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New Media News Every Morning

Google: Why Use Bing! When You Can Search At The Speed Of Type

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It wasn’t enough for the search engine giant to perfect real time search (making Twitter’s tweet stream useful for the first time) as it looks like the boys and girls at Google have once again redefined search while at the same time burying their competition.

Our search-as-you-type demos were thought-provoking—fun, fast and interactive—but fundamentally flawed. Why? Because you don’t really want search-as-you-type (no one wants search results for [bike h] in the process of searching for [bike helmets]). You really want search-before-you-type—that is, you want results for the most likely search given what you have already typed.

As you can imagine, searching even before someone types isn’t easy—which is why we are so excited today to be unveiling Google Instant. Google Instant is search-before-you-type. Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful. (Official Google Blog)

Despite the fact that Google already rules the search universe, it looks like the Mountain View giant’s latest innovation makes Bing! almost irrelevant, despite the latter’s assimilation of Yahoo! earlier.

If Google is able to successfully port this feature over to the mobile-verse, Bing! could be even further marginalized by Google who right now dominates the mobile map market as well as commands over 98% of the mobile search market.

Unless Microsoft has a secret weapon of some kind (perhaps the upcoming Windows 7 Phone?), Bing!’s attempts at dethroning Google just went from difficult to near impossible.

Originally posted on September 8, 2010 @ 3:06 pm

All Your Tweets Will Soon Belong to the Library of Congress

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Twitter is announcing several new and exciting things today at the  Twitter’s Chirp conference for developers. One of these is that the Library of Congress is acquiring, or archiving to be more precise all tweets posted on the Twitter public timeline starting from 2006.  This, according to the Twitter blog will be done because the Library of Congress deemed it worthy and useful for these tweets to be preserved.

So to show its support and cooperation to the Library of Congress’ invaluable work of preserving every bits of information important to America, Twitter is granting them access to the entire archive of public tweets – for preservation and research. Of course if you’re a heavy Twitter user, you’d know that lately tweets are becoming important part of the online news ecosystem and are becoming more useful than actual news reporting when communicating important events and most especially – emergencies and disasters.

Because of this, Twitter tweets are now part of the historical footprint that the Library of Congress must preserve and later on made available to researchers.  However, there is some restrictions to this arrangement.  Only after a six-month delay can the tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself and preservation.

This news runs in congruent with Google’s creation of  the Replay feature in search. Google Replay lets you take a look back into past tweets that were indexed by  Google which are crawled as results of your specific searches.

What’s interesting to find out after this has settled in is how Library of Congress will make these  tweets available for public consumption and whether making this happen warrants some privacy issues.

Originally posted on April 14, 2010 @ 4:15 pm

Googles’s Bundle of New Search Related Features

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Google recently introduced twin cool features relating to its search services – one is for Android devices, while the other is on web search. But both are aimed at making user’s search experience no matter what the platform is – faster and more fruitful. So, let’s take a look into each of these two search-related features.

First up is Gesture Search for Android-powered devices running on version 2.0 or above in the U.S. This is a pretty cool method of searching content from Android phones. Not just cool but a faster way of finding information. And how does this feature works? Simply draw alphabet gestures on your phone’s touch screen and Gesture Search will give you a list of items that starts with the letter that you’ve drawn. It searches your phone’s contact, installed application, a bookmark or a music track.

It told you it was cool, right? Even cooler than the Nexus One’s voice-enabled search feature. In addition, this app (yes it’s actually an Android app) also learns your search history, so your phone’s search quality improves in time. Gesture search is available now for free in Android Market.

The other search-related feature is about making web search more personalized for individual users. And that is through star markers that will be displayed next to individual search results. If you mark a search result with a star, it will appear on a special list right at the top of your results when relevant, the next time you do a search.

What’s good about stars in search is that you don’t need to exert extra effort in managing or using them. It just might even remind you that you’ve actually starred items related to your current search activity. In addition, this feature also syncs with Google Bookmarks and Google Toolbar, giving you an automated way of seeing your starred items.

So there, two new, cool search related features that Google introduced almost simultaneously.  Which of these two search features will you most likely use?

Originally posted on March 4, 2010 @ 4:40 pm

Yahoo Becomes a Real-Time Search Engine, Thanks to Twitter

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It didn’t take that long for Yahoo to achieve what seems to be the trend among search engines today – to become a real-time search engine. And what better way of doing this but by teaming up with Twitter to integrate the 600 tweets posted on Twitter per second, assuming of course that those tweets are public.

In other words, Yahoo and Twitter had agreed on an integration deal with several components. But this is not just plain Twitter streams integration to Yahoo search results, but there are other components  as well.

The integration was quickly implemented by Yahoo as soon as the deal was sealed. So, if you check Yahoo search right now, you will start seeing Twitter updates on your search results.

But that’s just one part of the deal. Once in full swing, the Yahoo-Twitter integration will allow you to do the following:

  • read personal Twitter feeds directly from various Yahoo online properties such as Sports, Mail, Updates and others
  • update your Twitter status as well as share content from Yahoo to your Twitter profile.
  • share your social actions on any website that appears on Yahoo Updates to your Twitter timeline
  • get quick pulse-check on various topics and trending on Twitter related to News, Finance, Entertainment and Sports

Of course as you all know that this is just one of Yahoo’s strategy on making itself social. It has recently sealed a partnership with Facebook as well. But this will have to take effect later this year.

So what’s next, Twitter?

Originally posted on February 24, 2010 @ 1:45 am

Social Search Engine Aardvark Joins Google

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Whenever I’m looking for an answer to a trivial question I normally type in the question on the Google search box. Yes, that’s how lazy I am. And so far Google search results are pretty much accurate and were able to give me some good links. Interstingly, most of the links to the answers given by Google are entries from Yahoo! Answers.

The point I’m trying to drive at here? Google badly needs a Yahoo Answers-like service. A crowd-sourced database of information that is of capable providing the best answer to the most mundane question that could possibly come up from anyone’s mind. And Google seems to be embarking on achieving that feat. To start off, it just acquired a social search engine called – Aardvark.

Aardvark’s model is pretty simple, you ask a question and Aardvark will find the perfect person to answer your question in minutes. Aardvark has several interfaces, via an iPhone app, IM, email and of course its web interface at vark.com.

Aardvark’s technology taps into the knowledge and experience of your friends and extended network of contacts. It analyzes your questions and determines what they are about until it is able to match each question to people who are knowledgeable about it to give you the final answer to your question. And it does that as quickly as it can.

Google has not announced yet how it is going to take to integrate Aardvark to its various products and services, but as soon as the deal was finalized, Google quickly put Aardvark into Google Labs.

With Google Buzz as a social sharing site and now this social search engine, Google is really getting into the social game.

Originally posted on February 12, 2010 @ 6:05 pm