Does Twitter need Google or does Google need Twitter? It’s a question complicated by recent events, such as the two companies not coming to an agreement to extend their previous partnership through which Google showed Tweets in search results. That deal wasn’t renewed,and then Google decided to promote its own Google+ results in search, which didn’t go over well with Twitter at all.
Asked about this at by Peter Kafka at the D: Dive Into Media conference this evening, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo responded: → Read More
How much does Google make in advertising from mobile? Cowen analyst Jim Friedland estimates that Google is generating $7 per year from each smartphone (and tablet). This includes both search and display advertising in mobile apps on both Android and iOS (iPhones and iPads). Thanks to the rapid growth in smart mobile devices from an estimated 509 million last year to nearly double that in 2012 to an estimated 914 million, Google’s mobile ad revenues are expected to more than double from an estimated $2.5 billion last year to $5.8 billion in 2012 (see chart).
CloudMagic, the personal search service that indexes your Gmail, documents, contacts, calendar and Twitter updates, is now available as a mobile app. The release follows a major update for the service this past fall, which added the ability to search Twitter and a move to host your personal index in the cloud.
This switch is what enables CloudMagic to work across multiple devices, including now, iPhone and Android smartphones. Using the new mobile app, CloudMagic is surprisingly fast – and far more useful than the phones’ built-in search functions alone. → Read More
Well, this is convenient. Google published its 2011 Zeitgeist list of the fastest-growing search terms of the year. The No. 2 term on the list, right behind No. 1 “Rebecca Black,” is its own product, “Google+”. Since nobody ever heard of Google+ until this year, and it received loads of news coverage as Google’s strongest attempt yet to take on Facebook, searches for the term rose more than 10,000 percent.
Remember, Google’s Zeitgeist is a curated list based on the fastest-growing search terms of the past year, not the ones with the most absolute volume. This focus produces a more interesting list of trending topics for the year. Overall, the list this year is Apple-heavy with “iPhone 5″ (No. 6), “Steve Jobs” (No. 9), and “iPad2″ (No. 10) all showing up. The Japanese word for Fukushima, “東京 電力” (No. 8), also made it, as did “Battlefield 3″ (No. 3) and “Casey Anthony” (No. 4). → Read More
New data from search marketing platform Efficient Frontier and Ben Schachter, a stock analyst at the Macquarie Group, indicates that mobile search advertising is at an important inflection point and may be ready to take off next year. Mobile search currently accounts for about 6 percent of the search advertising dollars in the U.S. as represented by Efficient Frontier’s clients. And that is up 2.7 times from 2010. But by the end of next year, it is projecting that mobile search could account for between 16 percent and 22 percent of total search advertising spending.
If the growth rate of mobile search continues, it will be on the conservative end of that projection, and if it accelerates, it could be closer to the 22 percent. Schachter expects the “growth to accelerate in 2012 and beyond as more and more mobile devices with full Internet browsers enter the market.” → Read More
In what appears to be a test among some users, Twitter is adding “Top News” and “Top People” results at the top of its realtime search results. When you search for a hot story like “gmail” (which came out with a buggy iPhone app today) or even “Humanoid” (a new startup I just wrote about), you will see a highlighted boxed result with a link to a top news story along with a thumbnail image from that article or blog post. Similarly, a search for anyone who is Twitter-famous will turn up a “Top People” result with their Twitter profile picture and a link to their stream.
I first noticed this earlier today, and I thought it was a paid search ad. But it is actually a way to help users discover the most popular content and people. Presumably, the Top News items are based on retweets and some sort of whitelist Twitter keeps for news sources. Although it seems like the Top News story sometimes rotates to another source if you repeat your search. → Read More
With the rise of Google+, the decrease in controversial posting activity by famous tech people and the allure of other shiny new things, the majority of tech press has turned the focus of their gazes away from Quora, my favorite startup of 2010.
Well now that Apple has gone and integrated the most sophisticated piece of AI to ever to see the light of the consumer market into its iPhone 4S, I thought it was time to brush some dirt off of Quora’s shoulder and shine a light on what the future of the company could hold. → Read More
Mobile devices are shifting many individual computing behaviors, perhaps none more significant than how we search for and receive information. Right now, it’s moving at warp speed. In between the time I finish this draft and its posted, it’s entirely possible another company or service launches in this space. Every time we “swipe open” our mobile devices, we seek out dopamine hits from receiving new emails, texts, notifications, or other bits of digital media. A good chunk of this current mobile activity revolves around the personalized search and Q&A space, which leverages these behavior in new ways.
By now, on traditional computers, we know how to find the information we seek, whether via sites like Google, Wikipedia, or through social networks. On mobile, however, our information needs and habits shift. On the go, we typically want smaller bits of information quicker, usually calibrated to our location. We are less likely to engage in longer discussion, and more likely to add questions in the hopes that machines, crowds, or some combination can produce relevant information. This shift has opened the floodgates of activity in the personalized search and Q&A space, with an impressive number of new applications vying for user attention in a crowded marketplace. → Read More
All year, I’ve heard some variation of this phrase: “A big shift, from search to discovery, is underway online.” I’m still figuring out what this means. I’d like to share my thoughts on it, and I’d like to hear what “discovery” on the web means to you.
First, I do not believe that there is a “shift” from search to discovery. “Shift” isn’t the right word, because people will continue to search based on specific intent for years. Second, although discovery won’t replace search outright, discovery can impact it significantly by changing how and/or where we search. Third, there are two types of discovery that matter: (1) discovery that leads to a transaction; and (2) discovery that does not end in a transaction.
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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. → Read More
A la 2006, today, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo collectively announced that they will be partnering to create schema.org, a resource for site owners and developers to learn about structured data and gain insight into how to improve their sites’ search results. The site adds more than 100 new forms of website markup for content ranging from movies to places in an effort to standardize, and thus improve, how websites are crawled and presented in search results. “The site aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages”, Google’s announcement reads. → Read More
Search is about to change quite radically. For more than a decade, search has been stagnant: the core product has not changed much. Users have changed radically in that time frame. Even though the kind of content users consume is different, search engines are still focused mostly on web pages. Users have become less patient and have less time on hand, while search engines still require users to dig through and extract information from the web pages to find what they’re looking for. In addition, users are spending more and more time on their mobile phones and other connected devices, which require a completely different kind of user experience for search. → Read More
Topix, the largely under-the-radar platform for local news, information, and influence, has been aggregating local news and community discussions for nearly 7 years. Over this time, the platform has quietly grown to over 13 million monthly visitors, according to Quantcast. It’s now aggregating local content from more than 50K sources and offers more than 360K edited news pages.
Topix has become a respectable web property, which is why today’s announcement that it will be partnering with young search engine, Blekko, seems like an interesting move. Blekko only launched publicly back in November of last year, so the human-curated, slash-tagging search engine is still very much an unestablished entity. → Read More
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. → Read More
In February, we covered the social search service’s public launch and, mere days later, wrote about its closing a $4 million venture round backed by Sequoia.
Since then, Greplin has been rapidly expanding the social applications it can search and index, adding Yammer, Highrise, and Google Contacts last month to its already healthy set of networks and services. On top of these, you can authorize it to search Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Evernote, Box.net, Basecamp, and Google Voice. With a single search query, sha-bang!, Greplin can search nearly your entire personal cloud for that address, contact, or invitation you just can’t seem to find. → Read More
In mid February, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt expressed pride in Google employee Wael Ghonim’s brave struggle against the autocratic Mubarak regime to establish political transparency in Egypt. “We are very, very proud of what Wael and that group was able to do in Egypt,” Schmidt said in Barcelona. But what Schmidt needs to do now is apply Ghonim’s views about political transparency to Google’s own search business.
With its 70% control of the global online search market, Google’s power to make and break online businesses is unrivalled. So it’s not surprising that website owners want more transparency over the reasons why the often autocratic Google sometimes impose penalties on their businesses. But a report issued last week by the newsnavigator OneNewsPage found a distinct lack of transparency in the search business with 88% of respondents saying that paid search advertising costs lacked transparency, while 24% said that they had experienced large, unexplained falls in site traffic as a consequence of changes in their search engine status. → 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
Editor’s note: Henry “Hank” Nothhaft, Jr. is the co-founder and CMO of Trapit, a virtual personal assistant for Web content still in private beta that was incubated out of SRI and the CALO project (as was Siri, the conversational search engine bought by Apple).
One of the most interesting concepts to emerge in media and tech lately is that of “serendipity”—showing people what they want even if they didn’t ask for it.
Despite its seemingly ubiquitous invocation, however, the concept of serendipity remains ill-defined and put forth as some vague panacea for a slew of emerging innovations hoping to attract new users in droves. What is needed is a closer look at what we actually mean when we talk about serendipity. → 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
Google has Google Instant. Bing has guided search and (soon) swimming whale videos on its home page. Yahoo, well, Yahoo now has an expanding accordion search box. Starting today, when you do searches related to music, movies, or news, a set of results will be packaged together at the top in a box with vertical tabs along the side. It is similar to Google’s Universal Search Onebox and the Bing Box, except that the vertical tabs create four or five expanding search boxes in one.
When you do a search for “Lady Gaga,” for instance, the default box is an overview with an excerpt from her bio, link to her official site, and photos, but there are also tabs for nearby events, albums, videos, and Twitter. The Twitter tab is further divided into her official Tweets, Tweets from Hollywood Insiders, and Tweets from “Everyone” (although it is not really from everyone, Yahoo filters out spam and bots). → Read More
