Tag: search

What Is Search Now? Disjoined.

(image shutterstock)

Today I answered a question in email for a reporter who works for Wired UK. He asked smart questions, as I would expect from a Wired writer. (Some day I’ll tell you all my personal story of Wired UK – I lived over there for the better part of a year back in 1997, trying to make that magazine work. I mostly failed – but it’s up and running strong now.)

In any case, one question in particular struck me. The writer is preparing a piece on the future of search. (I’ll link to it when it comes out). What big problems, he asked, still plague search?

Read More
38 Comments on What Is Search Now? Disjoined.

SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER

Stay up to date on the latest from BattelleMedia.com

On Mayer, Yahoo!, and The (Other) Customer

Mayer at the Web 2 Summit, San Francisco

(image James Duncan Davidson)

I try to let big news percolate for a few days before weighing in, and it seems even more appropriate to follow that playbook when it came to the scrum around Marissa Mayer joining Yahoo.

Read More
20 Comments on On Mayer, Yahoo!, and The (Other) Customer

Facebook Coalition To Google: Don’t Be Evil, Focus On The User

Last week I spent an afternoon down at Facebook, as I mentioned here. While at Facebook I met with Blake Ross, Direct of Product (and well known in web circles as one of the creators of Firefox). Talk naturally turned to the implications of Google’s controversial integration of Google+ into its search results – a move that must both terrify (OMG, Google is gunning for us!) as well as delight (Holy cow, Google is breaking its core promise to its users!).

Turns out Ross had been quite busy the previous weekend, and he had a little surprise to show me. It was a simple hack, he said, some code he had thrown together in response to the whole Google+ tempest. But there was most certainly a gleam in his eye as he brought up a Chrome browser window (Google’s own product, he reminded me).

Read More
86 Comments on Facebook Coalition To Google: Don’t Be Evil, Focus On The User

What Might A Facebook Search Engine Look Like?

(image) Dialing in from the department of Pure Speculation…

As we all attempt to digest the implications of last week’s Google+ integration, I’ve also be thinking about Facebook’s next moves. There’s been plenty of speculation in the past that Facebook might compete with Google directly – by creating a full web search engine. After all, with the Open Graph and in particular, all those Like buttons, Facebook is getting a pretty good proxy of pages across the web, and indexing those pages in some way might prove pretty useful.

But I don’t think Facebook will create a search engine, at least not in the way we think about search today. For “traditional” web search, Facebook can lean on its partner Microsoft, which has a very good product in Bing. I find it more interesting to think about what “search problem” Facebook might solve in the future that Google simply can’t.

Read More
56 Comments on What Might A Facebook Search Engine Look Like?

Our Google+ Conundrum

I’m going to add another Saturday morning sketch to this site, and offer a caveat to you all: I’ve not bounced this idea off many folks, and the seed of it comes from a source who is unreservedly biased about all this. But I thought this worth airing out, so here you have it.

Given that Google+ results are dominating so many SERPs these days, Google is clearly leveraging its power in search to build up Google+. Unless a majority of people start turning SPYW (Search Plus Your World) off, or decide to search in a logged out way, Google has positioned Google+ as a sort of “mini Internet,” a place where you can find results for a large percentage of your queries.(My source is pretty direct about this: “Google has decided that beating Facebook is worth selling their soul.”)

But to my point. An example of samesaid is the search I did this morning for that Hitler video I posted. Here’s a screenshot of my results:

Read More
164 Comments on Our Google+ Conundrum

Google Does Its Tenth Annual Zeitgeist

Ten years ago, Google’s first Zeitgeist inspired my first book (The Search). Here are some highlights from the tenth annual edition. Props to Google for going deeper than most year end lists with its data. Now…open source the damn data, folks!!!

 

 

5 Comments on Google Does Its Tenth Annual Zeitgeist