I pulled out the old trusty StumbleUpon toolbar this morning to use the Explore Box (the StumbleUpon version of search) to stumble through some topic which I’ve already forgotten, to find the Explore Box was not there. I asked a few others, and they weren’t seeing it either.
Wondering what happened to this tool (and hoping that they were not phasing it out altogether), which I use on pretty much a daily basis (sometimes multiple times throughout the day), I shot an email over to StumbleUpon, and it turns out that they’ve decided to remove the feature from the toolbar.
A StumbleUpon spokesperson told me, “Explore Box is still an important feature for our community so we decided to make it more readily available for users by moving it from the toolbar (Chrome and Web bar) to the home page. We also believe that removing it from the toolbar will reduce some of the complexity some users experience using the toolbar. We have no plans to eliminate the Explore Box.”
Okay, so good news that they’re not eliminating the feature. It was not present when they launched the new app for iOS, and I asked it about it then too, when they also told me that it’s “still an important feature for the community,” and that it would be available in a future release.
I’m not sure how moving it from the toolbar to the home page makes it more readily available to users, given that not only was it already on the homepage, but that the toolbar is available to users no matter what page they’re on, but I’m happy they’re not getting rid of it entirely.
This seems to be a play to encourage more users to interact with StumbleUpon.com. Historically, the nature of StumbleUpon hasn’t really required much use of the domain itself on the user’s part. This is one major thing that has really separated StumbleUpon from other social media.
StumbleUpon has, however, been adding more features to its site, and seems to want to get users starting from there more often. With the Explore Box disappearing from the toolbar, users who use this frequently (like myself) will have little choice but to oblige.
Tomorrow, November 6th, is election day in the U.S. If you haven’t already voted and need to know where you should vote tomorrow, both Google and Facebook have tools to make it incredibly easy.
Google has provided a quick answer application built into certain polling-related search queries. If you search “voting location,” “where to vote” or other similar phrases, Google displays a voter information search box above the results.
All you have to do is enter your address, and Google will show you your voting location.
They will actually take you to their new Voter Information Tool, which they unveiled about a week ago. The tool displays voting locations, times, directions, as well as ballot summaries dependent on area.
Facebook has partnered with Microsoft and the Voting Information Project to provide their own inline tool to let users find their voting location. It’s called the Polling Place Locator, and it is available via the U.S. Politics on Facebook page.
Just type in your address, and let Bing maps tell you where to cast your ballot.
Google and Facebook are two of the most-visited sites on the internet, so these simple voter information tools have a real chance to help people find out where to perform their civic duty. And as always – the stronger the voter turnout, the stronger the democracy. Just vote, people.
Last month, as you may know, Google introduced its Link Disavow tool, after dropping a hint that it would do so months prior. What we didn’t know until this past week, however, is that there is a possibility that Google will use the data it gets from the tool as a ranking signal.
First off, to be clear, Google is not currently getting any ranking signals from the tool. In the future, however, that may change. Danny Sullivan shared a Q&A with Matt Cutts in which he did not rule out the possibility. Sullivan asked him if “someone decides to disavow link from good sites a perhaps an attempt to send signals to Google these are bad,” is Google mining this data to better understand what bad sites are?
“Right now, we’re using this data in the normal straightforward way, e.g. for reconsideration requests,” Cutts responded. “We haven’t decided whether we’ll look at this data more broadly. Even if we did, we have plenty of other ways of determining bad sites, and we have plenty of other ways of assessing that sites are actually good.”
They haven’t decided. It could go either way, but if people are submitting enough links to the same sites, wouldn’t Google want to look at that as some sign that it is not a reputable site?
Yes, Google does have over 200 signals, and has other ways of deciding what is high or poor quality, but does that mean there is not room for data from the link disavow tool to play some role within the algorithm, even if it’s not the heaviest signal it looks at?
“We may do spot checks, but we’re not planning anything more broadly with this data right now,” said Cutts. “If a webmaster wants to shoot themselves in the foot and disavow high-quality links, that’s sort of like an IQ test and indicates that we wouldn’t want to give that webmaster’s disavowed links much weight anyway. It’s certainly not a scalable way to hurt another site, since you’d have to build a good site, then build up good links, then disavow those good links. Blackhats are normally lazy and don’t even get to the ‘build a good site’ stage.” Emphasis is ours.
No, it doesn’t seem like a very plausible strategy for competitors to hurt one another. However, that does not necessarily mean that some sites couldn’t potentially be affected if the data were to become a signal.
Since the Penguin update was launched, and Google has been sending out messages about links more aggressively, we’ve seen people scramble to get tons of links to their sites removed. Google is not telling you all the links that you should be getting removed. It’s giving you examples. As a result, we’ve seen many webmasters taking an aggressive approach of their own trying to get more links removed than they probably needed to. We’ve seen the letters webmasters have written to other sites asking to have links removed for fear that they could somehow be hurting them in Google, even if they would consider it to be a valuable link otherwise. If it’s a good link (and not one specifically meant for gaming Google), then it stands to reason it’s not something that Google should be frowning upon. Yet, these kinds of links are being requested to be removed.
So, why would paranoid and/or desperate webmasters not go overboard on the Link Disavow tool?
Sure, Google has warned repeatedly that the tool should not be used in most cases, and that it should only be used after trying to get all the links removed manually (they won’t even acknowledge your submission if they can see that you haven’t tried). But what is the likelihood that there won’t be numerous people jumping the gun and using it when they really shouldn’t be?
How many of the webmasters out there that have been hurt by updates like Penguin are tired of jumping through hoop after hoop, and will see the tool as a shortcut?
SEO analyst Jennifer Slegg writes, “People who have been affected with bad links will very likely take a very heavy-handed approach to the links they disavow in their panic of seeing their traffic drop off a cliff. There is no doubt that some of those good links that are actually helping the site will end up in the list along with poor quality ones because the webmaster is either unclear about whether a link is a bad influence, or just think the starting fresh approach is the best one to go with.”
“So good websites could also have their sites potentially flagged as a possible bad source of links because of clueless webmasters, even though those clueless webmasters are actually making more work for themselves by disavowing links that are actually helping them,” she adds.
And that’s exactly the point. If data from Link Disavow were to become a ranking signal, this is where things could get tricky.
“What happens if someone disavows a link from your website for whatever reason?” asks 352 Media Group Social Media Marketing Director Erin Everhart. “Will your website get flagged as spam? Google has enough leverage over us anyway. Do you want them to have even more?”
That’s a pretty good question too. Does Google have too much power over webmasters? Tell us what you think.
Google is taking Amber alert information provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and working it into their search results, the company said today.
Now, Amber Alerts will appear in users’ search results when they search for related information in certain locations (like where the child was taken or where the actual alert was issued). Searchers can also expect to see the Amber alerts if their queries are more specific, for instance referencing the name of the abducted child.
The Amber alerts will appear in both desktop and mobile search, and will also pop up in Google Maps.
“By increasing the availability of these alerts through our services, we hope that more people will assist in the search for children featured in AMBER Alerts and that the rates of safe recovery will rise,” says Google’s Phil Coakley, part of the Public alerts team.
The Amber alerts will be shown as part of Google’s Public alerts platform, which currently shows emergency updates concerning weather, public safety, and earthquakes from the National Weather Service and the US Geological Survey.
Google added that they are working with other child protection agencies in Europe and Canada to try to expand this program to other countries.
As reported on Tuesday, Google is running an interactive Halloween doodle on its homepage. It hit the other side of the world first, as usual, and today, it’s live here in these parts. You can read more about the nature of the doodle itself here.
Here’s a video Simon Rüger put together displaying the animation:
Once you get through the interactivity, and get to the search results, you will find the query is “Happy Halloween!” This is interesting because Google has recently been using its Doodles to show off its Knowledge Graph a bit. The recent Herman Melville doodle, for example, gave users a chance to see Knowledge Graph results for the author, see other authors people search for, and learn more about the man himself, as well as the Moby-Dick book.
“Happy Halloween!” does not display Knowledge Graph results, while a simple query for “halloween” does. It seems like a bit of a missed opportunity for Google who has been heavily pushing Knowledge Graph since it launched. Had the query been “halloween,” the countless users who click through the doodle to get to the search results page would have been greeted with knowledge (from Wikipedia) that, “Halloween or Hallowe’en, also known as All Hallows’ Eve, is a yearly holiday observed around the world on October 31, the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows.”
Google has apparently also hidden an easter egg here. Users for the “halloween” query, would have also been given the option to refine their search results page for “halloween 1978,” and seen something like this:
Notice those little pointy things in the Knowledge graph results. Those are bats who fly away upon mouse-over. They are actually appearing on Knowledge Graph results for a plethora of horror movies.
October has been a huge month for Microsoft, and it’s going to be interesting to see how the company’s new products and implementations inspire Bing use.
Is Bing poised to make a bigger dent in Google’s share of the search market? Do you intend to use Bing with Microsoft’s new products? Do you intend to use Microsoft’s new products at all? Let us know in the comments.
Last Friday, Microsoft launched Windows 8 into the wild. I won’t get into all the bells and whistles of that here. Read this, and determine if you think it’s worth the upgrade.
One thing is for certain though. There are still a lot of Windows users out there, and there are many will make the upgrade simply because it’s the latest version, and others will simply purchase devices that come with the operating system installed. This is a chance for Bing to thrust itself upon users in a flashy new way. Bing resides on the Windows 8 Start menu by default. Sure you can change it, but how many people are that passionate about the search engine they use, and how many simply won’t bother to use Google instead?
There is a standard Bing app for web search and image search, a Travel app, a Weather app, a News app, a Finance app and a Sports app. Some Facebook users (of which there are 1.01 billion), might be exposed to Bing’s social features for the first time, and find that appealing. They may like seeing their friends as they’re searching, and stick with BIng.
“Searching with the Bing app is fast and fluid, whether you use a touch device to tap and swipe or type and click with a keyboard and mouse,” says Brian MacDonald, Corporate Vice President, Online Service Division for Microsoft. “Finger-friendly results and images are front and center letting you quickly find what you’re looking for, so you can search less and do more. You can still rely on the same great Bing web experience in Internet Explorer 10, but we’ve optimized the Bing app to shine on Windows 8.”
“The Maps app makes it easy to find the places you’re looking for and helps you get there faster,” adds MacDonald. “Quickly pinpoint locations, get directions, see traffic conditions and more— all designed to be easily navigable with touch.”
The Weather app gives you a preview of the current weather and the hourly, daily, and 10-day forecasts. For the Finance, News, Travel and Sports apps (collectively referred to as the Bing media apps), Bing has partnered with brands like ABC, AP, Bloomberg, CNBC, Fodor’s, Lonely Planet, Reuters and complete daily editions of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Microsoft refers to the experience as a built-in newsstand. The Sports app offers headlines, live scores, schedules, standings, stats, etc., and lets you personalize it based on the teams you care about.
It comes with a feature called “For You,” which offeres personalized recommendations for deals, restaurants, music, videos, etc. based on a person’s location, previous searches and recommendations from Facebook friends.
There’s also a feature called “Local Scout,” which provides recommendations for nearby restaurants, shopping and various activities in a Bing-powered guide.
“Whether you’re looking for the best brunch or live music in your area, it’s all a tap away,” the company explains. “Simply pick a result and you’ll see everything you need to know – where it’s located, how to get there, who to call, when it’s open, the website, and even ratings and reviews. Local Scout includes eat+drink, see+do, shop, local deals and the new for you experience.”
Bing Explore is a feature that lets you swipe the Bing home page across to see content that it has deemed relevant to you, including trending stories, local deals, etc.
The lock screen image on Windows Phone 8 automatically retrieves the image of the day from the BIng home page, so this will provide a constant reminder that you’re a Bing user.
Bing Music on Windows 8 has a larger catalogue, and Microsoft says it’s easier to find out what song is playing by letting your phone “listen” to music. The Shazam-like feature will show you the name, artist and album, as well as where to buy it or hear it.
Bing search results will return Windows Phone Store apps that are relevant to searching. “For example, when you search for movie times, Bing will show you several of the top movie apps,” Bing says. “Bing also powers search for both apps and games in the Store. This system has also been rolled out to Windows Phone 7.x devices.”
Finally, with Bing Vision, you can use your phone’s camera to look up product info by bringing the object into view. Bing recognizes text and presents the option to select words for a search and return product results if there is a bar code. It can also read UPC codes, QR codes and Microsoft Tag, and cover art for CDs, DVDs and video games. There is a also a translation feature which you can use to translate text you come across while traveling.
Then there’s Xbox, which could be one of the greatest assets Microsoft has in terms of having an edge over Google. Google does not have a competitor to Xbox. Xbox 360 sales recently surpassed 70 million units, and we’re just getting into the holiday season this year.
Bing first came to Xbox last year, but was missing the key web search feature. The new update means people can use Bing from the Xbox just like they can from the desktop. Sure Google has Google TV as a living room weapon, but come on. We’re talking about Xbox here. Microsoft said in its announcement:
“Not only have the overall voice recognition capabilities and accuracy of Bing on Xbox been improved, but we’ve also added the following features to help refine your searches even further. Search the Web from Your TV: With the addition of “Internet Explorer,” you can now search across the web, as well as the content on your Xbox, to find the most relevant results. Bing on Xbox also searches YouTube for web original video. So, if you’re searching for a film with Jason Statham, you not only get results for his movies from within Xbox, but you can also view related web content within the same search.”
Bing also provides the search for the new Xbox Music service, and Microsoft has added the ability to search movies by genre.
On top of all of that, they’ve expanded Bing on Xbox to more countries, including: Australia, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Spain, Mexico, France, Canada (FR), Ireland, Japan, Austria and Switzerland (FR and German).
Now, I’m not saying all of this is going to come together and instantly put Micosoft ahead of Google in search. That’s just silly. However, I do believe the company is making some rather important moves that could lead to an uptick in its market share, and perhaps make Bing more relevant than it has been since it launched.
Microsoft has hardly toned down the marketing since it launched the search engine with a huge advertising budget. Now people know what Bing is, and Microsoft is putting it out there more than ever. Microsoft also has some major new products with its Windows 8 and WIndows Phone 8 operating systems, which will not hurt Bing’s chances of picking up some new users, even if Google is still a click (or a tap) away.
Of course people have to buy the devices (like the new Surface) for this Bing strategy to even try to come together, but that includes Windows PCs, and of course Xboxes. Let’s put it this way: none of this is likely to make Bing lose users.
Also, remember this: Bing doesn’t have to keep people from using Google all the time to get them using Bing more.
What do you think? Is Bing on the verge of taking a bigger piece of the search market? Let us know what you think.
Google announced that it has added Public Alerts to Google Search and Maps from the browser, Google Maps For Android and via Google Now for android devices running Jellybean.
We talked about the Google Now feature (and other new Google Now features) here.
This follows the crisis response maps the company put out yesterday to help those caught up in the “Frankenstorm,” Hurricane Sandy.
“Public Alerts provide warnings for natural disasters and emergency situations,” explains Nigel Snoad, product manager, Google Crisis Response. “They appear based on targeted Google searches, such as [Superstorm Sandy], or with location-based search queries like [New York]. In addition to the alert, you’ll also see relevant response information, such as evacuation routes, crisis maps or shelter locations.”
Here’s what public alerts might look like as you come across them:
“We’re able to gather relevant emergency safety information thanks to a strong network of partners, including NOAA and USGS,” says Snoad. “Their commitment to open standards like the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) is what makes this all possible. We’ve also developed partnerships to bring you even more relevant alerts in the future, including local emergency data from Nixle.”
Google says it was planning on announcing the features in a few days, but due to the circumstances, wanted to go ahead and get them out there. They’re available in English for the U.S. for the time being, but the company says it’s working with more data providers to bring it to more places.
Let’s see a show of hands – how many of you have spent at least one lazy Sunday afternoon sprawled out on your couch watching episode after episode of The Joy of Painting? Huh? More than once? I thought so.
For a little over a decade, painter Bob Ross was broadcast into our living rooms through his PBS series The Joy of Painting, which ran from 1983 to 1994. The series involved Ross instructing viewers how to paint in his famous style – a quick technique that he believed that anyone could learn. Watching Ross paint and instruct, you could really tell that he truly wanted to bring the joy of painting to the masses, and his talent and enthusiasm still lives on in reruns broadcast across the world and on YouTube.
And today, Google is honoring Ross with a Doodle.
In the Doodle, Ross makes up the “G,” and it depicts him working on a landscape piece. On his shoulder rests a squirrel. Ross was a noted animal and wildlife lover.
Google’s Doodle marks the late author’s birthday, October 29th. Ross died on July 4th 1995 after a battle with lymphoma. Ross would have turned 70 today.
Bing announced the launch of Bing Elections at Bing.com/elections. It includes “real-time” algorithmic news results from what Bing calls “key national, partisan and non-partisan sources.” It also features an interactive map with national, state and local election results from the Cook Political Report and Real Clear Politics as it’s reported.
There are filtering options and social data from Twitter and Facebook, as well as a feature to help users find their polling places.
Bing calls it “another reason to choose Bing over Google.”
Of course, Google has its own elections site at Google.com/elections, which includes news, relevant Google+ pages, and tons of relevant video content from YouTube, as well as trends, voter info, and various other features.
“Powered by Bing search technology and combined with the best from MSN and political partnerships including Politico, Real Clear Politics, The Cook Political Report, Huffington Post and Associated Press, bing.com/elections gives those interested in politics a new place to plug into what’s happening in Election 2012,” says Mike Nichols, Corporate Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Bing. “With coverage, polls and predictions of every race and candidate down to the state and congressional level, as well a unique take each day from Politico and its candidate tracker, Bing Elections is constantly updated so you don’t miss a thing.”
It’s not a third party, but Microsoft has, of course, launched its new Bing Apps for Windows 8, and the company is giving users a tour today. There is the standard Bing app for web and image search, but there is also a Travel app, a Weather app, a News app, a Finance app and a Sports app.
“Searching with the Bing app is fast and fluid, whether you use a touch device to tap and swipe or type and click with a keyboard and mouse,” says Brian MacDonald, Corporate Vice President, Online Service Division for Microsoft. “Finger-friendly results and images are front and center letting you quickly find what you’re looking for, so you can search less and do more. You can still rely on the same great Bing web experience in Internet Explorer 10, but we’ve optimized the Bing app to shine on Windows 8.”
“The Maps app makes it easy to find the places you’re looking for and helps you get there faster,” adds MacDonald. “Quickly pinpoint locations, get directions, see traffic conditions and more— all designed to be easily navigable with touch.”
The Weather app gives you a preview of the current weather and the hourly, daily, and 10-day forecasts. Here’s what it looks like:
For the Finance, News, Travel and Sports apps (collectively referred to as the Bing media apps), Bing has partnered with brands like ABC, AP, Bloomberg, CNBC, Fodor’s, Lonely Planet, Reuters and complete daily editions of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Microsoft refers to the experience as a built-in newsstand.
Finally, the Sports app offers headlines, live scores, schedules, standings, stats, etc., and lets you personalize it based on the teams you care about.
Microsoft has made an announcement about Bing that could potentially be very significant in helping the company’s search engine gain market share – the ability to search the web from Xbox via Internet Explorer. Here’s the thing: Xbox 360 sales just surpassed 70 million units. That’s a lot of potential Bing users, even if it doesn’t change their desktop searching habits.
Bing first came to Xbox last year, but was missing the key web search feature. The new update means people can use Bing from the Xbox just like they can from the desktop, and this is a place where Microsoft has a significant advantage over Google – the TV experience.
Here’s what Microsoft had to say about it in a blog post:
Last year, we introduced Bing on Xbox, a new way for you to search movies, TV shows, games, music and apps with the sound of your voice. With more than 65 voice-controlled TV & entertainment apps from leading brands such as HBO, Netflix, and ESPN available on the console, Xbox literally offers millions of entertainment options. By combining all this content with the power of Bing’s deep search expertise, voice recognition technology and the magic of Kinect, we provide instant access to the expansive catalogue of entertainment options on Xbox.
With this week’s updates, we are releasing a set of improvements to Bing on Xbox that make it even easier for you to discover the entertainment content you want. Not only have the overall voice recognition capabilities and accuracy of Bing on Xbox been improved, but we’ve also added the following features to help refine your searches even further. Search the Web from Your TV: With the addition of “Internet Explorer,” you can now search across the web, as well as the content on your Xbox, to find the most relevant results. Bing on Xbox also searches YouTube for web original video. So, if you’re searching for a film with Jason Statham, you not only get results for his movies from within Xbox, but you can also view related web content within the same search.
Bing also provides the search for the new Xbox Music service, and Microsoft has added the ability to search movies by genre.
On top of all of that, they’ve expanded Bing on Xbox to more countries, including: Australia, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Spain, Mexico, France, Canada (FR), Ireland, Japan, Austria and Switzerland (FR and German).
Google is rolling out some new features to Google News search, including click-to-expand news results clusters, more multimedia and some updates to the layout.
“Last year we updated Google News to make it easier for you to scan for stories that are interesting to you and let you dig deeper when you find them,” said product manager Rudy Galfi in a blog post Monday afternoon. “Today we’re announcing an update that brings some of those same ideas to news search.”
“Each news results cluster is collapsed down to one result with the exception of the first cluster,” Galfi explains. “Click on the ‘Show more’ link to see articles from more sources. This improvement makes it much easier to scan through the search results to find just the collection of news coverage you’re looking for.”
Some expanded results clusters will be accompanied by a bar of videos and photos that are related to the content. In terms of layout, cluster images now appear on the left, and the source info has been moved to below the article links.
In other Google News news, Google is facing a growing number of issues with publishers who aren’t happy with the way the site operates. Google is dealing with proposed laws in Europe that would require Google to pay to license content to link to it, while in Brazil, publishers have simply pulled out.
Last year, a company called Vringo sued Google over a couple of patents, and last week, the case began trial in Virginia. The patents are directly related to AdWords and AdSense, which are obviously vital to Google’s revenue.
One patent (6,314,420) is described in the following manner (via Ars Technica):
A search engine system is provided for a portal site on the internet. The search engine system employs a regular search engine to make one-shot or demand searches for information entities which provide at least threshold matches to user queries. The search engine system also employs a collaborative/content-based filter to make continuing searches for information entities which match existing wire queries and are ranked and stored over time in user-accessible, system wires corresponding to the respective queries. A user feedback system provides collaborative feedback data for integration with content profile data in the operation of the collaborative/content-based filter. A query processor determines whether a demand search or a wire search is made for an input query.
The patent was granted to Ken Lang years ago, who sold it to Lycos (also years ago), and eventually bought it back. Lang is now with Vringo, and appears to be greatly interested in getting paid. TechCrunch has a long, detailed version of the story from a friend of Lang’s from earlier this year.
The original complaint, which also goes after AOL, IAC, Gannett and Target, says, “Google has used and continues to use search and search advertising systems that adopt the Lang/Kosak Relevance Filtering Technology. For example, Google adopted the Lang/Kosak Relevance Filtering Technology with its use of “Quality Score.” Google’s search advertising systems filter advertisements by using “Quality Score” which is a combination of an advertisement’s content relevance to a search query (e.g., the relevance of the keyword and the matched advertisement to the search query), and click-through-rates from prior users relative to that advertisement (e.g., the historical click-through rate of the keyword and matched advertisement).”
“Google’s search advertising systems incorporating “Quality Score” – including products such as AdWords and AdSense for Search – generate advertisements and associated links when end users search from Google’s websites including, for example, its main webpage. Google additionally allows third party publishers – via AdSense for Search – to display advertising search results in response to search queries made on the third party publishers’ websites. After adopting the Lang/Kosak Relevance Filtering Technology, Google’s market share significantly grew and its profits from search advertising considerably outpaced those of other PPC advertising providers. The Lang/Kosak Relevance Filtering Technology proved to be extremely valuable to Google, allowing Google to generate greater profits and to expand its operations into many other technology areas.”
The complaint also maintains that Google had knowledge of the patented technology, citing Google’s settlement with Overture in the past.
Obviously, the outcome of this case has pretty big implications for the search industry, and just adds to Google’s stack of legal issues it has to contend with.
As you can see from the lead image, Vringo is also suing ZTE.
Will Google ever restore its realtime search feature? Will Google and Twitter ever reach another agreement giving Google the access to Twitter’s firehose it needs to make the feature useful? Would the feature ever work without Twitter?
These are questions we’ve asked repeatedly since the deal expired last year, and the realtime search feature went way. Given that Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, with search being the flagship product, it seems that this is an area that Google should have nailed down. Unfortunately, that’s far from the case.
Now, the best place to search if you want to find up to the second news and commentary about something that is happening “right now,” is undeniably Twitter. That might have still been the case even when Google had the feature, but Google had/has the luxury of being the starting point for search for most people.
We recently had a conversation with Mark Schaefer, author of The Tao Of Twitter, and wanted to see what he thinks about this. We asked:
How badly does Google need to get Twitter’s firehose back for realtime search? Do you think that Google is missing an important function without it? At the same time, is Twitter benefiting from people not going to Google for these kinds of searches?
“Twitter is trying to reign things in as a way to create more opportunities for monetization,” Schaefer tells WebProNews. “To the extent they can do that, then yes, Twitter will benefit. The real-time results from Twitter are an irreplaceable, unique and highly valuable asset, especially when it comes to providing ‘warm’ search results based on timely comments from friends.”
“It’s quite ironic that Google+ has been so conservative with providing access to their API,” he adds. “At SXSW last year, Google’s Vic Gundrota said before they made it available, they wanted to make sure it was the right thing to do so people would not be disappointed down the road. In hindsight, his comments seem prescient!”
“New data from The Social Habit project reveals that Twitter is benefiting from a youth movement,” Schaefer tells us. “People between 12-17 appear to be piling on to Twitter now. Are they using it for straight news? Probably not!”
“By comparison, I have surrounded myself on Twitter with the brightest marketing experts I can find,” he adds. “To a large extent, on this topic, Twitter is my trusted RSS feed and it is a very effective one. Today, the news breaks on Twitter. So, yes, Twitter can be an excellent news feed if that is what you want it to be.”
“News breaks on Twitter, whether local or global, of narrow or broad interest,” Twitter analytics research scientist Jimmy Lin recently said. “When news breaks, Twitter users flock to the service to find out what’s happening. Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most meaningful to them; the speed at which our content (and the relevance signals stemming from it) evolves make this more technically challenging, and we are hard at work continuously refining our relevance algorithms to address this.”
“Just to give one example: search, boiled down to its basics, is about computing term statistics such as term frequency and inverse document frequency,” he added. “Most algorithms assume some static notion of underlying distributions — which surely isn’t the case here!”
“During major events, the frequency of queries spike dramatically,” Lin noted. ”For example, on October 5 [2011], immediately following news of the death of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, the query ‘steve jobs’ spiked from a negligible fraction of query volume to 15% of the query stream — almost one in six of all queries issued!”
It’s interesting that even Google is acknowledging Twitter’s growing role in news seekers’ content consumption habits. One of Google’s official twitter accounts tweeted this out today:
The research, seen exclusively by Media Week, from Ipsos Media shows that 20% of top European businessmen, including chief executives and finance directors, are spending more time on Twitter in an average month, than on global business websites such as Reuters, Bloomberg, and the Economist.
The data also reveals that the business elite have dropped off in their daily consumption of the Financial Times and The Economist.
Beyond just news, there is also the social element of Twitter, and Google is increasingly looking to personalize search based on social connections. Twitter (not to mention Facebook) could play a significant role here too, even in real-time terms, when relevant, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon.
By the way, Twitter (like other Google competitors) is poaching Googlers. They reportedly just got Google business development director, Matthew Derrella.
Google has added explanations to the “People also search for” results that it shows as part of its Knowledge Graph on search results pages.
You know, like when you search for “Herman Melville,” and see that “people also search for” Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, etc. For some of these types of results, you can mouse over them or click the thumbnail, and see an explanation about why exactly it’s connected to the main subject of that particular Knowledge Graph result.
“Search is a lot about discovery, and the Knowledge Graph, our map of real-world people, places and things, is designed to help you find new information easily,” says Google engineer Golan Pundak. “Have you ever flipped through the ‘People also search for” section of the Knowledge Graph panels and wondered — just how are those two people connected anyway? People had fun with our Bacon Number calculator, which revealed some, often surprising, connections, and now we’re taking it one step further.”
Google says it is starting by showing major co-starring roles between actors, movies and TV shows, and highlighting family connections amongst famous people.
“These connections won’t show up all the time, but when there is an interesting explanation available, you can now see it at a glance just by mousing over or clicking,” says Pundak.
I guess we’ll see the feature expanded into other types of results over time, if these are just the starting point.
Google announced that it has expanded its coverage of building footprints in Google Maps, adding 25 million new ones on the desktop and mobile versions.
This includes coverage in Houston, L.A., Chicago, Miamai and the San Francisco Bay Area.
So you have a good idea of how much this has expanded, here’s what a section of Houston looked like in Google Maps before:
Here’s the same section now:
Here’s a neighborhood in San Diego:
“For areas that you’re familiar with, you can also help ensure that the building footprints are accurate and up-to-date by using our community mapping tool, Google Map Maker,” says Google Maps engineering manager Bobby Parikh. “In addition to improving the shapes, you can also assign your favorite local business to an existing building or draw the building footprint for that business using Map Maker.”
“For example, I enjoy exploring and updating the map around Detroit, Michigan, where I lived for many years,” says Parikh. “Now, whenever I go back for a virtual visit, I won’t have to imagine where all the buildings were in my old neighborhood since their footprints have been added for the world to see on Google Maps!”
The building footprints are created algorithmically by Google taking aerial imagery and using computer vision techniques to render the building shapes.
Google has been adding a lot of imagery for its different views in Google Maps lately, but it’s nice to see Google improving the regular Maps view as well. Earlier this week, Google also launched a couple of new Google Maps APIs for location-enabled apps.
Google CEO Larry Page spoke this week at Zeitgeist Americas 2012. You can watch the whole video here. Towards the end of the nearly 40-minute talk, an audience member from the Google Science Fair asked him about social signals in search.
“I was wondering how you thought the role of emerging social media would impact the future search algorithms,” she said.
“I think it’s really important to know, again, who you’re with, what the community is – it’s really important to share things,” Page responded. “It’s really important to know the identity of people so you can share things and comment on things and improve the search ecosystem, you know, as you – as a real person…I think all those things are absolutely crucial.”
“That’s why we’ve worked so hard on Google+, on making [it] an important part of search,” he continued. “Again, like Maps, we don’t see that as like something that’s like a separate dimension that’s never going to play into search. When you search for things, you want to know the kinds of things your friends have looked at, or recommended, or wrote about, or shared. I think that’s just kind of an obvious thing.”
“So I think in general, if the Internet’s working well, the information that’s available is shared with lots of different people and different companies and turned into experiences that work well for everyone,” he said. “You know, Google’s gotten where it is by searching all the world’s information, not just a little bit of it, right? And in general, I think people have been motivated to get that information searchable, because then we deliver users to those people with information.”
“So in general, I think that’s the right way to run the Internet as a healthy ecosystem,” Page concluded. “I think social data is obviously important and useful for that. We’d love to make use of that every way we can.”
Of course Google is severely lacking access to a great amount of social data via the world’s biggest social network, Facebook (which recently surpassed a billion active users). Google is also doing more poorly in delivering realtime social data via Twitter, since the deal the two companies had previously, fell apart last year.
It will certainly be interesting to see what kind of progress Google is able to make in social search in the future, beyond the signals it is getting from Google+. Twitter actually made a move recently by launching a user profile directory, which some think may actually help increase the visibility of Twitter users in Google results.
Google is also experimenting with email, which some might consider to be the original online social media tool, in search results. Google expanded a field trial for Gmail results in web search results this week, even adding Google Drive and Google Calendar data to the mix.
Blekko announced the launch of a new suite of premium SEO tools today. The suite features a re-designed user interface, and a number of new features.
The suite includes page analysis, SEO report cards, inbound links organized by categories, Blekko crawler sections reports and domain reports, instant SEO data and direct SEO access from Blekko’s search engine, AdSense and IP hosting information, a full list of pages crawled, and PageSource and Cache.
It also includes full link reports of the following types: inbound links by host, live inbound links, all inbound links from a host, all inbound links to a specific URL, outbound links fro a page URL, internal links, and domain comparison of inbound links.
“The mission behind blekko has always be to offer full transparency on the web,” said Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta. “Blekko’s premium SEO tools gives developers unique and often privately kept data about web domain content. Unlike other search engine analytic tools which only show general data oninbound links, our premium SEO tools provide full data reports that can be used to compare SEO stats between sites and direct SEO access from blekko search result pages.”
Blekko says it is able to provide its “up-to-the-minute” SEO tools because it is only one of four companies that can index the entire web. Blekko performs 120 million searches per month through 20 billion pages indexed. Over a hundred million of these are updated daily, Blekko says.
As previously reported, Google has expanded its field trial for Gmail results on web search results pages. Now, it includes Google Drive and Google Content (though you have to actually sign up for the new field trial to get these features). While these aren’t yet features that are available to all users, they are the latest sign of Google’s move to a more unified Google experience across its products.
Today, many people think about Google as a search engine, with YouTube as a separate site for videos, Google+ as a social networking destination, Google Docs/Drive as a product for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations, Picasa Web Albums as a place to keep photos, Gmail as a place for email, etc. It makes sense. Each of these products have specific things they do. However, Google doesn’t want you to necessarily think of these things as separate products. They want you to think of them as useful features of Google. One big, great Google experience that can meet all of your online needs.
With the new field trial, not only can you access Gmail, Google Drive and Google Calendar content from web search results, you can do so from Gmail results. Google is not only unifying its products, it’s unifying the search experience to some extent. How long before you can access content from any of Google’s products from the search box on another of its products. How long before you can find YouTube videos from a Google Docs search or Google+ results from a YouTube search? Picasa Web Albums content from a Gmail search?
Google has made other changes over the last couple weeks that fit into this line of thinking. For example, Google is now letting you see user reviews of local businesses from people’s Google Profiles. Google launched a familiar navigation system on its mobile homepage, reflecting the desktop version, which easily gets users to various Google products, as if they were simply features of Google.
Meanwhile, Google is already finding ways to improve search features of its various products. In recent months, we’ve seen Google launch updates to Gmail search. Just this week, Google made one to Google Drive search, enabling you to access menu functionality right from the search box.
While Google continues to integrate its various products with one another, it also continues to shut down numerous services. In some cases, these products just go away. In others, certain key functionalities go on to appear in other existing Google products. As giant as Google is, it has been slimming down and becoming more simplified little by little ever since Larry Page took over as CEO.
The Filter Bubble
The side effects of all of this simplification and integration are interesting. Alternative search engine DuckDuckGo highlighted one of them in a new video. That would be the “filter bubble“. Google, with its ability to use your data from product to product, is finding more ways to personalize your search experience. This new Gmail/Google Drive integration into web search results is a prime example. You’re seeing more content that is specific to you. Nobody else will get these search results.
DuckDuckGo’s whole point is that by personalizing the search experience to each user, Google is limiting access to information outside of this personalized bubble. You may never see results that other people are seeing, which could bring new perspective to whatever it is that you are searching for. They make the specific point of mentioning politically charged queries. The thinking is that you’ll never see the opposing viewpoints if you keep seeing results tailored to your existing biases.
Competition
There are three major themes that continue to dominate the conversation around Google’s strategy, and they’re all directly related: personalization, privacy and competition. The personalization (at least to some degree) is directly affected by the privacy policy, which is needed for Google to better compete against its rivals. Google has flat out said as much.
“Users are accustomed to their products working together, and expect this consistent experience across their Google Account,” the company wrote in a letter to the French data protection authority, the CNIL, which is leading the EU’s assault on Google’s privacy policy. “The use of a primary privacy policy that covers many products and enables the sharing of data between them is an industry standard approach adopted by companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo! and Apple.”
These, in addition to Amazon, are Google’s chief rivals. Meanwhile, these rivals continue to make moves that position them to better compete with Google. Interestingly enough, this is all shaking out at a time when Google faces antitrust battles with the EU and the FTC. Any regulation that may arise from these could severely hinder Google’s progress in the unification of its features at a time when such unification is at its most critical from a competitive standpoint.
Two of those competitors – Apple and Yahoo – just made significant hires that should enable them to compete at an even higher level against Google. Apple just got a major search player to lead its Siri unit, and Yahoo, now run by an historically critical Googler – Marissa Mayer – just took away Google’s President of Media, Mobile and Platforms Worldwide (not to mention other Googlers she’s managed to lure away in her short time at the company). How many more Googlers will follow Mayer over to Yahoo, which has been competing with Google since Google was launched?
Colorado congressman Jarid Polis, a tech entrepreneur himself, has come out against any antitrust regulation of Google. In a letter to the FTC, he wrote, “While Google is surely a big company and an important service in people’s lives, my constituents also use a variety of competing services, including Amazon.com for shopping, iTunes for music and movies, Facebook for social networking and recommendations, and mobile apps like Yelp for finding local businesses. Competition is only a click away and there are no barriers to competition; if I created a better search algorithm I could set up a server in my garage and compete globally with Google. To even discuss applying anti-trust in this kind of hyper-competitive environment defies all logic and the very underpinnings of anti-trust law itself.”
He’s absolutely right about being able to start his own search engine if he wanted to. DuckDuckGo has done it, and from what I understand, has managed to gain a modest user base in a space many felt it was impossible to penetrate. It’s not a major player in search, but it’s a player nonetheless, and people can use it if they want. Some do.
It’s not these smaller players that Google must contend with, however. At least not for the foreseeable future. It’s the big players that both Google and Polis mentioned – the players like Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Yahoo. The players that have a lot of money to throw around on new products and services, as well as marketing. Antitrust and even privacy policy restrictions placed on Google could disrupt Google’s ability to make changes it needs to make to stay relevant and compete with these other giants (Facebook, by the way, is the top global brand, according to a new report from General Sentiment). Apple products, in case you haven’t heard, are pretty popular too. Especially the mobile ones (where Facebook use happens to be growing like a weed, not to mention that increased integration with Facebook that Apple’s mobile operating system has introduced with its latest update – an update that also reduced user exposure to Google through its Maps offering).
The point is, that as hard as it is to imagine Google going away, other companies have been on top in the past, and have slid down considerably. Microsoft was obviously dealt a huge blow by antitrust regulation years ago, which some would say it has still not fully recovered from. As Polis said in his letter, “Several years ago, we called firms like AOL, MySpace and Yahoo ‘dominant’ — but those firms have struggled to retain consumers online. Given how easily consumers can switch to a new service with just one click, regulators should be wary of intervening in the tremendous competition online.”
For all of the outcry from competitors over Google’s business practices, and the scrutiny from authorities, it’s stil not clear how much consumers actually believe they are being hurt by Google’s dominance on the Internet, or by their recently updated privacy policy. Personalization? The jury’s still out on that one too.
DuckDuckGo is following Bing’s lead with a new ad telling you why its results are better than Google’s. Unlike Bing’s “Bing It On” campaign, however, DuckDuckGo isn’t pushing a blind taste test of side-by-side search results. They’re simply telling you that you’re getting different results than everybody else because of the “filter bubble,” and that you could be missing out on stuff just because it doesn’t fit the profile of what Google thinks you should be seeing.
Google personalizing results is nothing new, as anyone who follows the industry knows, though I’m not sure how common this knowledge is to the average user. I’m not sure how often the average user thinks about this or even cares, to be honest.
Earlier this year, Google updated its privacy policy to consolidate numerous policies from its various products into one that can cover most of them, and enable the company to use data from service to service so that it can better personalize the user experience. This is, in fact, something that is even still causing drama in Europe. The EU is expected to tell Google it can’t do this on Tuesday, though it’s been doing it for months.
Google has not hidden from any of this, however, and maintains that a personalized experience is a better experience, and many would likely agree.
DuckDuckGo makes the point that Google is still personalizing searches even for signed out users, and says it had 131 who weren’t signed into Google perfrom searches for three different political queries (abortion, gun control and Obama), with a “wide variance” in resulting links, as it’s put in a Talking Points Memo article on the study.
Earlier, we told you that Foursquare was planning a new homepage that would put the focus on search and open up their personalized recommendations to everyone – even if they aren’t a member of the Foursquare community.
And now, the new Foursquare.com is live for everyone. According to the company, it will “reinvent local search” by allowing anyone to utilize Foursquare’s billions of check-ins and millions of tips – without having to sign up.
“[W]e’ve been tweaking and improving the formula that supplies those recommendations, analyzing and re-analyzing our nearly 3 billion check-ins and 30 million tips to find the keys to the best recommendations. In fact, we even started running an experiment: without any check-ins, can we still provide the best local recommendations? Thanks to those 3 billion check-ins and 30 million tips (and a bit more magic behind the scenes), we’ve gotten really really good at it,” says Foursquare in a blog post.
Even for a logged-out user, a search on Foursquare will yield plenty of results complete with tips, composite ratings, photos, and a map.
“Foursquare doesn’t just hand you a one-size-fits-all list of suggestions. Even if you’ve never checked in, Explore still can make great recommendations based on a number of signals, like what’s popular in the neighborhood, new places, places that are trending at the moment, where experts go, and what’s popular on that day of the week. If you search for a bar, we don’t just tell you about great bars, but rather the best places you should go tonight,” they say.
With this move, Foursquare is obviously going after other directories with tips, ratings, hours, and menus – think Yelp or Urbanspoon. The great thing about Foursquare is they can not only give you recommendations based on where you are, but they have an insane amount of data that they can use to give you the best choices based on what everyone else likes and recommends. Of course, creating an account, checking-in, making friends, and leaving tips will greatly improve the accuracy of Foursquare’s personalized results.
But for the casual user who’s just looking for a great sushi place in a town they’re unfamiliar with, Foursquare wants to be the go to search engine. And this new interface puts them firmly in the conversation.