Because, at the end of the day, Twitter shows the shift to the realtime web (Microsoft calls it "Live Search" and T'Rati called it the live web). And if Google doesn't own it, someone else will. More when, well, the holidays come, and I can write. Meantime, read the…
Because, at the end of the day, Twitter shows the shift to the realtime web (Microsoft calls it “Live Search” and T’Rati called it the live web). And if Google doesn’t own it, someone else will. More when, well, the holidays come, and I can write. Meantime, read the piece I referenced in the last post or the last tweet.
My post on the subject, while arguably arguable (yes, I know, I know, but it's better to just say it than let it stick in your craw) is up on the Looksmart Thought Leadership site (part of an FM program I am participating in). From it (this is just…
My post on the subject, while arguably arguable (yes, I know, I know, but it’s better to just say it than let it stick in your craw) is up on the Looksmart Thought Leadership site (part of an FM program I am participating in). From it (this is just a portion):
I think Search is about to undergo an important evolution. It remains to be seen if this is punctuated equilibrium or a slow, constant process (it sort of feels like both), but the end result strikes me as extremely important: Very soon, we will be able to ask Search a very basic and extraordinarily important question that I can best summarize as this: What are people saying about (my query) right now?
When it first hit critical mass, it seemed Google answered this question. For the first time, you could ask a question in your native tongue, and get an answer. It felt immediate, but save for the speed with which the search results were rendered, it was not. Instead, it was archival – Google was the ultimate interface for stuff that had already been said – a while ago. When you queried Google, you got the popular wisdom – but only after it was uttered, edited into HTML format, published on the web, and then crawled and stored by Google’s technology. True, that has sped up – Google indexes a lot of sites more than once a day now – but as it nears the event horizon, this approach to search won’t scale.
So here we go – Google is jumping into the social media search world. "SearchWiki" is Google's answer to the question "Why can't I make search work the way I want it to work, and share/learn from others doing the same thing?" But one wonders if Google searchers have…
So here we go – Google is jumping into the social media search world. “SearchWiki” is Google’s answer to the question “Why can’t I make search work the way I want it to work, and share/learn from others doing the same thing?”
But one wonders if Google searchers have that question to begin with. As I’ve argued elsewhere, Google search had become a bit like the morning newspaper of yore – social glue that all of us could depend on because the results were pretty consistent. I don’t believe that search shouldn’t change – I’m a major proponent of change, particularly in the interface. But as Mike points out, many folks may not want this kind of change.
Readers of this site will recall my ongoing insistence that voice will be the new search interface (and honestly, the next interface for much of the web). Earlier this week, a step toward that reality was taken by Google. It's going over well. From Cnet: The new voice-activated Google…
Readers of this site will recall my ongoing insistence that voice will be the new search interface (and honestly, the next interface for much of the web). Earlier this week, a step toward that reality was taken by Google. It’s going over well. From Cnet:
The new voice-activated Google Mobile app for the iPhone is finally here. Whatever the reason for the delay, it was worth the wait. As we wrote last week, the search app knows when you bring the phone to your face to speak into it. It beeps, you talk, and it executes a Google search on what you said.
From a Weisel report emailed to me just now: On Monday (11/3) after the close, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google and Yahoo have submitted to the Department of Justice a revised version of their proposed search agreement. While we see little legal reasoning behind blocking the deal,…
From a Weisel report emailed to me just now:
On Monday (11/3) after the close, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google and Yahoo have submitted to the Department of Justice a revised version of their proposed search agreement. While we see little legal reasoning behind blocking the deal, we believe the DOJ is basically saying that Yahoo can’t be trusted to do the right thing for its business over the long term.
Shortened Duration: The reported revised plan shortens the partnership from 10 years to 2 years, forcing Yahoo to avoid lowering its search monetization capability if the company can’t rely on Google for a decade.
I think the business model at Twitter is going to be really, really interesting, and I think it's going to leverage search, but search as a proxy for data and pattern recognition. We get an inkling of it at Election 2008, Twitter's mashup of Tweets relating to the election,…
I think the business model at Twitter is going to be really, really interesting, and I think it’s going to leverage search, but search as a proxy for data and pattern recognition. We get an inkling of it at Election 2008, Twitter’s mashup of Tweets relating to the election, but there’s a lot more to think through. First off, Twitter is using its real estate to promote its deal with Current, which is a first, from what I can tell. The “ads” are on the right, right below each users’ profile. I remember covering every new pixel as the Google homepage caved to promotional reality, it’s interesting to watch it happen at Twitter, too, which I think has a lot of similarities to Google in terms of potential models.
Also worth watching is the hash function, where you can tag any topic (IE #redsox, as Churbuck pointed out). This function is not likely to catch on with my mother (I can’t imagine her adding hashes to her tweets, much less tweeting…yet), but what it enables certainly could. The problem is, when you create a site to pull hashed stuff out into a stream the result is often less than useful (as Churbuck noted in his post).
This is where the role of curation and editors is paramount. Voice, as Fred pointed out. There is voice in editing, voice in curation. And voice adds value. And where value is added, marketers can play, both on Twitter (imagine a cars.twitter.com, with auto advertisers on the right rail and at the top, perhaps using contextual TweetSense – yes, it’s owned, by…), and off (think about a feed of contextual Tweets and TweetSense next to conversational sites like Digg and, well, millions of others, as well as sites created simply from Twitter feeds on popular hashes…).
Not content to lease data from others who have satellites, Google today launched its own satellite into space. Via BeetTv, thanks Andy. Talk about web meets world….this is yet another indicator of the integration of virtual and physical. And it brings Google one step closer to what I think…
Talk about web meets world….this is yet another indicator of the integration of virtual and physical. And it brings Google one step closer to what I think could be the company’s Waterloo – a viral meme that Google is sensing too much, knows too much, and is too powerful. It may not be rational, but no one ever accused humans of being entirely rational.
Update: Apparently Google does not own the satellite, just the data….
An Anthropology of Google's Search Experiments (with all data exposed, of course). Never will happen, but we get some tantalizing hints in this post on the Google blog: At any given time, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments on Google sites all over the world. I'll start…
An Anthropology of Google’s Search Experiments (with all data exposed, of course).
Never will happen, but we get some tantalizing hints in this post on the Google blog:
At any given time, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments on Google sites all over the world. I’ll start by describing experimental changes so small that you can barely tell the difference after staring at the page, and end with a couple of much more visually obvious experiments that we have run. There are a lot of people dedicated to detecting everything Google changes – and occasionally, things imagined that we did not do! – and they do latch on to a lot of our more prominent experiments. But the experiments with smaller changes are almost never noticed.
The ruling yesterday on the merits of Viacom's data requests is worthy of review. Ars has more here. I am preparing for a vacation and can't elaborate, but trust me on this one……
The ruling yesterday on the merits of Viacom’s data requests is worthy of review. Ars has more here. I am preparing for a vacation and can’t elaborate, but trust me on this one…
I am thinking hard about the impact of open search – the idea that a major search index becomes totally open to developers, an open API, etc. that allows search to become a true platform that people can develop on top of. I'd love your thoughts on this….writing this…
I am thinking hard about the impact of open search – the idea that a major search index becomes totally open to developers, an open API, etc. that allows search to become a true platform that people can develop on top of.
I’d love your thoughts on this….writing this soon….I’ll update here with more thoughts but wanted to leave this as bread on the waters for the early risers…I know, I know, spam, but that can be routed around with business models and contracts…I’ve been noodling this for a long time and am close to saying SOMETHING….more background here (on Yahoo’s search monkey) and here (when Amazon did it and no one seemed to notice…)…
