Archive for the ‘Web Search’ Category

Are You Ready to Go to Googland?

Monday, October 26th, 2009

A day doesn’t go by that Google is announcing, updating, or just doing something they want to tell the world about. While sites like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable, and Search Engine Journal do a great job of not only presenting the news but also offering some perspective, they always don’t get to everything from the folks in Mountain View, CA.

Of course, the ResourceShelf team also tries our best to make sure you know about what Google is up to. But, like the others, we don’t get to everything.

That’s why Googland is so useful. Google usually makes their “official announcement” on one of many blogs. Googland aggregates content from many (not all) Google blogs into a single location (with an RSS feed, of course). After a few days of visiting the Googland you’ll be simply amazed at the number of posts that come from the ‘Plex.”

Access Googland

First Bing and Now Google Makes Deal to Provide Twitter Results

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Just hours after Bing made an announcement that they’ll now offer Twitter results at: http://www.bing.com/twitter, Google has just announced that will also offer Twitter results.

From a Google Blog Post by Marissa Mayer:

At Google, our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world. In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.

Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and [our emphasis] we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.

Btw, at the same time Bing announced their Twitter results engine, they also said that they have made a deal with Facebook to also include their results. That stream of content will be available at a later date.

Matt McGee is blogging Marissa Mayer’s panel at Web 2.0 (with several other big names). You can find the live-blogging here.

Bing Announces Does Deal to Amass and Search Twitter Data; Facebook Data Too!

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

UPDATE (6:30pm EDST): Google Will Also Offer Twitter Results, More Here.

UPDATE 1 from Gary) The new interface is now online at:

http://www.bing.com/twitter

+ Note the tag-cloud and the list of “hot topics” on the home page. Clink an item and you’ll see:

++ Most Recent Tweets about X

++Top Links Shared in Posts about X

+ Search results automatically refresh unless you hit the pause button (note other services do the same type of thing)

+ Clicking the RT button will take you to your Twitter page ready (with the info already in the box) to retweet. If you don’t have an account it will take you to a page to register (if you want to).

+ Some searches will trigger other results from the Bing engine. For example, note this result for #Chicago and how it shows links to other Bing content on the right side of the page.

+ When you see a shortened url from bit.ly for example, look to the right shortened and in parenthesis, you’ll see the domain of the url that’s being shortened. (Thanks Danny!)

UPDATE 2) In addition to the Search Engine Land post below, Danny Sullivan, will be updating with new data as it becomes available here.
It’s loaded with information and screenshots.

UPDATE 3) More in a Bing Blog Post

UPDATE 4) Matt McGee from Search Engine Land live-blogged Microsoft’s Qi Lu’s (Head of Microsoft Search) interview/presentation at the Web 2.0 Conference.

Here is Some of What We Learned:

+ Bing is using “Best Match” technology to dedupe results and then focus in on those results
+ Spam filtering is being used
+ What else effects Twitter results at Bing?
+

Quality – look at who’s tweeting and assign soicla relevance score popularity – look at the caption – length of comment, links, etc., affect quality and relevance usefulness – number of retweets affects results.

As noted above and elsewhere you might not see every “tweet” when using Bing.

Source: Search Engine Land

Scotland: Googling Jurors Warning from Top Scottish Lawyer

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

From the Article:

Donald Findlay QC, one of Scotland’s top criminal lawyers, has warned that the impartiality of the jury system is at risk due to jurors using internet search engines and has warned that the Government cannot continue with its “ostrich-like” attitude to the problem.

Writing in Scottish Legal News, the daily information service for Scotland’s lawyers, Mr Findlay called for tighter rules to warn jurors about using the internet to research cases they are sitting in.

Mr Findlay, who has acted in some of Scotland’s most high-profile cases, says that the Scottish Government needs to upgrade its legislation to stop “Googling jurors”.

Source: stv

Searching Can be Good For Your Health: Internet Alters Older Brains in Just One Week

Monday, October 19th, 2009

From the Article:

Adults with little Internet experience show changes in their brain activity after just one week online, a new study finds.

The results suggest Internet training can stimulate neural activation patterns and could potentially enhance brain function and cognition in older adults.

“We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function,” Dr. Gary Small, study author and professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, said in a statement.

[Snip]

Previous research by the UCLA team found that searching online resulted in a more than twofold increase in brain activation in older adults with prior experience, compared with those with little Internet experience. The new findings suggest that it may take only days for those with minimal experience to match the activity levels of those with years of experience, said Small.

Source: LiveScience.com (via MSNBC)

Why Are Web Sites So Confusing?

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Why Are Web Sites So Confusing?

Just as bread and milk are often found at far-away ends of the supermarket, Web sites that match consumers with certain products have an incentive to steer users to products that yield the highest margins. The result: a compromise between what users want and what produces the most revenues, say HBS professor Andrei Hagiu and Toulouse School of Economics researcher Bruno Jullien. A look inside the world of search.

+ Why Do Intermediaries Divert Search? (PDF; 490 KB)

Source: Harvard Business School Working Knowledge

Google and Its Design Philosophy

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

Matt McGee Writes on Search Engine Land:

[Director of User Experience Irene] Au leads a 200-person user experience team that often gets involved in new projects long after the design has started. She tells TechRadar that projects are typically started by engineers, and a developer toolkit lets the engineers “get 70 to 80 per cent of the way there without having a designer involved.”

Access the Complete Search Engine Land Post

Source Search Engine Land

Google, Microsoft Boost Search Share; Yahoo Declines + Both Facebook & Twitter Share Continue to Grow

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

From the Bloomberg Article:

Google and Microsoft boosted their share of the U.S. Internet search market in September, while Yahoo lost ground, according to research firm ComScore Inc.

Google’s share increased to 64.9 percent from 64.6 percent in August, Reston, Virginia-based ComScore said yesterday. Microsoft rose to 9.4 percent from 9.3 percent, while Yahoo dropped to 18.8 percent from 19.3 percent, ComScore said.

What about Twitter and Facebook? What’s most interesting are these numbers vs. last year.

Facebook Inc., the No. 1 social-networking site, had 95.5 million U.S. users during September, up 3.6 percent from the previous month, according to ComScore. The number more than doubled from a year earlier.

Twitter Inc., the No. 3 social-networking site in the U.S., had little growth in September from the previous month, with 20.9 million users. Compared with a year earlier, though, its users have swelled 18-fold.

Source: Bloomberg

See Also: If you Would like to Compare comScore September Rankings with September Rankings from Experian Hitwise, Here’s Our Hitwise Post (October 7, 2009).
This post also discusses search query length (how many terms are users placing in the search box.

See Also: Expanded and Enhanced Rankings from comScore

An Introduction to Factual

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

In a Search Engine Land post titled “Factual: Parting The Curtains Of The Invisible Web, Chris Sherman* introduces a database named Factual.

Here are a few points from the complete article:

1) Factual is a self-described “open data repository.” Like Wolfram Alpha, a “computational knowledge engine” that launched earlier this year, Factual seeks to create order from chaos by allowing anyone to share and mash open data on any subject, structuring information in database-like tables.

2) Unlike Wolfram Alpha, which is a closed system with data “curated” by employees, Factual has adopted a Wikipedia-like model which allows anyone to create, structure or even edit data in Factual tables. [Company founder Gil] Elbaz hopes this open model [they have about 10,000 tables as of today] will encourage community participation, enabling Factual to grow rapidly and enjoy widespread adoption.

3) As good as Google is at understanding open web content, it struggles to access this “deep” or “invisible” web content, largely because Google can’t easily interact with the user interfaces of databases. (Google is experimenting with structured data, most notably with Google Squared and Fusion Tables, but these are Google Labs projects and don’t appear to be major initiatives for mainstream search.)

4) Factual is allowing registered users to edit data, but rather than adopting Wikipedia’s “edit and replace” model, Factual lets people add information to a table without overwriting or deleting existing data. It then uses a consensus-based model to settle on the most authoritative facts to display. Elbaz says this makes it difficult to impossible for a charlatan to corrupt data with incorrect entries.

5) Search results, however, are very different [vs. Google and other engines}. Because Factual is searching data, you’re presented with the name of data tables, along with the fields in the table. You can sort results by relevance, table name, last updated, author, views, rows or user rating. Once you click through on a result, the table is displayed very much like an Excel spreadsheet.


The article goes
on to provide more background, explain Factual result sets, discuss how to create your own tables and mashups.

Make sure to read the complete article.

Access the Factual Web Site.

Source: Search Engine Land

See Also: Much More via Factual Blog

See Also: A Brief Users Guide to Wolfram|Alpha (May, 2009)

See Also: Wolfram|Alpha Officially Announces New Web Site for Educators and Students; Plans for “Homework Day” Webcast Also Released (10/09)

* In 2001 Chris Sherman co-authored a book titled, The Invisible Web, with ResourceShelf’s Gary Price.

Bing Reference Home Page Now Online

Friday, October 9th, 2009

From the Blog Post:

From the Bing homepage, click “more,” then click “Reference,” to be taken to Bing Reference’s very own homepage. Or you can always access Reference directly by going to http://www.bing.com/reference. Bing Reference is a product of the Powerset team at Bing. From the new Reference homepage you can begin your research on interesting topics of the day, and see examples of reference queries that illustrate the natural-language capabilities of our semantic technology.

Access Bing Reference Homepage

We ran several searches and most of the content came from a nicely enhanced version of Wikipedia along with the Freebase project. Here are three examples:

+ World Series

+ Population of Greenland

+ Internet History

One question we have is how often is the Bing/Powerset version of Wikipedia updated with new/changed/removed/edited data? One of the positives (it can also be seen as a negative) is the very dynamic (non-stop) nature of the Wikipedia corpus.

Source: Bing Community

Google Flu Trends Continues its Global Expansion

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

From a Google Blog Post:

…at Google.org are excited to announce the expansion of Google Flu Trends to 16 additional countries, including much of Europe. We’ve also made the site available in 37 languages.

[Snip]

In the past year, we’ve expanded our coverage to include Mexico, New Zealand and Australia and have continued to see a good correspondence between our estimates and official flu activity data. In fact, our analysis of last season shows that Google Flu Trends had a close 0.92 correlation with official U.S. flu data.

The blog post includes a two minute video on how Google built the the model that powers Google Flu Trends.

If you want to learn even more the FAQ and the “How Does this Work” page (and video) are required reading and viewing.

Access Google Flu Trends

Source: Official Google Blog

Google: Quickly View Formatted PDFs in Your Search Results

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

From the Official Google Blog Post:

Today, we’ve added new links to “Quick View” PDFs in your browser with the formatting intact. The new links are based on the same technology that’s available in Google Docs and Gmail, as well as to webmasters through the Google Docs viewer. We’ve been rolling this technology out to the search results page since July, and as of today we’ve added “Quick View” links to more than 50% of the PDFs in our index. The new links appear at the end of the second line of the result, right underneath the title.

Here’s an Example Search
Note the Quick View links for some of the results.

Source: Official Google Blog

September Rankings: Google Receives 71 % of Searches, Longer Search Queries Too

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

From the News Release:

1) Google, 71.08%, Up 1% Month-over-Month
2) Yahoo, 16.38%, Down 3% Month-over-Month
3) Bing, 8.96%, Down 5% Month-over-Month
4) Ask.com. 2.56%, Up 8% Month-over-Month

Search Query Length
One Word, 24.32%, 0% Month-over-Month
Two Words, 23.55%, Down 1% Month-over-Month
Three Words, 20.52%, Down 1% Month-over-Month
Four Words, 13.69%, Down 1% Month-over-Month
Five Words, 7.94%, Up 1% Month-over-Month
Six Words, 4.30%, Up 2% Month-over-Month
Seven Words, 2.33%, Up 3% Month-over-Month
Eight Words, 3.35%, Up 6% Month-over-Month

More in the News Release

Source: Experian Hitwise

BusinessWeek Takes an In-Depth Look at Google’s Search Quality Team

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Matt McGee writes:

In a series of interviews and articles recently published online, BusinessWeek magazine tries to open up the curtains on Google’s search quality team — the ways team members evaluate Google’s search rankings and their decision-making process when changes are being made.

Matt’s post summarizes (and of course links to the full text) of interviews with:

+ Eric Schmidt, Google CEO
+ Udi Manbar, Head of Google’s Search Quality Group
+ Amit Singhal, Head of Google’s Core Ranking Team
+ Scott Huffman, Head of Google Search Evaluation Team
+ Matt Cutts, Head of Web Spam Team

Source; Search Engine Land

Social Media: The Next Great Gateway for Content Discovery?

Monday, October 5th, 2009

From a Blog Post by Jon Gibs:

We continue to see that social media has not only changed the way consumers communicate and gather on the Web, but also impacted content discovery and navigation in a big way. But how? Is social media taking the place of portals and search as the hub of online navigation?

These questions led to some in-depth research – including an online panel survey of 1,800 participants fielded in August 2009 – in which we looked at three main consumer segments using search (Searchers), portals (Portalists) or social media (Socializers) as their primary vehicle for content discovery.

In a nutshell, there is a segment of the online population that uses social media as a core navigation and information discovery tool — roughly 18 percent of users see it as core to finding new information. While still a smaller percentage than those who use search engines or portals like Yahoo! or MSN, it is a significant figure. And as social media usage continues to increase (unique visitors to Twitter.com increased 959% YOY in August) I can only expect this figure to grow.

Much Much More (including several graphs) in the Full Text of the Post

Source: nielsenwire

Wolfram|Alpha Officially Announces New Web Site for Educators and Students; Plans for “Homework Day” Webcast Also Released

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Last Friday we posted an item saying to expect an announcement (soon) from Wolfram|Alpha announcing a new web site for students and teachers. We also said that plans were in the works for a webcast aimed at that audience.

Well, that was fast. Today, the news is officially out. Here are some of the details.

First, the permanent new web site for educators (K-12 and Higher Ed) and students is now live online at: homeworkday.wolframalpha.com

On Homeworkday.Wolfrmam teachers will be able to contribute and discuss ideas and share lesson plans, screencasts, and online video. There are also sections for Higher Ed students as well as K-12 students.

Currently, in the educators section, there’s a link to a page where questions can be s†ubmitted and videos uploaded for the Homework Day Webcast?

What webcast?

On Wednesday, October 21, 2009 (the start time is TBA), Wolfram|Alpha founder Steven Wolfram, will lead a multi-hour webcast for students, parents, and teachers. The event will not only feature Wolfram but also scholars, subject experts, and members of the Wolfram Alpha team.

According to the company:

The goal of Homework Day is to broadly share how students and educators are using Wolfram|Alpha in K-12 and college education and to demonstrate the advantages of using this free site not only to solve specific problems, but to inspire students to probe subject matter further and promote deeper understanding of fundamental concepts.

The Homework Day webcast on October 21st will feature:

+ step-by-step lessons that will give everyone the ability to use Wolfram|Alpha to tackle problems in a variety of subjects, including math, science, engineering, health and nutrition,
English, history, economics, and many more.

+ Content and segments tailored to specific age groups

+ Ideas and examples for how to make subjects like math and science more engaging and relevant to students

+ Live interviews and demonstrations by educators who are already using Wolfram|Alpha in their classrooms

+ Conversations with guest participants who will further discuss the role of technology in education

Finally, there is a Homework Day Facebook page. The event will also make use of the W|A Twitter feed.

Cool stuff. Will do our best to keep you posted with updates about Home Work Day that come from Wolfram|Alpha.
(more…)

Interesting! Science: Google and the Food Web (It’s Probably Not What You Think)

Monday, October 5th, 2009

From the Article:

Ecologists are taking a page, and its ranking, from Google.

A new algorithm inspired by the search engine works well for predicting which species losses will trigger the fastest collapse of a food web, says theoretical ecologist Stefano Allesina of the University of Chicago.

Food webs describe the pattern of what eats what in the neighborhood. If one kind of grass or bug, for example, disappears, creatures that fed on it would need to find something else for lunch. If they couldn’t, or if the alternative entrées went extinct too, then the loss could trigger a cascade of extinctions. Losing certain species can starve so many others that the whole food web unravels.

[Snip]

[Theoretical ecologist Stefano] Allesina got the idea for treating food webs like the World Wide Web while he was at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, Calif., and chanced upon a description of Google’s page ranking system. “I said, ‘That looks familiar,’’’ he remembers. In essence, the system calculates a page’s importance, or value to searchers, depending on the importance of the pages that link to it. Through the magic of mathematics, it works. In a food web, species draw importance from the importance of the species that eat them.

Much More in the Complete Article

Source: Science News

All Things Bing: Stefan Weitz from Bing Chats With Info Today’s Barbara Quint

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

In a Q&A style interview, Barbara Quint in Information Today (she’s also the editor of Searcher) sits down and talks all things bing with Stefan Weitz.

Access the Complete Interview

Here’s just a small portion of what Barbara and Stefan talked about.

Q: What are the differences between Bing and the previous Microsoft Live Search?

A: They’re pretty significant. With Bing, we looked at what customers are actually doing when they search. We’re No. 3 in a three-horse race. People didn’t know our brand, not nearly enough to try and adopt it. So we looked at what searchers were doing and saw the issues people were having. The first is that they were only successful a quarter of the time. That is staggering when you look at the high satisfaction, when you look at the data click algorithmic link, and they don’t come back. They may have gone off to Google. What happened to the query page is that a quarter of the time they were back in 30 seconds. That means they probably did the query, clicked on a result, realized it wasn’t what they wanted, and used the back button. The core issue is relevance. We didn’t have enough information on the results page, so it was easier for them to go after the query again.

The other two things we found out were that people do not necessarily have distinct queries when they navigate to a page or site. The last conclusion is that more people are adding more tasks on search engines to make complex decisions that the current search engines were never designed for. With Bing, we want to first make clear which links for standard core searches are the good ones. We want better relevancy. We use the “hover” preview for results. Where we’re better is in organizing the results and then adapting a user interface that depends on the task the user is performing—different grammars.

Source: Information Today

See Also: Just How Many Terms Are Web Searchers Using These Days? See this Post with Numbers from August Hitwise Experian.

A chart that’s provided shows percentages for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight or more term search queries. A one search term search was number one in August with 24.21% (up 3% month over month) , two words at 23.71%, (up 1%) and three words at 20.74% (down 1%). For four words the percentage drops to 13.78%.

Great Day for Power Searchers: Google Adds New Search Options

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

If you’re a Google power searcher today’s a great day!

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has the latest on some new search options from Google in this article. Like all of Danny’s articles, the new features are well illustrated with plenty of screenshots.

You can access these options/refinements (some of which went live in May, 2009) by clicking on the “Show Options” Plus Sign (+) at the top of a web search results list.* Once you click on the + link, you’ll see the options in the left margin. Note: If you’re not seeing any of these new options at the moment, relax, it’s because Google is rolling them out throughout the day. Remain calm. All is well.

* Refinements in the same format as those discussed above are available for video search, news search*, images search, and blog search*.

* News and blog search do note have a “Show Options” link but do offer refinements in the left margin.

So, what’s new from Google today?

Nine new search options/refinements:

Refining Your Search Results
1) Visited Pages (Refine your search results to show only pages in your Web History that you’ve visited before during past search sessions)

2) Not Yet Visited (Refine your search results list to remove from the results list any pages you’ve already looked in your Web History)
Note: #1 and #2 only work if you’re logged-in to your Google account and make use of the Web History feature.

3) Refine Results by Allowing More or Showing Fewer Shopping Results
Depending on your search query and the results you receive you can see more shopping sites or limit the amount number seen in a results list.

4) Time: You Can Now Limit Your Search Results To Added to the Google index in the Past Hour
This is in addition to several options to limit your search results to pages indexed in the past 24 hours, past week, past year, or a specific date range.

Note: If you want to limit your searches down even more to the last few minutes or even seconds, Barry Schwartz explains the correct syntax in this post.

5) Books, News & Blogs
Click to refine your results to any one of these content sources. They are in addition to reviews, forums, and videos.

Yesterday, Google released “Sitelinks” for web forums (online discussions) in the main search results that Danny Sullivan discusses and illustrates here.

See Also: For a More In-Depth Look at the Many Search Options Google Offers, See “Up Close with Google Search Options” from Search Engine Land.

See Also: Official Google Blog Post About the New Features: Refine your search results with new Search Options

August Search Numbers from Hitwise: Bing Increases 18 Percent While Google Accounts for 70% of All U.S. Searches

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

From the Announcement:

Experian Hitwise announced today that Google accounted for 70.24 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Aug. 29, 2009. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask.com received 16.96 percent, 9.48 percent and 2.37 percent, respectively. The remaining 56 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 0.95 percent of U.S. searches.

A chart is available and shows that Bing was the only major search engine to have a positive month-over-month percent change (18%).

Experian Hitwise also notes that longer search queries (number of search terms) was down slightly in August.

Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, decreased 2 percent between July and August 2009. Searches of eight or more words decreased 2 percent. The same time period showed that shorter search queries – those averaging one to four words long – increased 1 percent. Searches of one word comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 24.21 percent of all queries.

A chart that’s provided shows percentages for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight or more term search queries. A one search term search was number one in August with 24.21% (up 3% month over month) , two words at 23.71%, (up 1%) and three words at 20.74% (down 1%). For four words the percentage drops to 13.78%.

Source: Experian Hitwise

Update: Microsoft Bing U.S. Search Share Falls, Sparking Google’s Gain (via e-Week)
New numbers for another month from another source. (-: The article also does point out:

The findings clash with estimates from Nielsen, comScore and HitWise, all of whom found that Bing continued to post gains at the expense of Google, Yahoo or AOL in August. It will be a few weeks before those research firms post their September statistics.