Of course, BingTweets was the first real time mashup from a major player in search (and Microsoft has already announced its intentions to go further ), but we're just at the start of where real time search might go. … We've seen a fair amount of innovation in search interfaces lately (here's more on Pivot , for example), but real time data presents a significant challenge.
(This piece was written for the BingTweets blog and is part of an ongoing exploration of search underwritten by Microsoft. See my series on the interplay of search and decisions here, here, and here. I wrote the piece below before today’s web-wide conversation about content farms, but I think it’s related. We need new frameworks for search, and real time points us toward one potential path.)
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Read MorePaul points it out as a failed dishwasher search. Mike complains about automated content as does RWW. And we all have experienced it: The Google ecosystem is failing more – failing to get us what we think we want. Failing to not frustrate us. Failing at the more complicated queries…
Now, Google’s ecosystem is ripe for a quick buck – “content farms” that build article pages cheaply to make a quick buck off AdWords. But these articles, at least for a portion of us, don’t really provide the answers we are looking for. (thanks @thejames for the pointers.)
As Paul puts it in bemoaning his fruitless attempt to use Google for a researching a dishwasher purchase:
Read MoreGoogle's real time search integration, announced at Web 2 in October, is rolling out (good coverage from SEL). It'll be integrated as "Latest results." I'll be watching how this effects the traffic referral ecosystem across the web – that's the key. Will Twitter grow? Will Google start to obviate…
Google’s real time search integration, announced at Web 2 in October, is rolling out (good coverage from SEL). It’ll be integrated as “Latest results.” I’ll be watching how this effects the traffic referral ecosystem across the web – that’s the key. Will Twitter grow? Will Google start to obviate some refers it’s now sending to Facebook? Or will the opposite occur?
Google has launched a "Favorite Places" program to jumpstart its local search business. I like the moxy, but the ecosystem is lacking a clear dose of "Why Should I Do This," at least from the point of view of the business. Or the customer, for that matter. The program…
Google has launched a “Favorite Places” program to jumpstart its local search business. I like the moxy, but the ecosystem is lacking a clear dose of “Why Should I Do This,” at least from the point of view of the business. Or the customer, for that matter. The program has the same “Church lady dancing to rap” feeling that marks nearly all of Google’s socially-driven products.
If Google is serious about this space, they best buy Foursquare, pronto, and let the folks there take over.
Google today announced a new policy in its ongoing attempt to reach detente with an increasingly querulous publishing industry. (For background, read Mashable’s piece). A key piece of the new policy has to do with changes to Google’s “First Click Free” program. From Google’s announcement: One way we overcome…
Google today announced a new policy in its ongoing attempt to reach detente with an increasingly querulous publishing industry. (For background, read Mashable’s piece).
A key piece of the new policy has to do with changes to Google’s “First Click Free” program. From Google’s announcement:
Read MoreMicrosoft has been kind enough to give me a limited number of invitations for readers of Searchblog to grok Pivot, which I wrote about here last week. In that post I promised to grok Pivot, then report back more here. Alas, Pivot is currently Windows only, and – alas…
Microsoft has been kind enough to give me a limited number of invitations for readers of Searchblog to grok Pivot, which I wrote about here last week.
In that post I promised to grok Pivot, then report back more here. Alas, Pivot is currently Windows only, and – alas – I am currently Mac only. I do have a couple of PCs in my house, but they are owned by my son and my wife, and it’s fair to say I’m not eager to to use them for experimental installs. My son in particular will kill me if I touch his machine (though I’m pretty sure he’s going to download Pivot before I ever do).
Read MoreI never did understand why everyone releases the "top Searches of 2009" with one month yet to go. It's as if nothing happens in December. Anyway, here are the sites: Bing. Yahoo. Google….
Back when I was reporting the book, I remember a meeting I had with Gary Flake, then the lead technologist at Overture, now a Fellow at Microsoft running Live Labs, responsible for stuff like Seadragon, Photosynth, and now, Pivot, an experimental approach to large datasets that attempts to rethink…
Back when I was reporting the book, I remember a meeting I had with Gary Flake, then the lead technologist at Overture, now a Fellow at Microsoft running Live Labs, responsible for stuff like Seadragon, Photosynth, and now, Pivot, an experimental approach to large datasets that attempts to rethink some fundamental approaches to what we understand search to be today.
Back in 2004, I asked him why we couldn’t move forward in search interface, which struck me as a major issue (and still does). Gary looked at me ruefully and said something I’ve never forgotten: “If only I had just one modal dialog box…”
Read MoreYou imagine something out loud in a book, and then it starts to happen…. I am sure many of you have heard of RedLaser, but I hadn't until today. I love it! Here's the text from my blog post, written in 2004 (pre iPhone, so I used a Treo…) which…
I am sure many of you have heard of RedLaser, but I hadn’t until today. I love it!
Here’s the text from my blog post, written in 2004 (pre iPhone, so I used a Treo…) which I rewrote into the book:
Read MoreDanny was kind enough to ping me about this story, which breaks the news about Google's new "Dashboard," which is, in essence, a first start toward realizing the "privacy dashboard" I asked for so long ago (and again here), back when I was posting ideas like a madman (I'm…
Danny was kind enough to ping me about this story, which breaks the news about Google’s new “Dashboard,” which is, in essence, a first start toward realizing the “privacy dashboard” I asked for so long ago (and again here), back when I was posting ideas like a madman (I’m going to be doing that again shortly, so watch out…).
It’s a big deal I think, even if most of us never use it. And it’s very smart of Google to lead here. It really had no choice, when you think about it. And it’s kind of cool to see stuff I wrote about here over three years ago happen in the real world.
