When Facebook unveiled its new Graph Search function earlier today, it also unveiled the two people who spearheaded the new “third pillar” of Facebook: Lars Rasmussen and Tom Stocky, two heavy-hitters that Facebook hired away from the world’s current search leader, Google, over the last couple of years. → Read More
Today at Facebook’s press event, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced its latest product, called Graph Search. Two of the members of the Graph Search team, Lars Rasmussen and Tom Stocky, were very high up at Google. Facebook is calling it a “Dream Team.” Zuckerberg made it very clear that this is not web search, but completely different: What’s more interesting than… → Read More
Collectively, we probably barely use half of the power that Google Search has locked inside of its walls. If you don’t consider yourself to be a “Power Googler,” have no fear – the company has opened up registration for a program it’s calling “Advanced Power Searching.” It sounds pretty fancy, but it’s just a series of online courses to help you get… → Read More
CloudMagic, the cross-platform cloud search utility for web and mobile, is now introducing a way to combine public data search with personal search. Or, more simply put, it’s rolling out a feature that works like Google’s “Search Plus Your World,” without the Google+. In its place, instead, is your data on the other online services which CloudMagic indexes, including Facebook, Twitter, Evernote… → Read More
Google has long been running a number of experimental Search and Gmail field trials anybody can sign up for and today it’s launching a few nifty new search features for searching your Gmail inbox from Google.com on the desktop and your iOS or Android phone. Previously, Google already let you find you flights by using the [my flights] search operator, but now you can also use queries like [my… → Read More
When people want local information, more often than not, they turn to the nearest mobile device. In fact, Google reportedly announced in October that 50 percent of mobile search queries are for local information. Mobile devices are integral to how interface with the world, especially when it comes to searching for and discovering local businesses and services while on-the-go. While consumers are… → Read More
Microsoft updated Bing’s image search results pages with larger thumbnails and less white-space earlier this year and today, the company is taking this one step further by also introducing a new way to explore imagery on Bing. Instead of loading the actual page with the image after you click on a thumbnail, Bing now brings up a large image viewer that, as the company says, places “the image center… → Read More
Google wants website owners to add as much structured data to their sites as possible in order to improve its search results and Knowledge Graph boxes with rich snippets like event listings, reviews and other information. Adding this kind of metadata to a site, however, isn’t always trivial and many small businesses don’t really have the expertise to add microdata or RDFa markup to their sites. → Read More
Grokr, a mobile startup backed by $4.2 million in funding from NEA, U.S. Ventures, Triple Point, and Lerer Ventures, is today announcing a new mobile application for iOS that aims to rethink how search should work on mobile. Or, simply put, the app is something like an iOS version of “Google Now.”
Google Now, for those unfamiliar, is a feature designed for users of Android devices, which learns… → Read More
Bing‘s social sidebar, which displays relevant results from friends and experts on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, is one of the defining features of Microsoft’s search engine. Today, Microsoft is giving the social sidebar a bit of a facelift by removing the dark gray background and making the overall design more streamlined and less cluttered. → Read More
Last week, Priceline.com acquired Kayak for $1.8 billion. That’s more than twice what Google paid for ITA back in 2010. Why did Priceline make this move? And why now?
Priceline acquired Kayak for $40 a share, about $500 million in cash, $1 billion in Priceline equity, and about $300 million in stock options. Kayak got a premium price — a 29 percent premium, to be exact — from Priceline… → Read More
As Twitter tries to surface more content from its network, it continues to beef up tweets and its Discover section of the site. Today, the company announced a few new features to make sure that you know the context behind a story so that you can figure out why it’s being shown to you within another big feature, Search.
Context has been the missing piece to Twitter all along and the company is… → Read More
According to Bloomberg, the FTC is turning up the heat on Google over ongoing antitrust talks about the company’s practices. In fact, the FTC wants to settle the issue, or it will move forward with a formal complaint. This could turn into a long, drawn-out legal proceeding that would be expensive and time-consuming for both, to say the least.
The current talks have gone on for over two weeks… → Read More
According to Reuters, Google has settled a lawsuit brought by software maker Rosetta Stone over the search company allowing people to purchase keywords within its ad product using its trademarked name.
The lawsuit was filed in 2009 and has dragged on in Virginia since then. The language-teaching company says that competitors were getting a leg up by confusing people searching for them on… → Read More
Google just announced a small but interesting update to its Knowledge Graph panels. Instead of just showing you a list of related items that other people also searched for, hovering over these icons now shows you how they are related to your search query. → Read More
Yahoo has announced plans to close its Korean business by the end of the year. In a statement the company described the move as part of ongoing efforts to streamline operations and realign its global business. The company hired a new CEO — former Googler Marissa Mayer — in July, replacing interm CEO Ross Levinsohn. Reuters notes that South Korea is the first Asian market Yahoo is leaving. → Read More
A few months ago, Google announced a new field trial for a search experience that rocked my world. Basically, you could search within your emails by using the regular old Google.com, if you were logged into your account. For me, this has been awesome for finding flight information and meeting requests within my email, of which I have a lot. → Read More
Today the Apache Foundation released a major update to the open source search engine building tools Lucene and Solr. Version 4.0 adds several new features aimed at making Solr easier to use, more scalable and more customizable. → Read More
YouTube just announced that it is changing its search ranking algorithm to highlight videos that keep viewers engaged. The idea here, says YouTube, is to “reward engaging videos that keep viewers watching.” Because of this change, YouTube expects that the time viewers spent watching videos from search will increase in the near future. → Read More
ComScore just published its latest U.S. search market numbers and things aren’t looking too good for Yahoo. Yahoo’s Bing-powered search lost another 0.6 percentage points and now has just 12.2% of the market. That’s down from 12.8% in August and 13% in July and June. → Read More
The best line of defense is attack — and if you can couch your attack in authoritative legal language and attach it to lofty legal principles, so much the better. That’s the underlying message behind a Google-commissioned report (released today) which seeks to undermine the legitimacy of ongoing antitrust probes into Mountain View’s search dominance and practices. → Read More
Using search engine optimization (SEO) to get unsuspecting web surfers to go to malicious websites isn’t exactly new and it’s a problem that Google, Bing and other search engines are very aware of. According to new data from online security firm Sophos, however, Bing is apparently not doing a great job here, as the majority of SEO redirects affect Bing users. → Read More
Here’s the deal: Facebook is playing around with search right before our eyes. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even alluded to that fact at Disrupt.
Today, Facebook introduced a revamped Help Center on its site. That might not sound like a big deal at first, but when you think about how many users are on the site daily, it just might be the most important feature that the public company has to offer these… → Read More
Yandex today is doubling down in its ongoing battle to make sure that Google doesn’t eat away its market share in Russia, with the launch of two products that aim directly at some of Google’s strongest touchpoints with consumers (and the wider ecosystem of developers). Yandex today is launching its own internet browser, and it is also launching its first app store — with the former targeting… → Read More
Google just announced that it is merging Google Trends, its tool for checking trending topics, and Insights for Search, its tool for comparing search terms over time, into one single Google Trends product. As part of this merger, the company is also giving Trends a fresh coat of paint and, more importantly, it’s switching to HTML5-based charts and maps based on the Google Chart Tools. → Read More
John D. Rockefeller, the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, late on Tuesday sent letters to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo alerting them to how their search engines are being gamed through search engine optimization tactics as part of a wider scam involving moving services, which has seen affected consumers lose personal possessions and pay thousands of… → Read More
CloudMagic, the cross-platform cloud search utility, is one of those little undiscovered gems that has turned into an app that I now launch every day. The service, which started back in 2010 as a browser extension for faster Gmail search, later expanded to iOS and Android, and added support for additional services like Google Docs, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, Microsoft Exchange, and Twitter. → Read More
One of the things that I’m really passionate about is helping charitable causes and organizations in any way that I can. A lot of my friends and family try their best to give, either money or time, but have a hard time finding the right organization to donate to. It’s a good idea to stick with a cause that you care deeply about and find the right organization from there.
Google dropped a post… → Read More
Mark Zuckerberg is on stage at Disrupt talking about the potential for Facebook to get serious about creating a search engine, saying “we’re basically doing 1 billion queries a day and we’re not even trying.” He followed up noting “Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have. At some point we’ll do it. We have a team working on it.” → Read More
Some people are Googling rockstars. No matter what you want to find out, they can pull it up in a search result. Even though Google wants to make searching easy, there are tips and tricks to becoming an absolute pro at search.
The company has a program called “Power Searching”, which is a series of online tutorials and classes to teach you how to be the best searcher ever. The last time this… → Read More
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