Search Engine Update

Chris Sherman - search engine land


The guardian of the status quo: Google
New link "Show options": takes you to advanced search capabilities
Creating graphs with public data
Google Labs: what they are experimenting with
Flip: news
City tours: landmarks, create tourist walks
Google squared: structure unstructured data (a hint of where Google is trying to go)
Google trends: real-time snapshot of what people are searching, charts change in activity
Insights for Search: designed for search markerters (similar to trends)
Visualization API: another future looking feature, look at how data changes over time
Flu Trends: based on search queries only
(interesting- but not earth shattering- have lost there momemtum in leading org for search)


Emperor's New Clothes: Yahoo
Microsoft does all the heavy search lifting- the base result list
Yahoo will do all the rest- focus on browsing consumers


Assimilator as Innovator: Microsoft- Bing
Aquiring search technologies and integrated it into their own
Cool features: website previews, dynamic categorizing of results- ex. "reference" which goes to Wikipedia and gives every instance of the topic which would be helpful and integrates it.


The Shiny New Disrupter: Wolfram Alpha
"A Computational Knowledge Engine" using curated data sets
Ask it a question
Has really deep resources- iphone app is $50. Really sophisticated calculator.
Have the staying power to stay around and compete.


Social Media is a fad- no lasting value as a search medium for information professionals
Twitter is not a search engine- only uses your social network. Great for customer service, PR
Facebook is great for connecting individuals but problemanic for large organizations


Local search on mobiles are still not sophisticated enough to be worthwhile.
Last week deals where made with Facebook and Twitter to capture and use data: datastream from Twitter can provide more weight to news items.
Twitter searches are garbage.