Bing has released a webinar video featuring a “deep review” of Bing Webmaster Tools, so if you haven’t gotten familiar with it, this is probably a good place to start. It’s an hour long, and chock-full of info.
If that wasn’t enough, you can check out this half hour discussion about Bing Webmaster Tools from SEOmoz last year (it features Bing’s Duane Forrester).
Bing has a few more webinars coming up later this month and next month. Take a look at the schedule here.
Facebook just launched something new. That’s all you have to say, really. That in and of itself is enough to get people riled up about their privacy, or how Facebook is screwing with it. Of course, simply being a member of Facebook means that you give up some level of privacy – but some people expect Facebook to do everything they can to help their profile, posts, and likes stay as private as possible. It’s a fair request, really, considering Facebook has always said that they operate with user privacy in mind.
With the big unveiling on Graph Search, Facebook’s attempt to index all of the data available in their massive graph, Facebook hasn’t changed their tune on user privacy. At the big press event, Mark Zuckerberg made a point to say that Graph Search has no impact on user privacy. What’s private will stay private. What’s public will be public.
How much time do you devote to fine-tuning your Facebook privacy settings? Is privacy one of your top concerns when it comes to social networking? Let us know in the comments.
Basically, if a random person could find the info before Graph Search, they’ll be able to find it with Graph Search. If they couldn’t find it before, Graph Search won’t suddenly make it available. We can take Facebook at their word on that. Seriously – you should. I can assure you that Facebook is not going to change the privacy details on any of your posts, likes, photos, etc. Sleep tight.
There is one thing, however, that is a tad worrisome. You probably don’t know this, but as of now, you are unable to opt out of being featured in Facebook search results. You used to be able to do this, but as of mid-December, this option has been taken away from you.
About a month ago, Facebook unveiled some new privacy controls across the site. For the most part, they were good changes. Facebook added a “privacy shortcuts” tab to their blue bar that follows users around the site – wherever they go. From this tab, users can access important privacy information and settings like “who can see my stuff” and “who can contact me.”
Facebook also made improvements to the Activity log – your Timeline privacy nerve center. They also made a big change to third-party app permissions, splitting the long-serving single permission into two separate permissions – one asks if Facebook can post on users’ behalf, and the other asks to access their personal info.
Somewhat tucked away inside these new settings was the big change to search visibility. Below, you can read what Facebook actually said but in short, Facebook removed your ability to opt out of showing up in search results.
Facebook started as a directory service for college students, and today we offer a whole variety of services, such as news feed, photo uploads and mobile messaging. As our services have evolved, our settings have, too.
Everyone used to have a setting called “Who can look up my timeline by name,” which controlled if someone could be found when other people typed their name into the Facebook search bar. The setting was very limited in scope, and didn’t prevent people from finding others in many other ways across the site.
Because of the limited nature of the setting, we removed it for people who weren’t using it, and have built new, contextual tools, along with education about how to use them. In the coming weeks, we’ll be retiring this setting for the small percentage of people who still have it.
Facebook said that the opt out was not a very popular feature anyway, with only a small percentage of users choosing to remove themselves from all search results. But with over a billion monthly active users, even a 1% usage rate would be 10 million+. No matter how Facebook put it in December, this was a pretty significant shift in a users’ ability to control their own privacy on the site.
Of course, we mentioned at the time that it was hard not to think about this move in the context of Facebook’s much-rumored foray into search. But the tweak didn’t quite come into focus until Facebook unveiled Graph Search.
What Facebook has done is disallow users to remove themselves from search a month before releasing a giant new product that relies on user visibility in search. For the Graph Search to be useful to anyone, people have to appear in the results. When I search “people who went to Harvard and like The Winklevoss Twins,” I expect to turn up at least some results from people whose info in set to public, or “friends or friends.”
Well played, Facebook.
So now that you’re on the grid without the ability to opt out, what does that mean for your privacy? Who’s going to be able to find you using Graph Search?
Unfortunately for those concerned with privacy, probably more people.
But it’s not because any of your information is any more public than it already was. Once again, Facebook isn’t lying about that. You’ll probably be found more often simply because Graph Search is a better search tool that makes it easier to find stuff.
Previously, Facebook users could rest on the principle of security through obscurity (or privacy by obscurity, for our purposes). That line of thinking goes something like this:
“Sure, I have some public information out there. But unless someone is specifically looking for it or for me, it’s kind of hard to find.”
And that line of thinking is true, for most circumstances. If I wanted to find you, I would have to be actively looking for you. There was no real, reliable way to simply stumble upon your Facebook profile (with consistency), and definitely no way to find you based on your likes, photos, and interests.
Now there is, of course. If I search “people from Hoboken that like Bon Jovi,” your name may pop up. I don’t know you, and I never would have organically searched for you. But Graph Search has led me to you, and your adorable puppy photos, and information on your penchant for fine wines and spirits. I basically know you now.
Sh*t.
There’s good news! Facebook gives you a lot of control over your own privacy. The bad news is that shoring up your privacy can often be a tedious process.
First things first: You can’t remove yourself from appearing in Graph Search results altogether. We just covered that. There’s no big red opt-out button. But what you can do is limit the scenarios in which you’ll pop up in a Graph Search result.
As you would expect, much of Facebook’s indexing has to do with what users “like.” So if the Graph Search didn’t know what you liked, or better yet wasn’t allowed to show what you liked, you could make sure that you didn’t appear in results for that particular page. Luckily, Facebook allows you to edit the visibility of your likes.
If you were to set that visibility to “Only Me,” you would not appear in Graph Searches involving that signifier. So if you removed “wine” from your visibility, my search of “people who like Bon Jovi and wine” wouldn’t drag you up in the net. Your settings also allow you to make other key information more private, such as occupation, relationship status, hometown, and more. Long story short, you can make yourself less visible in Graph Search results but not entirely invisible.
But if someone finds you, and goes to your Timeline, what then? Remember this: Activity Log is your friend.
Activity log, accessible from the top of your Timeline, allows you to micromanage all types of activity that appears on your Timeline. Want to change the public visibility of a status? You can do that on the Activity Log.
Want to remove activity from your Timeline altogether? Activity Log has you covered. So even if you’re found via Graph Search, you can control exactly what people see when they look at your Timeline. You can lock it down pretty tight, if that’s your desire.
With the risk of being labeled a Facebook apologist, I’ll go out on a limb and say that Facebook gives their users as much or even more control over their privacy settings than is reasonable to expect. Facebook is a service, and yes, you may be the product. But Facebook doesn’t force you to sign up, and you are not entitled to Facebook. You are not entitled to Google, Twitter, or any other similar service either. These are companies, who provide a service. In Facebook’s case, it’s social networking.
In the grand scheme of things, the amount of information that Facebook forces to be public is very small. It basically consists of your name, profile picture, and your networks. Nearly every other action you make on the site can be hidden from the world, if you so choose. Sure, wading through the Activity log and setting up individual privacy protocols for every post, like, photo, and app action you make is tedious at times. But it’s there, and it’s available to you.
The bottom line is this: If you really want to take yourself off the grid, you can. If you set all your likes to “only I can see this,” then nobody will be able to find you through most Graph Search queries. Make your photos private, and nobody will be able to see that shot of your girlfriend eating ice cream at that awesome creamery when they search for “creameries, San Francisco” on Graph Search.
Or you could always delete your Facebook account.
On the other hand, Facebook did alter search visibility settings a month before unveiling a product that relies entirely on search visibility. Tricky tricky, Facebook.
How concerned are you about Facebook’s new Graph Search and your privacy? Let us know in the comments.
Google launched Google Handwrite in July. It’s a feature that lets you search Google from your smartphone or tablet, by simply writing your query with your finger, rather than having to type it out with the keyboard or use voice search. I’ve always thought it was a cool feature, but outside of playing around with it when it launched, I can’t say I’ve ever found it particularly useful. Still, another option never hurt anybody, and it should at least please those who are concerned about the art of handwriting going by the wayside.
Google really hasn’t done much with Google Handwrite since launch (though it did release a similar offering for Google Translate before it even launched this).
Today, Google announced that it has improved the recognition quality for Google Handwrite, and added some features to make it easier and faster to handwrite your searches.
“You can now distinguish between ambiguous characters, overlap your characters, and write multiple characters at a time in Chinese,” says product manager Lawrence Chang.
“If you’ve tried Handwrite before, you may have had some trouble entering a lowercase ‘L’, the number ‘1’, or a capital ‘I’,” says Chang. “Now, we provide alternate interpretations of your characters that you can select above the space bar. Similarly, in Japanese the characters ‘イ’ and ‘ィ’ look nearly identical but are different characters and produce different search results. If Google interprets your handwriting one way and you meant the other, you can now more easily make a correction.”
Google has also now made it so you can write letters over top of one another, so you don’t have to try and squeeze them all in on a small screen, or input them one at a time. In Chinese, you can now write multiple characters at a time on a single line.
While these features make the feature better, for sure, I’m still not sure that is a great deal of advantage to using it over other search options. I have grown pretty fond of Voice Search though.
Bing has launched some additions to its sidebar today, adding more content from Facebook to the already social-heavy Bing experience launched last year.
“Beginning today, each person will see an average of five times more Facebook content from their friends in the sidebar,” a spokesperson for Bing tells WebProNews. “This includes the addition of status updates, shared links, and comments from your friends, so it’s easier to see who and what they’ve shared related to your search.”
” With the addition of status updates, shared links and comments to the sidebar, it’s now easier to see who knows and what they’ve shared related to your search. So when your friends aren’t around, Bing is the perfect stand-in,” says Bing Corporate Vice President Derrick Connell in a blog post.
“Bing also puts you in control of your search experience,” says Connell. “We honor all of your existing Facebook privacy settings, nothing is shared automatically, you only see what your friends give you permission to see (though their Facebook settings) so you only share what you want to share.”
Bing launched a redesign of the social sidebar last month, making it so users no longer have to hover over friends and experts to see additional content. Instead, Bing now just shows the content, marked as social results.
Of course Bing is also involved with the new Facebook Graph Search, in that it still provides the web search results.
Facebook unveiled its much anticipated search product on Tuesday with Graph Search. This could mean big things for businesses who have pages on Facebook. In fact, Facebook has already gone out of its way to offer business owners some tips to make sure their business pages are “complete and up-to-date,” which is essentially to say, optimized for Graph Search.
We may have a whole new area of SEO to consider going forward. The easier it is for users to find your Page in relevant search situations, the better it is for Facebook and the success of its new product, so it’s easy to see why Facebook wants business owners to get on the ball.
“The search bar first returns the top search suggestions, including people, Pages, apps, places, groups, and suggested searches,” Facebook explains. “People can search for things like restaurants near them, hotels in places they want to travel to, photos posted by Pages they like, or games that their friends like to play.”
“These search suggestions take people to a unique results page,” the company adds. “The results returned are based on factors that include information that has been shared by your business and the connections of the person searching.”
Facebook will also make suggestions in the search bar, and will display Bing results (and ads) for web searches. Pages and apps will continue to be able to use sponsored results. These will continue to appear whether or not the user has Graph Search yet.
Here are the specific tips Facebook is recommending on its Studio blog:
- The name, category, vanity URL, and information you share in the “About” section all help people find your business and should be shared on Facebook.
- If you have a location or a local place Page, update your address to make sure you can appear as a result when someone is searching for a specific location.
- Focus on attracting the right fans to your Page and on giving your fans a reason to interact with your content on an ongoing basis.
- You can learn more about fan acquisition and Page publishing best practices here.
Graph Search is in limited beta, and will be rolling out pretty slowly from the sound of it. It’s also starting off in English only. It might be a good time to associate as much information with your Page a possible to get ready for an influx of searches on Facebook.
We’ll see what Facebook does on the advertising front in time, no doubt.
Last week, Blekko launched a new search app for tablets called izik (pronounced EYE-zik), and apparently it’s received a decent amount of buzz for its debut. The app debuted as the top free reference app on iTunes.
The company says in a blog post, We launched izik, our search app for tablets, last Friday and are amazed at the responses we’ve received! Thanks to our users, on day one izik was the #1 free reference app on iTunes and #49 free app overall…We are delighted that there is such a strong desire to see something fresh and new in search, and that our vision with izik is so well received.”
“The twitterverse has been especially active in spreading the word about izik,” the company adds. “We’ve seen a lot of comments about the beautiful design and interface, the useful categories, and most importantly the high quality results that make izik a truly viable choice for searching on tablets.”
If you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, take a look:
izik: take search for a joy ride from blekko on Vimeo.
The app is also available for Android, and there’s a working web version, but izik was created specifically for tablets.
Twitter’s Edwin Chen and Alpa Jain wrote an interesting post on the company’s engineering blog about improving Twitter search “with real-time computation”. They discuss the challenges of real-time search from an advertising perspective.
I’ve written quite a few articles about real-time search, often comparing Twitter’s offering to Google’s lack of one since the deal between the two companies came to an end, effectively killing off Google’s. Yet, I’ve never really talked about the advertising-related challenges that must accompany such an offering. Twitter’s post makes you consider what’s going on behind the scenes.
“The queries people perform have probably never before been seen, so it’s impossible to know without very specific context what they mean,” the two say. “How would you know that #bindersfullofwomen refers to politics, and not office accessories, or that people searching for ‘horses and bayonets’ are interested in the Presidential debates? Since these spikes in search queries are so short-lived, there’s only a small window of opportunity to learn what they mean.”
“So an event happens, people instantly come to Twitter to search for the event, and we need to teach our systems what these queries mean as quickly as we can — because in just a few hours, the search spike will be gone,” they add.
To tackle the problem of serving relevant ads on real-time queries, Twitter monitors for which queries are popular at the moment, tracks stats on them, and then sends them to human evaluators, who are tasked with answering a variety of questions about them. To make a complicated story simple, when a response from the evaluator is received, Twitter pushes the info to its backend systems, so the next time a user searches for the query, it can serve a relevant ad based on context.
“For example, suppose our evaluators tell us that [Big Bird] is related to politics; the next time someone performs this search, we know to surface ads by @barackobama or @mittromney, not ads about Dora the Explorer,” Twitter explains.
Today, it might be better to see ads for Knicks tickets than for cereal on a Honey Nut Cheerios query.
So, when you see ads on Twitter as you’re searching for information, just know that a lot of work is going on behind the scenes to make it fit the scope of what you’re actually looking for. Check out Twitter’s post for a much more in depth explanation.
Online reviews are a hot button issue right now, particularly as one case involving Yelp reviews has attracted some media attention. You can read about that here. Basically, a woman was sued for defaming remarks, as she claimed in reviews on Yelp and Angie’s List that a contractor had stolen jewelry from her, which she has so far been unable to prove. She was initially ordered to change her reviews, but the Virginia Supreme Court overturned that decision, indicating that a jury would have to find her guilty before the reviews would be required to be removed.
As WebProNews readers have indicated in various comments, a lot of business owners feel that the reviews shouldn’t be allowed to remain up, as the business stands to lose potential customers as a result, which of course, is the basis of the suit to begin with.
Accountability for online reviews is a big issue for businesses who face damage to their reputations. Google recognizes this, and last year, when they moved to the Google+ Local model for local search, the company was supposed to have started requiring users to be signed into their Google accounts, which would be accompanied by their names/profiles, to post reviews. This would ensure accountability for what is said in these reviews.
Upon trying to write a business review while logged out of Google, I am personally prompted to sign in.
However, Google appears to still be letting anonymous reviews through. Instead of the reviewers name, it may say “A Google User”.
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a Google Business Help thread, where a business owner complains about this problem:
About five weeks ago we started asking our patients to write reviews about us and our practice in our Google+ Local page (https://plus.google.com/101314730224126339952/about?hl=en sorry, I don’w know why but I can’t embed the link). We only have one page as Google already merged our Google Places and previous Google+ page.
We have noticed than some reviews appear to be written as “A Google User” instead of displaying the actual name of the review’s author.
Does anybody know why this is happening? As far as I know there’s no way for google users to ask to post a review anonymously.
I’m concerned about this as positive anonymous reviews are sometimes perceived as spam or false reviews, damaging our reputation.
Google’s Jade Wang responds in the thread, saying, “Thanks, all — we are investigating.”
The response was from yesterday. The anonymous reviews are still showing:
Schwartz also notes that this has been happening for months.
In the thread, one user says Google may show “A Google User” for reviews that were created before the changes, but they shouldn’t be displaying this way for reviews that recent. Wang’s acknowledgement seems to suggest that Google will fix this.
Luckily for this particular business, these particular reviews are positive.
Well, this is interesting. Bing ran a test, placing links to Facebook, Craigslist and eBay underneath its result for google.com when the user searched “google”.
Matt McGee at Search Engine Land noticed what he thought was a bug, until he received confirmation from Bing that it was actually a test (which has since ended, apparently).
Regularly, if you search “google” on Bing, the top result will look something like this:
You’ll get Deep Links (Bing’s version of what Google calls Sitelinks) for Gmail, Images, Maps, News, Videos, Translate, Documents, and Finance. In other words, you get links to various Google services, which makes sense. You also get an actual Google search box.
In the experiment, however, users would see half of the Google deep links, and the other half would be for things like “Go to Facebook, Go to YouTube, Go to Craigslist, and Go to eBay. Well, YouTube is still a Google service, but why in the world would someone searching for “google” want any of these?
McGee has a screen cap:
Essentially, Bing was sending users to Google competitors. You may not always consider sites like Facebook Craigslist or eBay competitors to Google, but Google has a social media service, and it has a shopping service. At some level, Google competes with all of these sites.
I’m surprised they didn’t just put a “Go to Bing.com” link there, or even a “Go to Yahoo.com” link. At least you can still access Bing results from Facebook.
McGee posted a Q&A with Bing about the test. He asked how Bing would respond if a search for “bing” on Google included Sitelinks to Twitter, Amazon or Kayak. Bing’s response was, “We appreciate all customer-focused innovation.”
Something tells me Bing would throw a fit if Google did that. Perhaps it would even get another anti-Google campaign from the company. It’s been over a month since they started one.
Sometimes Google’s Knowledge Graph is inaccurate. Google knows it’s not perfect, and provides a “feedback/more info” link at the bottom of Knowledge Graph results, which you can click to let Google know what it has wrong, if you believe there is an error. Of course, there’s no guarantee that Google will acknowledge your feedback or that you’ll hear back from them with any quickness.
Have you noticed errors in Google’s Knowledge Graph? Let us know in the comments.
Quality of the “knowledge” within the Knowledge Graph has been a question from the beginning. We asked Google after it launched how susceptible it would be to Wikipedia vandalism, given that Wikipedia is a major source of the info provided to the Knowledge Graph (though it’s only one of a variety of sources). At the time, a Google spokesperson told us, “I can’t share a ton of detail here, but we’ve got quality controls in place to try to mitigate this kind of issue. We’ve also included a link so users can tell us when we may have an inaccuracy in our information.”
“Our goal is to be useful; we realize we’ll never be perfect, just as a person’s or library’s knowledge is never complete,” he said. “But we will strive to be accurate. More broadly, this is why we engineer 500+ updates to our algorithms every year — we’re constantly working to improve search, and to make things easier for our users.”
Google is showing Knowledge Graph results for a whole lot of searches these days, and continues to expand the product all the time. Earlier this month, Google announced its expansion into more languages. You have to wonder how many errors are out there. It’s one thing for Google to try to deliver the best results in terms of other sites, but this is the information that is supposed to be “knowledge”.
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a Google forum thread where somebody claiming to be the agent for NFL player Nick Eason found an error with the player’s Knowledge Graph entry, and asked to have it corrected:
I am writing to get some information removed from one of my Client’s biogrpahy’s that is sponsored by Google. When you search the name, NICK EASON in Google, a little biogprahy box comes up under his picture and under the Wikipedia blurb.
…
Nick is no longer married and desperately wants his Spouse tab removed. Can you please let me know the most efficeient and effective way to get this done? Thanks!
By the time this article was first written, it had remained unchanged, but Google has since fixed it.
Wikipedia appears to be the main source of Google’s “knowledge” about Eason. That’s the only source Google has labeled, anyway. When we checked, Eason’s Wikipedia page had no mention of his marriage or Regina Eason, who Google’s result said was his spouse (before finally updating it).
As Schwartz writes, “With web search, the results can be within minutes updated – extremely fresh. But the knowledge graph, if it needs an update, it can take months and months.”
A lot can change in that amount of time, obviously. Google, per its mission statement, wants to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, but the ways in which it has been able to address the timeliness and/or freshness of data has left a great deal to be desired in recent years.
Google has placed such a great deal of emphasis on providing fresh search results, but then you have an example like this, where the result Google is actually emphasizing is simply outdated. Results, in general, have also become less fresh due to the lack of Google’s realtime search feature, which used to give you near-realtime content from Twitter as it appeared in the Twitterverse. This gave you fresh up to the second (or close to it at least) content about newsworthy topics right in your search results. Now, if you want that, you better just go to Twitter.
Meanwhile, Google is cramming organic search results with “fresh” content, often leaving more relevant content buried under the more recently written content. This was illustrated perfectly on the day of the Sandy Hook shooting, when reports came out that a person named Ryan Lanza was responsible for the horrible shooting in Newtown, Connecticut (granted, the killer was later reported to be Adam Lanza). If you tried searching Google for “Ryan Lanza,” you were likely getting little but few-minute-old reports, when you may have really been looking to find more about who this guy really was (a situation made even more confusing when media outlets started putting out photos and pointing to social media profiles for the wrong guy).
That has little to do with the Knowledge Graph, but it has everything to do with the relevance and usefulness of Google’s search results (which is being diminished in other areas of search as well).
One thing that’s mildly disturbing about this whole Knowledge Graph thing, in terms of the potential for errors, is that Google recently started including information about medications in the Knowledge Graph. This was an area of major concern as so-called “content farms” filled up Google’s search results with hardly credible articles about health issues. Google has made strides in that area, particularly with updates like Panda.
“This data comes from the U.S. FDA, the National Library of Medicine, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, among others,” said Google Search Senior Product Manager Aaron Brown of the recently added Knowledge Graph data. We hope you find this useful, but remember that these results do not act as medical advice.”
That last part is important.
Have Google’s search results gotten better since the launch of the Knowledge Graph? Have the results in general gotten better over the past year? Let us know what you think.
Experian Marketing Services released some findings about search trends in the U.S. for the year. The firm finds that Facebook was the top search term for the fourth year, accounting for 4.13% of all searches (up 33% from 2011).
The data is based on the top 1,000 unfiltered search terms in the U.S. across over 60 search engines. It does not include mobile.
Four different variations of the term “facebook” were among the top 10, accounting for 5.62% of searches overall (up 27% from last year). The top two terms stayed the same from year to year. Behind Facebook was “youtube” again at number two.
The top ten in 2011 were:
1. facebook
2. youtube
3. facebook login
4. craigslist
5. facebook.com
6. yahoo
7. ebay
8. www.facebook.com
9. mapquest
10. yahoo.com
For this year, the list looked like this:
1. facebook
2. youtube
3. craigslist
4. facebook login
5. facebook.com
6. yahoo
7. ebay
8. www.facebook.com
9. mapquest
10. amazon
Notice that “amazon” moved into the top ten for the first time.
Experian says that analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 6.03% of the top 50 searches, an increase of 44% compared to 2011.
Google terms, including “youtube,” accounted for 1.91%, a 20% increase from last year. New terms that entered the top 50 included: backpage, cool math games, fox news, pinterest and pof (an acronym for dating site Plenty of Fish).
“Navigational searches continue to dominate the top search results as users continue to visit their favorite sites via search engines instead of directly entering a web address into their browsers URL bar,” said Bill Tancer, GM of global research for Experian Marketing. “Single-word searches grew 16% in 2012 as a result of continued reliance on search engine’s suggested results. Other top 2012 searches reflected the ongoing infatuation with celebrities online.”
The terms “yahoo” and “ebay” have been in the top ten since the ranking was started back in 2006.
At some point next year, Microsoft is going to release its new game console. Soon after, Sony will release the next PlayStation. These two systems will be competing once again to control your living room. Who’s going to win? A simple Google search may tell you.
Ludos Mundi recently looked into Google Trends for both PS4 and Xbox 720. According to their numbers, the Xbox 720 is far more popular in Google search. That means more people are actively looking for information on the next Xbox which could imply the machine has a popularity advantage before it even launches.
Looking at the numbers on Google Trends, the difference is not as drastic. In November, there were 75 searches for PS4 for every 100 searches of Xbox 720. PS4 had higher search traffic in 2011, but Xbox 720 came back with a vengeance in 2012.
Changing “PS4” to “PlayStation 4” yields a higher average to Sony since people were already searching for “PlayStation 4” as far back as 2004. Much like the previous search, Sony’s machine did better in 2011 than in 2012.
Now, what happens when you search for the new console’s codenames – Orbis and Durango? It appears that many consumers either don’t know about the names or they prefer to use more familiar terms like Xbox 720 and PS4. Either way, the searches for Orbis have far outpaced that of Durango. The most popular term that garnered the most amount of search traffic was PlayStation 4 Orbis while Xbox Durango only garnered five searches for every 100 searches for PlayStation 4 Orbis.
So what does this all mean? It means that people are excited about the next generation of gaming consoles. The increased amount of search traffic for Xbox 720 this year can be attributed to more stories coming out about Microsoft’s new game console. Sony’s Orbis is still relatively veiled in secrecy comparably and therefore doesn’t get as much search traffic. You can expect searches for PS4 and PlayStation 4 to skyrocket again once more leaks and rumors start to disseminate across the Web next year.
Just for fun, here’s the comparison between the PS4, Xbox 720 and Wii U. Note that the Wii U saw a massive surge in search when it was unveiled in mid-2011 and then it dropped back down to comparable levels with the competing next-gen consoles for most of 2012. Search didn’t jump again until it neared the launch of the console. It’s expected that both the PS4 and Xbox 720 will see similar spikes in search when it nears each console’s respective launch.
[h/t: Venture Beat]
Alternative search engine blekko announced today that it is “donating” 22 billion pages’ metadata to Common Crawl, a non-profit foundation, which maintains an open crawl of the web for access and analysis by anyone who cares.
“The holiday season is in full swing and blekko is getting into the giving spirit – donating metadata on search engine ranking for 140 million websites and 22 billion webpages to Common Crawl,” a spokesperson for blekko tells WebProNews.
“With this donation of spam-filtered metadata, blekko is helping Common Crawl ensure that their resources and man-hours are spent crawling real, useful webpages,” he adds.
Blekko says that web and search being open and transparent is “number one on the blekko bill of rights.” Yes, blekko has a bill of rights:
Through blekko’s API, blekko says Common Crawl will have access to the metadata from 140 million websites.
More about the initiative on blekko’s blog.
Last week, Google’s Festivus search results easter egg was revealed. If you type in “festivus,” Google will display the famous Festivus Pole, as described in a classic episode of Seinfeld. Now, Google has decorations for actual holidays like Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Hanukkah. Some associated terms will also bring up similar results.
Here’s “Christmas”:
Here’s “Kwanzaa”:
Here’s “Hanukkah”:
Google has just made their Image search worse in an effort to protect your virgin eyes.
If you’re in the U.S. and trying to search for boobs on Google Images right now, you’re going to have a tougher time. That’s because Google has prevented U.S. users from disabling SafeSearch. And if you want to find NSFW images, you’re going to have to be more specific with your searches.
Google users should be familiar with the SafeSearch toolbar at the top right of Image searches. Until recently, that bar allowed users to select MODERATE, STRICT, or OFF. As of right now, those options have been removed from the drop-down menu – but only in the U.S.
Do you think Google should have messed with the SafeSearch format? Do you think it makes Google Image search worse? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Here’s what it currently looks like:
And here’s what it looks like on Google.co.uk (and other countries). This is what it looked like in the U.S. before today:
Note that “SafeSearch” is the only option for U.S. users. For a search for “boobs” for instance, this means that the results will not feature any “explicit” images (nipples showing). The only other option is the “filter results,” which in our boobs search filters out all results. “The word ‘boobs’ has been filtered from the search because Google SafeSearch is active,” reads the results.
It would appear that the only two options Google is giving U.S. users are STRICT and MODERATE. Or in other words, you can’t turn off SafeSearch.
The default “SafeSearch” results for U.S. users are the exact same results for a MODERATE SafeSearch results for U.K. users:
U.S. default:
U.K. MODERATE:
If you go to Google’s SafeSearch help page, they tell you how to disable SafeSearch from your settings:
Here’s how to disable SafeSearch:
- Visit the Google Preferences page.
- In the “SafeSearch Filtering” section, select Do not filter my search results.
- Click Save Preferences.
But when U.S. users visit their search settings, they are only given the option to filter explicit results:
But moderate SafeSearch is already on by default.
If you go to another country’s Google, say Google.com.bz, the search settings provide the option to turn on “no filtering.”
So, what gives? Is Google guilty of some seriously awful censorship? The quick answer is no, but it’s a little more complicated than that.
You see, you have to be specific if you want NSFW results. Searching for “boobs porn” does give you plenty of nudity. But for searches on words without specific qualifiers, you still don’t see any of these results. In essence, Google has changed their search settings to only display adult results when queries are specifically adult-oriented.
That means for all intents and purposes, users in the U.S. now only have two options – default SafeSearch and filter explicit results. The default SafeSearch is akin to MODERATE. The option to turn off SafeSearch completely for all results is gone in the U.S. And the big question is why? What was wrong with the old Google image search format (and the one seen in the rest of the world)? Why did Google feel the need to change it?
Let’s look at two different responses we received from Google. First, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller had this to say:
“The default should continue to behave similarly to what most users have had as the default so far (“moderate”). Our algorithms are designed to downgrade explicit content when you’re not specifically looking for it. If a search term is very explicit, relevant adult content may show up, but we’ll err on the conservative side. So if you want to see adult content in Image Search, just make it clear with the query — we’ll show the most relevant content for each search.”
Now from another Google spokesperson:
“We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for — but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them. We use algorithms to select the most relevant results for a given query. If you’re looking for adult content, you can find it without having to change the default setting — you just may need to be more explicit in your query if your search terms are potentially ambiguous. The image search settings work the same way as in web search.”
Ok, so the point here is that users need to be specific with their searches. Got it. Apologies for the frankness, but if I want to find blowjob images, I now have to search “blowjob porn.” There is now no way that I can edit my own personal settings to make a search for just “blowjob” yield all results, both NSFW and otherwise.
In essence, Google is fragmenting their image search. A “no filter” search is a true search of the most popular images across the web. U.S. users no longer have this option. We’re now only given the choice between filtered results for “blowjob” or the most popular results for “blowjob porn.” That smattering of all results, both NSFW and SFW for the query “blowjob,” cannot be achieved anymore.
Plus, is there really a question about what I’m looking for when I search “blowjob?” Do I really need to provide any more detail?
It seems like a big gripe about a small change, and it is in a way. But one could make the argument that this actually is a form of censorship. If I go to Google images and search “blowjob,” I want to see the best of what the web has to offer – all of it. Not what Google thinks I should see based on their desire to prevent adult results unless users are super specific.
Go ahead and try a search for “blowjob” on Google Images right now. Those aren’t really very relevant results, are they? Users should see the most relevant results for their searches, no matter what. And they should have the option to simply turn off the SafeSearch filter, which they all had just a couple of days ago.
How about you? Do you think this is a form of censorship? Are we making mountains out of molehills? Could this Image search tweak make you seek out a competitor’s image search? Tired of reading the word “blowjob?” Let us know what you think in the comments.
Bing has been tweaking its search results interface for the past week or so. First, they added people and places information to the middle column (Snapshot). After that, they launched a redesign of the social sidebar.
Today, Bing has updated its Safari for iPad (and iPad Mini) browser support with the new social sidebar.
“In a glance you can now see what friends, experts and enthusiasts have shared on leading networks including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Klout related to what you’re searching for,” says Bing Social principal group program manager Chris Rayner.
The design will adapt to landscape or portrait. Support will be rolling out over the next few days.
Microsoft also expanded Bing for Desktop to more versions of Windows and more languages this week.
Antivirus maker AVG announced on Thursday that it has formed a new Search and Distribution relationship with Yahoo. AVG’s Secure Search offering is now powered by Yahoo. This is interesting, considering that Yahoo’s own search is powered by Bing.
AVG CEO JR Smith said, “AVG is excited to team up with Yahoo! to help provide Internet users with peace of mind when searching the web or accessing their favorite online properties. This relationship represents a shift from the company’s previous strategy of entering into exclusive search agreements in its search and advertising services business. Consumers have many choices when it comes to how they access the Internet, and our objective is simply to keep them secure, each step of the way.”
Yahoo SVP of Connections Shashi Seth added, “Internet users everywhere want to be able to access online content easily without having to worry about security threats. We’re committed to providing a rich search experience to AVG users and see this relationship as a strategic way for us to enrich and broaden our search footprint moving forward.”
AVG Secure Search is aimed at protecting people from “dangerous websites and online threats,” and utilizes the company’s LinkScanner technology. Here’s a bit more about the product from AVG’s site:
AVG Secure Search alerts you before you visit dangerous webpages to make sure your identity, personal information, and computer are protected. In addition, our integrated AVG Do Not Track brings the control over your privacy back to you.
AVG says it provides Intenet and mobile security to 143 million active users.
According to the latest numbers from comScore, Yahoo’s share of the core search market in the U.S. is on the decline, dropping 0.1% year-over-year to 12.1%
Google may soon have another weapon in its travel search arsenal. While only in testing stage right now, the company has a new tool out called Flight Explorer. You can access it at google.com/flights/explorer.
TheNextWeb appears to have spotted the tool, and Matt McGee at Search Engine Land got a statement out of Google:
Flight Explorer is a an experimental feature of Flight search that allow users to explore flight destinations. The feature enables users to consider multiple destinations and multiple days at once, all using live prices, quickly.
According to McGee, it’s the “most fully realized implementation” of the data Google gets from its ITA Software acquisition.
You can browse fares for flights by trip length, number of stops, airlines, duration, outbound times and return times.
The feature is not part of Google’s Flight Search offering, but if the test is deemed successful, it most likely will be.
comScore has put out its monthly search engine rankings for the United States, looking at the month of November. Google sites made up 67% of explicit core search queries conducted, up 0.1% from October, according to the firm. Explicit core search excludes contextually driven searches that don’t reflect specific user intent to interact with search results.
Microsoft sites were up 0.2% at 16.2% of queries, and Yahoo sites were down 0.1% at 12.1%. Ask Network was behind Yahoo with 3% of queries (down 0.2%), and AOL followed with 1.7% (down 0.1%).
There were about 17 billion explicit core searches performed in November, according to comScore. Google sites accounted for 11.4 billion of them. Microsoft sites accounted for 2.7 billion searches, and Yahoo accounted for 2.1 billion. Ask had 506 million, and AOL had 297 million. Again, this is just the U.S.
Of course, Yahoo is actually powered by Microsoft’s Bing. comScore says that in November, 69.4% of searches carried organic search results from Google, while 25.4% of searches were powered by Bing (up 0.4 percentage points).