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. → Read More
I sent my first e-mail message in 1995, to a member of my development team. That was the only person I knew who had an e-mail address in those days. I also did my first web search around that time. I think I used Lycos for this. I entered some keywords into a text box, separated by Boolean operators, and received a list of web pages that I could click on that referenced these words.
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
Last December toolbar startup Conduit announced they were bailing on Google search in favor of Bing.
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
At the “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 turns 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.” Indeed it does seem from Danny Sullivan’s post that the Google honey pot nonsense queries are showing up on Bing weeks later. → Read More
Sometimes, all it takes is a little spark to set off a major forest fire. That is what seems to have happened with my New Year’s Day post on Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google. Over the last two months, there has been an avalanche of articles echoing my post, including New York Magazine, Business Insider, GigaOm, TechCrunch, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal.
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. → Read More
The recent victory of IBM’s Watson computer against human competitors in an exhibition round of Jeopardy got computer scientist Stephen Wolfram thinking about how regular search engines might fare in such a match-up. So he took 200,000 known Jeapardy clues and ran them through six search engines (Google, Bing, Ask, Blekko, Wikipedia Search, and Yandex). He excluded known Jeopardy sites from the results, and didn’t test his own Wolfram Alpha because it is not designed for those kinds of queries.
What he found is that the search engines did fairly well, depending on how you measure success. Google did slightly better than the rest, but Bing and Ask were close behind. On average, Google got the correct answer somewhere on its first results page 69 percent of the time, versus 68 percent for Ask and 63 percent for Bing. Google got the right answer somewhere in the title or snippet of text of the very top result 66 percent of the time, versus 65 percent for Bing (and Ask dropped to 51 percent). → Read More
A couple of weeks ago, comScore came out with a report that said Microsoft’s Bing had reached an all-time high market share of 11.8% in November 2010.
According to rival Compete, however, Bing’s market share is actually much larger than that. → Read More
This semester, my students at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley researched the VC system from the perspective of company founders. We prepared a detailed survey; randomly selected 500 companies from a venture database; and set out to contact the founders. Thanks to Reid Hoffman, we were able to get premium access to LinkedIn—which provided a wealth of information. But some of the founders didn’t have LinkedIn accounts, and others didn’t respond to our LinkedIn “inmails”. So I instructed my students to use Google searches to research each founder’s work history, by year, and to track him or her down in that way.
But it turns out that you can’t easily do such searches in Google any more. Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search. → Read More
Today Microsoft is holding a ‘Bing Search Summit’ in San Francisco, where it’s showcasing some of the latest addition to its search engine, as well as some new features for its mobile applications on iPhone and Android.
The overarching theme here has been to highlight numerous minor enhancements the Bing team has been making to help improve its search experience. The goal: boil search down to the tasks that most people are typically conducting on Bing.
Microsoft says that the vast majority of Bing queries fall under 155 query segments, which include things like Music (4.6% of searches), Consumer Electronics (1.6%), and Recipes (1.1%). Bing wants to take these segments and figure out which verbs they typically involve: music has “download songs” and “read lyrics”, electronics has “read reviews”, and so on. → Read More
Panoramic photos of streets are now standard in online and mobile maps, with Google Street View being the most well-known example. Bing has its own version of 3D streetside photos layered on top of maps, but soon it will start adding the ability to go inside buildings and look around thanks to a partnership with EveryScape. The feature will be called “Interior Views” and it will allow people to visually explore local businesses and other buildings. It will appear as an option next to local search results when available. You can check out an example of what the technology looks like for this mall in San Francisco.
EveryScape has been working on the technology for years and raised $6 million last February to pursue go after the interior photo mapping space more aggressively. EveryScape charges local businesses to photograph their interiors and put them on a map. Now that will be an easier sell with the Bing Map partnership. → Read More
Bing has just made a small improvement to travel search, adding the ability to add natural language queries to flight search. So instead of selecting your airport, destination, dates or other options to conduct a flight search, you can type in your parameters in the search box to retrieve results.
For example, you could enter a search for “Flights from Chicago to SFO in January.” In the results, Bing will include a pre-set Flight search section with possible dates, fare predictions, cheapest fares and more. → Read More
Microsoft this morning announced several new efforts to gain some ground in the booming social/casual gaming market. The company will be debuting an all-new version of MSN Games (see preview here), bring new social games to instant messaging client Windows Live Messenger and expand Bing Games internationally.
Last but not least, Microsoft has struck a partnership with social games publisher CrowdStar to bring some of its most popular titles to Microsoft’s various casual games properties. → Read More
Search engines like Bing and Google will swear up and down that their natural search results are determined by one thing and one thing only: the all-knowing, all-powerful Algorithm. Sure, paid results might pop up at the top or to the side, but they are always highlighted as such. But sometimes the temptation is too great and the natural search results, which are supposed to be sacrosanct, are used to promote a product or service owned by the same company that operates the search engine.
That certainly appears to be what is happening on Bing right now if you do a search for the term “datamarket.” The top result is for Windows Azure DataMarket, a product which just launched a couple days ago. Don’t get me wrong. It sounds like a cool product. It is a cloud-based service where people can upload and sell data in a consistent way. → Read More
Online analytics company Compete has just published its ranking of the top 50 websites for September 2010, giving some insights into current visitor trends (and not absolute numbers, as the company tends to undercount traffic for most websites).
Compete’s data compilation shows increasing traffic to Microsoft’s search engine Bing (up 11.7 percent for the month and 108.5 percent for the year) as well as Ask.com (up 8.7 percent for the month and 75.3 percent for the year). → Read More
Today, Facebook and Microsoft deepened their existing relationship around search. At an event in Silicon Valley, both companies announced a new phase in their partnership, especially as it relates to social search. Bing will be adding more Facebook social data into its main search results.
Starting today, if you do a search on Bing, it will try to recognize your Facebook account through instant personalization, and you will automatically start to see links that your friends have “liked.” These will appear in a separate module, with related social links called out. The example Microsoft gives is if you are searching for San Francisco steak houses and one of your friends liked Alexander’s Steakhouse in San Francisco, that would appear as a result along with the name of your friend. → Read More
Today in Mountain View, CA, Microsoft is holding a special event to showcase some of the new features of Bing. And as we noted yesterday, it’s got a special guest: Facebook. According to our invite, the two companies are planning to “talk about the new directions and future opportunities of search and a demonstration of some new search innovation by Bing.” I’m here live taking notes. The event is being live streamed here.
Facebook has a big presence here, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, CTO Brett Taylor, and numerous employees and what seems like half its PR team in attendance — we’re expecting some big news on this front. → Read More
Tomorrow morning Microsoft is holding a special event to showcase some new features of its Bing search engine (and yes, they have more up their sleeves than the nifty HTML5 demos they showed off a few weeks ago). And we’ve just gotten word that the Bing team will be accompanied by Facebook where they’ll “talk about the new directions and future opportunities of search and a demonstration of some new search innovation by Bing.” In other words, expect some new Facebook integration into Bing.
Bing first announced its deal with Facebook a year ago, continuing the longstanding relationship between the two companies. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
