Posts with tag "search"

Thank you Mr. Newsome – finally a sensible outlook

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Posted 1260 days ago

It’s understandable that we get excited about new things but at some point that newness wears off and reality sets in. Well the newness of Twitter is long over and yet the hype and silliness surrounding its importance continues to roll on.

Today came the non-stop fawning over the fact that Google was going full tilt into this social search idea with Twitter results showing up real-time (yet another misconstrued idea that is giving everyone a woodie it seems) as you sit there staring at your Google search results page.

The rapture around Twitter as our guiding light to the illustrious future of living in the moment is sometimes stupefying and yet it continues unabated.

CobWEBs Daily Edition podcast: A single search index – a solution we’ll never see

Category: Podcasts
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Posted 1273 days ago

While both Sean and I are hoping that everyone is having a great time with family and friends this Thanksgiving long weekend in the US the rest of the world gets to carry on like it is a regular Thursday which of course means another show.

Tonight once I get the last two frustrating days of trying to move data around off of my chest we both get down to talking about a great post from Tom Foremski over at Silicon Valley Watcher. In his post he talks about the idea of a single search indexed overseen by a non-profit organization.

It is a fascinating idea and one that both Sean and I agree will never happen no matter how much of a benefit it would be to the web as a whole.

Posts mentioned in the show

A Single Search Index Would Speed Up The Entire Internet – A Zero Carbon Speed Boost – Silicon Valley Watch

Enjoy the show

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Factery and their authority algorithms

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Posted 1349 days ago

Other than the fact that Factery has raised $1.2 million in funding not much more is known about the Menlo Park based startup. The company was founded in April, 2009, by Paul Pedersen and Sean Gaddis both of whom worked in search marketing at Google, Powerset, eBay and Skype.

The about page at the Factery.net site doesn’t hold much more information other than the company is dedicated to commercializing a product or service called FactRank technology that they say is meant to “enhance the discovery of relevant information in order to simplify and make useful the increasingly noisy social web experience”.

That’s the company blurb but I’ve also heard that the company is working on what is essentially authority algorithms. Tied in with this is there is also what AltSearchEngines refers to as a “sort of a hybrid of a semantic search engine”. Factery utilizes real time results from Twitter posts, images from Yahoo and content from other sources.

I was also told today that the company soon plans to expose a rich API of their data for developers to get their hands dirty in the hope I imagine that through the use of widgets and the such they’ll be able to gain some traction in a crowded field – regardless of whether they call it a “fact engine” or just another search engine.

And you people call yourselves tech bloggers

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Posted 1452 days ago

In much of the news about Microsoft’s relaunched search engine, Bing, one of the things that many tech bloggers have been mentioning as being new is how Bing will display images and videos. More than a few comments I have seen around is how it is rather cool that Bing will let you play videos inline.

Here’s a hint people: Live.com was doing that for some time.

What is even funnier though is how cool people think the way that Bing let’s you drill down on images. When you select Bing – Images and enter in your query you will see something like this

As you can see a graphic for Shooting at Bubbles shows up quite nicely (which it didn’t do in Google’s image search by the way). Now if you click on the actual graphic you will drill down to this display

Here’s another hint guys – Live.com has been doing this for a very long time.

It’s one thing to poke fun at something but come on folks if you’re going to write about something especially when you are pointing out faults or pluses make sure you know what you are talking about. I remember Live.com getting panned all the the time but obviously when it comes to Microsoft this doesn’t apply.

Microsoft = FAIL
Google = FTW

Ya, right.

Ballmer admits to the value of ‘verbing up’ but gives us bland instead

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Posted 1455 days ago

It’s nice to have my opinions about something, even if in a round about way, verified as being even close to on the money. It doesn’t happen very often and especially not from the level of a Steve Ballmer.

I took a lot of flack recently over a post I wrote at The Inquisitr that took Microsoft to task over calling their relaunch of their search engine under the Bing brand. The point that I tried to make and have made in the past is that as much as Microsoft might have a search engine that is on par with Google it won’t matter. It has boiled down to being a marketing of the verb game.

Even with a killer search platform Microsoft has forgotten the most important thing – Google owns the culture. It owns the verb. How often have you seen someone write “I googled you last night”, or said “I’ll google that for you and get right back”. Google has become the search language verb. From pretty well primary school right through to the grave Google has become the defacto word for search.

So it was rather interesting to find out today as I read through all the blog posts following up on Microsoft’s announcement about Bing, and when it would go live (June 3), that Steve Ballmer acknowledged that the ‘verb’ was important (emphasis mine) .

Asked about the name onstage at the D7 conference, CEO Steve Ballmer admits: “I am not what you would call the creative side of life. Short matters. Being able to verb up can be helpful.” But he also says, “We wanted something that unambiguously says search.”

Source: TechCrunch

While they might not have taken my advise it is nice to see that what I was trying to say was a part of the process they might have gone through. As to whether Bing will change the search landscape – I sincerely doubt it but any new ideas are more than welcome as it is the only way that search will get better. So I’m looking forward to giving Bing a try as soon as I can – even if I think the name sucks.

Can Google afford the real-time and semantic web?

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Posted 1470 days ago

Google makes its money from AdSense and AdWords based advertising. In fact they make billions of dollars off of the simple act of selling keywords which then people create ads around. The idea that Google makes any money directly from their search business is a fallacy.

Every penny they make is based on keywords.

While real-time search may be based around keywords it is a lot harder to sell AdWords against because how are advertisers going to now what is going to be the hot keyword in the next minute, the next second. After all that is what real-time search is suppose to be about – what is happening right now.

Even harder though is the move to a semantic web. The semantic web doesn’t depend on keywords for searching. As Tom Foremski asks “.. is there such a thing as a semantic keywords?”

So this begs the question that is the move in search is going away from keywords just how is Google going to be able to monetize it?

This is the question that Tom asks in his post earlier

Still, it’s an interesting question, because there is a lot of chatter about the "semantic web" and "semantic search" in the industry. How would you sell "semantic advertising?" Can there be a "semantic keyword?" How much ambiguity can you quantify and sell to advertisers involved in search engine marketing programs?

It’s all part of a larger question, how would you monetize a "semantic web?"

An interesting question and one we will be coming back to more often I think.

It’s Microsoft So It Must Be Dumb And Smack Of Desperation

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Posted 1694 days ago

I don’t get it – really I don’t

Why is it everyone seems to get their panties in a bunch when Microsoft decides that it wants to use exactly the same kind of promotional ideas that many other companies do online; or just about every company in the real world uses. The latest action by the company that has got all the pundits in a let’s slap Microsoft around mode is the announcement that they are testing out an new Live Search promotion campaign.

It doesn’t matter where you turn in our real world but at some point point in your day you are going to have some company offer you a special promotion for their product or service. Whether it be a cashback deal on a vehicle, a percentage off coupon for the price of shampoo or air miles to some vacation spot these normal business practices come at us a mile a minute. Yet when Microsoft offers the same thing we get things like

If you can’t beat ’em, pay ‘em off. – Mary Jo Foley

or this from TechCrunch

So will SearchPerks be any different? It’s too early to tell. But begging people to use your search engine certainly doesn’t send the right signals to those who may be considering it.

then we have JR from The Inquisitr chiming in with

The move reeks even more of desperation than the company’s CashBack deal back in May.
[..]
Microsoft’s already on its knees and begging.

and finally from Paul Glazowski we get this gem of business acumen

It smells of soft desperation, of Microsoft throwing its hands in the air and subsequently throwing things against the wall to see what sticks. Which isn’t a healthy impression to make at this point in the game.

Oh wait …. I get it. It’s Microsoft doing this and since they are number three in the search game anything they do; including accepted business promotional ideas, must be regulated to the dumb idea pile. Because it’s Microsoft who is trying to gain ground in the search business this idea must show how absolutely devoid of any business sense they are.

It doesn’t matter if the plan works or not – that isn’t the point here. What is the point is that people seem to think that just because it has to do with search there is a whole new set of business rules that need to be used. Bullshit – business is business whether it is online or offline. If the idea is that there is some sort of purity that is associated with the search business well I hate to break it to you but that idea went out the window with the first time AdSense was added to search results.

This recent test campaign by Microsoft will succeed or it will fail – which I am betting it will – by it’s own merits but that doesn’t make it stupid, desperate or leave an unhealthy impression. If that was the case then every coupon you use or every air mile you case in is just as stupid or desperate.

You can’t have it both ways.

Sorry Louis But Links Are Important

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Posted 1779 days ago

There are times where I really wonder if there is a different brand of kool-aid that bloggers start drinking the more popular they become. Not that long ago we had Robert Scoble in one of his few and far between blog posts suggesting that commenting on blogs; an integral part of blogging and discussions, was going to disappear. Now today we have Louis Gray suggesting that links aren’t important anymore either to which Stan Schroeder of Mashable says he agrees with the premise but not how Louis got there.

Well I hate to be the one to tell these two gentlemen but you’ve been drinking too much of Robert’s kool-aid. The idea that the only value of links is because of the traffic that they might bring to a blog is not what links are meant for. They are a nice added bonus if they do send traffic your way but links are much more important for two other reasons which are totally different from each other but equally important.

At their most basic use – that of linking to posts by other authors – links are a way to provide attribution for either ideas or actual sources of quotes being used. Whether you link to someone else’s post because they have written something that provided you with the basis of your own post or because you are quoting a section of theirs it is the one way that we have to credit someone for their work. By doing that we also affect their value for the second reason that links are important.

It doesn’t matter what search engine you use these days they all use link counts at some point in their algorithms to rank one item over another when they return search results. This in turn helps provide relevance when we are searching on a subject as these links show how others have related to any given subject. Without links there is a key indicator of value that is taken out of the equation and has a direct effect on the types of results we will get.

Having posts without links is like a tree out in the middle of nowhere waving to get our attention but we have no way to see it. Many smarter people before me have said that links are the very glue that hold the blogosphere together and no matter how much the social media mavens might want us to think otherwise we need them.

I find this equally interesting that statements like these come from people who have for all intents and purposes made it as bloggers. For them they might not think that links are important anymore or that Google only sees them as links but for those bloggers who are not in that rarified space and continuum links are their lifeblood that provides them with a way to gauge their growth forward. I wonder how quickly that air of superiority would change if the links to them and about them dried up.