Posts Tagged ‘google’
Google searches for ‘perfect search’
December 11th, 2009
Google has been busy recently with a raft of announcements on visual, audio, location-based, social and real-time services. That includes the introduction of audio search via Google Voice, real-time audio language translation, location-based searches, and real-time searches incorporating Twitter and news feeds.
There are a number of big clues to the future for Google within these announcements, and real-time search perhaps caused the biggest reaction. This was a must for Google, and unusually it was behind the curve on this. Google’s overview of the launch was: ‘Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page’.
The real issue for real-time search is that it changes the game, and although this is good for the user, for search engines and businesses that rely on them, real-time search offers a challenge in terms of revenue stream, and identifying authority and relevancy of content.
Real-time search works well within a community such as Twitter, as many automatically go to the trusted source that they recognise within the results, but on a much larger scale over Google, this could initially confuse and present a set of new problems, or force a new way of thinking for the user. It’s certainly the right way to go, and will help people to understand how the social web works, but that’s quite a big leap for the average user.
That’s where the ‘other’ engines are trying to get the jump on Google by answering a need that Google does not answer at this point. I sat through a Bing presentation on Wednesday, and this was one of the key points.
I believe Bing is an excellent alternative to Google, and offers functionality Google does not, yet, but when you look at current market share, it’s difficult to see where Bing will be able to make a substantial dent in Google’s lead, as Google can upgrade or add new services pretty quickly. You might argue that even if Bing only has a small share, it’s a massive piece of web real estate, but do we really think Microsoft will settle for second place? They may have to.
So, just how big is Google’s search presence these days? Pretty big, and it’s still growing according to the latest numbers from Hitwise, who noted a one-percent rise in Google’s U.S. market share for November. Google now comprises 71.57 percent of Web searches in the U.S.
Yahoo and Bing, meanwhile, both slipped. Yahoo dipped five percent down to 15.39 percent of the total market, while Bing dropped two percent, down to 9.39 percent of the market.
In the UK, Google is even stronger, with 88.74% of all traffic (again according to Hitwise) with Yahoo on 5.51%, and Bing, with just 2.89%.
So, if Google look set to continue dominating, what’s the vision? Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has gone on record to say Google wants to create “the perfect search engine” and last month, Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search & User Experience, offered an insight on what this ‘prefect search engine’ might contain:
“It would understand speech, questions, phrases, what entities you’re talking about, concepts. It would be able to search all the world’s information, different ideas and concepts, and bring them back to you in a presentation that was really informative and coherent.
“We have two, three, five changes every week that are visible to the end-user in the UI but we don’t publicise ranking changes. We are making changes to our ranking algorithm at the rate of two per day. Some of our competitors haven’t made any changes to their ranking function for some time.”
This vision is supported by updates such as “Google Caffeine“, which is a faster algorithm developed to literally fuel real-time search and faster applications.
The other big announcement from Google this week looks at the other side of the coin, not the search engine itself, but how we search. Google Goggles arguably offers a peak at an even more interesting future, by incorporating both visual and mobile search. Yes, I know, every year has been ‘the’ year mobile will explode for the last five years, but one thing we’re all agreed on (pretty much) is that mobile will happen in a big way - sooner or later.
That’s what makes Goggles so important. Basically it is an application that lets users get search results from pictures taken with their Android smart phones, and supposedly other platforms in the future as well.
The visual search concept, which Google also call “computer vision” and “search by sight” is not a new idea, but the practical application could change the way we search. Fundamentally all the user needs to do is use a mobile phone with a camera to identify objects (products, places of interest, vehicles, etc) and match them to search results or online databases, such as maps or e-commerce sites to compare prices, venues, alternatives, whatever.
We’re working towards a future where perfect search engines allow for perfect search; i.e. the user asks a structured question and receives a complete answer. These changes won’t enable perfect search quickly, but they are another stepping stone towards it, and we could see our first perfect searches in five years time.
Google, News Corp and a bit of advice for restaurants
December 4th, 2009
The Google - News Corp debate has been raging this week, and while at first I made the decision not to add to the many, many, many opinions on this issue, after a debate with a colleague earlier today, I realised I couldn’t resist. So Tim, I blame you.
Some of the comments made this week by both Murdoch and Google have been quite telling in my opinion, and it’s much more than just the two big boys of media jousting for position. The Guardian has provided excellent commentary all week.
To recap, Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation addressed the US media regulators’ workshop in Washington this week, where he made a speech punctuated by his comment that internet users will pay for content, saying they would be happy to shell out for “information they need to rise in society”, before going on to attack internet news aggregation as “theft”, claiming that advertising-only business models were dead.
“From the beginning on, newspapers have prospered for one reason: giving readers the news that they want…If we fail, we fail like a restaurant that makes meals that no one wants to eat.”
Murdoch offered some points that made absolute sense, i.e. the restaurant example, and a few that didn’t, such as the ‘theft’, and ‘rise in society’ points above.
I think that simply suggesting Murdoch is blaming Google for the demise of national media is a bit of an over-simplification, although I don’t think he would be too upset if that was the general assumption. However, I think he has missed one key point, which is that Newspapers are so late to the content revolution that it’s nearly destroyed them, and that now they are realising the scale of the issue, their only response is to place traditional media monetisation rules on a medium which not only doesn’t accept these rules, but has also been enjoying their content free for years.
Why would you pay for a service that hasn’t changed or evolved at all from the service that you’ve been getting for free for years? Is news from newspaper sources more valuable to the user than news from other sources? Are people that loyal to a newspaper brand to pay for online content that has no added value and is no more useful than news form other sources? Not in my opinion.
So what about Google’s response to this? Well, both Matt Brittin, the director of Google UK, and Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive have made interesting comments in return. Schmidt’s was in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, which many will point to as a success in terms of paid-for content.
But I was especially interested in Brittin’s comments, who was speaking in UK Parliament to the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, as he worked as director of strategy and digital at Daily Mirror publisher Trinity Mirror before joining Google in 2007, so he should understand the issue.
My favourite quotes from Brittin were:
“We do not steal content. If you look at Google search and Google News what you will find is snippets, a little line that will take you through to the original websites…
“That’s accepted as in line with copyright law worldwide, seen as like a newspaper article quoting lines from a book in a book review. We defend copyright owners’ rights and it’s wrong to paint us as stealing content. We are like a virtual newsagent…
“Publishers have control, they choose to make content available for free online. They have control now and have always had control to allow them to opt out. They can say, ‘I don’t want to appear in Google search or in Google News or in one and not the other.
“They choose to stay and have content discoverable because they find it helpful to have huge numbers of people coming through to their content.”
That pretty much says it all in my opinion. Google and other search engines are driving many thousands of readers to these websites, if the publishers wish to opt out they can do, and this is something Murdoch has threatened and I believe would do if pushed.
However, as we all now know, this week Google has also made a concession by allowing publishers of paid for content to limit the amount of free access users have to their websites from Google News.
This means publishers can limit Google News users to no more than five pages of content a day without registering or subscribing. In affect, Google is still driving traffic to the content, but the publishers get their fee if the user wishes to continue looking or get more content.
I think this is Google’s way of settling the publishers down. Google has the upper hand in the long term, and whether this decision was affected by political forces I guess we’ll never know, but by giving a little Google gets a lot in the long term, and I feel the outcome will still be the same.
In reality most users will look at other sources for their news once the free clicks have gone from major publishers, or learn that it becomes a nuisance navigating away from publisher’s sites after the free clicks, so stop visiting them in the first place. That is unless, you’ve guessed it, there is more useful and relevant content on offer to warrant a charge.
In many ways this is similar to a restaurant that makes meals that no one wants to eat, as Murdoch said, or more precisely a restaurant that charges today for exactly the same meal that it offered free yesterday.
Google Wave blog post round up
October 12th, 2009
If you haven’t heard of Google Wave yet you must be have been living under a rock for the last few weeks. But fear not, in this post I will share some of the better posts with you to get you up to speed, and hopefully encourage you to have a go yourself, if you’re lucky enough get an invite that is.
1. The first place to have a good old nose around is the Google wave help page. The help forum is full of useful discussions that will help you to get to grips with the practical issues.
2. You should also check out some of the Google Wave featured extensions which give you a sense of what’s coming next.
3.
4. Google Wave: A Music Industry Primer, goes on to highlight how the music industry could use waves.
5. Here is a third party video explaining Google Wave.
6. Lifehacker has an in-depth post on Google Wave features, etiquette, and extensions. Including all these handy shortcuts.
7. Top 10 Complaints About Google Wave slideshow can be seen over at eweek. Point 4 touches on similar elements to a post from Techcrunch - Google Wave Is Easier To Understand Than…
8. Force.com have put together a new demo on how you might leverage the Wave platform on salesforce.com and how you could leverage salesforce.com from Wave. Interesting stuff!
9. And finally to round things off, The psychology of Google Wave
One last point, I don’t have an invite yet, so please do the honourable thing and help me out if you have one going spare!
Google and Twitter - the rumour mill grinds on
April 8th, 2009
The web’s soothsayers have been talking about Google acquiring Twitter for some time, but last week, the rumours seemed to have a bit more substance thanks to stories of a Google/Twitter deal and potential acquisition talks that started on TechCrunch and spread rapidly, as you would expect.
The original TechCrunch story has been updated three times, including an official denial from Twitter on Friday, and further discussion from various sources that agree or disagree that acquisition talks are going ahead.
What most people seem to agree on is:
1. Google wants a deal, but initially focused on real-time feed of Twitter updates to speed indexing, as it currently has to index each Twitter user periodically to look for updates. This is apparently the main point of the current discussions, and certainly makes sense for Google at least when you consider global visits to Twitter approached 10 million in February, up 700% from the same time last year, according to comScore, and this figure is only going to keep growing, which leaves Google with a big issue.
2. Twitter’s current valuation is $250 million following the recent round of funding
3. Twitter values itself at much more, some sources say closer to $1 billion at least
4. Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone have already sold Blogger to Google five years ago
So why would Google want Twitter? Well I think this quote from Jeff Mann of Gartner Research that appeared in Forbes sums it up well: “Twitter’s value is in its content, growing by 6 million tweets per day. Twitter is attractive because it has built a service that attracts this much volume, creating a constantly growing, twitching, seething real-time source of comments, news and opinions.”
Beyond that, Twitter is the real-time search engine for breaking news and comment, it’s also not a bad reputation engine and Google undoubtedly wants a piece of this, as mentioned in my post in March.
Why would Twitter want to work with Google? Well, beyond having done it before, Twitter has so much potential as a revenue generating platform, but seems to be having trouble in realising this potential. Could Google be the answer to get the business model moving?
Whatever the eventual result, i think it’s going to take longer than a week to resolve, and since the story first broke last week there has been much discussion, an example of which can be seen in this Paid Content article, but little in the way of movement. As we know, these things don’t tend to move quickly.
So, do i think Twitter will be acquired? Probably, but probably not this year until they have developed a few more valuable services, proved revenue generation and got that all important valuation up.
Can Twitter smell Google’s fear?
March 5th, 2009
When Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, talks, people tend to listen. And so they should, Google has been pushing the digital revolution, and making money out of it, for many years. However, when Mr Schmidt decides to belittle a very popular, and most would argue useful service, people begin to listen even more, because there aren’t too many things coming out of the Google corporate mouth piece that haven’t been thought through and calculated.
So when Schmidt gave a presentation at the Morgan Stanley Technology conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, and said Twitter and products of its ilk are ‘poor man’s email systems,’ we wonder what his real message is.
Analysing the statement doesn’t really help. Twitter wasn’t designed as a substitute for email, although there are of course general similarities, and the ‘poor man’ statement just seems unnecessary. So why? With the massive coverage that Twitter is receiving, it’s obvious that such a statement would be beamed around the world in an instant and not only aggravate the ever growing Twitter fan base but position Mr Schmidt as the villain. So again, I ask why?
Of course there was also much conversation on Twitter around this issue as the story broke and a theme became apparent, which is perhaps best encapsulated in Alexei Oreskovic’s post on Reuters.
Fundamentally, the quote is only half the story. What’s more interesting is why Mr Schmidt gave this response, which was apparently in answer to a question about Twitter’s real-time search capability, well known as not only a very powerful conversation mining and monitoring tool, but obviously offering Twitter a very valuable advantage if it was to go the ad-funded route and thereby pose a threat to Google.
So, behind this rather odd statement, can we sense a hint of competitive fear? Or was it merely a lapse in the usually focused Google comms machine?
Interestingly, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has replied to Mr Schmidt’s comment and said: “We think it’s important to introduce the power of a real-time network to even the weakest of signals around the world—as Twitter grows, we realise it’s not about the triumph of technology, it’s about the triumph of humanity.”
Touché! Or am I reading too much into the technology vs. humanity comment?