Image via CrunchBase
Google announced on Friday that Google+ users will soon begin to see Google+ posts in their Google Search results.
This feature is activated only when you’re signed in to your Google Account, according Product Manager Sagar Kamdar, who posted the announcement on the Google Search Blog.
When you’re searching Google for, say, a restaurant, you might see that some results include content shared publicly by members of your Google+ Circles.
Social Search a feature provided by Google combines regular search results with publicly available data of friends- friends would generally mean Google contacts, Google talk and other networks from Google account.
This feature was recently subjected to lot of controversy when Facebook a stiff competitor used a PR firm to release negative stories about Social Search to the press. Facebook claims that Google has been using Facebook data to run its service without Facebook’s permission.
Google has chosen to remain quiet on this issue and has mentioned only about Twitter in its blog post. Social Search shall be available in 19 more languages from next week, with more languages on the way. Google may probably not be allowed to enter facebook users communication as Facebook’s internal search engine Bing , from Microsoft, is the rival to Google search engine.
While the web is growing fast as a tool to search information about anything, Google will definitely grab its share from other companies. As Google is the search engine powerhouse and as people trust Google’s results this is definitely a smart move from Google’s perspective.
Source :- http://www.clickindia.com
Image via CrunchBase
Most people think about search as a simple series of actions: type in a phrase, cross your fingers it brings up what you need, and then click around a page of blue links till you get what you were looking for.
But Stefan Weitz, director of Microsoft‘s search engine Bing, says that we should expect more out of our search experience. He criticizes “traditional” search engines — namely, web giant Google, Bing’s main competitor — for failing to keep up with the changing needs of users by sticking with the the search model they’ve always used, which is based on an algorithm measuring the strength of backlinks.
“When Google launched, they wanted to organize the world’s information, that was their mantra — it still is,” Weitz said in an interview. “It was a great vision that assumed really the web of yore, which is a web of documents, literally pages and the connections. Google’s whole mission was to leverage those connections and say, ‘Okay, I can see that the connection between these two pages is almost as important as the page content itself in defining what these things are about’ — it was a brilliant, brilliant model.”
But what worked ten years ago doesn’t work as well anymore, Weitz said, noting that the amount of information available online today, and the range of activities people seek to do there, have made the simple search that currently exists less effective.
“Search itself hasn’t changed fundamentally in the past 12 years,” he said. “Traditional search is failing. The standard notion of search … looking at the texts in the page, the backlinks, all that stuff doesn’t work
anymore.”
Yet for all the flaws Weitz might find with Google, Bing offers a similar set of features, such as searches keyed to news, images, and maps, as well as the ability to calculate sums, define words, and check the weather. Moreover, Google has maintained its dominance in the search market. It claims 65 percent market share to Bing’s 14 percent — a dominant position that has attracted scrutiny from government regulators, who are investigating whether Google’s search dominance is anti-competitive. Microsoft, itself convicted of antitrust abuses, has supported regulators’ investigation of Google in Europe, and Weitz added that in his estimation, the government probe into Google’s activities is understandable, given Google’s power in the area.
“I think whenever you have a player who has, depending on who you’re looking at, two-thirds of the market, it’s natural for regulators to look into this,” he said. “In Germany they have 98 percent share. It’s natural for folks to just look into what’s going on there. This is a place that controls so many people’s livelihoods, you want to make sure its a level playing field.”
Google has started to include social results in its search in an attempt to make searches more relevant to users. Its new +1 feature lets users “like” results in search and see when friends and other users have “liked” that result as well. But Weitz said he didn’t think the feature was particularly useful.
“+1 today is only on search results,” he said. “I don’t really like search results very often. I like the sites, but I don’t like the result itself. I don’t know how helpful it is, frankly, to like the results.”
Bing is attempting to get a leg up on Google with its own take on social search results. The company recently unveiled a feature that pulls information from Facebook to show what sites, articles and other content Facebook friends have “liked.”
Bing’s approach to social data is to focus on delivering what it believes will characterize search in the future: An engine that anticipates a user’s needs and helps make decisions, finding the most relevant information without the user having to put in an undue amount of effort. But whether it will be able to distinguish itself from Google’s efforts to go social remains to be seen.
“Our mission is literally to deliver knowledge by understanding intent. What that implies is that we understand the web as this digital representation of the real world,” Weitz said. “We’ve now mapped almost every single square inch of the planet, we know where buildings are, we know who the people are, we know what tasks people are accomplishing — we are literally creating a semantic model, or a model, for everything in the world.”
Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com
Image via CrunchBase
Facebook has been left red-faced after having to admit that it hired a PR agency to plant negative stories with the press about privacy concerns on Google.
The irony is, of course, that Facebook is hardly a shining example of how an online firm should protect its users’ privacy.
Here’s what happened:
* Facebook secretly hired giant public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to seed stories in the media about privacy concerns with Google Social Search.
The Social Search feature of Google scours the web for publicly available information about you from sites such as Twitter, Yelp, Picasa, and FriendFeed, and displays it in the search results of your online friends.
* Facebook’s plan backfired badly when Burson-Marsteller approached former FTC investigator and blogger Christopher Soghoian offering him the story, but refusing to reveal who its client was. An unimpressed Soghoian published the email exchange.
Amid much speculation, The Daily Beast news website revealed that the firm pulling Burson-Marsteller’s strings was Facebook.
* Facebook confirmed it had hired PR firm Burson-Marsteller to promote the company’s position against Google’s Social Search facility and admitted that it should have presented the issues in a “a serious and transparent way”.
This wouldn’t necessarily have been a problem, if the PR agency had been up-front that it was representing Facebook when pitching the anti-Google stories in the first place. What is seedy is that Facebook’s involvement was deliberately hidden.
This whole story reeks of poor judgement by Facebook and its PR agency.
And it’s rather hypocritical for Facebook to point fingers at possible questions over Google’s attitude to privacy, when its own house is in such a mess.
For instance, Facebook recommends that users adopt privacy settings that can reveal their personal data to anyone on the internet.
Don’t believe me? Read the small print in Facebook’s privacy policy:
"Information set to 'everyone' is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations."
"The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to 'everyone.' You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings. If you delete 'everyone' content that you posted on Facebook, we will remove it from your Facebook profile, but have no control over its use outside of Facebook."
In other words, if you make your Facebook information available to “everyone”, it actually means “everyone, forever”. Because even if you change your mind, it’s too late – and although Facebook say they will remove it from your profile they will have no control about how it is used outside of Facebook.
If Facebook really cared about your privacy online, wouldn’t it recommend more privacy-conscious settings and not default to sharing your profile information with search engines?
If you’re interested in being safer on Facebook, read more about the security and privacy challenges that exist for Facebook users. You could also do a lot worse than follow the advice in our step-by-step guide for better security and privacy on Facebook.
And, if you’re a regular user of Facebook, be sure to join the Sophos page on Facebook to be kept informed of the latest security threats.
Full disclosure: Parts of Sophos, although not Naked Security, use Burson-Marsteller on some PR projects.
Source :- http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com
