Showing posts with label search. Show all posts
Showing posts with label search. Show all posts

Thursday, November 10, 2011

The End of SEO as We Know It: Mobile is the Reason

Lots of observers note that traditional search is changing with the advent of social networks, mobile apps and other ways for people to find things without engaging with a traditional search engine application. Some would say that Apple's Siri voice recognition app is just the latest example of that trend.


That has implications for content marketers as well, a least in terms of how much time and effort to spend to search engine optimization, for example. 


In the future, it is argued, people often will bypass search altogether. Ask Siri to "find the closest Italian restaurant" and the result is based on your current location and data from Yelp. 


Clawing your SEO way to the top spot on Google for "Philadelphia Italian restaurant" won't matter.


At the very least, the importance of presence on local content sites will grow. As a result, savvy small businesses that don't rely on e-commerce will spend even more time optimizing listings on Foursquare, Yelp, Facebook Places.


Yelp recommendations are currently embedded in Siri responses, so Yelp optimization matters more than SEO, some will argue. Siri: This Is the End of SEO as We Know It | Inc.com

The choices brands make might also change, to favor recommendation sites that are affiliated with certain app environments such as Siri. 





Monday, November 7, 2011

Google Not Dominant in Search?

Some will dismiss assertions by Eric Schmidt, Google executive chairman, that Google is not dominant in the search business, something Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently told U.S. regulators.


Schmidt argued that Google is not “overwhelmingly dominant” in the online search market, and competes with the likes of Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft. Google not dominant


Some will scoff at that notion, but there is a reality, namely that in the mobile domain, people do not "search" in the old way. Put one way, where traditional search is a relationship between "pages," in the mobile domain, search is more of a "relationship between persons," while the reason for "searching" changes.


In the desktop domain, search is often about information related to ideas and facts. In the mobile domain, search is more often about "things I want to buy." Google argues that leadership in desktop search does not ensure leadership in mobile search.


That has been a growing trend since the mid-2000s, one might argue. Mobile search is different


The mobile search market generated revenues of $901 million in 2010, equivalent to around three percent of total search revenues.  In 2015,  mobile search revenue is expected to  reach $8 billion, equivalent to around 11 percent of total search revenues and representing a compound annual growth rate of 55 percent. Mobile Search Challenges Google


Mobile search makes up around a quarter of total mobile advertising revenue, but this will increase rapidly and is forecast to exceed 40 percent in 2015.


Although Google already has a strong position in the mobile advertising market, a range of established and new players are challenging its dominance. Voice and local search are important trends, providing opportunities for new and established players. Operators and handset vendors have a strong position in the value chain to influence the success of mobile services.


In fact, many observers would note that Google is challenged by social networking generally, as social networks supplant search engines as the place and the way people look for things, find out about things and link to things.


So far, the historical record suggests that no firm dominant in one era of computing actually retains that same leading role in the following era.


As IBM was dominant in the era of mainframes, but DEC and others lead in the mini-computer era, while Microsoft and Intel lead in the era of personal computing, it is reasonable to expect that none of those firms will be dominant in the next era, however we come to describe it.


Some might argue that Schimdt's comments are merely a reflection of an understanding Google has that it will not, in the next era, have the market leadership it arguably enjoys today.


The issue, some might argue, is to avoid regulating based on the past, and act only when future problems actually have arisen. It might not be precisely true to argue that Google "does not" have a commanding position in desktop search.


But it already is clear that such leadership has not yet conferred on Google any ability to dominate the emerging "search" business, which is based on social networking and mobile mechanisms that increasingly are different from desktop search. Over time, in other words, Google's leadership in desktop search will be effectively challenged by other ways of using "discovery" mechanisms in the mobile and social realms.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Google Revising Search Algorithms to Deal with "Spam"

The problem with much "search engine optimization" is that it essentially consists of mechanical "tricks." SEO professionals will argue, rightly, that SEO is not necessarily limited to such techniques, but I suspect most people are familiar with some of the "dumber" techniques.

Google, for example, has recently been accused of allowing too much trickery to seep into search results, and Google seems to be working on making that sort of thing harder. Google itself says that, according to the evaluation metrics it has refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.

Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English.

"However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we’ve already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to improve our search quality," Google says.

None of that will stop some people, and some sites, from continuing to boost rankings in ways that some might view as the equivalent of "spamming." That's one reason why it is a good thing that Google constantly revises its algorithms.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Google starts showing full page previews in search results

Google is testing a major new layout to their search results, which allows a user to see full page previews of target sites, when you hover over them.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Chomp Launches, Provides iPhone App Search

Chomp's new iPhone app provides an app search function for iPhone apps, including a recommendation engine.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Google Test Updates Search Results as Characters as Entered

This apparently experimental feature of Google Search updates search results as characters are entered in the search term stream. Nobody outside Google can tell whether this might be be applied as a standard feature for all Google searches, but it certainly indicates an advance in algorithms, caching or processing, possibly all three to some degrees.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Google "Caffeine" Promises 50 Percent Fresher Results





Google's latest search indexing system, "Caffeine," promises search results that are 50-percent fresher than Google used to be able to provide under the old indexing system. In a world where real-time and near-real-time content is boosted by applications such as Twitter, that's important.

"Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before," the Google Blog notes. Google noted that faster indexing is needed in part because with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex, and user expectations simply are higher.

Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.



The old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

Caffeine lets Google index web pages on an enormous scale, processing hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day, Google says.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Bing,Grows Share of U.S. Searches by 50 Percent

A year after the official relaunch of its search product under the "Bing" brand, Microsoft's share of U.S. searches has grown by 50 percent, according to data from comScore.

The firm estimates Microsoft's sites accounted for eight percent of U.S. searches in May 2009, but that the company grew its share to 12.1 percent of searches in May 2010. That represents a year-over-year growth rate of over 50 percent.

Over the same period, searches on Google and Yahoo properties dropped by 1.3 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points, respectively, with Ask and AOL sites also losing searches. Data for Google sites does not include searches on its video site YouTube.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Google Caffeine Boosts Content Refresh Rate 50%

Google's new indexing engine, Caffeine, is said to provide 50 percent fresher results for web searches than Google's last index.

Google's older index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others. The main layer would update every couple of weeks, for example. To refresh a layer of the old index, Google would analyze the entire web.

With Caffeine, Google analyzes the web in small portions and updates its search index on a continuous basis, globally. That means fresher information.


Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Google Personalizes Search

Google personalizes as much as 20 per cent of a user's web searches, based on location, Web history, or online contacts, according Google software engineer Bryan Horling.

In addition to that, searches automatically are tailored based on what a user is looking for in a particular country, and has been doing so forr years.

The difference now is that Google is tweaking results based on the individual user's behavior. Horling says many of these changes are rather subtle. "When these techniques fire, the changes tend to relatively minor," he says. "We're moving a few results. We might be moving a few down. We're generally not changing the entire character of the page."

In early December of 2009, Google also began personalizing based on the cookies stored on any particular machine.

Google is also tailoring results to the user's particular metropolitan area or local region. Basically, the idea is provider greater granularity of results, based on as many behavioral and locational clues as possible.

Apparently, Google also is using contact information mined from Gmail and Google Chat or Buzz in its search results.

There are likely some implications for search optimization, as each user, in each place, on discrete machines, with discrete social networks, will see slightly different results when using the exact same search term.

That probably will defeat some amount of search optimization. That might not be such a bad thing for users, though some optimizers will not like it.

source

Monday, March 1, 2010

Google Adds "Nearby" Function for Search

Location has become an important part of the way we search, the Google Blog says, in something of an understatement.

"Simply put, location changes everything," Wired technology writer Mat Honan has said. That might be an exaggeration, but one intuitively can sense the potential to change behavior in the real world, if people easily can ascertain what is around them.

The key for marketers is to understand what kinds of information people want when they're tied to a certain place. One analogy might be that search solved the "what is" problem. Social networking provides a "who" context filter. Location awareness changes the "where" context.

In the early going, people are going to experiment with retail location offers. just as in the early days of the World Wide Web companies put up brochures online. But as the Web moved from static to active, interactive and real-time applications, so will the use of "location" features.

One might say the shift is from manually searching for "what is around me" to having that information show up automatically, without having to ask. Promotions and advertising will be important, but so will new applications that relate to where a person is, right now.

That might mean on-the-spot offers for travelers waiting to board a flight, missed connection options, or seat upgrade information.

"If you're a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer's market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information," Google says. "Starting today, we've added the ability to refine your searches with the 'Nearby' tool in the 'Search Options' panel.

The search process also has been revised, Google says. If "Minneapolis" is the query, results will be returned for "St. Paul" or "Twin Cities," as well as "Minneapolis."

Thursday, April 30, 2009

58% Local Search Growth in 2008

Local search, using online search tools to find local businesses, products, or services, grew 58 percent in 2008, reaching an annual total of 15.7 billion searches, says comScore. By comparison, overall core U.S. Web searches grew 21 percent year-over-year, nearing 137 billion searches by the end of 2008.

About 75 percent of the top 100 keywords searched on Internet Yellow Pages sites were non-branded, indicating that a majority of consumers have not decided on a specific company or product brand when they begin their search, comScore says.

Nearly half (45 percent) of Internet Yellow Pages and local online directory searchers made an online purchase in the fourth quarter of 2008.

One wonders whether Google Maps and mobile Web access have at least something to do with the growth. Local search makes much more sense when one is out of the home or office, and Google Maps, with or without global positioning satellite support, makes it really easy to search for something one needs, where one is at the moment.

The other angle is that small businesses, which operate locally, now are investing more heavily in Web sites, which would allow them to be found more easily.


Saturday, March 28, 2009

Long Tail Yes, But Perhaps Not What You Were Expecting

In recent years much has been made of the implications of the "long tail" theorem, the notion that digital technology, digital goods and the Internet make possible a vast shift of commerce from the few large firms in any category to many hundreds to thousands of other firms.

Search market share indicates that the basic underlying theorem, the Pareto Principle, commonly understood as the "80/20" rule, does indeed operate.

But not in the ways some might predict. There is a search long tail, with four providers at the head of the curve, and then several score other smaller providers forming the tail.

Unfortunately, it does not appear that market share is much different from what might predict for physical goods. In search, as elsewhere in life, 20 percent of providers have 80 percent of the market share. In this case, a few percent of providers have 99 percent share.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Slight Skews to Google, Yahoo Search User Demographics

The Yahoo search engine is slightly more often to be used by younger users; Google slightly more often is used by older users. But the overall patterns are pretty similar.

The real difference is that Google accounted for 65.98 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending January 26, 2008. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 20.94, 6.90 and 4.21 percent respectively. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.97 percent of U.S. searches.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

iGoogle for Mobiles Now Live


If you are the sort of user who uses iGoogle, and you put Real Simple Syndication feeds on the iGoogle page, this is helpful. Also, Google has authored a number of its other applications, including Docs and Spreadsheets, the RSS reader, Picassa, Gmail, Google News and even the basic search function in ways that are compatible with a mobile screen. Very nice.

Friday, January 4, 2008

Google Can Index Test in Images and Video


A patent application lodged by Google in July 2007 but recently made public seeks to patent a method where by robots (computers) can read and understand text in images and video, notes Duncan Riley at TechCrunch. That would be a big step forward in indexing visual media, since there would be no need to manually attach tags to such visual media.

Basically, the patent covers a method whereby any visible text in an image--a street sign, for example--can be automatically indexed. Obviously, as with any of the developing Web-based technologies, there are privacy issues. As someone who has to work with lots of images, and spends lots of time wading through images that a search suggests are appropriate, and aren't, this is really helpful.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Search Ads Will Drive U.K. Spending Growth


Internet searches will contribute around three-quarters of the growth of U.K. advertising in 2008, according to Group M, a unit of WPP Group, says the Dow Jones news wire.

U.K. advertising will grow by six percent in 2008, and all but 1.5 percent of that will come from search engine ads.

Group M also said the value of the Internet advertising market will come close to that of the television advertising market in 2008.

Newspaper advertising revenue is expected to decline by 2.8 percent in 2008, after a 3.4 percent decline in 2007, Group M forecasts.

Friday, December 21, 2007

Is Google the New Microsoft?


Is Google the new Microsoft? Some people think it is on the way; others say there is no chance of such an enduring dominance. For regulators, the question is thornier. Every competitive market sooner or later turns less competitive, for very simple reasons: users flock to great products and stop using or buying the less-good products. Over time, that naturally creates market dominance, and that in turn ultimately draws in regulators to prevent excessive market control.

But regulators have to define what markets are in the first place, define the relevant competitors, then quantify the impact and propose remedies. Let's assume the relevant market in this case is "search." Ignore for the moment the fact that neither Google nor any of the other contestants ultimately will operate in such a narrowly-defined segment as "search."

Sometimes, regulators, users and markets get the "dominance" thing wrong. Some of us can remember very-serious discussions about how to "control" the browser market, as that was deemed essential to "control" of Internet experiences. As it turns out, the browser was not central to "control." Then Microsoft proposed an Internet identification system called "Passport." Regulators were concerned that Microsoft could become the "toll keeper" to the Internet if the identity scheme were massively adopted.

For starters, it didn't get such adoption. In broader terms, the Internet itself grew so fast that it is questionable whether any single identity system could be said to "dominate" the Internet.There was competition after all.

All that said, regulators have ruled that Microsoft has a monopoly in desktop operating systems, that Microsoft has abused its monopoly position and that consumers therefore were harmed, though not necessarily in the opearating system market but in "ancillary" markets that might have developed more competitively.

So the issue is whether Google is becoming, in search at least, the equivalent of Microsoft in the operating system area. Curiously, Google will be charged simultaneously with being a "monopolist" over information and at the same time essentially a leech as it "creates no new information of its own." Google will be called an "information gatekeeper" even as it continually tries to devise better ways for users to find the very information it is supposed to be "gatekeeping."

The issue with that line of thinking is that Google doesn't "own" or "control" the information. What it "controls" is a user preference for its algorithms and search results. If Google interferes with the value of search results, users will go elsewhere. There arguably are more issues about paid local search. But the analogy there is probably "phone books" rather than search. Phone books are in the paid local search business. What Google wants to do is provider a better paid local search experience.

There probably are better-grounded objections in the privacy area. Google will know lots about its users. But that's something other Web application providers, entertainment and access services provider also are racing to capture. Privacy is a legitimate issue. The conflict between search and advertising models built around search seem less legitimate. Think of Google as media. Media always have had business models based on ad support for content. Google's privacy issues in that regard will not be different in kind from the issues other media will face as well.

To be sure, every era of computing has been lead by new companies. So some company, some day, will be acknowledged to have become that new leader. At some broader level, one wonders whether any such company will have "control" of the Internet and the Web the way Microsoft once controlled desktops.

So far, most consumers say they haven't even heard of "online versions of desktop productivity suites," for example. That isn't to say things will always be that way; just that domination of adjacent markets on the Web will be quite difficult.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Google Dominates Search Even More This Year



Google accounted for 65.10 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending December 1, 2007, according to Hitwise. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 21.21, 7.09 and 4.63 percent respectively. The remaining 46 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.96 percent of U.S. searches.

As you might expect, search engines also continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing November 2007 to November 2006, the travel, entertainment and business and finance categories showed double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

"Tokens" are the New "FLOPS," "MIPS" or "Gbps"

Modern computing has some virtually-universal reference metrics. For Gemini 1.5 and other large language models, tokens are a basic measure...