Category: Future of Search

On Location, Brand, and Enterprise

From time to time I have the honor of contributing to a content series underwritten by one of FM's marketing partners. It's been a while since I've done it, but I was pleased to be asked by HP to contribute to their Input Output site. I wrote on the impact…

HP IO.pngFrom time to time I have the honor of contributing to a content series underwritten by one of FM’s marketing partners. It’s been a while since I’ve done it, but I was pleased to be asked by HP to contribute to their Input Output site. I wrote on the impact of location – you know I’ve been on about this topic for nearly two years now. Here’s my piece. From it:

Given the public face of location services as seemingly lightweight consumer applications, it’s easy to dismiss their usefulness to business, in particular large enterprises. Don’t make that mistake. …

Location isn’t just about offering a deal when a customer is near a retail outlet. It’s about understanding the tapestry of data that customers create over time, as they move through space, ask questions of their environment, and engage in any number of ways with your stores, your channel, and your competitors. Thanks to those smartphones in their pockets, your customers are telling you what they want – explicitly and implicitly – and what they expect from you as a brand. Fail to listen (and respond) at your own peril.

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More on Twitter’s Great Opportunity/Problem

In the comments on this previous post, I promised I'd respond with another post, as my commenting system is archaic (something I'm fixing soon). The comments were varied and interesting, and fell into a few buckets. I also have a few more of my own thoughts to toss out there,…

Itwitter-bird.pngn the comments on this previous post, I promised I’d respond with another post, as my commenting system is archaic (something I’m fixing soon). The comments were varied and interesting, and fell into a few buckets. I also have a few more of my own thoughts to toss out there, given what I’ve heard from you all, as well as some thinking I’ve done in the past day or so.

First, a few of my own thoughts. I wrote the post quickly, but have been thinking about the signal to noise problem, and how solving it addresses Twitter’s advertising scale issues, for a long, long time. More than a year, in fact. I’m not sure why I finally got around to writing that piece on Friday, but I’m glad I did.

What I didn’t get into is some details about how massive the solving of this problem really is. Twitter is more than the sum of its 200 million tweets, it’s also a massive consumer of the web itself. Many of those tweets have within them URLs pointing to the “rest of the web” (an old figure put the percent at 25, I’d wager it’s higher now). Even if it were just 25%, that’s 50 million URLs a day to process, and growing. It’s a very important signal, but it means that Twitter is, in essence, also a web search engine, a directory, and a massive discovery engine. It’s not trivial to unpack, dedupe, analyze, contextualize, crawl, and digest 50 million URLs a day. But if Twitter is going to really exploit its potential, that’s exactly what it has to do.

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Book Review: In The Plex

Last night I had the pleasure of interviewing Steven Levy, and old colleague from Wired, on the subject of his new book: In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. The venue was the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, and I think they'll have the audio…

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=johnbattelles-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1416596585&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Last night I had the pleasure of interviewing Steven Levy, and old colleague from Wired, on the subject of his new book: In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. The venue was the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, and I think they’ll have the audio link up soon.

Steven’s interview was a lot like his book – full of previously untold anecdotes and stories that rounded out pieces of Google’s history that many of us only dreamt of knowing about. When I was reporting my book,The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, I had limited access to folks at Google, and *really* limited access to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Levy had the opposite, spending more than two years inside the company and seeing any number of things that journalists would have killed to see in years past.

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Google “Head End” Search Results: Ads as Content, Or…Just Ads?

Today I spoke at Sony HQ in front of some Pretty Important Folks, so I wanted to be smart about Sony's offerings lest anything obviously uninformed slip out of my mouth. To prepare I did a bunch of Google searches around Sony and its various products. Many of these…

GoogHeadEndSearchAdEditRatioBattelleMedia.png

Today I spoke at Sony HQ in front of some Pretty Important Folks, so I wanted to be smart about Sony’s offerings lest anything obviously uninformed slip out of my mouth. To prepare I did a bunch of Google searches around Sony and its various products.

Many of these searches are what I call “head end” searches – a lot of folks are searching for the terms I put in, and they are doubly important to Google (and its advertising partners) because they are also very commercial in nature (not in my case, but in general.) Usually folks searching for “Sony Tablets” have some intent to purchase tablets in the near future, or at the very least are somewhere in what’s called the “purchase funnel.”

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Google, Social, and Facebook: One Ring Does Not Rule Them All

When I read Google announcements like this one, An update to Google Social Search, I find myself wondering why Google doesn't just come out and say something like this: "We know social search is important, and we're working on it. However, we don't think the solution lies in working…

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When I read Google announcements like this one, An update to Google Social Search, I find myself wondering why Google doesn’t just come out and say something like this: “We know social search is important, and we’re working on it. However, we don’t think the solution lies in working only with Facebook, because, to be honest, we think social media is bigger than one company, one platform, or one “social graph.” We’ve got a bigger vision for what social means in the world, and here it is.”

Wouldn’t that be great?

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Does Google Favor Its Own Services?

Seems so. I've written about this a lot, so much that I won't bother to link to all the stuff I've posted. It was the basis of a chapter in the book, where I pointed out that (at the time) Google claimed algorithmic innocence, and Yahoo, on the other hand,…

Seems so. I’ve written about this a lot, so much that I won’t bother to link to all the stuff I’ve posted. It was the basis of a chapter in the book, where I pointed out that (at the time) Google claimed algorithmic innocence, and Yahoo, on the other hand, was cheerful in its presumption that Yahoo services were the best answer to certain high value searches (like “mail”).

Now comes this study, from Harvard professors no less, which pretty much states the obvious. Check this graph:

search favorites 1.png

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blekko Explains Itself: Exclusive Video (Update: Exclusive Invite)

And in case you are wondering what the big deal is, besides all the data you can mine, to my mind, it's the ability to cull the web – to "slash" the stuff you don't care about out of your search results. … And to bone up on the various merits of the service, here are a few key links: Blekko: A Search Engine Which Is Also A Killer SEO Tool (SEL) TechCrunch Review: The Blekko Search Engine Prepares To Launch (TC) A new search engine Blekko search: first impressions (Economist)

blekko: how to slash the web from blekko on Vimeo.

Blekko is a new search engine that fundamentally changes a few key assumptions about how search works. It’s not for lazywebbers – you have to pretty much be a motivated search geek to really leverage blekko’s power. But then again, there are literally hundreds of thousands of such folks – the entire SEO/SEM industry, for example. I’ve been watching blekko, and the team behind it, since before launch. They are search veterans, not to be trifled with, and they are exposing data that Google would never dream of doing (yes, they do pretty much a full crawl of the web that matters). In a way, blekko has opened up the kimono of search data, and I expect the service, once it leaves private beta, will become a favorite of power searchers (and developers) everywhere.

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Publishers, Marketers, and the Gap Scenario

A while back I wrote a post titled "The Gap Scenario." In it I outlined one (of many) scenarios that I imagined would become pretty commonplace as location based services, search, and social merged into a retail setting. Today's news (Business Insider) that publisher Daily Candy has created an Android…

mindthegap.pngA while back I wrote a post titled “The Gap Scenario.” In it I outlined one (of many) scenarios that I imagined would become pretty commonplace as location based services, search, and social merged into a retail setting.

Today’s news (Business Insider) that publisher Daily Candy has created an Android app that sends users articles when they are near “current local happenings” such as designer sales, spas, and concerts got me thinking about this scenario once again.

The app monitors where you might be in the background, then matches content, and one must assume, eventually, offers. It works only in New York for now, but more cities are expected.

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Search, Foursquare, and Checking Into States of Mind

I've written before about my relationship with Foursquare, and I'm sure I will again. I've tweeted my complaint that the "friend" mechanism is poorly instrumented (in various ways), and I should note that this is certainly not just a Foursquare problem (more on "Friendstrimentation" shortly). But today I wanted to…

Screen shot 2010-07-14 at 1.06.43 PM.pngI’ve written before about my relationship with Foursquare, and I’m sure I will again. I’ve tweeted my complaint that the “friend” mechanism is poorly instrumented (in various ways), and I should note that this is certainly not just a Foursquare problem (more on “Friendstrimentation” shortly).

But today I wanted to build on my earlier post, “My Location Is a Box of Cereal,” and Think Out Loud a bit about what I’d really like to do on Foursquare: I’d like to check into a state of mind.

What do I mean by that?

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Will Google Compete With Facebook? Er…It Already Is, Folks.

Last weekend the news was conjecture about Facebook doing web search, today, the news is conjecture about Google doing social networks. All of this has been sparked by two well known Valley guys opining on samesaid…Kevin Rose, CEO of Digg, tweeted that Google was working on a "Google Me"…

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Last weekend the news was conjecture about Facebook doing web search, today, the news is conjecture about Google doing social networks. All of this has been sparked by two well known Valley guys opining on samesaid…Kevin Rose, CEO of Digg, tweeted that Google was working on a “Google Me” social network (he since was “asked to take down his tweet” by someone…) and then a former Facebook employee answered a related question on his own Q&A service, Quora.   

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, folks. I certainly don’t find it the least bit surprising that Google is continuing its push into social – let’s not forget, the company recently launched Buzz, which qualifies as a major social network, already owns Orkut, which also qualifies, and has added social features to its core search service – including Google Profiles and social search functionalities.

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