LeGuide.com Group, a pan-European publisher of online shopping guides, comparison websites and the like, has acquired online shopping portal Ciao from Microsoft.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but LeGuide.com says it paid for the Ciao assets in cash and didn’t need to take on debt to finance the transaction.

Read more over at TechCrunch Europe.

According to Israeli businesspaper Calcalist (in Hebrew), Microsoft has acquired San Mateo, California-based video search technology company VideoSurf for about $70 million.

We’ve confirmed the acquisition with multiple sources, although we haven’t been able to nail down the exact price (yet). One source who requested anonymity pegged it at $70 million too, though.

VideoSurf raised $28 million from a couple of tech heavyweights, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg, along with Al Gore and Current Media CEO Joel Hyatt and other investors, including Pitango VC and Verizon Ventures.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

Microsoft this morning blasted out an email to all subscribers of its Bing Daily Deals offering, informing users that the service will henceforth be known as ‘MSN Offers’. It’s a confusing move, but then Microsoft has a history of making confusing moves when it comes to naming and branding its products and services.

The company claims it didn’t want people to mix up the daily deals it offers with its Bing Deals service, which essentially aggregates daily deals from a range of third-party providers.

Microsoft also says aligning its own daily deals offering with MSN “seems to make good sense”.

Well, as long as we’re 100% sure about it …

Here’s the email that was sent to all Bing Daily Deals subscribers:

Hey Bing Daily Deals Subscribers,

Thanks for signing up to get the best offers around–we hope you’re living it up and exploring all the awesome stuff in your city!

We wanted to give you a heads up that Bing Daily Deals will soon be re-named MSN Offers.

It’s the same great set of values in your local area, but we wanted to clear up confusion between the Daily Deals you receive via email and the Bing Deals feature which aggregates daily deals from hundreds of providers at Bing.com/Deals. Moreover, better aligning Daily Deals with MSN, where you can go to find the best things going on in your local area, seems to make good sense.

You don’t need to do or change a thing. You’ll still be getting the same great deals, with the same account information.

Thanks again for subscribing, we hope you enjoy the new experience.

Best,
Daily Deals Team

Microsoft appears to be readying the formal launch of a Bing-branded daily deals website powered by white-label group buying platform service provider Tippr, a well-informed source tells me. You don’t have to take my word for it: Microsoft and Tippr are testing the service right now, and the Bing-exclusive daily deals site is hiding in plain sight (see here and here, or check screenshots below).

For the record, this offering is notably different from Microsoft’s earlier launch of Bing Deals, which basically features links to aggregated deals from a number of partners, including group buying service providers like Tippr, Groupon, LivingSocial, Zozi and Gilt City but also over 2,000 merchants through Bing Shopping, including Target, Nordstrom, and Zappos.

I haven’t found any mention of, link to, official videos or screenshots of the Bing-exclusive daily deals site powered by Tippr. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Microsoft has never made any announcements concerning the Bing.com/daily-deals website whatsoever.

As you can tell from the screenshots embedded below, Bing’s group buying destination site will be familiar to you if you’ve ever visited the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial for deals.

You can use your Facebook account or Windows Live ID to log in, browse and share current deals, past deals, and read more about how it works. The latter page notes:

Subscribe to Bing Deals and we’ll e-mail you a new deal every day from a great local business. You can also search at Bing.com or browse for deals at Bing.com/daily-deals.

Again, this site is the only one I can find on the Web that has ever made any mention of the URL / website Bing.com/daily-deals.

The website also mentions something called a ‘sweetened deal’, which is described as follows:

What is a sweetened deal? It’s a deal that gets better over time. Some of the deals that appear on Bing Deals will get a better value as more deals are purchased.

For example, a deal may start off as $10 for $20 at Some Corner Bakery. If enough people purchase the voucher, the deal hits the sweeten point and it becomes $10 for $25! No matter what, you will always pay the same amount for the deal you purchase, but what you get for your hard earned dollars goes up!

The cool thing about Sweeten Deals is that as more people buy, the value of the deal gets better for everybody who purchased and will purchase the deal. This is why it’s a great idea to share the deal you bought with your friends, so you and everybody else get the biggest bang for your buck.

As you can tell from one of the screenshots below, daily deals are / will be available in 12 markets, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Seattle.

When reached, Tippr CEO Martin Tobias declined to comment on the partnership between Microsoft and Tippr. A Microsoft spokesperson tells me he believes this is part of something they’ve talked about before, then referred to as Bing Exclusive Deals for some cities, which are deals you can only get through Bing, but that the team is still “getting it up and running and working out kinks”.

It’s also worth noting that Microsoft last week expanded its Bing Business Portal, adding the ability for local businesses to run group deals – rather than regular deals – on Bing (among other things).

Search Engine Land offers an excellent run-down of everything that’s new.

Other daily deal sites in the U.S. include Groupon, LivingSocial, Google Offers, BuyWithMe, AmazonLocal, HomeRun and Dealster, among many, many others.

On the rare occasions that I’m not sitting in a chat room and writing about phones, I usually play the role of “hang-out coordinator” among my friends. You probably have too: messaging people to see who’s available, finding out who wants to eat what, getting ETAs from prospective partiers, the works. It’s a bit draining to say the least, but if you’re usually stuck with that responsibility and you have a Windows Phone, then Bing’s newly-launched “We’re In” app may be just right for you.

The process is simple: when you use the app to create an event and invite people to it, the invitation goes out via text message. Once your friends respond (either from the Windows Phone app or the mobile website), their locations will be plotted on a map, which is great for keeping tabs on that one friend who’s always late.

All the participants can leave status updates on the fly, so the first person who makes it to the restaurant can let the others know that he’s snagged a table in the back. It’s just as easy to duck out of event you’ve committed to, although protocol suggests you should leave a parting status update so as not to gain a reputation as a flake.

In a way, it almost seems like We’re In is Foursquare’s other half: while Foursquare lets you know when someone makes it somewhere, We’re In deals with all the back-end logistics of getting there in the first place. Instead of having to message individual people back and forth and try to determine who knows about what, We’re In puts all of that information in one location. The Bing team has announced their intention to bring We’re In to other devices, but sorry international partiers: it’s U.S. only for now.

The combined search market share of Microsoft’s Bing and Bing-powered Yahoo (AKA BingHoo!) keeps creeping up.  The latest market share figures from comScore’s qSearch service are out, and the combined BingHoo! climbed to 30.2 percent market share of total explicit searches (excluding the effects of slideshows, contextual search, and Google Instant), up 0.2 percent from May.  Google remained steady at 65.5 percent share.

When you drill down into the data, Bing keeps adding share (up 0.3 point to 14.4 percent), and Yahoo seems to have stabilized at 15.9 percent for the last three months.  And Bing’s year-over-year growth in market share is an impressive 41 percent, compared to 6.4 percent growth for Google.  That’s not a bad growth rate for Bing two years after launch.

The big question is whether the combined BingHoo! can ever get significantly above 30 percent. Since October, it’s gained about 2 points, from 28 percent.

Google also powers search on Ask and AOL. If you add those up, it’s share goes up to 69.8 percent. So there is still a lot of room for Bing to grow. And these numbers do not include mobile search, where Google is even more dominant. It’s gonna be a long war.

(Table courtesy of Mark Mahaney at Citi).

Editor’s note: Guest contributor Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer internet, and social networks. He is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semilshah.

While the tech world is buzzing about the launch and implications of Google’s new social network, Google+, it’s worth noting that Google isn’t just in a war with Facebook, it’s at war with multiple companies across multiple industries. In fact, Google is fighting a multi-front war with a host of tech giants for control over some of the most valuable pieces of real estate in technology. Whether it’s social, mobile, browsing, local, enterprise, or even search, Google is being attacked from all angles.  And make no mistake about it, they are fighting back and fighting back, hard. Entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist Ben Horowitz laid the groundwork for this in his post Peacetime CEO / Wartime CEO, saying Larry Page “seems to have determined that Google is moving into war and he clearly intends to be a wartime CEO. This will be a profound change for Google and the entire high-tech industry.” Horowitz is exactly right.

Before I investigate each battle front in the war, it’s important to highlight the fact that perhaps no other tech company right now could withstand such a multifaceted attack, let alone be able to retaliate efficiently. Sure, Apple might get pushed around by Facebook, so it integrated Twitter into iOS5, and sure, Amazon and Apple have their own tussles over digital media and payments, but at the end of the day, Google is in this unique and potentially highly vulnerable position that will test the company’s mettle and ability to not only reinvent itself, but also to perhaps strengthen its core. Let’s take a quick look into the GooglePlex, which may now resemble more of a military complex, plotting out strategies and tactics for this war. Google must battle on at least six fronts simultaneously.

The Browser Front: Users have a choice between Internet Explorer (Microsoft), Firefox (Mozilla), Safari (Apple), and Google’s offering, Chrome. The speculation is that Facebook is interested in a browser, too, since Mozilla co-founder Blake Ross is an employee, but that hasn’t happened yet. More recently, the social browser RockMelt has captured some peoples’ interests, and last week secured $30M in financing, adding Facebook board members Jim Breyer and Marc Andreessen to its board. Andreessen obviously knows a thing or two about browsers. Though most browsers enable users to power their search by Google as an option, Googe’s Chrome offering isn’t the lead browser by market share, and not even in second place.

The Mobile Front: Apple’s iOS took the mobile world by storm in 2007 with the first iPhone. Then Google’s Android operating system roared alongside it, turning into a freight train of downloads, as Bill Gurley said, only recently to be slowed by Apple’s release of a phone with Verizon. While Android may have more installs, they don’t have the developer community to build killer apps because the Android marketplace (both for hardware and firmware) is highly fragmented, whereas iOS is about symphonic convergence. All the along, there’s been ample speculation about whether Facebook was building its own mobile phone device, or as the company has publicly hinted, how it would integrate social layers into different mobile operating systems and platforms.

The Search Front: Whether we’re on the desktop/laptop, a tablet, or a phone, Google wants to be powering our search, and this is where they dominate, though Microsoft’s Bing has been able to acquire an impressive number of clicks. While everything is fine today, there are some troubling warning signs. On desktops and laptops, people will continue to use a variety of browsers, though they end up spending a lot of time on Facebook, which scares Google because of the trend of people moving slowly from search to discovery. This, however, won’t shift overnight. For mobile devices, it’s trickier. Most iOS users navigate the web either through Apple’s own browser, Safari, and can have it search by Google. On Android-powered tablets and phones, Google controls more of the user-experience, including search, navigation, and application integration. While this is going on, users are trying their hand at realtime search on Twitter or BackType, looking for content directly within Quora, or using Blekko’s hashtags to better cut through and sort the web.

The Local Front: When users search for things on Google and click through, Google gets a little cut of that click. It knows how to drive traffic online and be paid handsomely for it. Driving and directing traffic that originates online into the real world, however, is a different story. As Steve Cheney elegantly stated, when we search online for places to go and then end up there in real life, the place itself does not have a clear sense of what drove them there. This is why the Daily Deals space is so red-hot and competitive, as it helps to close this major, valuable loop. If you search for a restaurant via OpenTable and make a reservation, the merchant knows exactly what drove you to the door. That’s why Yelp, which only used to provide reviews, offered the ability to check-in for credit after Foursquare built up a head of steam. The opportunity here is so complex yet fragmented that it drove Google to offer $6B for Groupon just six months ago. In local, Google is competing against Groupon, but also Amazon (which has a stake in LivingSocial), and a host of smaller (Loopt) and forthcoming deals companies will continue to roll out. This is just the beginning.

The Social Front: Yes, again, Google is fighting a war with Facebook. That much is obvious. What’s less obvious is how other social networks have been able to capture bits and pieces of our identities, leaving Google without any information of who we are. Users have been pumping personal content into blogs like Tumblr, networks like LinkedIn, and even asking search-related questions on Quora. Although we may all predominantly search via Google, the company is struggling in the social field. That is why Larry Page stepped in as CEO, why he tied bonuses to social, and why Google+ is their social sword and shield to fight back and capture user data, despite it being late in the game. Strategically speaking, even if Google+ doesn’t hold or catch fire, it will probably cause its rivals to pause for a moment and consider a range of short- and long-term implications.

The Enterprise Front: If you think the browser, mobile, social, local, and search isn’t enough, check out Google’s combatants in enterprise—just some names like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and VMware, among others. Google’s App Engine could go up against AWS, though that doesn’t seem likely. Google competes with IBM and Oracle on enterprise search (such as OmniFind) and email and work collaboration tools (Lotus). Google’s Chromebooks are seen as a potential entry point into enterprise computing, going up against hardware giants like HP, Dell, and Lenovo. Furthermore, Google may be trying to push Android into the enterprise, which would apply even more pressure on Research in Motion. There’s VMware, which offers Zimbra, PaaS, and presentation tools, to name a few. And, of course, there’s Microsoft, which competes with Google for a wide range of productivity applications. For all of Google’s consumer-facing brands and applications, its strength in enterprise sometimes is underestimated despite the fact that they currently hold many excellent positions.

It’s easy to pile on Google given their size, their wallet, and their global influence and impact. They are the goliath, and have been for many years, and are now facing many challenging tests, all at the same time. And while it’s a fun parlor game to sit around and pontificate about how Google’s reign might be over or how slow GMail loads, the reality is that no other company could compete legitimately on so many different battlefronts against so many different competitors. There’s no way Google can win each battle, and they must know that, but they will win some, and it will be fascinating to see how the company both adapts and stays the course along the way. Google is not going to go down without a fight, and it could take another decade for all of these battles to play out. The company has some of the world’s brightest engineers, a stockpile of cash, and incredible consumer Internet mind share, worldwide. Sit tight.

Photo credit: Flickr/hellosputnik

We all want solutions tailored to our needs for a lot of things, online and offline, but does that include a search engine that shows results for queries based on dozens of factors (and more importantly, hides from you certain results based on those factors)?

Well, I’m inclined to think that’s not such a bad thing at all, or at least not that big a deal.

DuckDuckGo, a tiny alternative search engine, begs to differ, and this morning they spread the word about a new website they’ve set up to give home to an illustrated guide of the ‘search engine filter bubble‘ concept and why they think it ducks sucks.

Go visit DontBubble.us and please make up your own mind.

For the record, MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser came up with the term ‘filter bubble’ (see his TED talk), and has even authored a book about it.

Also, you can add &pws=0 to any string on Google and it will turn off personalized search results (though there is some debate about if it actually does what it’s supposed to).

(Via Hacker News, where there’s an interesting discussion about the ‘filter bubble’ being complete nonsense or of the utmost importance to mankind)

Escape your search engine Filter Bubble! An illustrated guide by #DuckDuckGo http://t.co/WP8OnVu—
  (@duckduckgo) June 20, 2011

Yahoo was first to break the news, drawing historical comparisons to the last time the three leading search companies put their heads together to create sitemaps standards. It’s a very interesting move, and will no doubt have website creators the world over paying attention to the new standards advocated by schema.org.

Schema has elements of Yahoo’s longtime Search Monkey project and Google’s rich snippets, which enable websites to improve their position in search results by giving them tools and guidance as to how to do so, and uses meta data to enhance the search results display.

In other words, the site will provide a collection of schemas, or HTML tags, webmasters can add to their pages to make it easy for search providers to recognize their sites, which rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages — and for search engines to display them.

As Google pointed out, it’s a tricky and time-consuming process to add markup to webpages, especially if each search engine asks for data in different ways. How to fix this? Standardize the vocabulary. Which is exactly what they’ve done. And, hey, it might even work on other search engines. Whatever those are. Just kidding, Blekko.

For more, here’s Schema.org’s description of what they’re up to: “Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.”

And for good measure, here’s Yahoo’s announcement, Google’s announcement, and last but not least, Bing’s.

We recently broke the story of a small search software outlet named Masterobjects taking on Amazon.com in a notable patent infringement lawsuit, later also taking Google to court.

Now it’s apparently Microsoft’s turn to get sued by the company, and my guess is more will follow. The patent-in-suit, US patent no. 7,752,326, describes a method to immediately start showing search results even while a user is still typing his query into the search box.

That search functionality, call it instant search if you will, is evidently used by many major online website operators, particularly e-commerce companies.

Microsoft uses similar technology to power its Bing Instant search engine.

Masterobjects alleges that Microsoft has been infringing on its patent since 2006, however, when the company introduced Suggestions, a feature that suggests to the user possible search queries as the user types. The suit also mentions an upcoming HTML5-flavored version of Bing, which will likely incorporate instant search functionality as well.

For your background, here is the summary of the patent, originally filed in August 2001 and entitled “System and method for utilizing asynchronous client server communication objects”:

A session-based client-server asynchronous information search and retrieval system for sending character-by-character or multi-character strings of data to an intelligent server, that can be configured to immediately analyze the lengthening string and return to the client increasingly appropriate search information.

Embodiments include integration within an Internet, web or other online environment, including applications for use in interactive database searching, data entry, online searching, online purchasing, music purchasing, people-searching, and other applications. In some implementations the system may be used to provide dynamically focused suggestions, auto-completed text, or other input-related assistance, to the user.

For what it’s worth, Masterobjects isn’t your typical patent troll but a real company that has been actually making and selling software products powered by the technology it claims to have invented.

The obvious next question: are others giants like Yahoo, eBay and Apple next on its hit list?

Yesterday, in a massively botched press launch, Bing released some new features that begin to really tap into the huge amount of social data exposed through its partnership with Facebook. The alliance isn’t a new one — the companies have had a friendly relationship ever since Microsoft made a $240 million investment in Facebook that valued the social network at $15 billion in 2007, and Bing launched Facebook’s Instant Personalization last October.

But Bing’s Facebook integration up until now was a little superficial — if you ran a query relevant to something your friend had previously ‘Liked’ on Facebook, you’d see that in a special module embedded in the search results page. Beginning today, things are getting much more interesting: Bing will actually reorder search results based on friends’ Likes (in other words, your friend’s recommendations won’t just be relegated to a standalone widget, they’ll influence the Ten Blue Links).

That isn’t all. If you run a query that matches information in a friend’s profile (but not necessarily their ‘Likes’) then Bing might show a link to their profile too (for example, run a query for “San Francisco” and you’ll see which of your friends live in SF). Sometimes Bing will show that a certain result has been liked N number of times by other users, even people who aren’t your friends. Bing’s blog post announcing the news outlines the features in more detail. And they look nifty.

But there’s still a big question: will social search, a term that gets tossed around as if it’s some kind of Holy Grail, actually be useful?

The average Facebook user has around 130 friends, which isn’t that many in the grand scheme of things, so you’ll be drawing from a limited amount of recommended content. And my hunch is that the majority of ‘Likes’ are concentrated around a few key areas that include movies, TV shows, breaking news, and humor — you know, the things you see popping up in your Facebook News Feed all the time. Obviously people search for those things on Bing, and when you’re looking for that awesome dancing Android video you heard about but don’t know the name of, surfacing these water-cooler links can be invaluable.

But people use search engines for a ton of other tasks too, and many of them aren’t involving the sort of content that people share to Facebook. How times have you actually ‘Liked’ the new shoes you just ordered? Or your favorite hotel in the Caribbean? Or the how-to guide on repairing your dishwasher? Everything you Like is shared with your friends via the News Feed, and when you share something they’re interested in — like breaking news, or something funny — there’s positive reinforcement as they interact with that shared story. But at the same time you’re probably going to be a little hesitant to start Liking things that are more mundane, even if you found them useful.

And there’s also the question of whether people actually care what their friends think. Internally, Facebook has found that people aren’t necessarily motivated to click links because they share similar tastes with their friends — sometimes, people are interested in a piece of content because it was shared by their friend. In other words, we care about our friends’ recommendations because we care about our friends, not necessarily because we like similar things. So do these ‘Liked’ pages become helpful for finding the information you’re searching for?

I asked some of these questions to Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, who was unsurprisingly a bit more optimistic than I am. He says that the ‘new web’ is inherently social, and that for the first time in human history we can tap into the data that was previously stored in people’s heads. But that’s long-term.

The features Bing launched yesterday, he says, are not ‘the ultimate social search’. He explains that we’re just at the tip of the iceberg, and that social search isn’t going to revolve exclusively around Facebook data. “It’s hard to predict where it’s going next,” Weitz says. “Facebook went from zero Likes to what they have now in one year. The challenge is to not get too locked into one signal — we have to pivot quickly around the current zeitgeist.”

As for my concerns about the way people are ‘Liking’ content with Facebook and how that ties into search, Weitz says that it’s still up to the user to figure out which of their friends’ recommendations are relevant (e.g. if you see one of your gadget-savvy friends ‘Like’ a camera, that’s important; someone else’s recommendation may not be).

And, regarding the scope of content that people are Liking, Weitz points out just how new the Like button is, and that it generally appears in inconsistent places on webpages. Bing launched a new browser toolbar as part of yesterday’s news that solves this issue, but this is only available to IE users. And I’m not convinced that people are having a hard time finding the buttons — I just don’t think they’re compelled to click them unless they really want to broadcast something to their friends.

Of course, Facebook isn’t standing still either. It has every incentive to get you to Like a broader array of content online — after all, its ad platform revolves around showing your friends what you’ve Liked. And it also has a strong incentive to give partners like Bing a way to leverage that data in a useful way.

A couple days ago, the headlines blared that Bing now has 30 percent search market share in the U.S. Not so fast. Those numbers were based on Hitwise estimates. Today, comScore came out with its own qsearch estimates, which is what Wall Street analysts following Google report. The comScore numbers tell a slightly different story.

If you include all searches, then the combined market share of Bing (13.3 percent) and Yahoo (17.7 percent), which is powered by Bing, is indeed 31 percent. But this “core” search number includes Google slideshows, contextual search in places like Yahoo News, and Google Instant. Every time you go through a slideshow on Yahoo, for instance, related search results appear below, inflating its numbers.

But ComScore strips out those numbers to come up with what it calls “explicit search” (you know, when someone actually types a query into a search box). When you look at explicit search, Bing and Yahoo combined only had 29.5 percent market share in the first quarter of 2011, which is up from 28.0 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. So Bing is making gains at the expense of Google, whose explicit search share in the first quarter was 65.6 percent, down from 66.4 percent in the fourth quarter, or almost a full point. But it hasn’t quite reached 30 percent yet.

Bing also keeps taking share from Yahoo, which ends up being a wash. Over the past nine months, Bing has gained nearly 3 percentage points in explicit search share, but half of that has come from Yahoo.

In March, 2011, Bing reached 13.9 percent, while Yahoo dropped to 15.7 percent, for a combined total of 29.6 percent share, which is actually down 0.1 percent from February. Google’s explicit search market share in March was 65.7 percent, up 0.3 percent from February, and pretty much flat with nine months ago.

The table below is courtesy of Citi analyst Mark Mahaney:

Editor’s note: This is a guest post submitted by Mahendra Palsule, who has worked as an Editor at Techmeme since 2009. Apart from curating tech news, he likes analyzing trends in startups and the social web. He is based in Pune, India, and you can follow him on Twitter.

What’s the Next Big Thing after social networking?

This has been a favorite topic of much speculation among tech enthusiasts for many years. I think we are already witnessing a paradigm shift – a move away from simple social sharing towards personalized, relevant content.

The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social Graph. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google are already working on delivering relevant content, a slew of startups are focusing exclusively on it.

Relevance is the only solution to the problem of information overload.

The above matrix is a representation of how the process of online information discovery has evolved over time.

Phase I: The Search Dominated Web

This is how Google began its dominance over the web two decades ago, using PageRank to surface the most popular web pages as identified by other web pages that linked to them.

Phase II: Web 2.0 With Social Bookmarking

In the Web 2.0 era, social bookmarking services gained significant traction, surfacing popular content. Sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon are hugely popular even today, driving millions of page views.

Phase III: Personalized Recommendations

Services like Hunch, GetGlue, etc. have focused on building an Interest Graph for users, to deliver personalized recommendations using a ‘taste engine’.

Phase IV: Personalized Serendipity

The latest crop of startups is focusing on personalization using a combination of Interest and Social Graphs. Personalized Serendipity is what Jeff Jarvis calls ‘Unexpected Relevance’. Examples include Gravity, my6sense, Genieo, and TrapIt.

What Exactly Is Relevance?

The battle against information overload is sometimes presented as a choice between Relevance and Popularity, where ‘relevant’ is equated to ‘personalized’ as against popular.

However, Relevance does not always mean Personalized. Relevance is very dynamic – it depends on the needs of a person at a specific point in time. There are times when users want to know about the most popular stories, and other times when they seek personalized content.

There are multiple approaches to filtering information for Relevant Content. Google, Paper.li, and PostRank are examples of algorithmic filtering, while Reddit, Hacker News use a crowdsourcing approach. Klout can be used to filter Twitter streams by influence, while Facebook uses social affinity as a filter for its newsfeed and social signals for its new Comments Plugin. Location is another high-impact signal for delivering relevant content, gaining importance in a mobile world.

In other words, Relevance spans across all the quadrants of the Discovery Matrix above, and none of the above approaches to filtering for relevance is the ‘best approach’. There is no killer approach to Relevance. Henry Nothhaft, Jr., CMO of TrapIt, described it as “the myth of the sweet spot”. The competitive edge will be with services that support multiple discovery methods, multiple filtering approaches, have flexibility, and support multiple mobile platforms.

Quora: A Showcase Of The Interest Graph

Quora has pioneered the use of the Interest Graph as a dominant signal for its newsfeed. Quora asks new users to select Topics to follow, as part of its onboarding process, which is the first revelation that Topics are as important as Users to follow.

Quora’s newsfeed is an interesting showcase of what happens when you mix an Interest Graph with a Social Graph – and the result is the mysterious addictiveness so many have experienced, but found difficult to explain. An item pops up in your newsfeed not because you were following a user, but because you were following a related topic.

This often leads to Personalized Serendipity – or Unexpected Relevance – which is why Quora gets many people hooked.

The war over the Interest Graph began between Twitter and Facebook last year, as Erick described so eloquently. So how did Quora beat them to this game?

For starters, Quora is built from the ground-up with the Interest Graph being a backbone of the framework. Twitter’s ‘Browse Interests’ is too broad and primitive to be of use, even at present. And while Facebook has a mechanism for allowing publishers to push new items to your feed, most publishers have been unaware of this functionality.

This is also the reason why Facebook’s Like Button now publishes a full news feed story. The future clearly belongs to who best captures the Interest Graph as Max Levchin and Bill Gurley put it.

The implications of a Relevance-driven web are wide-ranging and broad in scope. Better utilization of the Interest Graph by services will lead to better ad targeting, and a potential decrease in reliance on CPM/CPC-based advertising. Monetization focus will be on higher yields through transactions and subscriptions as Dave McClure once described. Online media publishers will focus on Relevance Metrics revealing engagement and time-spent on site, than primitive metrics like page views and traffic.

Social media may lose its obsession with follower numbers and traffic, evolving to context-driven reputation systems and algorithms.

Interest Graphs will be used to build Better Social Graphs. Today’s monolithic Interest Graph will get further specialized into Taste Graphs, Financial Graphs, Local Network Graphs, etc., yielding higher relevance for different needs.

The Age of Relevance beckons!

Sixteen years has passed. I receive about 400 e-mails a day now from people all over the world. E-mail has become part of my life and has changed the way I communicate and the way I work. I don’t know anyone anywhere who doesn’t have an e-mail address. When I went to Sikkim, India, last year, a Buddhist monk in a remote Himalayan monastery even gave me his e-mail address. The web has also evolved in a similar fashion—it seems to be everywhere and connects everyone, for everything. Internet technologies are now toppling dictatorships in the Middle East.

But what has really changed in search? We still go to the same text boxes, enter expressions that we hope the computer will understand, get back lists of web pages that reference those words, and click on links to find the information we are looking for. The only real difference is that now the top links take you to spam sites—which want you to click on other links that make them money and that make Google money. Creating low-quality, low-cost information pages has become such big business that the leading content farm, Demand Media, just went public and is valued at $1.9 billion. According to Blekko’s spam clock, over 1 million spam pages are created every hour. So the web is becoming one giant heap of trash.

I had hoped to put Google and Bing on the spot at the recent BigThink conference by challenging them to fix the spam problem; perhaps to follow Blekko’s bold lead in blacklisting the leading polluters. But they instead got into a pissing match about who was copying whom.  Google simply changed the subject. And when I asked the panelists about their long-term vision on search, I was really disappointed at the shallowness of the response. They weren’t talking about changing the world—just about fine-tuning what they’ve been doing forever. You can watch the video below to see what I mean.

In the hope that I don’t have to wait another 16 years to see advancements in search, I’ll share my views on where it needs to go. Perhaps you can also share your views and we can inspire a new generation of startups to do to the current search leaders what Google did to Lycos and AltaVista: antiquate them.

In a nutshell, what I want is for my computer—or a new Google—to serve me. I don’t want to be serving it words that make sense to it, and then have to wade through pages of spam it delivers to me, to find the information I am seeking. I want it to learn what I like and what my friends like and tell me what I want to know or do what I need it to.

If I am visiting New York City tomorrow and want to eat dinner at a moderately priced North Indian restaurant near where I am staying, I want my computer to suggest the two or three places that I will like and that have space available. I book my flights and hotel reservations on line, have my calendar on Google, tweet my likes and dislikes, and talk to my friends on different social media sites, after all. So why can’t my new Google simply take my information and my friends’ information and give me what I want?

Is this so hard? I don’t think so. This week, we witnessed a computer, Watson, beating the top Jeopardy contestants. It was able to parse human speech patterns, make sense of complex questions, do very sophisticated searches, and come back very quickly with the right answer. It didn’t respond with a series of links—it computed the probability that its answer was correct and responded accordingly.

Watson’s technology is a great start, but I want much more. I also want it to analyze my social graph and get recommendations from friends who matter. For example, when it comes to Indian food, I don’t care what my academic peers say or what my South Indian friends say; I want input from fellow Punjabis—they know their tikka masalas and saag paneers better than anyone else does. If I am looking for health-related advice, I want to know what doctors say. If I am shopping for a gift for my wife, I want input from women who share her tastes. This isn’t rocket science.

And then I want more. I want my new Google to automatically make a dinner reservation for me, buy me a ticket to a movie that I may want to watch, or place an order on the cheapest and most reliable shopping site. Yes, I know there are already many applications/sites that do this. Why aren’t my preferred sites integrated into the search function—so I never have to see the 90s-era text links?

What I really don’t ever want to see is the spam that Google delivers. The present page-ranking system is easy to bait—just add the right key words to some garbage content or pay Google for an ad, and your listing appears at the top of everyone’s search results.

Google took some good steps forward this week with its announcement that it will let users tag sites as spam via a Chrome extension and rank the websites of people they know higher than others. But this is still more of the same—the spammers still get top billing. Just do a search on a term like “digital camera under $200” to see what I mean. The results are practically useless. (Bing just added a nice option to let you search by price, but that is buried in its spammy results when you do a regular search).

We need some out-of-the-box thinking here. I doubt we will see this from Google, because it makes billions by serving up ads.  So here is an excellent opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @wadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

A decade ago I tried Google for the first time. Like everyone said, it was magic – the result I wanted was right there at the top. For someone who’d been using AltaVista for years before that it was a very pleasant experience. Anyone who was on the Internet before Google came along knows exactly what I’m talking about. Google just felt right. It got the job done.

It’s been a creeping feeling, growing over the years, but it sort of feels like pre-Google again. Search is a really bad overall experience. Travel searches, for example, are a joke, and startups like Gogobot are popping up to try to fix that. When I’m trying to figure out the best hotel for me when I travel I bail on Google entirely and head to Tripadvisor (shudder), and Gogobot.

Same for gadget product reviews. GDGT, Amazon and occasionally Consumer Reports seem to have the best collections of data, so I just go there directly and bypass Google. In fact, I use Google mostly for navigation, not discovery these days. Meaning I know the document I’m trying to find and figure out the best search query to locate it. But pure discovery? It’s a shit show of layer upon layer of SEO madness vying for my click.

Is there actual evidence of Google failing at search? Probably somewhere, but certainly not in the search share numbers. They maintain a healthy, almost monopolistic, lead in search despite huge efforts by Microsoft to compete. But then again, AltaVista had huge search share too, right before they suddenly didn’t any more.

And while I watch search startups like Blekko make serious attempts to fix search by thinking about the problem a little differently, it’s just too early to know if they’ll succeed.

So what is the evidence that search still sucks? Well, you know it’s true, just like me. And the fact that the mighty Google is suddenly taking every opportunity to toot their own search horn shows they know it, too. They tore into Microsoft for stealing data with just a little too much vehemence. In the end it felt like less of a gotcha moment, and more like entrapment.

And then today, with this JC Penney nonsense. For months the company gamed Google to get the top result in dozens of lucrative product searches. Google recently discovered it and shut it down. And then, as best I can tell, fed the story to the NY TImes as a sort of victory lap.

I say it should be an embarrassing moment for Google, not one to celebrate. In fact I did say it, here. Google’s Matt Cutts responded by lightly trashing Bing: “@arrington the newer/most recent spate of links happened in the last 3-4 months; not over a year. JCP still ranking on [dresses] on eg Bing.”

Which is fine. It’s always fun to slap Bing around a little, I guess.

Vanessa Fox, who used to fight spam at Google, weighed in as well, saying “@arrington – spam fighting will always be an ongoing battle at Google. Have to balance being aggressive in algorithms w/ collateral damage.” Earlier today she also reported on the JC Penney story.

When companies start to flail they nearly always do a couple of things. First, they trash the competitors. Then they talk about how hard the problem is and that the solution is a long term one.

Altavista did a lot of that in the late nineties. Right before a competitor came in and fixed the AltaVista problem permanently.

Yes, search is very hard. But Silicon Valley is really good at doing hard things. The real problem right now is that there’s a perception that Google is untouchable in search. When a venture capitalist sees a pitch from a new search startup all they can think about is the Cuil debacle. And since venture capitalists are just about the most risk averse people in Silicon Valley, the funds just don’t flow.

But all the evidence suggests otherwise. Demand Media is worth $1.6 billion, and their entire business is based on pushing cheap, useless content into Google to get a few stray links. If Google was good at search, Demand Media wouldn’t exist. And Bing wouldn’t be making solid gains in search market share. And JC Penney wouldn’t be able to massively game search results for a few months, during the holiday season, without getting caught until months later.

We need to see a real competitor emerge in search. If only because it will make Google up its game, and make all of us a lot happier.

In January Bing surged in search market share, up over 2 points to 12.8%.

You wouldn’t think Conduit was the main force behind the rise. But the data suggests it is.

Conduit didn’t just bail on Google in favor of Bing. They also changed the way they do search. They previously put Google results onto their own domain. Now when someone searches from the Conduit toolbar the user is results are shown on Bing.com directly. So Conduit is losing all those page views and sending them to Bing.

Look at this comparison of Bing and Conduit from Alexa:

Comscore shows much the same mirror effect. Bing added 138 million more page views worldwide in January than December, and Conduit lost 165 million in the same period.

Coincidence, or cause and effect? That Conduit search deal may have been a lot more important than anyone realized at the time it was announced.

The Google/Bing fight over search results-stealing has gone from inspiring jokes like this one on Twitter all the way to Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” last night, where Stephen Colbert took advertiser Bing to the mattresses regarding the news that the search engine had been caught copying Google’s results. “For the first time ever, someone’s search history has been busted for something other than porn,” Colbert said.

Riffing on the ridiculous synthetic search terms that Google used to entrap Bing (searches like “hiybbprqag,” “juegosdeben1ogrande,” “jiudgefallon,” “indoswiftjobinproduction,”"mbzrxpgjys” and “delhipublicschool40 chdjob”) Colbert went out of his way to call out Microsoft, “Apparently ‘hiybbprqag’ is a word meaning ‘You got served.’”

You can read the Danny Sullivan post that started this mess here.

Also, in the same vein.

Via @alexia_tsotsis/@issaco

In previous posts, I wrote about the epic battles that are brewing between spammers and content farms—which are turning the web into a massive garbage dump—and search providers, which have to choose between profit and customer satisfaction. This is a serious problem. The content farms are “dumbing down” the web by churning out thousands of mostly low-quality articles, every day, on topics that Google tells them they can make money from. All of these players are raking in billions of dollars at our expense.

I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion this week between Google, Microsoft, and Blekko. The event, which I emceed, was called Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box, and was organized by BigThink and Microsoft.  As I joked, it seemed odd that Google was playing the role of “evil” monopolist; Microsoft, the “good” contender, whilst Blekko was a fly on the wall.

I had originally invited Google SEO development head, Amit Singhal, and Microsoft Research GM, Ashok Chandra. But Ashok dropped out in favor of Corporate VP of Bing, Harry Shum; and Amit dropped out in favor of Webspam team head, Matt Cutts. I was very disappointed, because Matt has the reputation of being a really nice guy—a “teddy bear”. Harry has the reputation of being feisty. I was afraid that Harry and Rich Skrenta (Blekko CEO) would devour Matt. And it would seem as if I had set up an ambush for Google.

Little did I know that Google had its own ambush cooking: that Matt was more like a tiger than like a teddy bear.

At the conference, I gave my spiel on my vision of search: how I want my computer to serve me and tell me what I want to know, rather than my having to cater to its whims by entering specific keywords in a text box and reading through text links—which are often baited by spammers. I challenged Matt to tell everyone what Google was doing about the spam. Matt, instead, went on the warpath and accused Bing of stealing Google’s information. He disclosed a sting operation that his team had run. He expressed outrage at Microsoft’s ethics. Harry Shum fired back, defended Bing, and accused Google of playing games.

There has been extensive media coverage of this. Harry Shum and Yusuf Mehdi of Microsoft both posted blogs to respond to Google’s allegations. So I don’t need to visit the same territory. You can watch the video of the event and form your own opinions. There was a lot more discussed in 40 minutes than was covered by the media, so this is worth watching.

Both sides have strong views and believe they are right. In opening the debate, I said that, as a professor, I can’t condone any kind of plagiarism or cheating—and that is what Microsoft’s usage of Google data seems to amount to. But in the tech world, such information exchange is the norm. Everyone cheats and this may be a good thing for innovation. So there is no black and white here. Both sides are right and they are wrong.

The one thing that is clear is that Google pulled off a huge PR coup. It changed the topic. Media coverage isn’t about spam and how Google profits from this any more; we are debating how valuable Google’s search results are.

Here are the real issues we should be discussing:

1. Who really owns the data that Google and Bing are tussling over? Is it the search providers—which “cheat” and copy from all over the web? Or is it the content creators—us—who they “steal” from? Why do Google and Microsoft believe that they own our information? And why aren’t they paying us for using this?
2. Facebook rivals Google in web traffic and will get way ahead. And Google can’t search within Facebook’s walls. Doesn’t this give a huge, long-term, advantage to Bing, which can (within limits)?
3. Blekko announced a bold decision to block content farms—sites such as eHow and Answerbag. Will Google and Microsoft take similar steps? Will they be able to forsake the revenue? Can the volumes of spam we are dealing with even be screened algorithmically or do we need curated search solutions?
4. We need a standard measure of web quality. Google says that it has not noticed any reduction in web quality. Yet most experts agree that this has declined significantly over the past two or three years. Why doesn’t Google, as the market leader, work with its competitors to create an open measure that can be used by everyone? Let Google prove to us that it is, indeed, better than the rest.
5. Why not allow web users to designate what sites are spam and make this information publicly available? Google lets you filter your own results, but why not share these data with everyone? Sites that believe they are unfairly labelled can lodge an appeal. Why the secrecy?

So let’s get back on topic. Harry Shum and Matt Cutts can duke it out in a bar somewhere. What I want is for them to clean up the web and give me the best search results.

Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School , Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, andDistinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

At the impeccably timed  “Who Will Win the Spam Wars” roundtable at the BigThink conference this morning, Google’s Matt Cutts, Bing’s Harry Shum and Blekko’s Rich Skrenta got together to discuss recent dramatic turn of events in the search market, most notably Google’s accusations today that Bing is using Google user data gleaned from Internet Explorer and the Bing toolbar to improve its own results.

Cutts took issue with Microsoft’s statement that they did not copy Google’s results, “Microsoft said they don’t copy the results and we have screenshots that prove that happened.” It does seem from Danny Sullivan’s post that Bing is tailoring its results with Google data, as Google’s honey pot nonsense queries showed up on Bing weeks later. See below:

“Google engineers helped us discover a new form of spam. I wished the Google engineers had shared that with us before they went to press,” said Shum. He went on, “If you look at how each search engine ranks the results, Matt Cutts is referring to a few outlier examples. It’s not like we actually copied anything. We actually learn from our customers. Do you mean that Google owns the data?”

Cutts took issue with this obviously and implied that the copying extended beyond what was evidenced in its synthetic search experiment, “We saw Google search results showing up in a lot of different queries not just in synthetic queries but a lot of different queries.” And then, “We don’t use clicks on Bing’s users on Google rankings.”

Later on in the panel Cutts still seemed stunned with Microsoft’s response, “I’ve been doing search for a decade and this is the first time I’ve seen something like this.”

Shum released a public statement going over many of his talking points, but namely reinforced the categorical denial of copying by Bing.

“To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today’s story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment. But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience.”

The Bing copying Google imbroglio is the latest battleground as the search engine wars intensify. As panel moderator and TC contributor Vivek Wadhwa pointed out, it’s interesting that we live is a world where Google is now the monopolist, Microsoft is now a contender and Blekko is a fly on the wall.

I had a feeling that this would get Google’s attention. And I had the same concern as when I challenged the Russian government, once, in a Bloomberg BusinessWeek article about Skolkovo (a new tech park). I feared that Google would either blacklist me or do its equivalent of putting me in a Gulag—deliver even more spam when I search websites.

But I was delighted to get an e-mail from Amit Singhal, the head of Google’s SEO team. His message was exemplary for those wanting to learn how to handle a PR crisis. Here is part of what he wrote:

I read your post on TechCrunch yesterday and was quite disappointed by the fact that Google search failed your students at their task. My team and I treat every such failure as an inspiration to improve Google. Would it at all be possible for me to get a few queries from your students for which our algorithm failed? We will debug every aspect of our system for those queries.

He went on to invite me to visit Google to show me how they run the search system and listen to any other criticism I had to offer.

I took Amit up on this and spent hours with him; with Matt Cutts, who heads Google’s webspam team; and with their lead developers. They were incredibly open and honest. They acknowledged the deficiencies of Google search, shared ideas on how they plan to fix them, and asked for feedback.

I raised concerns that “content farms” are turning the web into a massive garbage dump, that many sites are simply replicating the content of others like TechCrunch, and that Google has no incentive to stop this because it gains advertising revenue from the spammers.

The Google developers assured me that there is a very high Chinese Wall between them and the business side of the company; that they have been instructed by Google’s executives to do only what is in the interest of users—to keep improving quality of search results and the user experience. They said they understood the issues and had many solutions to the technical problems. I questioned whether the spam problems could even be solved algorithmically; whether the only solution was a curated web-search model like that of Blekko and DuckDuckGo. They convinced me that they could, and would, win the battle.

Matt said he would post a blog, which he did, on Jan 21. In it, he explained that Google had already made improvements to make it harder for “spammy on-page content to rank highly”; had radically improved its ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010; and was about to implement a change that would directly address the issue of sites copying others’ content. Most importantly, he acknowledged that something had to be done about the “content farms,” and said that Google would.

Not surprisingly, Matt’s blog led to another avalanche of media coverage. As it turns out, the biggest content farm of them all, Demand Media, was set for an IPO this week (on Jan 26).   Savvy bloggers and journalists began to question whether it could sustain its profits without Google’s support. The Wall Street Journal asked Did Google Just Make Demand Media Less in Demand?, and GigaOm wondered Did Google Just Declare War on Demand Media?

Nonetheless, Demand Media had a spectacular IPO. Its investors reaped huge bounties, with the company achieving a market cap of $1.7 billion—valuing it higher than the New York Times. So the public markets rewarded junk over quality. And they called Google’s bluff.

Where does that put us? Do we have to watch the web become one big toxic waste dump—as the spammers rake in billions of dollars? Or will Google indeed save the day?

There is an event on Tuesday, Feb 1, called Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box, to discuss these questions. It will be live-streamed on TechCrunch (watch for a post by Jon Orlin on that day) and is being organized by BigThink, a public online forum for intellectuals (people like Gary Kasparov, Jimmy Carter, Malcolm Gladwell, Salman Rushdie, Nouriel Roubini, and Paul Krugman). BigThink has thousands of videos on its site, which 1.5 million people watch every month.

I am emceeing the BigThink event and moderating a panel with three big players: Matt Cutts from Google; Harry Shum, Microsoft Corporate Vice President who heads Bing development, and Rich Skrenta, founder and CEO of Blekko.

Here are some questions that I plan to ask the panelists. Please share your comments below and suggest additional questions. I can’t promise I’ll cover all the topics you raise, but I will bring up as many as I can.

1. How will they save the web? Is it possible for search engines to separate the wheat from the chaff—tell the difference between content produced by regular people and large-scale junk produced by the spammers?

2. How are the engines really different? Most people can’t tell the difference between Google and Bing. Where is the magic?

3. What lies ahead? What is the future of search?

I have no doubt that this will be a very lively and informative event.  There are also other great presentations such as:

• Jaron Lanier, named by Time Magazine in 2010 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, speaking about the need for a new sustainable revenue model for search.
• Esther Dyson, in an address entitled “The Future of Search is Verbs,” speaking about how we want search to help us do something—a set of many verbs.
• Demos from Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Architect of BING maps at Microsoft; and Luc Barthelet, Executive Director of Wolfram|Alpha.

I hope you’ll tune in.

Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School , Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.