Two items from two of the major search players.

First, Bing is now including Twitter results from “more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres” for certain types of searches. Learn more via the Bing blog and Search Engine Land.

Second, word from Google Book Search that they’ve added tag clouds for some titles in their database.

From a Blog Post:

Starting today, you’ll find a cloud of “Common Terms and Phrases” on the Book Overview page for some of our books. This cloud represents the distribution of words in a book: big terms are more common in the book, while small terms are rarer.

Here’s an example.

See Also: Amazon’s “Look Inside the Book” program continues to provide a concordance/tag clouds for some titles. They’re found under the heading “concordance” on a book overview page. Here’s an example.

UPDATE: Want More Web Search News? We’ve got it!
++ Google Blog and News Search has added several new features (via Search Engine Roundtable.

++ Google Blog Search Sees Twitter Trends & Raises With Blog Search ‘Hot Queries’ (via Search Engine Land)

++ Bing gets a favorable review from USA Today.

See Also: On a related note, if you’re a Firefox user you can now create tag clouds from Twitter, Google, and Yahoo results via a tool named Search Cloudlet.

The article discusses the following engines and tools:

+ Collecta

+ Ice Rocket

+ Scoopler

+ Trackle

+ Kosmix

+ Voyij.com

+ Indeed.com

+ Searchme.com

+ Fizy.com

+ Blinkx.com

and several others.

Direct to Article

Source: Wired

Marti Hearst, the well known and highly respected professor from the School of Information at UC Berkeley has written a new book about search user interfaces and she’s making the full text available online at no charge. Cool!

The book will appear on bookshelves in September and is being published by Cambridge University Press.

Chapters Include:
1: Design of Search User Interfaces
2: Evaluation of Search User Interfaces
3: Models of the Information Seeking Process
4: Query Specification
5: Presentation of Search Results
6: Query Reformulation
7: Supporting the Search Process
8: Integrating Navigation with Search
9: Personalization in Search
10: Information Visualization for Search Interfaces
11: Information Visualization for Text Analysis
12: Emerging Trends in Search Interfaces

Direct to Full Text: Search User Interfaces

See Also: Marti Hearst’s Publications Page
Another full helping of some very interesting writing. Make sure to check it out.

A new, 7 page article, from Technology Review is now online.

It’s an in depth (7 web pages) look at the days leading up to and the launch of Wolfram|Alpha.

You’ll find comments from:

+ Stephen Wolfram

+ Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo Labs

+ Ivan Herman, Semantic, Head of Semantic Web for W3C

+ Daniel Weld, Semantic Web Researcher at the U. of Washington

+ Peter Norvig, Google

+ Marti Hearst, UC Berkeley

Direct to Complete Article

Source: Technology Review

From the Article:

Real-time search is among the hottest, or most hyped, trends in the Internet industry today. At technology conferences, the term is repeated like a mantra, although the idea is still nascent and its definition fuzzy.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

Articles Include:

+ The effectiveness of Web search engines to index new sites from different countries

+ The publication activity of Region Västra Götaland: a bibliometric study of an administrative and political Swedish region during the period 1998-2006.

+ D-Fussion: a semantic selective dissemination of information service for the research community in digital libraries.

+ Archives, libraries and museums as communicators of memory in European Union projects.

+ Mapping techno-literary spaces: adapting multiple correspondence analysis for literature and art.

+ Personality traits and group-based information behaviour: an exploratory study

Source: IR

Sum Help: New Search Engine for Mathletes

It is the tool you wish you had in high-school math class.

Wolfram Alpha, a new search engine, has been assessed by Web watchers for its potential to compete with Google. But it’s really a bigger threat to calculators — and science and math curricula. Enter a chemical formula for, say, caffeine, and it will tell you everything from its molecular weight to its structure diagram. Enter a derivative, that fixture of calculus class, and it will determine the results, complete with a helpful “show steps” button.

Math teachers say the software, which takes elements from pricey proprietary programs and makes them freely available online, has the potential to give students empowering new tools. Some would argue too empowering. Lazy students could take shortcuts, while harried teachers get headaches redesigning their homework and tests in response to a moving target: The company behind Wolfram Alpha vows to keep expanding and improving it.

“Why bother learning information that can be Googled when needed?” asks Bruce Yoshiwara, a math professor at Los Angeles Pierce College. “And why master some mathematical algorithm, say long division, when computational power is always at hand?” Prof. Yoshiwara adds, “Wolfram Alpha should reinforce the millennial generation’s devaluation of knowledge.”

Source: Wall Street Journal

This article about local search by mobile web users is another example of why libraries should have web sites and tools for “local” information searchers.

From the News Release:
comScore today reported that the number of people who sought local information on a mobile device grew 51 percent from March 2008 to March 2009.

The mobile browser is the leading access method for seeking local information, with 20.7 million users in March 2009, up 34 percent versus year ago. However, the strongest growth in the category is coming from downloaded applications, which grew 83 percent versus year ago, followed by SMS at 72 percent. However, despite the attention mobile applications have received from developers, carriers and device OEMs, they remain the least popular access mode for mobile access of local information, with 11.3 million users in March. A marginally more often used channel for obtaining local information is SMS, with 11.7 million users, and an impressive 72-percent growth rate. Overwhelmingly, though, the preferred mode to access local content remains the mobile browser.

Source: comScore

You can find Tom Costello’s new blog here. It’s in addition to the official Cuil Blog.

You can also read “Tom’s Blog” via this RSS feed.

More about Tom and other members of the Cuil management team can be found on this page.

The first post on “Tom’s Blog” is an in-depth look at Bing.

Source: Cuil

The Web’s Most Dangerous Search Terms (PDF; 2.2 MB)

Unless you work for or own an online business, chances are you’ve never heard the terms “search engine optimization” (SEO) and “search engine marketing” (SEM). Yet these two phrases—SEO (the effort by site owners to get their website ranked higher by search engines) and SEM (the use of paid advertising to gain prominent placement on search engines) are increasingly important vocabulary for businesses that seek to prosper on the web. Unfortunately, legitimate businesses are not the only ones gaining fluency with this new language.

The scammers—from solo operators to organized criminals—have quickly realized that the same search engines that enable legitimate businesses to reach more consumers can also be used by criminals to separate more victims from more of their money.

This paper examines a new phenomenon—the use of search engines as a conduit for profit-driven hackers—by analyzing the risk of searching for more than 2,000 of the most popular words and phrases (“keywords”) used in search engines in 2008. From “Jonas Brothers tickets” to “game cheats” to “Viva la Vida lyrics,” these keywords represent a broad slice of what search expert John Battelle calls our “database of intentions.”

Along with our “intentions,” this database also reveals how much risk we expose ourselves to each and every time we put our favorite search engines to use. How much risk? For some keywords like “popular screensavers” and “descargar google” and certain of their resulting pages, the risk can be pervasive— 75% or more results (three out of four) can lead to increased web security risk. This should not be surprising to observers of security trends. Since hacking for fame has given way to hacking for profit, malicious players have grown increasingly sophisticated in their ability to find large pools of potential victims. By measuring the relative risk of popular search terms, this study confirms that scammers continue to target the largest pools of victims.

But this study also found some interesting evidence to the contrary. Previous McAfee® studies of web safety have shown about 4% of sites to be risky. This is a broad measure of the overall risk we face when we use the web. By contrast, the average risk level of all results pages we studied was just 1.7%. This study is broad and directional. New tools and research methods need to be deployed to allow us to better understand the mechanics of how search is being misused. We hope this study helps pave the way for other studies that take on these important questions.

Source: McAfee

Hat tip: DG

Resource of the Week — Microsoft’s New and Enhanced Search Engine Named “Bing” Debuts
By Gary Price, Chief/Founding Editor

Microsoft’s new general-purpose search engine (think Yahoo and Google) named “Bing” has gone live on the web. If you were a user of the Live.com search, many of Bing’s features will be familiar to you.

Here are a few things we noticed when using the new search engine:

+ An advanced search interface is located next to the search box on any search results page.

+ The left rail offers the ability to find related search terms.

+ The left rail also keeps track of your most recent searches. To clear them, hit the “clear” button and/or turn off the feature.

+ Enter the names of two cities and at the top of the results page you’ll see airfare information. Here’s an example. The air fare and fare prediction data comes from Farecast, another Microsoft property that has been renamed Bing Travel.

+ Cached pages are available. Look for the link next to the URL on a web results page.

+ Previews: If you place your cursor on the right side of a results page next to each result, a box will appear with a preview of the content that’s on the full page. No clicking required.

+ Video Search Previews: Simply cursor over a video thumbnail and watch a preview of the clip. No clicking.

+ Enhanced views of Wikipedia content are accessible via a link next to a Wikipedia URL. The first two results on this page contain enhanced view links.

+ Sites NOT in English contain translate links next to the page title on the search results page. Here’s an example.

+ In some searches, local results appear at the top of the page. Here’s a search for “newspapers Chicago.” Note the local listings at the top of the page. In this example, the results don’t include Chicago’s two largest papers, the Sun-Times and the Tribune. Not good. Same thing when you run the same type of search for “newspapers New York City”.

+ Here’s a search for Paris France Airport and another search for Los Angeles Sports. Note how the options at the top of the left rail change depending on what content is available. For the Paris search you’ll see:

• Events
• Weather
• History (with content from Encarta at the top of the page)
• Airport
• Map
• Image
• Video

For the Los Angeles Sports search you’ll only find (in the same location):

• News
• Local In some cases, these left rail options will take you to images, video, etc., while in other cases they will take you to a more focused list of web pages that Bing believes will be useful.

  + The same “direct answers” that were available with Live Search are also available with Bing. Examples include:

  • Athletes
  • Calculator
  • Stock Quotes
  • Flight Tracking

  + When running an image search, you can focus by size, layout, color, style, people. Look for these options on the left rail on the search results page, as in this example. (These tools were available with Live.com search.) You can also find “related images” — based on the composition of an image — by hovering over an image with your cursor and selecting, “show related images.”

  + When running a video search, you can narrow by length, screen size, resolution, and source. Look for these options on the left rail, as in this example. Very cool!.

  + WARNING! If you turn off the safe search feature when searching for images and then toss in the correct terms, you’ll find a ton of adult material.

  + Microsoft’s wonderful Virtual Earth maps and imagery appear when you run a Map search. Bing also offers 1-click directions. Here’s an example. Note the directions to the Museum of Modern Art from from four compass locations (N, S, E, W) plus the option to add a specific location/address.

  + Boolean: Yes. Default is AND. OR is also available. More advanced search syntax here, here, and here. Note: These are the same options that were available with Live.com. No major changes seem to jump out at us.

  Update: We have tested several of the advanced search operators and they appear to work correctly.

  + All searches can turned into RSS feeds. Most browsers should be able to autodetect the presence of an RSS feed. No? Simply append your search with the following: &format=rs.

  + In some cases, pages will be marked as an official site. Example. In this example, take note of the customer service number readily available and a search box to directly search the site from the results page.

  Overall, while it’s good and important to have another unique database of web content out there, we are a bit saddened to see the lack of new feature and services with this first release of Bing as opposed to what was available with Live.com. Bing is worth knowing about and using, but getting the masses to switch to it as their default search tool will be a massive challenge. Time will tell. Expect to see a lot of advertising for Bing. Finally, Bing Maps (and imagery) continues to mesmerize, and the limiting functions for images and video are very useful.

  See Also: More Tips and Tricks (via Digital Inspirations)

  See Also: Bing411 is Now Live (via TechCrunch)
  This appears to be a simple rebranding and enhancement. Microsoft has had two interactive voice services (IVR) for several years. The first was Live411 (now Bing411). The service came from the Microsoft acquisition of long time player TellMe (1-800-555-Tell) which is still live. It appears that Bing411 adds several new features like movie times, movie ticket purchases and news headlines.

  Want More Interactive Voice Response Tools?
  + 1-800-Free-411 (business and residential listings)
  + 1-800-Flights (Flight Info)
  + 1-866-My-TRAFC (Traffic Info for Major U.S. Cities)

  Update: View the Bing TV Commercials (via SEL)

The workshop took place in Beijing on April 20, 2008. The 2nd Workshop on Social Web Search and Data Mining will take place this November in Hong Kong.

Here’s a selected list of papers presented at the workshop. A full list is available here. All papers are in PDF. Some of these papers are technical but the abstracts can help non-techies (like the ResourceShelf team) get a handle on social web search research.

+ Bootstrapping the Semantic Web of Social Online Communities

+ Semantic Service Composition based on Social Network

+ Data Mediation and Interoperation in Social Web: Modeling, Crawling and Integrating Social Tagging Data

+ Trend Prediction in Social Bookmark Service Using Time Series of Bookmarks

+ On the Effect of Group Structures on Ranking Strategies in Folksonomies

+ Identification of Personal Name Aliases on the Web

+ Beyond Web-log: Transform Blog into Personal Expertise and Social Network via myFOAF Support

+ Searching and Visualizing Domain Knowledge Using Ontology

From a News Article:

No matter how good a search engine is, it is sometimes necessary to change the search terms to get the information you need. But what if you did not have to change the search terms yourself? What if the search engine could do that for you?

A Penn State researcher analyzed nearly 1 million Web searches to detect patterns of query reformulation and create models to predict them — models that may help create more advanced search engines.

“The key finding in the research is that we are moving from descriptive aspects to predictive models in Web searching,” said Jim Jansen, associate professor of information sciences and technology and one author of the paper “Patterns of Query Reformulation during Web Searching,” published in the online edition of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology and scheduled for the July issue.

Researchers found that the search terms in 22 percent of queries were reformulated or changed to more precisely convey the information for which the user was searching.

Source: PSU Live
Hat Tip: P.W.

We just discovered a neat and new little feature on the new Bing search engine from Microsoft. It actually maps images to a location on a MS Virtual Earth map. From what we can tell, it’s only working for several major U.S. cities at this time but it wouldn’t be a stretch to see more cities coming

Here’s how to see it in action:

+ Run a Bing image search for a city. Let’s try New York City.

+ Next, look for the “show map” link located below the search box.

+ Click the link

Now you should see a map of New York with various images placed on it. For example, take a look at the image of the Statue of Liberty. It’s placed where it’s actually located on the map. Cursor over the image and you’ll see the name of the location.

Cool.

Here are a few other examples:

+ Seattle

+ Chicago

+ San Francisco
Note: How the image of the Golden Gate Bridge is placed in the exact spot on the map.

How is this done?
We would imagine the combination of the text surrounding the image and metadata.

See Also: Microsoft’s New and Enhanced Search Engine Named “Bing” Debuts on Web

See Also: Free Services: Live411 Becomes Bing411

Very soon (in the next week or so) Microsoft will rebrand and enhance their general purpose web search service. It will be named Bing. This article takes a look at one of the designers of Bing, Brian MacDonald.

From the Article:

The update consists of a new look, a new name, and new capabilities for the product. And in the process, Microsoft hopes it will also get a fresh start in what has thus far been a painful journey.

Several of the features are things championed by MacDonald. In particular, the new engine has a left-hand navigation pane for moving among different types of searches. Kumo also breaks a search query down into a number of possible categories.

When one hovers over a particular result, they get a pop-up window with more information, such as the query terms in context on the page.

In other cases, Microsoft is bringing more information into the results themselves. Type in “Amazon” and one will get not only links to that Web site, but also the company’s hard-to-find customer service phone number. A search for UPS will let one track a package directly from Bing.

Source: News.com

See Also: A Complete Review of th Bing Search Engine by Danny Sullivan (via Search Engine Land)