Posts Tagged search
Bing Making Big Advertising Strides
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on July 14th, 2009
AdGooroo’s released another search advertising report, and many of the statistics within are predictable; on the whole, they indicate that Google’s doing well and Yahoo’s not. But some interesting (and mostly positive) changes are taking place with regards to Bing.
AdGooroo’s report states, “For the year ending June 2009, Bing appears to have grown its advertiser base by about 35%.” New advertisers who have made it onto Bing’s top 25 list include impressive entities like Dell, Edmunds, Home Depot, and Sears.
Google grew its advertiser base by more – 52 percent – yet the report explains, “Bing is tempting many established pay-per-click advertisers to taste their service.” And “it may simply be that Microsoft is executing a two-stage strategy; the first stage being to grow their audience, and only after that, to focus on recruiting advertisers . . .”
Then there’s what Bing’s accomplished for those advertisers to consider. Bing actually showed 24 percent fewer first-page ads in June than Microsoft’s old offering did in March, and so may be making progress in terms of ad relevance. (Plus, this detail supports the two-stage theory.)
The next quarter or two may be quite interesting, then, as Bing does its best to establish a sort of advertising foothold against the much-more-successful Google and Yahoo.
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Bing Making Big Advertising Strides
How to steer clear of money scams
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on July 10th, 2009
This post is the latest in an ongoing series on how to stay safe online. – Ed. As the designated tech support person for my immediate family, I’m used to getting calls about issues like browser crashes and confusing websites
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How to steer clear of money scams
Seeing the world with improved Google Search results
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on July 10th, 2009
As an avid traveler, I know how helpful it can be to see a map when searching for a location on Google. Using our Universal Search technology, we have provided maps in our search results for more than two years
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Seeing the world with improved Google Search results
Surprise! Bing Can Outdo Google
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on July 10th, 2009
For the past 15 years, Microsoft’s master business plan seems to have been, “Wait until somebody else has a hit. Then copy it.”
I know that sounds mean, but come on — the list of commercial hits/Microsoft wannabes is as long as your arm. You would think Microsoft would feel a little sheepish after awhile.
And now we have yet another me-too effort. It’s something called Bing, and it’s the latest iteration of Microsoft’s multiyear attempt to imitate Google.
The name, presumably, is supposed to evoke the sound of a winning game-show bell. The cynics online, however, joke that Bing is an acronym for, “But it’s not Google.”
Here’s the shocker, though: In many ways, Bing is better.
That’s quite a statement, of course — almost heresy. But check it out yourself. It’s easy to compare the two, thanks to sites like bing-vs-google.com. Here, you are shown search results from both Bing and Google, side-by-side, on a split screen.
At first, Bing is pretty much Google: a Search box; a menu that offers to complete what you are typing; and inconspicuous links to Images, Videos, News, Shopping and Maps.
Once you hit Enter, however, you can’t help noticing Bing’s more concerted effort to get you answers faster.
For starters, how’s this for a dream feature? Point to any search result without clicking; a pop-up balloon shows you the first few paragraphs of text on it. Without leaving the results list, you know whether it’s going to be helpful. Here’s another example. On Google, search results usually appear as a long list of blue text links. Occasionally, a photo appears, too. Or, if your search clearly has only one informational answer — weather, stock price, sports scores, street address — you get that answer right at the top: a five-day weather forecast, a stock chart, current game scores, a…
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Surprise! Bing Can Outdo Google
Find Creative Commons images with Image Search
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on July 9th, 2009
Let’s say you’re a blogger. You’ve just returned from a trip to New York City, and you’re writing a post on New York landmarks. You want to illustrate your travel guide with an image — as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words
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Find Creative Commons images with Image Search
Google Images Safe Search Switch Changed
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on July 5th, 2009
Google image search made toggling the SafeSearch option a tiny bit easier, by including the settings switch menu right on the results page (instead of linking to the settings page, where one has to toggle a radio button option and hit a save button).* SafeSearch is Google’s adult content filter that can be turned off in most countries, though interestingly enough not in (at least) Google China.
*I believe this is rather new, but don’t know when exactly it was added.
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Images Safe Search Switch Changed | Comments]
[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more…
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Google Images Safe Search Switch Changed
New Blog Search tools: Feeds, Hot Queries and Latest Posts
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on July 2nd, 2009
Ever since the new Google Blog Search homepage launched , we’ve been fielding requests for a myriad of different features. Today we’re happy to announce the launch of our most requested feature: RSS and Atom feeds. Simply click on the links under “Subscribe” in the left-hand column of the Blog Search front page to subscribe to any topic or story in any feed reader, like Google Reader .
The rest is here:
New Blog Search tools: Feeds, Hot Queries and Latest Posts
Gmail With Drag & Drop
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on July 2nd, 2009
Drag and drop has come to Gmail: you can now drag a message by its left-hand grid, and move it into a label/ folder to the left side. Also, you can now re-arrange labels via drag & drop.
[Thanks Cookie Lee and Niranjan!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Gmail With Drag & Drop | Comments]
[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more…
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Gmail With Drag & Drop
Bing Starts to Get Real (Time)
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles, Twitter on July 2nd, 2009
I’ve been complaining that nearly no search engines surface real time data (for now, that’s Twitter, but Facebook is coming soon enough, and there will be tons more). In fact, I complained to Microsoft about this well before the launch of Bing, and then complained some more when Twitter results were not surfaced in initial beta versions of the service. Man, I’m grumpy lately, eh?
Well, that’s changing. Sort of. From a Bing blog post today:
There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. We’ve been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space. Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres. This includes Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest. Starting later today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results.
Oh boy! I wonder if maybe…I’m one of those folks? Sigh. No such luck. Although, to be honest, I can’t seem to make it work for anyone, including Danny and Kara. Maybe it’s not working yet in my area.
In any case, what DOES come up is my and everyone else I tested’s Twitter account, at least when I add “Twitter” to the query. That’s a major step forward from where Bing was even at launch. That said, there is NO reason to make folks put the word “Twitter” into the query. None. That is a failed use case. Commit, or don’t commit, but don’t ask users to specify Twitter to know what someone might be saying in real time. Better to indicate that the query has real time results, and offer them if a searcher wants them. Or figure out some other clever UI solution. Real time is here to stay, may as well design to it, and not ask users to do it for you.
After all, with the whole Websquared thing, we’ll soon be leaving real time trails all over the globe, and we may well want them surfaced by our favorite search engine, no?
But good on ya, Microsoft, for dipping your toe into the water. Google, your ball.
UPDATE: It works now. I’m one of the chosen ones! Oh joy!
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Bing Starts to Get Real (Time)
Google v. Facebook? What We Learn from Twitter.
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on June 23rd, 2009
Last week I wrote a post in which I opined a bit about Facebook search. In it I wrote:
Facebook is way more than its newsfeed, and its search play is key to proving that value, and extending it….No doubt building Facebook search today is akin to building Google ten years ago – bigger, most likely, in terms of data, algorithmic, and platform challenges.
If only I had waited a few days, I could have pointed to Fred’s piece in Wired, out this week. He profiles the ongoing feud between the King of Search, Google, and the upstart, Facebook. In his piece, he writes:
For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this “social graph” to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.
I agree that of all the contenders out there right now (including Twitter), Facebook has the most data, position, and potential to upset Google’s dominance of the web. But I disagree with one premise of the piece, which is that Facebook’s proprietary approach to the data it stores presents a blind spot to Google that gives Facebook a competitive edge. Fred writes:
Together, this data comprises a mammoth amount of activity, almost a second Internet. By Facebook’s estimates, every month users share 4 billion pieces of information—news stories, status updates, birthday wishes, and so on. They also upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos. But anyone wanting to access that stuff must go through Facebook; the social network treats it all as proprietary data, largely shielding it from Google’s crawlers. Except for the mostly cursory information that users choose to make public, what happens on Facebook’s servers stays on Facebook’s servers. That represents a massive and fast-growing blind spot for Google, whose long-stated goal is to “organize the world’s information.”
I think it’s a major strategic mistake to not offer this information to Google (and anyone else that wants to crawl it.) In fact, I’d argue that the right thing to do is to make just about everything possible available to Google to crawl, then sit back and watch while Google struggles with whether or not to “organize it and make it universally available.” A regular damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario, that….
For an example of what I mean, look no further than Twitter. That service makes every single tweet available as a crawlable resource. And Google certainly is crawling Twitter pages, but the key thing to watch is whether the service is surfacing “superfresh” results when the query merits it. So far, the answer is a definitive NO.
Why?
Well, perhaps I’m being cynical, but I think it’s because Google doesn’t want to push massive value and traffic to Twitter without a business deal in place where it gets to monetize those real time results.
Is that “organizing the world’s information and making it universally available?” Well, no. At least, not yet.
By making all its information available to Google’s crawlers (and fixing its terrible URL structure in the process), Facebook could shine an awfully bright light on this interesting conflict in interest.
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Google v. Facebook? What We Learn from Twitter.