Category: Of Note in Search Biz

As part of BingTweets, an FM/Microsoft promotion blending the two services, I was asked to opine on the idea of how we use the web to make decisions. My first post has been up for a while but I managed to lose track of time and forgot to let you all know about it. I wrote a piece called “Decisions are Never Easy – So Far” – and have already written a followup piece, though that one is yet to be published. (And yes, I’ve asked them to make that picture smaller. Migod.)

From the first post:

If what you are looking for is a hotel room, a plane ticket, or something else in the “head end” of search results, plenty of sites aggregate tons of results for you. But as soon as you go a bit down the tail – like my example for classic cars – search becomes a pivot point for an ongoing and often taxing decision process. The opportunity, I think, is to figure out a way to support that process down the tail – saving us time, clicks, and frustration along the way. I see two paths toward that goal: one is creating applications on top of “ten blue links” which help me organize and aggregate the knowledge I process while pursuing a search query, and the second is making my searches social, so I can share the process of learning and learn from those who have shared – not unlike Vannevar Bush’s “Memex” concept.

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Back when I predicted this in January, I recall worrying I was calling it too early. Now it appears the timing was about right. From Mashable:

…while Google grew from June to July, it still lost market share to its competitors – from 66.1% in June to 64.8% in July, a 1.3 percentage point drop.

From my prediction: 3. Google will see search share decline significantly for the first time ever. It will also struggle to find an answer to the question of how it diversifies its revenue in 2009.

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Matt Cutts points to a video interview (embedded above) on Google’s Caffeine infrastructure update.

“It’s a pretty fundamentally big change” Matt says. What I’d like to know is why and in response to what changes on the web. Of course, the major changes in how the web works are clear: Real Time Search.

In this post (and/or this one) I said:

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Facebook’s previously announced realtime engine has been released, coverage from Mashable:

Fast forward to today: Facebook just announced that it is rolling out the new Facebook search. With realtime search and FriendFeed in its pocket, Facebook is gunning directly for Twitter.

Also for Mashable, a story on Google’s “major revision” of its engine. I plan to dig into this one, as I sense it has a lot to do with crossing the infrastructure chasm to real time:

Secretly, they’ve been working on a new project:the next generation of Google Search. This isn’t just some minor upgrade, but an entire new infrastructure for the world’s largest search engine. In other words: it’s a new version of Google.

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Sorry, it’s late, and I just saw this piece in the NYT. But for Bartz to say that Yahoo was never a search company is simply not true.

Yahoo was the original search destination, and a place folks first learned to “search” for stuff on the Web. As the original directory of things worth paying attention on the Web, Yahoo was – and remains for many – the definitive place to start a search query. And also, in the history of Yahoo, let us not forget the entire homepage was redesigned around search just three years ago.

Feh.

Flickr has upgraded its search, and I like the results. Funny how we are all talking about Yahoo ceding search to Microsoft, but we all forget there’s a lot of other search to be done on Yahoo – like Flickr search. I wonder who Flickr will be integrated into Bing, by the way? Anyway, from the post announcing the news:

Note the new “View” controls at the top of the page, these allow you to display the results in different sizes and formats. Both small and medium views have an ‘i’ icon on every thumbnail — click it to see more detailed information about a particular photo. We’re also doing some whiz bang stuff in the small view to take advantage of as much space as you have on your screen, just try resizing your browser to see.

On the right side of the page we try to provide a new perspective on your search. Based upon how our members are tagging their photos and participating in the Flickrverse, you’ll see links to the groups, photographers, tag clusters and places that are most closely related what you’re looking for. We hope these will occasionally provide a little extra inspiration for your search.

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What a total surprise (kidding!).

In a statement, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that “as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest.”

That Chrome OS was the last straw, I’d warrant. From my earlier coverage:

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The NYT has a good background piece from Carol Bartz’s POV. Carol will be at Web 2 this Fall, so will Qi Lu, the man who will own the deal and the search fight with Google.

Yesterday I spent an illuminating hour with the folks behind Wowd, a still-private-beta search upstart that is taking a new approach to, well, just about everything in search as we traditionally understand it.

In a odd coincidence, this morning Venturebeat published a thoughtful piece on how search might shift when more data, in particular social data, is added to the mix.

I point these two links out as a marker of sorts, I’ve got a much longer piece brewing in me about Wowd’s approach to search, and how the Big Guys might respond should an upstart like Wowd get traction. More on that soon. Meanwhile, the Wowd guys posted on Tim and my Websquared paper here.