Category: Of Note in Search Biz

Until today, we’ve been indexing the links shared on Twitter, MySpace, Digg, Delicious and by our own OneRiot panel to help determine our search results. Now, with the addition of Facebook data, OneRiot delivers search results that reflect the pulse of a much, much wider social web.

Also, the service seems a bit wary of what might come of all this:
Now, of course, we’re only showing (indeed, only have access to) data that has been shared publicly by Facebook users. A user can restrict the visibility of these Likes on their Facebook profile. However, we’d be sidestepping the issue if we didn’t recognize that some users might be concerned that stuff they have shared on Facebook can now pop up on services like ours. Given that, we are rolling out this feature as a very limited bucket test today to assess users’ reactions and gather feedback. We love the new feature. And if users do too then we’ll roll it out to everyone at an appropriate speed.

As well they should. The service can be found here.

Bill Gross, the serial entrepreneur who pioneered search advertising, is unveiling a venture on Monday that aims to make money by allowing people using Twitter to bid on key words to give their posts top ranking.

I’d say this was brilliant if it weren’t for the fact (OK, not fact yet, but my strong sense) that Twitter is going to do something quite similar, soon. I’ve been calling this platform “TweetSense” for some time, but whatever its name, it’s certain Twitter will do something along these lines, and it has a distinct advantage because it sees all the data across the Twitter ecosystem.

What Apple needs is a search engine that “crawls” apps, app content, and app usage data, then surfaces recommendations as well as content . To do this, mobile apps will need to make their content available for Apple to crawl. And why wouldn’t you if you’re Yelp, for example? Or Facebook, for that matter? An index of apps+social signal+app content would be quite compelling.

What Apple will NOT do is crawl the entire web, which is what’s implied by this headline. Apple has already shown a general disdain for the open Internet, anyway, and I don’t see the company spending hundreds of millions of dollars in capital expense to play a game it can’t win anyway.

It’s clear Google put a lot of thought into how this new feature would be exposed, both in terms of a searcher’s privacy, and how an advertiser might use the new data. It’s clearly limited, and for good reasons.

But what Funnels belies is a more fundamental truth: Google itself has access to all the conversion patterns surfaced by this feature, and more. In the SEL article, Barry Schwartz notes: