How Today’s Tiny New Search Engines may Win Big Tomorrow
There is a reason why Google is No.1 in the search business: anytime you ask anyone about their choice in search engines, you’ll probably discover that they don’t even see it as a choice anymore, so monolithic is Google’s influence on its customer base. And while the Google vs. Bing contest is avidly watched as ever, another more interesting contest is being fought in the microscopic minority of the search market share left over after the majors are through with it. This is the crowded part of the search engine market with hundreds of innovative new search engine providers chasing after the crumbs of the Internet user market, no more than one in 10,000, left over after the big boys have finished.In the credulous times of the early Internet, Ask Jeeves was a very popular search engine that claimed that you could type in your search in natural human English. They call it Natural Language Processing these days, and they still haven’t bested that challenge yet. Google’s attempt in this area at one time was to eschew computers altogether, and put people in charge; and it was called Google Answers. It wasn’t free either – you posted your questions, and real people, if they knew what the answers were, offered to help, for the right price. Of course that program was a miserable flop. The search engine ChaCha, with the insight that the main problem with Google Answers was that you had to pay, picks up where Google left off, and gives you ChaCha Guide. You get a real person to hand-hold you through your search, for free. Their tagline is ” Real people answering your questions! Crazy, huh?”. And it’s so crazy it makes sense.
Quintura is a search engine that tries to offer you possible searches related to your search – in a cloud of related keywords you can take ideas from. Useful related keywords are certainly things Google never helps you with. All you get with Google is your standard list of search results. Google has always been a pure search engine; it won’t give you any recommendations, it will only help you find a thing you have in mind already. And then there is the intelligent search engine. Enter, the market, for the recommendation engine, where when you try to search for, say the movie Titanic, you’ll get asked if you like tragic romantic movies and get offered a few suggestions. This of course uses algorithms like you see on Pandora, the music finder website. But it uses that and wider context.
And there are other more specialized search engines too; if you want to search for pictures, far better than the Google images, is Like. And how about search engines like Speeglebot and Nayio that are speech and voice enabled? The sky is the limit for innovation in search engines; and when the sky is Google, innovators re really motivated to do things better.
Google and Bing Consider a New Search Engine Just for Children
Have you ever stood by a child struggling to get a search going on Google, and itched to tell him what obvious search keywords he was missing, or how he needed to understand the psychology of search differently? Most adults don’t rush to help the children out right away; the only way to learn the mind of a search engine, to learn the way it uses words, is through repeated trial and error. As far as making search engines child-friendly goes, most search engines usually go no farther than to protect them from unsavory content. It may be time for the major search engines to think of the child constituency differently. Children are using the Internet for all kinds of learning, and homework; and they need search engines to be tailored to their level of maturity. The search engines are only just beginning to grasp this; and their programmers are studying usability by children.The problem is, search engines were basically always designed for the adult mind; while they could have seen it coming, the engineers just always assumed from the start that the Internet was for serious pursuits such as research, and that frame of mind has persisted. Children for instance, do not read as effortlessly as adults do. Search engines aimed at children could conceivably make better use of pictures or videos. Children could even use an automated help system with pre-recorded content when they come up against a wall. Google is today considering designing a search engine just for children; and they have a deeper reason to do this then just being nice. They consider it possible that children would just have the same problems that adults have, only amplified. By studying the way children work on Google, adult weaknesses could become easier to notice. Studying children can provide deeper insights into the exact ways in which adults go wrong.
Google has had a Related Searches feature for about two years now. Looking up a phrase like ‘the jungle’on Google could give a child the regular results, but also possible related suggestions, like videos on YouTube, information on the various national parks in the US, and some information about species extinction in the Amazon. Children don’t type really well, and tend to look closely at the keyboard as they go along. The part of the screen closest to the keyboard, at the bottom, is therefore important screen real estate for the search engines. Bing has found a special niche with children. The search engine has especially leaned towards images far more than the others, and it attracts children.
Not to be outdone, Google has had the Wonder Wheel feature turned on for a few months now. You get to it when you press on ‘Show Options’ when you get your search results. A wheel pops up, with spokes pointing you in different desired directions. Search engines don’t understand what exactly you’re asking; they find it hard enough as it is to understand what words you want. Children seem to want to use natural language when dealing with searches. And search engines want to be able to make some sense of natural language questions. The most promising development here so far has to be the Voice Search feature available on the iPhone and Android smartphone operating system. Of course those were developed with business users in mind;children would think it was pretty cool too.
Looking Closely at User-Generated Content
Amazon is a website that is perennially at the top of Google’s rankings – for its popularity with customers of course; but as those in SEO know, Amazon’s pioneering efforts in allowing customers to rank its products, and write reviews, have given the site a boost in a way that only a constant stream of new content is known to be capable of doing. Amazon realizes that an active user community on its website helps newcomers trust the company more. In a recent move, they’ve started a program called Vine that helps reward the best contributors to its website, with free products.SEO is usually is all about paying attention to every last word that is published on your website: you have to be careful that the right keywords come up often enough, and so on. Using user generated content is a new kind of SEO though. You are supposed to exercise your SEO while you trust other people to do the right thing while you have only a moderate degree of control over it. You usually need to pay attention to areas like seeding the forum when user input thins out, and judging to see whether there are enough tags and other opportunities at interlinking the content generated. There is actually a software product that helps you analyze the user content on your forum; it is called Leximancer. It helps you analyze your user content to see how often your targeted keywords turn up, and analyze link ability in those keywords. You could easily check, for instance, how often a brand or product that you promote, comes to be associated with a positive or negative term. It also helps you gain some insight into the psychology of your visitor by analyzing the content for you.
Software like Leximancer also helps you moderate your forum by giving you some tools in text mining. On a very large forum with hundreds of pages of user generated content,you can easily zero in on hecklers, bullies and people who break your rules for, say, family-friendly content. With the way webmasters race for fresh avenues in obtaining free content, user generated content and software to manage it effectively,certainly deserves a close look.
Local Twitter Use with Google and Bing
First there was Bing with its localized content, then Twitter Local, the app ( designed on Adobe Air by the way) that helps you find out who in your immediate geographical neighborhood is online and tweeting, and now there are Bing and Google Maps (and the iPhone) offering to pinpoint tweets on a map for you, to locate where exactly in your neighborhood a tweet you are interested in emanates from. Using this kind of locating with Bing requires Bing Maps Beta and Microsoft Silverlight. Google Maps makes it much easier on you: you can just use an RSS feed of the tweet stream, that includes the geolocation. The way it is implemented is pretty amusing in itself. You are just supposed to open Google Maps, and paste into the search box the URL of any Twitter feed that you are interested in. Right away, you get a bunch of blue location balloons on the map. Click on any one of them, and you should get the tweet itself. Google Maps will even remember all your favorite twitter streams for the next time you open it.
The iPhone works just the same way; but Bing Maps, surprisingly, takes the lead in visual appeal, even compared to the iPhone. Next to Bing Maps, Google Maps clearly looks a decade old. The balloons contain little Twitter icons, and it displays tweeted pictures too. But Twitter is different on Bing (Bing calls that search engine Bing Twitter). What Bing calls a hot topic is not what Twitter calls one. Bing’s Beta version now allows Twitter results on the search page, and also a cloud of the most happening topics on Twitter, hot in Bing’s opinion, not Twitter. It may not seem like much if you don’t put stock in Twitter, but Bing’s Twitter search usually has a half minute lag to when tweets appear on Twitter. Microsoft ascribes this to the processing they have to do before they publish a search result: removing duplicates, flagging adult content, and so on. Things could improve – they are after all still in beta.
How Widespread is the Use of SEO among Established Websites?
Is it only the small struggling startup Internet company that desperately uses SEO? There are some who believe this: that established companies do not really need to use SEO. They do, because every reputable company has reputable competitors. Well, what better instance of respectability in a votary for SEO could one ask for then, than the august one of the BBC News site? The company estimates that a third of all visits to the website at BBC News comes from search engines, and it is finally choosing to turn to SEO The BBC plans SEO in this way: each article headline is to have twice as many words, to better help search engines locate it.
So how does a serious organization like BBC News do SEO? All news stories on the website from now on will carry two separate headlines. One of them will be the regular short variety, with about 30 letters in them. These short headlines will appear on the home page, the website index and will appear to cell phone visitors. The SEO one, which will be nearly twice as long, will hold more descriptive words and will be visible to search engines. In a world where most websites are visited via a search engine listing, or by way of Google News, or by Twitter recommendations, SEO has just become the way websites are created these days.
There is just one shortcoming to the use of SEO: the temptation to mangle even flow in an idea , just to bring in the search term as often as possible; or to get greedy, stuffing in important search words whether or not they belong in a sentence. As long as one doesn’t get too greedy, the BBC states, putting in a few extra keywords can only help in making a title more understandable.
Google Squared
Launched with a lot of hype in early 2009, Google Squared, Google’s semantic search engine, failed to live up to expectations, often returning rather nonsensical results and unleashing a volley of criticism. The true power of Google Squared, which is still in Beta, lies in its ability to perform a grid search, i.e., in being able to gather and display structured data, turning the random information found on the Internet into computable data. Google Squared is very much a work in progress and Google recently announced updates to its Google Squared service that should hopefully make it more usable.The updates include the facility of exporting the data to Google Spreadsheets, from where it can be sliced and diced to mine information. The columns have been made sortable and the default number of facts per search has been increased from 30 to 120. Squared now has the ability to learn from the modifications and corrections made by users. It seems also that Google Square has become more selective and the quality of the data has improved.
There are other companies working on the semantic web, a key one being Wolfram, the publishers of Mathematica. Wolfram’s Wolfram Alpha is a semantic search engine (Wolfram call it a computational knowledge engine) focused on scientific and mathematical applications. Alpha’s approach is to build its own database of information from what is available on the Internet and then run the queries on the database. Google Square on the other hand deals with all the data available on the Web and tries to extract meaningful information directly from it.
Both are very different approaches targeted at very different audiences. Wolfram’s approach works best for a specialized user base that is looking for reliable and vetted results in specific areas such as astronomy or physics, etc. Google Squared is aimed at the common users of the Web who are try to extract meaningful information from the reams of data available on the Net. For example, a user who wants information about dog breeds will get a table that sorts the results in different columns by breed, images, description, size, weight, etc. The semantic web is the new frontier for cutting edge search technologies and search as we know it may be rendered extinct soon by these emerging search paradigms.
Google Commerce Search – Another Indispensable Google Innovation?
Google has a new search product out; and it is here just in time for the holiday shopping season this year. The problem that the product has set out to solve is the lack of an effective search technology that is customized to retail and business. Google certainly offers a generalized search function to any website that cares for it and pays to have a Google-powered search-box on its website. But this new product, and it’s called “Google commerce search,” is specifically built to help with retail.What does it mean though to call something “customized search”? To begin with, Google Commerce Search will allow customers to search by parameters that are specific to a retail context. The ranking of the search results that arrive this way will be done to best suit customers looking to locate a product just as they would at a store, with a salesman’s help. Spelling alternatives will be considered with better sensitivity and business owners can do things like place product promotions at the top of the rankings, no matter what.
They call this, Product-specific Search; Yahoo Music has rolled out such a product too to help visitors to its music site, in searching for and exploring music; the new Yahoo Music website is special in the way it interprets the searches visitors perform. Perhaps this is the next step up from Mozilla’s advance a few years ago giving people browser tabs to use in place of separate browser windows – to help people keep their Internet exploring focused and manageable. In Yahoo Music search, when you search for a musician, say Robbie Williams, the original search stays, and a pane on the left shows choices of his most popular videos and songs.
Retailers who pick Google Commerce Search can call in on other business-oriented Google products like Google Product Search and Google Analytics too to help collect statistics how their visitors like to search while on their visits. How much would it cost for a company to order Google Commerce Search integration in their websites? The word on the street is that Google charges about $50,000 for a yearly subscription to its services. For that kind of price, most small retailers should feel locked out; but Google would perhaps do well to take another look at its familiar and stark search results presentation style. Retailers are all about visual appeal; Google’s no-nonsense approach in a sparse format could work for faster search; but what would it do for the retailers who cannot do without visual appeal?
Twitter and FaceBook Search: The Latest Move in the Google vs. Bing Match?
It used to be that you would expect to have an e-mail account or three, you would receive a few messages everyday from work or from your friends, you would sniff when you saw the Spam folder say “100 New Messages”, every week, and you would consider your e-mail existence pretty fulfilling. On the other hand, there is life on the Twitter and Facebook plane that sees your Inbox full with wonderful emptiness every 15 minutes. The social media craze has not gone unnoticed as a potential area to capitalize on, in the search engine war between Bing and Google.Microsoft’s tested the waters first in this area; there is now a special Twitter search option on Bing. When you search with this service, the results page shows a pretty hysterical cloud of tags of hot Twitter topics, along with a swarm of relevant shared links to them. You can even search among the search results you get.
Google won’t be left behind of course, having put down arrangements with Twitter. It says it plans to show Twitter search results among its regular search results; this innovation could be a few weeks coming though. But there’s not nothing quite like The Google Social Search feature that Google has planned; you could probably guess that it’s a Google Labs project yet again.
Google’s Social Search is for Google account holders only; when an account holder performs a regular search, Google looks up everything that your Twitter pals may have put up on the subject you searched for and gives you that information too. Now this is not exactly an all-new feature the way you might imagine, seeing it appear on Google’s Labs. Search websites like Crowdeye have been letting you search for Twitter results for quite a while now. It’s just that having the major search engines do it helps you do all your searching in one place. Will great new startups like Crowdeye be crowded out of the market they helped create, by the majors? Only time will tell.
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