Showing posts with label Web search engine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Web search engine. Show all posts

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Facebook Search Can't Be Bing

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase
That is the obvious point. Facebook search necessarily has to be social, relying on data Facebook already has. Of course.

Why Facebook's Search Engine Won't Be Anything Like Google's
By mining users’ updates about vacations, music listening interests, online habits, and more, Facebook Search could be better at answering subjective questions, about what products, experiences, and businesses you might be interested in, than a traditional search engine. ..... “Because Google is so big,” says Gerasoulis, “they have data for the long tail”—the uncommon queries for which relatively few pages are a match. .... Since 2009, the Redmond company has spent more than $5 billion on Bing ..... serves only 15 percent of U.S. searches, compared with Google’s 65 percent. .... answering queries about the things that people share and discuss on Facebook, such as vacations, movies, recipes, and more. “When you go to specific subjects, the signals Facebook and other social networks have are amazing,” says Gerasoulis. ...... Mining users’ comments could help Facebook unlock even more useful data ..... “Facebook and Twitter both have teams working on search” ..... Digging deep into social data can uncover a wealth of information and forgotten content related to things people care about ... most of it not accessible by conventional search engines. ...... “Search is about what you want right now,” says Gerasoulis. “You go to Facebook and hang out; it doesn’t currently have the same directness.”
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Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Inconvenient Search

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase
It's interesting to see Google compete with itself.

How Google Plans to Find the UnGoogleable
The company wants to improve its mobile search services by automatically delivering information you wouldn’t think to search for online. .... relatively small pieces of information that I’d never turn to Google for. For example, how long the line currently is in a local grocery store. Some offline activities, such as reading a novel, or cooking a meal, generated questions that I hadn’t turned to Google to answer—mainly due to the inconvenience of having to grab a computer or phone in order to sift through results. ..... mobile devices made it possible for Google to discover unmet needs for information ..... the perfect search engine will provide you with exactly what you need to know at exactly the right moment, potentially without you having to ask for it ....... Google Now offers unsolicited directions, weather forecasts, flight updates ...... the pinnacle of this hands-free experience, an entirely new class of device ....... "In the future you might want to search very new information from the physical environment ..... Your information needs are very localized to that place and event and moment.” ....... Google Now already combines location data with real-time feeds, for example, from U.S. public transit authorities, allowing a user to walk up to a bus stop and pull out his phone to find arrival times already provided. ..... a search engine for mobile devices dubbed Gander, which communicates directly with local sensors. A pilot being installed on the University of Texas campus will, starting early next year, allow students to find out wait times at different cafés and restaurants, or find the nearest person working on the same assignment
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Sunday, November 18, 2012

Yahoo Facebook Search Alliance Would Be Interesting

I think this is the most intriguing move by Marissa Mayer since she took up leadership at Yahoo. But so far this is just a meeting between two powerful women in tech.

I have long advocated Facebook should go into search. And I thought from day one Yahoo outsourcing search to Microsoft was a mistake.

Facebook's Search Option
The Facebook Search Engine
Facebook Could Do Well In Search

This move is audacious. I'd be interested to know what kind of timeline we might be talking about.

But it would be a mistake to think of this in terms of a political alliance. When Yahoo and Microsoft teamed up, two plus two did not equal four. They together lost share to Google.

This is about if you can innovate. I think these two might be able to.

Marissa Mayer: Biographical Details
Marissa Mayer's Gameplan
Marissa Mayer: Photos
Sheryl Sandberg: New Yorker Profile

Yahoo! plots alliance with Facebook in new search deal
Facebook has already said it plans to boost its web search facility, with founder Mark Zuckerberg noting that the social network is “pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have”. ...... Yahoo!, which started life as one the first major search engines but is now dwarfed by rival Google, would benefit from Facebook’s vast army of more than 1bn users. ..... Working with Facebook would also allow Yahoo! to piggyback on the social network’s brand cachet to help it recruit top-tier computer programmers ..... An alliance between Facebook and Yahoo! will pose a major threat to Google and stands to reorder the hierarchy of the world’s biggest technology companies. A senior figure likened Yahoo!’s position to that of a minority party in a hung parliament, with the power to act as kingmaker by choosing another party with which to align itself. ..... she and Ms Sandberg, who is also a former Google executive, are expected to use their combined might to launch a serious competitor. ..... Google dominates the market with around a 66pc share. Bing has had some effect at the edges, with just under 16pc of all searches taking place on the platform.
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Sunday, October 28, 2012

Google Now

Image representing Google Search as depicted i...
Image via CrunchBase
Google is never far behind.

Google's Answer to Siri Thinks Ahead
Google has ambitions to go well beyond what Siri has shown so far. ..... Google Now doesn't have a pretend personality like Apple's sassy assistant, instead just appearing as a familiar search box. But just like Siri, it can take voice commands ..... combines the constant stream of data a smartphone collects on its owner with clues about the person's life that Google can sift from Web searches and e-mails to guess what he or she would ask it for next. ..... Virtual index cards appear offering information it thinks you need to know at a particular time. ..... the intimacy of people's relationships with their smartphones makes Android one of the best places to take that to an extreme—by pulling together everything Google knows about the world, and you. ...... it uses every system that Google has built in the last 10 years. It touches almost every back-end system at Google .... increase in a person's tranquility ..... having the search engine come to you, rather than vice versa, can be uncanny. Thanks to Google Now, as I stroll around San Francisco, live bus times are offered to me whenever I pull my phone from my pocket at a bus stop ..... Google Now will show the status of a flight if an airline confirmation e-mail in my inbox shows I'll be taking it or if I did a Google Web search for a flight number from my work computer—providing I've logged into my Google account. ..... estimates of emotional state can be useful
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Saturday, October 27, 2012

Google Should Pay For Linking? Weird

Image representing Rupert Murdoch as depicted ...
Image via CrunchBase
I think Rupert Murdoch had a similar beef a few years ago. He was sick and tired of Google linking to articles on his properties. I found that mindset amazing.

If Google scrapes your article and publishes them at its own property passing for its own, that is a huge problem. But if Google shows you up in search results, if it links to your articles from the Google News page, how is that a problem for you? What do you want? Less traffic to your site? I don't get it.

Learn from The Drudge Report about how to survive in this digital age.

French Minister Says Google Faces Critical Questions Over Copyright
French lawmakers want to pass a bill that would tax Google for content it currently indexes for free, after newspapers lobbied for the measure. .... Brazilian newspapers have taken the more extreme step of boycotting Google for the past year. .... The company noted in a letter it directs 4 billion people a month to French publishers’ pages, so a Google ban would be a significant blow to newspapers, too.
How are the Brazilians managing to stay away from Google? Beats me.

Boycott of Brazilian newspapers on Google becomes a model abroad
The Brazilian newspapers' pioneering boycott on Google News - most newspapers haven't allowed links with news to be displayed on the search engine for over a year - has raised interest abroad. ..... information requests from French, German and Chilean newspapers. ..... boycotting Google News helped to bring down one of the arguments the search engine used, that being featured on the search lists helps to improve audience - which could lead to more publicity revenues. ..... Since the newspapers associated with ANJ, which represent 90% of the market, decided to give up having their articles displayed by the search engine, their traffic declined on average less than 5%. ..... Unlike Brazil, in Germany and other European countries copyrights belong to journalists, not the newspaper.
I still don't get it. Even if you charge people to access your content, showing up in Google's search results would be in your interest, one would think. Scratch, scratch. Why is losing that 5% a good thing?
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