Google customizes search results with a smattering of your own content
Google rolled out a big change to its search engine on Tuesday that will allow people to find private items, such as online family photos, in their search results.
The new search feature, dubbed “Google Search, plus Your World,” essentially creates customized search results for different users, displaying publicly available Web content alongside any relevant personal online content.
Right now that means search results can feature private photos stored within Google’s Picasa service, as well as photos and posts from Google+, the company’s social network.
If you’re logged in to Google, and you search for Hawaii, you might see photos that your friends or family have shared with you about Hawaii, or musings related to Hawaii from friends on Google+, alongside the standard Web fare about the Pacific islands.
The new search feature also means that a search on an individuals’ name will suggest the one that’s most relevant to you, such as a Ben Smith that you’re personally connected with on Google+ instead of a generic list of results for all Ben Smiths.
“We want one window to answer each and every question that you have” said Google Fellow Amit Singhal in an interview.
Will Google fight Apple’s Siri with Alfred?
Apple has Siri, and now Google has Alfred.
On Tuesday Google said it had acquired the tech company that has developed Alfred, a smartphone app that acts as a “personal assistant” to make recommendations based on your interests and your “context,” such as location, time of day, intent and social information.
According to Clever Sense, the company that created Alfred and that is now part of Google, the app uses artificial intelligence technology to sift through the Web’s vast amount of data and to recommend restaurants, bars and other real-world places that you might like.
That sounds a lot like Siri, the personal assistant technology that comes built-in to Apple latest iPhone. Siri offers a much broader range of capabilities than those that appear to currently be available with Alfred, allowing users to speak into their phone to manage their calendars, find nearby restaurants and even inquire about the weather.
But Alfred’s AI recommendation technology could provide an important building-block that Google could pair with its existing voice-recognition technology to create its own answer to Siri.
Google’s head of mobile Andy Rubin famously dissed Siri at the AsiaD conference in October, saying that “I don’t believe that your phone should be your assistant.”
“Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone,” Rubin proclaimed.
Google sprinkles search results with social networking, but leaves out Facebook
Google is turning up the volume on social networking content within its Internet search results.
The company unveiled some changes to its search engine on Thursday that will infuse search results with more social elements, such as links and information shared by your friends on services like Twitter, Quora and Flickr.
It’s easy to see how this improves search: If you’re looking for an accountant for instance, instead of simply getting a list of accountants’ Web sites, Google might include a snippet showing that your friend has posted a Twitter message lauding a particular accountant, and rank that accountant near the top of your search results.
There’s one conspicuous absence from Google’s social search though: Facebook, the world’s No.1 social networking service.
Google says the lack of Facebook content is due to the fact that most Facebook content is behind closed walls and can’t be indexed by its search engine. Google product management director Mike Cassidy said he could not comment on whether or not Google was in any discussions with Facebook about getting access to its trove of social data.
Microsoft, which began infusing its Bing search results last year with Facebook information — such as the pervasive “like” buttons that Facebook users click on to endorse news articles, videos and other Web content -– is an investor in Facebook and has partnerships with it.
Industry insiders believe that Google’s Internet search dominance is increasingly under threat, as more Web surfers turn to social services like Facebook and Twitter to get information. Google’s efforts to create its own standalone social networking services (such as Orkut, Google Wave and Google Buzz) have not fared particularly well.
Google uses of some data from Facebook. I have found found it from Google social connections. You can see more details in this blog post http://www.nuttakorn.net/2011/02/update- google-social-connection-data.html
Five things I learned from the genius of Google’s Zeitgeist
The word Zeitgeist is defined as “the spirit of the age.” But the German term was itself a translation by Romanticists of the Latin phrase “genius saeculi.” Those Romanticists didn’t think of “genius” in its modern meaning of an extraordinary mind, but rather its etymological roots of a guardian spirit that watches over people from their birth.
I delve into the etymology of Zeitgeist because it casts an interesting light on the choice by Google to describe its annual summary of search trends, especially when you consider the company’s thoughts on artificial intelligence. Google’s search engine is hardly a guardian spirit, but if it doesn’t exactly watch over our online lives, it does watch them carefully enough – remembering data points it collects in each search and distilling them into interesting trends.
Some of the general trends Google’s Zeitgeist for 2010 discovered are interesting, if hardly profound. Here are a few insights gleaned from all the searches done through Google search engines in the last year.
The power of a Steve Jobs presentation remains strong. The iPad was released in early April, but Google searches for the term peaked in January – two months earlier, when Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple tablet. Which suggests Jobs drew more attention to the iPad than the iPad itself did.
Facebook and Twitter flourished at micro-publishing platforms. Facebook was the more popular, of course, but to get an idea of just how much more it’s dominating the online conversation, look at this chart.
iPhones and Android phones may be thriving as gaming platforms, but the good old web browser still remains popular too. Two of 2010′s fastest rising search queries were for “Friv” and “Gamezer” – sites offering flash and multi-player games for PC browsers.
There is an inverse relationship between searches for “swine flu” and those for “Justin Bieber.” I’m just saying….
Google to speed up searches with visual Web site ‘previews’
Google’s search engine has a new feature that may cause Web surfers to do less…Web surfing.
The company’s new Instant Previews announced on Tuesday provides visual snapshots of Web pages directly within the list of search results, making it easier and quicker to home in on the Web page you’re looking for.
Instant Previews, which will be rolled out during the next few days, puts a small icon of a magnifying glass next to most of Google’s search results. Click on the magnifying glass and Google serves up a screenshot of the Web page, highlighting the section of the page that’s relevant to your search query.
That eliminates the time-consuming back-and-forth excursions from Google’s list of search results to various Web sites.
Google says the majority of the preview snapshots are already stored in its index of the Web, and Google will pre-load the preview images for search results in your browser in the background. Result: preview images typically load in less than one-tenth of a second, says Google.
The previews represent the latest step in Google’s efforts to find new ways to accelerate Web searches, following September’s introduction of Google Instant, which predicts a search query and fetches the relevant list of results before you finish typing.
It will be interesting to see to what extent data-heavy new features like Instant Previews add to Google’s infrastructure spending – Google’s capital expenditures in the third quarter jumped to $757 million compared to $476 million in the second quarter and $239 million in the first quarter.
Yahoo unfurls accordion to revamp search
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz once played in an accordion band, so perhaps it’s fitting that the ole squeezebox has figured in to Yahoo’s products as the central motif in a revamped Internet search experience.
Yahoo has unveiled a snazzy new search interface that lets users flip between a stack of vertical tabs to view different types of results. Search on the rapper Lil Wayne for example, and you can quickly tab between groups of results like albums, videos and Twitter messages.
The new search interface, which the tech blogs have nicknamed ‘the accordion’, represents Yahoo’s first big overhaul of its search product since partnering with Microsoft.
Under the ten-year deal, Microsoft will handle so-called back-end search chores like crawling and indexing Web pages, while Yahoo will focus on improving the front-end of its search products, making search more than a mere “ten blue links” as Yahoo is fond of saying.
Yahoo’s accordion also comes as Internet search king Google has revamped its flagship search engine with Google Instant, which predicts a person’s search query as soon as they type a single letter in the search box, instantly returning the relevant results.
And it comes as some tech industry observers and analysts start to claim Bartz has failed to define a clear vision for Yahoo. In a world increasingly dominated by Google and social networking leader Facebook, they say Yahoo has failed to unveil new products to bring back some buzz to the Yahoo brand.
Perhaps the accordion will hit the first note in Yahoo’s comeback song…
Google’s Brin: Make smartphone apps searchable
For more than a decade, Google has reigned supreme as the main gateway to online information.
But with consumers increasingly accessing the Internet through specialized apps on smartphones like Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Web search engine could be at risk of playing a smaller role in the Internet’s next phase.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has an answer: Make apps searchable.
On the sidelines of the press event in San Francisco to unveil Google Instant on Wednesday, Brin offered some thoughts on the future of apps and search.
“I do think with respect to apps, it would be nice to adopt some kind of URL conventions, so that even content within apps is in fact searchable, and I think that it would be nice to adopt some kind of standard in that respect, and that would benefit all search engines and all users.”
Has Google had talks with any organizations about making this happen?
“I don’t think we’ve pushed too far yet, because typically most of the apps that do surface content are usually reflections of websites today anyway. But if there starts to be more unique content in apps, I think that would be a nice thing.”
Ridiculous conclusion.
Google are positioning to become the Global leader as both a telecoms carrier and phone handset interface provider.
So says this 63 yr old Telecoms consultant.
Twitter’s price for Tweets: $25 million
The last time the world had a look at Twitter’s financial books, the company was targeting a meager $400,000 in revenue for the third quarter of 2009 and $4 million in the fourth quarter.
But that information was based on documents stolen from Twitter by a hacker and republished by the blog TechCrunch.
And it was before Twitter, the popular microblogging service that allows users to broadcast short, 140-character text messages across the Internet, had inked monumental deals with search giants Google and Microsoft.
The companies have kept mum about the financial terms of the deals, which will allow Tweets to appear in Google and Microsoft’s search results. But people familiar with the situation have told Reuters that money did change hands as a result of the deals and the blog AllThingsDigital previously reported that the search deals could be worth several million dollars apiece.
It turns out the search deals were worth $25 million, according to a report in Business Week on Monday. Google coughed up $15 million and Microsoft paid $10 million, the report said, citing two anonymous sources.
The deals will allow Twitter to finish 2009 as a profitable company, and comes amid ongoing efforts at the company to cut costs.
Twitter declined to comment on financial terms of the deals.
For those who have any doubts about Twitter’s strength as a communication medium, search on Google for ‘Long John Twitter’. It’s a book about Twitter and will give you an idea of how effective Twitter can be in business, in politics and in social causes.
Twitter is going to grow and the deal with Google gives Google Power users access to real time data that Twitter provides. It’s a win-win scenario for Google users, Google and Twitter. Yahoo better pony up some money too if it wants a piece of real time search.
Google Search: Fresh, not real time
Google has yet to outline a gameplan to respond to the search world’s latest phenomenon: real time search.
But the Internet company clearly recognizes the importance of fresh search results.
On Thursday Google announced a new feature that lets Web surfers view only search results that have been indexed by its Web crawlers within the past hour.
The update was one of several new features that Google has unveiled over the past week as it seeks to refine the tool used by two out of every three people searching the Web.
Google also introduced a feature that lets users specify whether they want results that are heavier on shopping-oriented Web pages, such as retail sites with products and pricing information, or results that are less commercial in nature.
The shopping option comes as Microsoft tries to lure people to its revamped Bing search engine by highlighting Bing’s strength in shopping and travel searches.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s real time search engine is becoming the Internet’s go-to place for finding the most current information on world events, from earthquakes to political protests.
Welcome to Hotel Yahoo: Check in anytime you want…
It’s been a whirlwind couple of weeks at Yahoo, following the announcement to outsource Internet search technology to Microsoft and Yahoo stock’s subsequent 15 percent sell-off.
But the scene in Sunnyvale, California took a really odd turn on Friday when a staff memo left some Yahooligans wondering if the company planned to ditch the whole Internet thing altogether and get into the hospitality business.
In an 800-plus word memo, new Customer Advocacy EVP Jeff Russakow (pinch-hitting on the weekly memo for vacationing CEO Carol Bartz) held forth on the merits of all the hotels he’s stayed at.
Luxury hotels like the Ritz Carlton and The Four Seasons delight guests with “incredible culinary extravaganzas, personal activity and shopping attendants, and state-of-the-art spas promising to erase every worry and wrinkle,” wrote Russakow.
I think you need to make the point of this article clearer. We at Patong Beach Hotel Phuket are unable to make out your point.
