Thanks to Google, people these days (e.g. your customers) are...
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Today is Google’s 15th birthday and the big G is...
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Read Article Facebook announced Graph Search back in January, a new type...
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At Facebook’s press event today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened by saying that Facebook has three pillars: the News Feed, the Timeline, and a third: “Graph Search,” which is Facebook’s new, super-charged search product. He pointed out that, at this point in time, Facebook users can only search through content that has been shared with them, either by being made public or by those you are “friends” with on the service. Zuckerberg made it a point to differentiate Graph Search from a normal Web search, saying that Graph Search is meant to “return an answer,” instead of a page of links.
And the answers, of course, lie in the rich data that Facebook has stored in its ever-growing fortress.
In a report by The Next Web published today, it appears that Lycos is planning a comeback in 2013. That’s right, one of the former search giants from the early 1990’s, is going to be releasing its own proprietary search engine in the coming year.
While the details of the search engine are currently scarce, Lycos CEO Rob Balazy did tell The Next Web that, “In the coming year you will see us introduce a new proprietary search product. I don’t want to say too much about it as it’s still in the planning stage but we have a vision to merge the notion of a search-type activity with a curated content experience.”
Don’t get Scroogled says Microsoft in its latest Bing campaign, and its most recent effort to woo users away from Google. The company even put out this (somewhat amusing) video displaying how you could get “Scroogled” this holiday season.
Now I understand where Microsoft is coming from with this new campaign, typically Google has been very clear about what was an advertisement on its site and what wasn’t, with Google Shopping it isn’t as clear. And despite the warning in the footer and the “Why these products?” message, it’s still slightly deceiving.
However, is Bing really as unbiased as it makes itself out to be?
DuckDuckGo, a search engine, that focuses on user privacy, is challenging Google on privacy issues with the recent launch of a video that accuses Google of putting its users in a “filter bubble” of personalized results that make them miss out on results they may want to see or that would be more useful.
The video hits on some of the company’s main talking points as it continues its quest to educate searchers on privacy issues and the benefits of using its own search engine instead of Google. The video also features the findings of a study conducted by DuckDuckGo in which they asked 131 volunteers to search for three current U.S. political terms — “abortion,” “gun control,” and “Obama” at the same time and then compare the results.
If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past ten years chances are you have seen the iconic I’m Feeling Lucky button sitting on the front of Google’s home page. If you haven’t actually ever clicked the I’m Feeling Lucky button, it does actually have a function.
As companies, organizations, and entities grow in size they tend to have a much higher visibility in the eye of the general public. Sure, being in the spotlight can ultimately be greatly beneficial to a company and can help them grow significantly more than they would if they were unknown, but the fact of the matter is that public exposure works both ways. When a company has high levels of public visibility, all of their flaws end up out in the open and they open the doors for scrutiny and criticism. And in the era that we live in, web giant Google – arguably the largest entity on the vast Internet – is definitely no exception.
For Google, a lot of their bad PR recently has surrounded the one area that helped the company get to where it is today; search. You see, many people have realized that in recent months Google’s search results have become more and more irrelevant and infested with spam. Knowing that their failure to fix this problem could have easily been devastating to the company, however, Google recently rolled out a new and improved search and index algorithm targeted at generating more useful and relevant results for end-users. After having seen these changes first-hand over the last couple of days, I’ve decided to answer the one question that I’m sure is brewing in the heads of end-users and content providers alike; how will this affect me?
