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
As you type into a search box on Yahoo or Google, a list of suggested keywords pops down below to help you complete your search faster. Today, Yahoo turned on a local component to its keyword autocomplete feature. The search assist now serves up different keywords based on your location.
So if you type in “Santa” in northern California, “santa clara county” might be the first suggestion, but if you type it in southern California, “santa barbara” might be first.
Location is often a very relevant way to filter search, so this makes Yahoo’s search assist smarter. But, as with many things Yahoo, it is lagging behind Google with this feature. Google’s search assist also factors in your location. And, from what I can tell, it does it better. → Read More
There has been lots of buzz around Blekko, one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups. At the recent Social Currency CrunchUp CEO Rich Skrenta gave an impressive demo of their product and attendees got a first glimpse of Blekko’s powerful search engine.
Slense, an Austrian startup, which has been developed by bunch of Viennese PhD students recently launched and is in some way a Blekko competitor. The company’s goal is to establish a customizable and private search experience. By adding sources you know and trust – for now, just RSS feeds and your Delicious stream – Slense only displays results deemed relevant to you. Results improve not based on your historical search behaviour but on the primary sources you add, and from those external sites, the content is analyzed and via some sort of “peer reviewing”, weighted for future searches. → Read More
Social search site OneRiot just announced layoffs and staff restructuring on its company blog, in a post entitled “Welcome to the future, it’s coming fast.”
Now, being agile also necessitates making some tough decisions too, if they are the right thing for the company right now. Unfortunately, today, we have had to let a handful of well respected colleagues go. This is a pragmatic decision based on a strategically focused go-forward plan for the company. It’s in no way a reflection of the talent of the people concerned.
Bing is on a roll. Yesterday, it released Bing Entertainment and a new iPhone app. And today it is following up with an update to its mobile web search at http://m.bing.com. Bing only recently became a search option on the iPhone, but it really wants to become your default mobile search engine. In fact, if you are not careful, Bing will take over as your default search engine the first time you use it on your iPhone. A message box pops up asking you, “Do you want to change your search engine to Bing?” (Yahoo, the other search options, is using the same notification). Once you do, the hope is there will be no going back.
The new mobile web site looks gorgeous in the iPhone’s mobile web browser (as well as on Androids, Palms, Windows phones, Kins, and Zunes). It looks more like an app, with simplified menu buttons along the bottom (local, maps, directions, movies, weather, favorites) and smooth scrolling in maps. The homepage features Bing’s signature background photo, which looks great on an iPhone screen). And right under the search box, you have the option to “Locate me.” It was able to find my exact street address immediately, something which Google’s mobile web search was having trouble with for me (I had to manually enter my zipcode to get local results). Once you let Bing locate you, it remembers your location on subsequent searches. → Read More
Bing’s iPhone app isn’t the only thing getting an upgrade today at Microsoft’s search engine. Bing is also starting to roll out close to 100 new features to its main search engine on the Web. The biggest change is a new major search category under Bing Entertainment, which will include better ways to search for music, movies, TV shows, and games. “We did travel, health, shopping and local last year,” explains senior VP Yusuf Mehdi. “Now the Web has unlocked all of this entertainment, but for many people they are spending too much time looking for what they want to do instead of enjoying it. We are trying to remove all of those hurdles that block you from enjoying it. You should be able to watch a show, listen to online music, or play a game with a few clicks.”
Roughly 10 percent of all searches are entertainment related, according to Mehdi. And 90 percent of people do at least one entertainment search a month. Bing Entertainment is designed to provide a more in-depth and visual search experience for music, movies, TV shows, and games.
One of the most noticeable changes will come in music. Music searches will now come back with lyrics and playable streams for 5 million songs, which have already been licensed through Microsoft’s Zune service. A full stream of each song will be playable once per person, and then 30-second clips will be available in subsequent searches. → Read More
As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.
But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.
Editor’s note: In the following guest post, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website. → Read More
[France] Nomao defines itself as a personnalized search engine. It helps you to find places, based on what you like or what you Facebook friends like and where you are. Their search is using not only the data they have about the places, but also what they found on the web about them (a kind of aggregator). To show the tool what you like, you just have to use a “like” button, and to find what you friends like, you can connect to Facebook.
They have had a web version for a long time that helped them to build a good database of places (classical ones such as restaurants, bars or hotels but also any kind of shops, theaters, sport centers etc. or even dentists :p) but it also showed interest in mobile from the beginning, with a mobile version. Even if Nomao on the web is available in different languages, their iPhone app is only available to French users by now. → Read More
Taptu, the mobile search engine, announced a partnership with OneRiot last month to provide real time search results in their mobile-friendly web site. This worked from any mobile client, not just the iPhone. But one of the points of using a smartphone is the use of native applications. Today Taptu announced that they’ve rolled the real-time search results into their iPhone app. → Read More
Search is getting more visual. Today, Google is adding universal search elements to Google Suggest, the drop-down list of suggested keywords that appear under the search box as you type. Now you may find suggestion box filled with results from universal search, which may include weather, flight status, definitions, calculations, currency conversions, and more. Universal results tend to have a visual component, such as the sun-and-cloud icons that appear for weather-related searches or the clock for time-related searches.
Google says it is all about making search even faster. It is also releasing a new extension for Chrome called Quick Scroll which helps you find the part of a web page that triggered a search result. So when you do a search and then click through to a results page, a black box pops up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen which will take you exactly to the place on the page which most closely matches your search query. Once again, this is designed to get you to the information you are looking for faster rather than just using the “find” function in your browser. → Read More
Earlier this week, Google made a massive push into realtime search, taking advantage of its newly gained access to Twitter’s firehose of data, as well as realtime feeds from Facebook, MySpace and others. You can see these realtime results for every search you do by selecting the Updates option, Bing is also in the realtime race.
So what’s Yahoo’s less-than-realtime response three days later? A limp-wristed addition of selective Twitter results to its main search engine. Already, Yahoo shows Twitter results in its News search for breaking news and trending topics. Today, it is adding Twitter results to its main search page, but only for trending search terms. So will not always see it, if ever. → Read More
[France] Google and Yahoo have both published their most searched terms of 2009. TechCrunch already took a detailed look at the US rankings, but now let’s see what we can learn from the top search terms in France for 09… → Read More
Taptu, the mobile search engine, is announcing today that they’re using the OneRiot search API to provide realtime search results to mobile devices at their touch-friendly mobile web page. The realtime search results will eventually make their way into the Taptu iPhone app. Full press release inside! → Read More
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