Posts Tagged ‘Web search engine’

‘Traditional Search Is Failing’ – Bing Director Stefan Weitz

May 20th, 2011

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.”

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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

  • Bing head says ‘traditional search’ is dying (news.cnet.com)
  • Bing’s Stefan Weitz: A Web of Verbs, Not Nouns! (stonetemple.com)
  • Is Traditional Search Passé? (technologizer.com)
  • Bing head says ‘traditional search’ is dying (news.cnet.com)
  • Bing Increases Facebook Integration to Outsocial Google (wired.com)
  • Bing Gets Friendlier with Facebook (technologyreview.in)
  • Bing Makes Facebook Data To Use, Personalized Bing Results By Facebook (seroundtable.com)
  • Bing’s Social Search Won’t Always Rely On Facebook “Likes” (fastcompany.com)
  • Why Bing Could Beat Google in Social Search (readwriteweb.com)
  • Bing Taps Facebook Data for Fight With Google (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
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Google Unveils +1 Button For Third Party Websites

May 17th, 2011

Image via CrunchBase

It is just like Facebook Like , but can do more

After unveiling the +1 button in March, Google has started rolling out the button for third party websites. Google previewed this button, which works like the Facebook Like button, at the Google I/O conference and confirmed that this button will be launched within this week.

The +1 buttons will be in different sizes – Small, Medium, Standard and Tall, with and without the +1 counter, and websites can tie the buttons into their own site logon systems to know which pages are accessed more by users, to keep a record of this. After sufficient number of people have the +1 page on their website, users can view different data such as age and sex of people who recommend those particular pages. This can be done using Google s Analytics system.
Is Google stepping up its social networking strategy? Yes, it is doing it steadily and surely. They tried it with Buzz, not long ago, and it didn t quite succeed. Now they are trying other ways to step up to Facebook in Facebook s backyard. Will they succeed? Only time will tell.

Source :- http://www.techtree.com

  • Google’s +1 = a new social media giant? (jenifferthompson.com)
  • Google +1 for Websites Nears Launch (mashable.com)
  • Social Search: Deeper Facebook Integration Pushes Microsoft Past Google (newsgrange.com)
  • The Week We Searched For- May 13, 2011 (thesearchagents.com)
  • Google’s +1 Button Expanding Around the Web Soon (slashgear.com)
  • How and why Google is taking on Facebook (thenextweb.com)
  • Here Comes The Google Version Of Facebook “Likes” (GOOG) (businessinsider.com)
  • Just Weeks Away, A Preview Of The Google +1 Button For Websites (searchengineland.com)
  • Bing Search Results Showing Facebook Like Out of Context (lockergnome.com)
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Google Experimenting With Redesigned Search Results Page

May 7th, 2011
Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Google has begun testing a new design for its search engine results page, one that sports a new color scheme and a lot more white space.

A Google representative confirmed to us the company is conducting one of its user tests. As you can see from the screenshot below, the redesign results page incorporates a tweaked color scheme. The greens, purples and blues are not as harsh as the current set of colors used on Google.com.

The bigger changes focus on separating and spacing out individual search results. There is simply a lot more white space around each search result and each link. Also, each search result is divided by a dashed line.

Combined, the changes are rather dramatic for a search engine used by millions of people daily. Google is gathering data on how people react to the new changes. Those numbers will determine whether or not these changes will move out of testing and become permanent.

This isn’t the only Google experiment to make headlines this month. On Monday, the tech giant began testing Voice Search integration on Google.com.

Check out screenshot, and let us know what you think of the changes in the comments.

Screenshot courtesy of TwitPic, chanian

Source : – http://mashable.com

  • Google Experimenting With Redesigned Search Results Page [SCREENSHOT] (fakeiitian.com)
  • Google Experimenting With Redesigned Search Results Page [SCREENSHOT] (mashable.com)
  • Google Appears To Be Testing A Sparse, Ugly New Results Page (techcrunch.com)
  • Google messes up a .gov website search result somehow? (digitalvegetarian.com)
  • Voice Search Being Tested on Google.com [SCREENSHOTS] (fakeiitian.com)
  • Voice Search Being Tested on Google.com [SCREENSHOTS] (mashable.com)
  • See Facebook likes on Search results (techattitude.com)
  • Internet Marketing Expert Cybertegic, Inc., Along with Two More Clients, Achieves New Top 10 Positions at Google’s Search Engine Results (prweb.com)
  • Fat Pandas and Thin Content (seomoz.org)
  • The Value of Staying Consistent (problog.weddingwire.com)
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Chrome’s new “Speak to Search” option

April 9th, 2011

Google chrome earlier had developed a software that allowed the users to talk to the browser via HTML5 code. Now, a team has come up with an extension of this software that allows this software to be used in search boxes across the web.

The extension, called “Speechify”, was developed by the Dugley Labs. Now many of the search engines display a small microphone icon right next to their search boxes. This icon when clicked allows users to “speak” what u wanted to search. Google, Bing, Youtube, Hulu are some of the sites that support this.

It is working pretty well as of now and returns exact searches for songs or sites or videos. Though there are minor hitches and glitches, like in some sites the microphone feature doesn’t work although it shows and in others it is shown at weird places like the title bar but it still works. But it works the best with Google and the Instant as it allows the users to search without using the keyboard.

This kind of feature has been used in mobiles before but to see it work on the web is interesting. As of now Chrome 11 beta supports it bu tit is expected to soon move to other builds too.

  • That Was Fast: The Speak-To-Search Extension For Chrome (techcrunch.com)
  • Speechify for Google Chrome adds speech-to-text voice search (downloadsquad.switched.com)
  • Why Use Chrome’s Speech Input API When You Can Speechify? (thechromesource.com)
  • Google Chrome Gets Malware Download Alert (pcworld.com)
  • Google Chromes Personal Blocklist Extension (netlz1.wordpress.com)
  • Firefox 4 Review: Good Enough To Leave Google Chrome? (shegeeks.net)
  • Google Chrome Browser Will Block Dangerous Downloads (pcworld.com)
  • Google Experiments With Anti-Malware Warnings in Chrome (ostatic.com)
  • Update: Evernote Google Chrome Extension Gets New Features (evernote.com)
  • Google Tests a Search Option for Definitions (googlesystem.blogspot.com)
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Yahoo India to Launch Search Direct within 2011

April 4th, 2011

Will give predictive search results as you type keywords in the search bar

a chart to describe the search engine market

Image via Wikipedia

Like they say, better late than never.

A good half a year after Google launched interactive prediction based search feedback service Instant, Yahoo India just announced that it will launch its own version of Instant dubbed Search Direct. Don’t hold your breath yet, because the service will not be available till the second half of 2011. Just like Google’s Instant, Yahoo’s Search Direct predicts search results as you type in the keywords into the search bar. The announcement comes a week after Yahoo launched Search Direct in U.S. in the beta stage.

“The new search engine predicts search results as fast as a person types – character by character, and presents those results dynamically, generating a fast, simple search experience that goes beyond mere blue links,” said  Prabhakar Raghavan, chief scientist, senior vice-president and head of Yahoo Labs. Despite competition from Google, Yahoo reaches out to 30 million unique users per month in India, which is about 74 percent of the Indian Internet audience. Loyal Yahoo users therefore finally get one of Google’s most innovative features on the search engine of their choice.

  • Yahoo! India to roll out Search Direct within the year (thenextweb.com)
  • Yahoo ‘Re-imagines’ Search (actionableinsights.covario.com)
  • Yahoo! Takes on Google and Social Networking Sites to woo Indian Users (globalthoughtz.com)
  • Yahoo’s Answer to Google Instant: Search Direct (epiphanysolutions.co.uk)
  • Yahoo Search Direct Launches (seroundtable.com)
  • Yahoo! Search Direct Takes On Google Instant (unionstreetmedia.com)
  • How Google’s +1 button is going to help bloggers. (blogavenues.blogspot.com)
  • Yahoo Challenges Google Instant With Instant Answers [News] (makeuseof.com)
  • Yahoo Search Direct Takes On Google Instant (girlinthearchive.wordpress.com)
  • Oneupweb : Yahoo Launches Search Direct (straightupsearch.com)
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