Advertisers will continue to have access to useful data to optimize and improve their campaigns and landing pages. For example, you can access detailed information in the AdWords search terms report and the Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries report. This is discussed on Search Englne Land, but what isn't addressed anywhere is: how does stripping out the search term make a search more secure? Surely what you're securing is the connection between the searcher and Google. If you move on from Google to the advertiser, over a link that might or might not be secure, how is your security compromised by the search term being passed on or not? On the other hand, though, Google gets to see everything - what people search for and what they click - while advertisers see less and less, with only Google's dashboards showing them data about keyword performance.]]>
A couple of notes are important before I talk about Ayres' claims. There are two separate claims that have been used with the Bing It On challenge. The first is "People chose Bing web search results over Google nearly 2:1 in blind comparison tests". We blogged about the method here and it was used back in 2012. In 2013, we updated the claim to "People prefer Bing over Google for the web's top searches", which I blogged about here. Ayres' frequently goes back and forth between the two claims in his post, so I wanted to make sure both were represented. Now, on to Ayers' issues and my explanations. This is Bing's version of Inception, right?]]>
And the database is free for the public to search at Topsy.com. Want to see what people are saying about President Obama and the Syria vote in Congress? A quick search pulls up what Topsy’s algorithm thinks are the most relevant results, factoring in retweets and the past influence of the tweeter. You can narrow down results by time frame, search for tweets in 10 languages, and see a graph with the volume of tweets over time and an indicator of the general sentiment, positive or negative. Big achievement. Even Twitter uses it (in the paid-for form).]]>
That something was the world's first web crawler.
[Jonathon] Fletcher called his invention JumpStation. He put together an index of pages which could then be searched by a web crawler, essentially an automated process that visits, and indexes, every link on every web page it comes across. The process continues until the crawler runs out of things to visit.
Ten days later, on 21 December 1993, JumpStation ran out of things to visit. It had indexed 25,000 pages. But he couldn't get funding at his place of work, the University of Stirling. A pair of people in Stanford University did. A modern morality tale for British venture capital.]]>
For example, when I searched my social network for “friends who like ice cream,” Facebook only returned 12 results. Left out was the silent majority who regularly lick cones and never bothered to tell Facebook.
Graph Search also tends to be too literal, often failing to discern the broader meaning of specific data points. For example, a search for “my friends who work at newspapers” returned no results, even though several hundred of my Facebook friends have listed specific newspapers as employers. Latter point is tricky if you don't have structured data. Former point is just, well, life.]]>
Further investigation of this surprising bias revealed that 41 out of the 100 individuals tested did not know that Adwords were paid-for adverts, believing them instead to be the most authoritative links.
Looking at a Google results page for 'car insurance', the paid ads do stand out thanks to the background shading, while Google does add the label 'ads related to car insurance' at the top. The survey seems to be robust (people were recruited in the street, and eye-tracking was used to see what they looked at). If verified more widely, it would be ammunition for Google's detractors in its fight with the European Commission's antitrust arm.]]>
More than half of DuckDuckGo traffic comes from outside the United States, Weinberg said. "This NSA story played into the trend of people's fears" about online tracking, said Weinberg. Weinberg said another factor is that Google results are being gamed by search engine spammers and other companies trying to rank their results higher."
Dutch-based Ixquick, which also uses the name StartPage, said it too has seen a dramatic jump in usage after news of the PRISM data sharing program. It would be educative to know how many people know of more than (or even) one alternative search engine to Google. (Thanks @EasilyLead for the link.)]]>
Don't get me wrong. If you ask people about search privacy, they'll respond that it's a major issue. Big majorities say they don't want to be tracked nor receive personalized results. But if you look at what people actually do, virtually none of them make efforts to have more private search.
Duck Duck Go's growth is an excellent case study to prove this. Despite it growing, it's not grown anywhere near the amount to reflect any substantial or even mildly notable switching by the searching public. This feels like it's both right (it's indubitably true that colossal numbers of people are still using Google) and wrong. What if that that tiny (compared to the total size of Google) group going to DuckDuckGo and the like - we don't have figures for other private search engines - is just a precursor to a larger shift? Google was a tiny private company once, and the publicly-listed AltaVista was dominant. That changed too. One other point: if everyone who now uses Google had shifted to DuckDuckGo or other search engines within three days, the probably would have collapsed.]]>
In this instance, the results that Google serve me do not match my search intent. I want to download Incubus’ album – but instead Google is pointing me in the direction of illegal download sites, music videos, and a streaming platform.
To paraphrase Google’s mission statement, they want to offer me the most relevant result in as few clicks as possible – and at the moment there are no legal and relevant results within 3-4 clicks away. Surely Google can do better?
So here is where I think we’re heading. Please note that these are photo-shopped images, and not actual screenshots. His suggestion is that Google Play Music All Access results will be pushed to the top of music search results - as happens with lots of other Google properties. One has to wonder about the antitrust implications.]]>
2) Where I did struggle was with the non-core search searches (i.e. maps, images, videos, news). This was 2012, but much the same applies today.]]>
Of 641 survey respondents, 379 participants received a survey asking which of two search result pages they preferred. One page of results for the term “file taxes” included true Google results and the other page included true Bing results. The Google page was chosen by majority of the respondents. (Thanks @HotSoup for the link.)]]>
With this data, the search giant has uncovered the most important factors that determine whether or not a smartphone will launch into the arms of millions of adoring fans, or to an audience that either doesn’t know the phone exists or simply doesn’t care.]]>
In the familiar bricks-and-mortar world, Google’s anticompetitive behaviour would have been obvious to all. But, in the unfamiliar and seemingly impenetrable world of internet search, Google’s ability to get away with these practices has often depended on its ability to confuse, obfuscate, and intimidate. Will the EC decision favour Google or Foundem?]]>
The efforts are in part a fruition of ideas put forward by a team from Yahoo Research in a 2009 paper called “A Web of Concepts,” in which the researchers outlined an approach to extracting conceptual information from the wider Web to create a more knowledge-driven approach to search. Great article. Yahoo - remember them? (Thanks @tehgreatgonzo for the link.)]]>
For the record, Mozilla wasn’t contractually bound to keep Yandex as the default search option in the Russian Firefox build – but still, why the change? The Firefox change was done as a bugfix. Neat.]]>
Google Hotel Finder and Google Flight Search were both launched last year. On the surface, they seem like Google’s other “vertical” or topic-focused search engines, such as Google Images, Google News or Google Shopping, which allow you to search for certain specific types of information.
Unlike Google’s other vertical search engines, however, payment seems to have a role in being included in Google Hotel Finder and Google Flight Search. Maybe Google will find your hotel or your flight and list it for “free.” But it seems more likely you’ll appear if you have a paid relationship. There are "sponsored" blobs, but not explanations of in what way results are "sponsored".]]>
But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings. Google is in effect moving to the semantic web. It's a huge move. Our take here.]]>
Beside (or beneath) each result is an icon. A starry icon, which in a universally understood language, rates the result as ‘Great’, ‘Not so hot’ and ‘Terrible’ – through the simple expedient of yellow colored stars.
You pick the 5-star rated bakery, get directions to it from Google Maps, and arrive at the store. You bite into the muffin and the delighted grin you wore as you stepped in turns into a wry grimace of dismay.
It tastes awful! Ludicrous scenario, but the general point is hammered home: "social" search (Facebook Likes, Twitter followers, Google+ followers) is already being manipulated by SEO experts so that it simply isn't trustworthy. Which implies that real "human" search will remain more trustworthy, though that conclusion is carefully avoided.]]>
Instead Yahoo will focus on the properties that contribute the most engagement and revenue — news, finance, sports, entertainment and mail. R&D and resources will go to owned-and-operated sites, halting third-party efforts. Among the things that new chief executive Scott Thompson says aren't working is the alliance with Microsoft, which provides search via Bing. That's a big problem for Microsoft.]]>
I present Exhibit A, which I discovered thanks to Twitter. If you’re signed in to your Google+ account and you search for pet meds, a little ad module appears at the top of the search results, with your email address already filled in. Less obvious outside the US, but just wait for the EC antitrust decision.]]>
So again, props to DuckDuckGo on the new records and for even showing query data to the public at all. (Wouldn’t it be great if Google and Bing did the same?) But wow … still such a long, long way to go.DuckDuckGo is, indeed, a pretty good search engine (which doesn't gather any user data). Oddly, we can't get Chrome to make it our default search engine.]]>