new stuff will be rolling out to all U.S. users in English on the desktop, tablet and smartphones, with Voice Search.
This all expands on the conversational search features Google launched a few months ago, but it’s also a just part of an ongoing trend we’ve seen with Google over the last couple years.
The search engine (originally designed to surface content from across the web) is continually becoming more of a personal assistant. Google has been personalizing results to some extent for years, but the company really started pushing personalization with “Search Plus Your World” launched early last year. As we recently reported, by the way, Google is no longer labeling the personalized results the way it used to.
Other personalization efforts have come in the forms of the field trial that let users opt in to include content from Gmail, Calendar, and Drive in their search results, and Google Now, which utilizes your personal information from across Google services and presents it to your when it thinks it might be of use.
Again, more personal assistant than search engine.
But Google Now, when it came out, was somewhat separate from search. Google appears to be doing everything it can these days to keep you in the Google universe, rather than truly searching the web. Searching the web (organic search) is almost a secondary thing at this point. Just an added service that Google provides when it doesn’t really know what you’re looking for.
The good news about all of this personalization and “quick answers” from the business perspective is that businesses have new avenues to get in front of users in Google search that basically sidestep past SEO strategies. With Google integrating Gmail into search, for example, businesses may be able to get emailed information in front of users when they’re simply searching. There’s no reason not to assume that Google won’t continue to expand on these features.
It’s already getting harder to get in front of Gmail users thanks to Google’s recent Gmail redesign, and additional integration into search could be a blessing in disguise. Search ads have always been attractive to businesses because they get messages in front of users right when they’re searching for that particular need. Increased Gmail integration into Google search could provide a similar effect for email marketing messages. Of course, this really comes down to Google’s implementation.
Activity on Google+ is also more likely to find its way into search. You get the idea.
The point is that the more Google integrates its various services into search, the more businesses will be able to get out of these services. Rather than trying to outrank competitors with SEO tactics, businesses could end up better off by simply being better at working the greater Google universe. As Google continues to integrate its various offerings in different ways, businesses should also look to integrate these offerings into their strategies.
Do you see Google’s increased focus on personalization and direct answer-providing as a positive evolution for businesses or is it just going to make things harder? Tell us what you think.
It appears that at some point, Google stopped labeling personalized search results based on its “Search Plus Your World” feature.
Are you still seeing personal results labeled as such? Have you noticed the disappearance? Let us know in the comments.
Google launched Search Plus Your World back in January of 2012. The reaction from users was mixed.You can toggle the feature on and off with these buttons:
In the past, since launching the feature, Google has shown the little person icon next to the results that were included as a result of it – the personalized results that others don’t see. Now, Google is not showing these icons to indicate personalization on these results.
You can see in the video how they were labeled:
Here’s Google’s page about the Search Plus Your World feature as it currently stands on the company’s Inside Search site. You can see the icons in the example images.
Now, no icons.
Here’s an example of a generic search for “game” with personalization turned on. I’ve highlighted the obviously personalized results, which are based on Google+ connections.
Here’s the same search with personalization turned off:
It’s also worth noting that Google is showing me a Google Play link with personalization turned on (at the bottom), which doesn’t appear with it turned off. Perhaps this is because I have an Android device. Also, Google is showing an ad the top on the non-personalized results that isn’t present on the personalized results.
As seen in the video, the mouseover text for the personalization icon at the top used to say, “Show personal results.” Now, the text says, “Show all results,” when it’s turned off, and “Currently showing private results” when it’s turned on.
I’m not sure how long ago Google stopped showing the icons. I don’t know if I’m the first to point this out or not. I didn’t see any mentions of it, but please feel free to let us know if you’ve noticed this in the past. If this isn’t news, and I somehow missed it when it was, I apologize, but searching Google is giving me no indication that it’s been a topic of discussion, so if that’s the case, perhaps Google burying this is a story in and of itself.
It’s unclear at this point if Google has stopped labeling these results for all users, or if it is just testing the lack of labels, but I had multiple people test it, and none of them were seeing the labels. We’ve reached out to Google for comment, and they don’t appear to be interested in responding. We’ll update if that changes.
For Google, which often talks about being more transparent, this seems like a bit of a reduction in transparency. Kind of like when they decided to stop putting out those monthly lists of algorithm changes or “search quality highlights” a while back without saying anything about it.
A Pew report from March of last year found that 65% of those polled view personalized search as bad, and 73% saw it as a violation of privacy. That sounds like the kind of thing that people would want to continue to see clearly labeled at least.
Personalized search service Greplin announced that it has changed its name to Cue, made some adjustments to its functionality, and is now resides at CueUp.com.
“In the last year, we’ve received so much feedback from our users. We’ve learned that you’re busy and you need your technology to work for you, instead of the other way around,” the company said in an email. “Many of you wanted a better way to contact the people you care about, get where you’re going, and stay informed. We’ve used all your input to create Cue. It has all the elements of Greplin that you’ve come to rely on, plus some new features designed so you’ll always be one step ahead.”
It’s quite true that Greplin took some time on the user’s part to make usable. It required users to add services and wait for the service to process all the data needed to become useful, at least in my experience.
Here are a few glimpses of the new service:
Now, Cue is only available as an iPhone app, whereas Greplin was available on as a standalone web product. A web product is on the way, however. No mention of an Android app.
In the email, the company says:
Here’s how Cue will help you know what’s next:
Your email, contacts and calendar become an intelligent snapshot of your day.
Your events are automatically connected to related emails, phone numbers, and addresses.
Get the details you need to change or cancel reservations, check into flights, track the arrival of packages, or text friends that you are running late.
See up-to-date contact info alongside recent communications and the contact’s latest posts on Facebook and Twitter.
It will be interesting to see if Cue can gain more ground in its new form that Greplin was able to. As other popular apps like Instagram and Flipboard have proven, iOS is as good a place to start as any.
Google launched Search Plus Your World earlier this year. Most Google users probably just know it as Google filling their results with a lot more results based on social connections. A lot of users complained about it, but Google appears to consider the whole thing a success (not unlike the Penguin update).
Google Fellow Amit Singhal spoke at SMX London this morning, and talked about the feature, and search personalization in general.
Daniel Waisberg at SMX sister site Search Engine Land liveblogged Singhal’s on-stage discussion with Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman. Singhal indicated that the SPYW is actually increasing search result clicks, and that the filter bubble is not much of an issue. From Waisberg’s liveblog:
Amit says the key motivation behind Search Plus Your World is to have a secured search, it is the first baby step to achieve Google’s dream, and data shows that Google users like the personal results. It also gives the user one click removal from their personalized results. Google is currently analyzing and improving their personalization engine.
Chris mentions that personalization can be narrowing, as it gives people the same results and they do not discover new things. Amit answers that there should be different points of views in any search results, and Google is aware of that and they balance between personalized and non-personalized results.
Danny mentions a Pew research that concluded that people do not want personalization. Amit says “I am a scientist, when I look at researches I look at how the question was asked.” He discussed the specific research, and said that personalization is valuable for Google users. Danny asks: can you tell what percentage of personalized searches are clicked? Amit says people are clicking more than before on searches and it is lifting CTR from search pages. Chris mentions Bing Social efforts and how it is different from Google’s. Amit says: “the key challenge with personalization is that no one can judge a personalized search for someone else.” That’s why Google looks at the data about how users like their results. Search Plus Your World is the same approach as Universal Search, people have to find what they intend to find on their results.
There hasn’t been much indicating that Google will be gaining access to the Facebook and Twitter data anytime soon. The subject was mentioned briefly during the SMX London discussion. Waisberg liveblogs: “Danny mentions the integration Bing did with Twitter and Facebook, and how this might be good for users. Will Google do that in the future? Amit said that their contract with Twitter expired. Google cannot add Twitter and Facebook right now as their information is hidden behind a wall. It has been tough to build an integration in this terms.”
The good news is that at least Twitter and Google are talking frequently. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was recently quoted as saying, “We continue to talk to Google frequently and on an ongoing basis. They are a company that’s doing several different things right now. Those conversations have a complexity to them that is different than our conversations with the company.”
Some people like personalized search results based on their social connections. Some don’t. Google thrust Search Plus Your World upon users earlier this year, to mixed reviews. While it has an on/off toggle, it has littered search results with more content based on what people you may be connected via various social networks (like Google+ – not Facebook/Twitter) have shared.
Last week, I wrote a post asking if social is really a good signal for relevancy? My conclusion is that while it can help in some kinds of searches, is not necessarily helpful for all kinds. While knowing what hotel in Chicago my friend recommends might be useful to me, knowing which article about Mitt Romney he gave a thumbs up to, isn’t necessarily what I’m looking for.
Google sprinkles in these results, and social signals influence rankings. I’ve written about Wajam’s efforts in personalized/social search more favorably in the past. One thing that is very different about this, that it gives users a designated spot for these kinds of results. You can glance and see if there’s anything interesting there (plus includes Facebook/Twitter connections), but it doesn’t insert them where it thinks they are most relevant throughout the organic search results.
Today, Wajam announced a new version of its social experience for Google.
“Learning from hundreds of thousands of users who made hundreds of millions of searches, we redesigned the whole user experience and packaged it in a convenient, unobtrusive new design that removes clutter from your search results page,” says Wajam’s Alain Wong.
“The new design clearly breaks down number of results, organizing them by links, photos or videos, and lines up specific friends who have commented on the search term you searched,” adds Wong. “This gives you the ability to more easily filter results by specific friends, relevance or time.”
In the past, I’ve not been shy about hiding my dislike for some of Google’s practices. In fact, I’ve called them everything from an arrogant bully to an incestuous circle jerk, trapped in a filter bubble world . But recently I’ve been reading all of the press and counter press about how Google+ is growing faster than the waistline of your average McDonald’s customer along with the incessant blood sucking social media guru’s top ten posts about how to leverage Google+ for everything from attention, mindshare, links, SEO, and Fritos covered with caviar. It’s all a bunch of BS: Google+ is doomed to fail. The only people too blind to see it are the techno-weenies, social media charlatans, or any other clueless half wits who think getting on the homepage of techmeme is a meaningful goal worth achieving.
Let’s get one thing straight: Google is an amazing company. They have built some amazing top of the line products that I love and use by choice daily because they are top of the line (like Google Apps). Other products (like Google buzz and Google wave) suck worse than a Bethany Getting Married weekend marathon on Bravo. But what makes a Google product work and what doesn’t? It’s really quite similar to way things work in the rest of the world. What works is building products that solve problems for CONSUMERS and are things that “normal people” want to use, not products companies want to ram down the throats of normal consumers for the company’s own best interests. The reason Facebook works is because it allows “regular” people to connect and socialize with their friends. The reason people loathe Facebook ads and Facebook pulled their online stores is because it was like trying to sell things to your friends while they were hanging out at the bar. You were the annoying Amway dude that no one wanted to talk to or be around.
So why does Google+ suck despite all the free hippie love from the tech community fan boys? First off the tech community has the attention span of a squirrel on ADD medication. This is the new shiny cat toy of the moment. They all want to play with it. To be honest, they are like political commentators on CNN: they have 24 hours a day to fill with programing (or, in their case, a day’s worth of page view journalism). They will say anything for 15 more seconds of air time time, more attention, or a boost in klout score. You should pretty much ignore 90% of the things that come out of their mouths. Secondly, deep down inside they all want to work for Google. Maybe it’s the peer respect, the pay, the perks, or just maybe it’s the free lunch. Since Google tied all of the Google employee’s benefits to the success of Google’s social network, Google employees are now highly motivated to engage with “the common folk” using all the nifty things on Google+ like video chat. This is all smoke and mirrors to get you to think Google+ is where the cool kids are when they’re really not (its the real world equivalent of paying celebrities to show up at a party). However, if you are a Silicon Valley reporter, talking with a Googler on video chat is the equivalent of a 13 year old girl talking to Justin Bieber. Yea, I went there–but just try and tell me it’s not true.
Aside from the naive delusional tech press, who are little more than puppets on strings at this point, regular people “know without knowing exactly why” that Google is being disingenuous and lying to them. But for now, thanks to SPYW being integrated into Google’s SERPS, if you sell anything on the web, you have to play with social media to remain competitive. However, you should never put all your eggs in one basket, especially one you are going to let Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ carry around for you. You’ll never know when they will decide to change or phase out your mission critical business functions or take your data and keep it to themselves, leaving you to swing from the gallows.
Update: A Google spokesperson tells WebProNews: “Like you wrote up in your article, it’s not new. Search plus Your World builds upon existing search features such as Social Search, personalized search, and authorship. You will continue to see existing Social Search features including +1s and content shared by your connections on Google+ and other sites. We’ll continue to look at your Google+ profile to see other content you’ve published online and linked to your profile.”
He shows a screen cap to back up his claim. It’s not the People and Places box or anything, but it does appear to show a social search result from Twitter, very similar to the recent injection of personalized Google+ connection results.
I’m not sure this is the result of any new offering from Google. They’ve had such social search features long before SPYW. See the “Social Connections and Content” section of your Google dashboard. This is basically the same connections you have listed on your Google Profile. So if you have your Twitter account connected, Google has that information, and can deliver you such results.
It’s not exactly the same as having access to the Firehose, which would blast all tweets into Google’s index in real time.
That said, SPYW has pretty much dominated those personalized search results with Google+ connections since it was announced, though Google made it clear, that it does in fact draw from other open web sources.
Still, Twitter raised a big stink about the whole thing, claiming Google was making Twitter results less visible. Many criticized the lack of non-Google sources in the People and Pages box in particular.
There have been reports of the relationship between Google and Twitter souring. Apparently the companies were supposed to have an Android-related conversation at the Consumer Electronics Show last month, but that didn’t happen, as Google’s SPYW raised the aforementioned stink.
It’s really not clear if this finding from Lurie is the result of any new developments. My guess is not. We’ve reached out to Google for comment, and will update accordingly.
Either way, it does show that Google will still show personalized Twitter results in some cases. That said, given Google’s increased emphasis on freshness, that firehose would be a lot more helpful.
You know those new personalized search feature Google launched last week that everybody’s talking about? It looks like there may be another advantage to using Google+ for search. Apparently Google is showing content quicker in the personalized results than it is for non-logged in users.
It took less than a minute for my latest post to Google+ to show up in logged-in, personalized search results for Google+ users.
And it took just 20 minutes for that Google+ post to be visible to non-logged in users via the main Google search results. I double checked this by using Chrome to do an incognito search.
He shared the following screen captures:
Vic Gundtora, Google’s Senior Vice President, Engineering shared Allen’s post, appearing to lend some increased validity to the findings.
Foursquare announced that it is expanding the “explore” feature that has been available for mobile, to include a web version at foursquare.com/explore. Essentially it’s a way to utilize Foursquare’s huge number of check-ins and personalization based on your own check-ins, to find places you want to go.
“Most real-world searches are one-size fits all,” the company says in a blog post. “You search for pizza, and it gives you the same list of pizza places, whether you like deep dish or thin crust, whether you want a slice or a sit-down meal, or whether your friends would love it or hate it. But not with foursquare Explore, because you and your friends’ check-ins (along with the 1,500,000,000 more from the foursquare community) help us personalize our recommendations for you. Every time you check in, we get better at finding places you’ll like.”
“Finally, because Explore is powered by check-ins and foursquare Tips, it’s not just personalized, it’s specific. Search for ‘pool table,’ or ‘guacamole’; ‘deep dish,’ or ‘thin crust,’” the company adds. “Because not all bars, Mexican restaurants, or pizza joints are created equal, and we want to make sure you find what you’re craving.”
In addition to 1,500,000,000 check-ins, Foursquare says it has tens of millions of tips and over half a million lists.
Foursquare says it is in the process of rolling the feature out, and that it should be live for everyone by the end of the afternoon.
This week, Google launched Search Plus Your World (SPYW), a set of features to personalize search results for users, which also happen to give Google+ content a lot more play in search results. The whole thing has sparked a great deal of controversy, with people talking about antitrust implications, relevancy issues, etc. Even Twitter called the day it launched “a bad day for the Internet”.
The Google vs. Twitter element of this thing has been very interesting to me. In case you haven’t been following, let us recap this public back and forth these two companies have had this week. It started, when after Google announced SPYW, Twitter General Counsel tweeted:
For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.
Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.
We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.
“We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.”
I also found it a bit odd that Twitter would say this now, when really the lack of that aforementioned agreement renewal is what caused Twitter results to be less prevalent in Google search results. Twitter has not returned my request for comment on that at this point, but Macgillivray did tweet an example of where Google is surfacing Google+ over Twitter for the query “@WWE”. I’m not sure this is actually a product of SPYW, though the new features do place a prominent box of recommended Google+ profiles on the right-hand side of the page.
A lot of people view Google’s pushing of Google+ in search results to be anticompetitive. Some disagree.
One point that has been brought up repeatedly is that Google could be recommending public profiles from Twitter and Facebook alongside its Google+ recommendations. Sure, they could.
Facebook and Twitter don’t grant access to Google for all of the stuff that would improve the personalization experience. Danny Sullivan was able to get Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt to talk a little about this:
Google Fellow Amit Singhal, told Sullivan, “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service. Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”
Those are basically the same responses.
Likewise, in a blog post talking about the SPYW features, Google’s Matt Cutts talked about how the features do, in fact, surface content from other sites from the “open web”. It’s not just Google (though that still appears not to apply to the “People and Pages” recommendations box that gets such prominent attention – the feature that really seems to be causing the most stir).
But does Google not have the right to promote its own product in this way? Many don’t think it’s right. It’s worth noting that while Google may dominate in search, it is still an underdog in social. Even still, Google has only something like 65% of the search market.
“Is 65% enough to assert an effective monopoly?” asks Bud Gibson on Google+. “There’s probably plenty of room here for Google to assert that there’s healthy competition in the search and social spaces. And, … they’d be right.”
Matthew Yglesias at Slate writes, “A 65 percent market share in web search is big, but by no means a monopoly. And there are basically zero barriers to switching from Google Search to Bing.”
That plays to Google’s go-to statement of: “The competition is only a click away.”
For that matter, if people are using Google, and are signed into it, there’s a good chance that they want Google-related content. If you consider Google+ and Google search to be features of one larger Google product, than you might want these features to be as integrated as possible. All of Google’s products do operate under one central Google account. You expect Facebook search to return Facebook Pages.
Granted, Facebook isn’t apparently trying to be a search engine, but then why do they bother to supplement their search results with web results from Bing? Clearly Google and Facebook are direct competitors now – maybe not as much in search (yet), but as companies. If you look at things this way, you’d almost have to say that Google even having Google+ at all is anti-competitive. Are they not supposed to make the features of their broader Google product tightly integrated?
By the way, Google does a lot more to drive traffic to Twitter and Facebook than Facebook and Twitter do to drive traffic to Google.
“Given that it’s opt-out, I’m just not sure that this is all that different from Microsoft bundling IE with Windows,” says tech columnist MG Siegler. Based on a lot of what I’ve been reading around the web, quite a few agree with him.
Here are a few recent tweets about the issue:
@DanielBurstein Daniel BursteinWhen Microsoft embedded IE in Windows, there was an antitrust investigation. How is Google+ embedded into @Google search any different?4 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto
Regardless of whether Google’s features are right or wrong, the timing of their release could end up biting Google in the ass, considering the heavy amount of scrutiny over competitive practices that currently surround the company. The complaints continue to pile up, and in various areas of Google’s search offerings.
Is Search Relevancy Being Sacrificed for Google+ Promotion?
Beyond all of the debate about Google’s competitive practices, there is a more important issue, at least to users. The new features may impact relevancy of search results for the worse. I personally have noticed that they could be a lot better, in terms of being personalized for me. Granted, I can turn the personalization off with the controls Google provides.
Some simply don’t like the idea of Google filling up their results with info based on who they know just because they know them, or content from Google+ just because it’s from Google+. Sullivan points to some “real life examples” of where Google isn’t necessarily living up to the relevancy side of things.
As he says, “Those results are supposed to be showing what are the most relevant things for searchers out there. That’s how Google wins. That’s how Google sticks it to competitors, by not trying to play favorites in those results, nor by trying to punish people through them.”
Ironically, if Google’s results become less relevant, people will probably want to use Google less. Perhaps Twitter, Facebook and other “competitors” should be cheering on Google’s approach.
Twitter made it clear that it was not thrilled with Google’s new “Search Plus Your World” set of personalization features very shortly after it was announced.
Twitter General Counsel Alex Macgillivray tweeted:
And the company emailed around a statement saying:
For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.
Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.
We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.
“We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.”
Twitter hasn’t responded to that, exactly (at least to my knowledge), but Macgillivray did tweet on the subject again, this time pointing to a specific example of where Twitter is taking a backseat to Google+ for the query “@WWE”:
In case you can’t see it well, the organic rankings are as follows: Official WWE site, WWE Google+ account and YouTube videos. The screen cap cuts of there, but after that comes WWE on Wikipedia, then WWE on Twitter.
Interestingly, when you hit the toggle button to display the results without Search Plus Your World, it makes no difference. I’m not sure if Twitter was ranking better for this prior to the rollout (my guess is not), but the fact that WWE on Google+ is ranking over WWE on Twitter in organic search seems like a separate issue (anti-competitive or not). Granted, Google+ does get the added boost from the prominent “People and Pages on Google+” section on the right-hand side, which is where much of the controversy lies.
Perhaps another question we should be asking is: does Twitter own the “@” symbol? When you search for @username, yes you are most likely looking for a Twitter account. Google knows this, I’m quite sure. It’s a valid point. But, on the other hand, the symbol has been adopted throughout social media, blog comments and forums simply as a way to address someone specific. Kind of like the hashtag has also been adopted by…Google+.
On Tuesday, Google announced the launch of “Search, Plus Your World,” which is a set of new personalized search features. For a longer explanation, you can read here, but basically, it involves Google suggesting Google+ content and profiles based on what it knows about you from your own Google account. You might see profiles appear in autocomplete suggestions or search results, and there’s a section where you will see suggested Google+ profiles for topical searches. For example, if you search “music” you might see Britney Spears’ Google+ profile in that section.
It didn’t take long at all for critics to cry “antitrust”. Google forcing more of its own properties down users’ throats? Gasp!
Surprisingly, even Twitter spoke out against the features, implying that it would somehow reduce access to tweets. I’m still trying to figure out how it would do so, as nothing about Google’s announcement indicates this would be the case. This would apply more to Twitter and Google failing to reach an agreement over realtime search last year, but for some reason, Twitter chose this announcement to be the time to bring this up.
Google responded to Twitter, by saying: “We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.”
Twitter content does still appear in some search results, by the way.
Google’s Matt Cutts has since taken to his personal blog to write about “Search, Plus Your World”. By the way, “Search plus Your World does surface public content from the open web, not just content from Google+,” he says.
The “open web” would be the web that does not block access to its data, like Twitter and Facebook. As Google Fellow Amit Singhal told Danny Sullivan, “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service. Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”
Cutts shares some examples of content Search Plus Your World returns. It manages to return a picture of Cutts playing “Werewolf” as the first image result for the query “werewolf” (personalized for him of course). It is able to do this, he explains, because his friend tagged him in the picture, which was in an album of “25 Werewolf photos”.
Cutts says the features are able to draw from sites across the web “such as” Flickr, Quora, FriendFeed, LiveJournal and WordPress.
Update: Google has responded to Twitter’s comments via Google+:
“We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.”
Burn.
Add Twitter to the growing list of critics of Google’s practices of delivering search results.
As you may know by now, Google announced some new features for personalized search today. I’m not going to run through all of that again. You can read the rundown here.
Interestingly, Twitter is speaking out against the new changes, which they seem to think will make Twitter content less accessible to users. Twitter General Counsel Alex Macgillivray, calls it a “bad day for the Internet”:
The company has been emailing around a statement, saying:
For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.
Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.
We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.
This is quite interesting. I don’t recall anything in Google’s announcement saying that it would no longer be including results from Twitter.
In fact, this mentality, to me, would have been more appropriate when Google and Twitter were unable to reach a deal to extend Google’s use of the Twitter firehose for realtime search, which I totally agree is a bad thing.
Google used to show tweets rolling in, in real time (or at least close to it) when people searched for timely topics. That is in line with what Twitter is talking about here. It doesn’t do that anymore, and that sucks, but I don’t see why making Google+ content more accessible in Google results is making Twitter results less accessible than they were yesterday.
Perhaps Twitter knows something that the rest of us don’t.
Granted, Google has said all along that it would look to use Google+ in the future to bring back realtime search.
Actually, Google Fellow Amit Singhal (who announced the changes) is quoted as saying:
“Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service. Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”
In other words, if Google was granted access to the Twitter and Facebook data it needs to put that content into the results, it would probably do so – at least that appears to be Google’s position on things.
Google just announced some new elements it is bringing to Google Search: personal results, profiles in search, and people and pages. They’re billing the changes collectively as “Search, Plus Your World”.
Now, Google has been doing personalized search to some extent for quite a while. Likewise, profiles have appeared in search results for quite some time. The new features are different in that the personal results will let users find info specifically for them. This may include Google+ photos and posts of their own and things that have been shared with them. Profiles will appear in both autocomplete and results. The “people and pages” feature comes in to enable users to find people profiles and Google+ pages related to topic areas of interest, and make it easy for users to follow these people.
“Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more,” says Google Fellow Amit Singhal. “But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.”
Here’s a video Google put together showcasing the “search, plus your world” concept:
“As a child, my favorite fruit was Chikoo, which is exceptionally sweet and tasty,” says Singhal, sharing an example of where the new features may prove useful. “A few years back when getting a family dog, we decided to name our sweet little puppy after my favorite fruit. Over the years we have privately shared many pictures of Chikoo (our dog) with our family. To me, the query [chikoo] means two very sweet and different things, and today’s improvements give me the magical experience of finding both the Chikoos I love, right in the results page.”
In terms of Profiles appearing in search, Google is demonstrating why it can pay off in search visibility to be active on Google+ and develop a substantial following. Before it was clear that this was beneficial, but now, you can see directly where this will help you. Not only will Google show people you are friends with, but it will show people it thinks you would be interested in.
Google says it will show autocomplete predictions for “various prominent people from Google+, such as high-quality authors from our authorship pilot program”. You can see this in action here:
People can click on these results and easily add the person to their circles on Google+.
It doesn’t look like brand pages will be showing up as autocomplete predictions. When asked about this, a Google spokesperson told WebProNews, “For profiles in search, you will see an autocomplete prediction for people who have Google+ profiles. These are people you’re connected to or popular people related to the query. For Google+ Pages, there’s Direct Connect (launched back in Nov).”
Google is also showing people who discuss certain topics frequenty on Google+ in a special section on the right side of the search results page, when the user searches for that topic (such as “music” or “baseball”) :
Privacy
“When it comes to security and privacy, we set a high bar for Search plus Your World,” says Singhal. “Since some of the information you’ll now find in search results, including Google+ posts and private photos, is already secured by SSL encryption on Google+, we have decided that the results page should also have the same level of security and privacy protection. That’s part of why we were the first major search engine to turn on search via SSL by default for signed-in users last year. This means when you’re signed in to Google, your search results—including your private content—are protected by the same high standards of encryption as your messages in Gmail.”
That move was a bit controversial in the SEO community, as it made referrals harder to track. Not everyone was buying the privacy explanation Google was selling, but today’s new features do make that a little more believable. Google doesn’t want to face the kind of privacy backlash it did when it first launched Google Buzz in Gmail.
Google is providing privacy controls for search, similar to those found in Google+. Personal results are marked as “Public,” “Limited,” or “Only You,” which will be familiar to Google+ users. People in results are marked with the Google+ Circles they are in, or as suggested connections.
In addition to all of that, there is a toggle that appears on the upper right of the results page, where you can see what your search results look like without the personal content:
Turning it off will eliminate personalization based on web history as well. The toggle itself is for an individual search session, but you can also make it the default by going to your search settings and setting it that way.
Filter Bubble
While the new features will have their benefits to users for sure (at least for Google+ users), it would appear that they will only add to the “filter bubble” problem. The filter bubble, a phrased coined by Eli Pariser in a famous TED Talk (below), is this concept where the content we consume online is being more and more personalized towards us based on what sites know about us. The sites take this information that they have about us and direct us toward content that they think would be better for us.
While this may be convenient at times, some feel the filter bubble is keeping us from expanding our horizons. It’s making it harder to see things out of the box. It’s an obstacle to encountering great content that we might not see because we don’t have a direct connection to it. There are valid points to both sides of the debate (feel free to share your thoughts on this in the comments).
Google is by no stretch the only site engaging in this filter bubble concept, but given its massive reach and enormous search market share, it is arguably the most important site on the web to be considered with regards to said concept.
Is Google moving in the right direction?
Why Google’s Personalized Search is Still Lacking
Filter bubble aside, there is a use for personalized search, and despite Google being the king of search, there are obstacles keeping Google from the best it could be when it comes to organizing the world’s information. The lack of a deal with Twitter for realtime search is a prime example of this.
If Google could provide these new kinds of search results for Twitter and Facebook content and profiles, it would be a lot better. Google+ is a solid social network, but it’s not Facebook or Twitter in terms of user numbers. That makes it inferior for access to a broader set of information. That could change in time, but right now, that’s just how it is. Even if Google+ is able to achieve Facebook-like numbers, it still won’t be complete without Facebook.
In fact, it’s for this reason that tools like those from Wajam and Greplin still have a place for those seeking truly personalized search.
Still, the features really emphasize Google’s confidence in Google+ going forward. The fact that they continue to alter their flagship product – search – so much, with an increasing Google+ flavor indicates that they view Google+ as much more than Google Buzz or Google Wave (previous social offerings). Google+ just may be here to stay.
“Search, Plus Your World” is rolling out over the next few days to signed in users searching on https://www.google.com in English.
Earlier this week, Greplin announced it had raised a new $4 million from Sequoia Capital, and revealed that it might open up to the public this week. Now it has. Until now, it has been in closed beta, and now everyone can see what it’s all about.
While not perfect, Greplin has some interesting things going for it (you have to pay if you want to access larger amounts of data). There’s no question that Greplin could be an even more useful service if it was simply integrated with regular search results, similar to how Google already displays its own social results. I previously suggested that Google (or another company – like Microsoft) might look to acquire Greplin, but I think much of what Greplin does, Google could achieve on its own.
As I said, Google could certainly sprinkle in the results from across its own services (Gmail, Docs, Reader, Buzz, etc.), and with the recent acquisition of fflick, could just as easily sprinkle in the Twitter element (though without the Facebook element, the results could never be as good as they could be otherwise).
With content farms aiming to greatly expand, it seems that it will only become increasingly hard for Google to keep a variety of sources among its top results for any given query when a few select brands are pumping out so much content. Google has indicated it’s looking to solve the content farm problem algorithmically, as opposed to the human-edited style of Blekko, which recently banned 20 of the top content farm sites, though Google has released a Chrome extension geared toward crowdsourcing search quality to some (probably minor) extent.
Google needs to get social search right to be the most effective it can be. Unfortunately without Facebook data, it doesn’t seem like it will ever be able to truly give users the best social results, as Facebook is clearly the dominant social network with about 600 million users. For many people, the majority of their online social behavior happens in Facebook. Their real friends are on Facebook, so if they want to search for a topic, and have any mentions of said topic from their actual friends, Facebook data is important.
This makes Greplin useful for some types of queries. With Greplin, you can search across your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Gmail connections, along with feeds you’ve subscribed to in Google Reader, your own Google Docs, your own Google Calendar, etc. More services are said to be coming soon.
We’ve written about Greplin a couple of times – once after the service launched, and again last week, when the company sent users an email with some new updates. If you’re unfamiliar with the service, the best way to describe it is truly personalized search.
You give Greplin access to your various accounts across services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, and others (with many more to come), and you can perform a search and get results back from these various services. If, for example, I search for "mexican food", and I am friends with people on Facebook or follow people on Twitter who have mentioned "mexican food", it will return these updates in the results. If I had a conversation with my wife about some restaurant a while back, but can’t remember the name of it, I may find that as well.
While not perfect, Greplin has some interesting things going for it (you have to pay if you want to access larger amounts of data). According to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, Greplin has now raised a new $4 million from Sequoia Capital.
"What I don’t get is why Google, or someone, hasn’t done this before," he says. "It’s a no-brainer way to get in front of the social parade, and Google should have been on top of this. One reason why they haven’t may be that Greplin needs unprecedented access to the services it indexes. And it may be unlikely that Google could hope to be digging that deep into Facebook, for example. This may be one service that just has to be done by a small startup that can play off all the politics involved. And once they’re big enough, it’ll be too late to stop them."
There’s no question that Greplin could be an even more useful service if it was simply integrated with regular search results, similar to how Google already displays its own social results. I previously suggested that Google (or another company – like Microsoft) might look to acquire Greplin, but I think much of what Greplin does, Google could achieve on its own.
Google could certainly sprinkle in the results from across its own services (Gmail, Docs, Reader, Buzz, etc.), and with the recent acquisition of fflick, could just as easily sprinkle in the Twitter element. Of course without the Facebook element, the results could never be as good as they could be with it, and those politics would seem to be the biggest hurdle in tha regard.
Wait a minute, isn’t it supposed to be all about the user experience?
Greplin has been in closed beta, but according to Arrington, it’s about to open up tot he public within the next few days. It will be interesting to see how (and if) the public reacts.
Bing has started testing new personalized search features, aimed at making individual search results more effective. "Personalized search is not new, but Bing is taking a different approach, focused on the type of search a person is doing and understanding more about what that person is likely searching for," a spokesperson for Bing tells WebProNews. "As no two people have the exact same search behavior, Bing has taken the extra step to automatically tailor search results."
One feature involves results based on previous searches. "People often search for the same thing over and over and choose the same link regardless of where it is on the results page because they know exactly what they want," Bing says. "Now, when a person searches in Bing for the same term multiple times and consistently clicks on a search result that happens to be lower on the results page, it will eventually be promoted to the top position. For example, if a person is searching for {ACS} looking for the American Cancer Society that website appears lower in the results page, but if they consistently choose the American Cancer Society website when searching {ACS} that result will eventually be promoted to the top of the page."
The other new feature comes in the form of results tailored to location. "Results are now tailored to the city a person is searching from," Bing says. "People will no longer have to type their location when searching for a local result. For example, instead of typing ‘Pizza in Seattle’ to find the website of popular pizza joint in Seattle, a user in Seattle can simply search for “Pizza” to see local results."
The new features are rolling out today. Bing talks about them more in this blog post.
To be honest, it’s a little surprising that Bing is just now incorporating these features into its search engine now.
I recently wrote a lengthy post about how content is flooding the web, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for any one search engine (including Google) to keep up and deliver the best possible results at all times. Google does a great job for a lot of queries, but the company knows it needs to get better. That’s why they’re putting a new focus on content farms.
With existing content farms aiming to greatly expand, it seems that it will only become increasingly hard for Google to keep a variety of sources among its top results for any given query when a few select brands are pumping out so much content. Google has indicated it’s looking to solve the content farm problem algorithmically, as opposed to the human-edited style of Blekko, which recently banned 20 of the top content farm sites.
In my previous post, I said that as companies are rushing to create ways of filtering out the noise of an ever-increasing amount of content, the search space may become more competitive than it’s been in a long time. Bing is trying its hardest to give Google a run for its money in search market share, but companies like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are bringing different ideas to the table.
It’s unlikely that you’ll see either of these achieve Google-like domination of the market, but I do think they represent a bigger picture view of the space, illustrating that that there is room for more ideas based on different concepts.
Google needs to get social search right to be the most effective it can be. Unfortunately without Facebook data, it doesn’t seem like it will ever be able to truly give users the best social results, as Facebook is clearly the dominant social network with about 600 million users. For many people, the majority of their online social behavior happens in Facebook. Their real friends are on Facebook, so if they want to search for a topic, and have any mentions of said topic from their actual friends, Facebook data is important.
Google recognizes the need for this kind of information. The company recently bought fflick, a tool that lets you search for movie titles and brings back results from your Twitter friends. This kind of search can be extremely effective. The service was reportedly expected to expand to other verticals besides movies, and it’s easy to see such a feature being useful within regular Google search, although for now, Google is keeping the fflick team within YouTube. That could change. But as long as Facebook friends aren’t part of the equation, it will never be as effective as it could be (unless people stop using Facebook and only start using Twitter, which doesn’t seem like a likely scenario for the foreseeable future).
Enter Greplin. We talked about Greplin back in September when it was new. Greplin is truly personalized search. While still in its early stages, there is a lot of potential in Greplin’s concept. It lets you search across a multitude of services that you use (you can add the ones you want it to include in your searches). This means you get results from the services you use.
Imagine being able to search across your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Gmail connections, along with feeds you’ve subscribed to in Google Reader, your own Google Docs, your own Google Calendar, etc. Here’s what they’ve got so far (as well as what they’ll have soon):
One can only imagine that the number of supported services will only increase. This could be pretty useful for cutting through the noise. Greplin sent users an email today talking about some new features. New updates include (as listed in the email):
– Data updates much faster: in seconds for email and minutes for almost everything else
– Google Apps accounts are now supported. More sites coming soon
– Search results now include pictures, links, attachments, threading and more
– We added advanced query options including "to:someone", "has:attachment", and "has:link"
– Our new mobile-optimized version is available when visiting from your phone
One can’t help but wonder if Greplin is on Google’s acquisition radar, considering the acquisition spree the company has been on of late. If the functionality of Greplin was incorporated into Google, how useful would it be? As a standalone service Greplin can’t be the be-all search engine, but as part of Google, it could be really powerful (plus it’s already searching across numerous Google services, which seems like a logical option for Google to include anyway). Greplin has similarities to fflick, but with an more all-encompassing approach.
Of course, Greplin doesn’t need Google to be useful. Once it gets more feature rich, it might be out there with the Blekkos and the DuckDuckGos as an attractive search alternative. Not as a contender for search market share dominance, but simply as another vertical chipping away at single search engine dominance. Or maybe another company will try to acquire it.
There’s a new kind of personalized, social search available that may trump any effort we’ve seen from Google to date in this corner of search.
Greplin is a new site that searches through "all your online data in one place, really fast" – or at least your the online data you have in the services that it supports, which is likely far from all of your online data. Still, the concept behind the site is pretty noteworthy, and it will likely add more services as time goes on.
With the regular version, you can add Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. With the pro version, you can also add Salesforce, Evernote, box, Basecamp, and Google Voice.
There is obviously great potential for a service like this. With so many forms of communicating and networking available, it can sometimes be hard to remember just which service was used in some instance. If you can search across all services to find what you’re looking for, it’s going to save time. There is likely significant demand for a tool like this.
There is also room for evolution. What other kinds of features could Greplin offer in the future, taking advantage of all the services you give it access to?
The site is in beta, and once you give it access to your info, it says it will email you when the system’s ready for you. TechCrunch has a demo.
