Google Powered Nearly 7...

According to comScore's latest qSearch analysis of the U.S. search engine market, Google powered nearly 70 percent of all organic searches in April, leaving Bing with about 26 percent of organic searches.

Google Just Got A Whole...

Today, Google is launching  one of its most ambitious and interesting updates to its search engine in recent months. Starting in a few days, you will start to see large panels with additional factual information about the topic you were searching for take over the right side of Google’s search result pages. The panels are powered by what Google calls its new “Knowledge Graph” and they will serve two different functions. Google will use this space to show you a summary of relevant information about your queries (think biographical data about celebrities and historical figures, tour dates for artists, information about books, works of art, buildings, animals etc.) as well as a list of related topics. In addition, Google will now allow you to clarify what exactly you are looking for and will use these boxes for disambiguation. Thanks to this, you will soon be able to tell Google you were looking for the L.A. Kings ice hockey team and not the Sacramento Kings when you searched for ‘kings.’ The company has actually been working on the semantic technology that drives this knowledge graph for quite a few years. This specific project, Google told me earlier this week, has been in the works for about the last two years. During this time, the company has been working hard on creating the vast database of structured knowledge that powers the features it is launching today (though Google’s acquisition of Freebase . Today, the knowledge graph database currently holds information about 500 million people, places and things. More importantly, though, it also indexes over 3.5 billion defining attributes and connections between these items. “Strings to Things” As Google Fellow Ben Gomes told me yesterday, the company really wants to move beyond just understanding the characters you are typing into its search engine to getting a better understanding of what it is you are really looking for (“strings to thing” is what Gomes likes to call it). To do this, Google is using both its own and other freely available sources like Wikipedia, the World CIA Factbook, its own Freebase product, Google Books, online event listings and other data it crawls, but it is also using some commercial datasets (though Google wouldn’t reveal which companies specifically it is working with here). Here is what this will look like in practice. Google is currently pretty good at understanding general search queries, but some terms are just too ambiguous. When you search for ‘andromeda,’ for example, it just can’t know if you are searching for the TV series, galaxy, or this Swedish progressive metal band . Now, whenever you type in one of these queries, Google will show you a box on the right side of the screen that lets you tell it which one of these topics you were really looking for. Once you pick the topic, the search result page will reload and show you the results related to what you were really looking for. So if you were looking for the TV show Kings, the search result page will show you images related to the show, the right Wikipedia entry and links to episodes that are available for online streaming. If you were looking for the Sacramento Kings, though, you will get the latest box scores and other information related to the basketball team. That’s only one part of what the Knowledge Graph now allows Google to do. The second part involves Google’s new automatically created topic summaries that will appear when you look for a topic that’s well defined by the Knowledge Graph. Say you search for the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, for example. Instead of having to click through to Wikipedia to find out when he was born, you will now see his biographical data right there on the search result page. As Gomes told me, Google, of course, knows what kind of facts around a certain person, place or event people usually search for, so it these summaries will also highlight these topics. According to Gomes, you will see these summaries about as often as you currently see Google Maps in your search results. To put this into perspective (and sadly we couldn’t get Google to give us more concrete numbers), this launch is significantly bigger than the entire launch of Universal Search combined – and that was one of the company’s largest launches in this field. What makes these summaries even more interesting, though, is the fact that they also highlight other relevant information. For Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, the summary will give you links to some of his most famous projects, as well as a short list of related people Google’s users tend to search for. Click on these, and you will get to their respective summaries. Inside the summaries, Google will also highlight other entries that you can use to dig deeper (family members, band members, albums, schools, a TV show’s director etc.). This, says Google, will allow you to search more naturally across a topic. Google is aggregating this data from a large variety of sources. It will typically feature a short summary from Wikipedia or a similar service at the top of the summary and specifically link to the source. For the rest of the data, though, it will often just draw upon its own Knowledge Graph database and not specifically link to where it found a person’s birth date, for example. In case Google gets something wrong, by the way, you can report errors with just a few clicks. Looking Ahead Google, of course, has been adding bits and pieces of semantic search smarts to its search engine over the last few years (and so has Microsoft after its acquisition of Powerset). With Google Squared , one of its recently shelved experiments, it also once launched a pretty ambitious project to understand information on the web and then display it in a table (some of this technology likely lives on in the Knowledge Graph now). Today’s launch, however, represents Google’s most ambitious move in this direction. As Gomes as told me, now that Google’s algorithms have access to this structured data and can understand it better, the next step will be to understand more complex questions like “Where can I attend a Lady Gaga concert in warm outdoor weather?” For now, though, it is worth noting that this update isn’t about natural language processing and answering questions so much as about displaying relevant data in It’ll be interesting to see how this new feature will influence how people search and what links they click on. I wouldn’t be surprised if this had quite a negative influence on traffic to Wikipedia, for example. At the same time, though, the disambiguation feature may just help drive more relevant traffic to the sites Google links to as well.

Bing Exposes Its New, S...

Last week, Bing began the initial phase of rolling out a major redesign , in fact the “most significant” redesign in its three-year history. Today, the wait is over. This afternoon, Bing officially turned on its new design , and has made it available for everyone in the U.S. You can check it out here . The new Bing is now integrates search and people in our social networks through a dedicated social “sidebar.” With sidebar, Bing brings together the best of the web, with what experts and your friends know, giving you the confidence to act. This new way to search lets you share, discover, and interact with friends like you do in real life. If you’re on the go, you’ll notice we’ve optimized the layout and placement of the social results on the mobile device for smaller screen sizes and for touch input, so the user experience will be different than what people see on a PC. The new design is Bing’s answer to the problem of “Search Overload,” something many are familiar with — the feeling of being overwhelmed by the bramble of links, maps, tools, and options that prevail in today’s search model. And, really, it’s a response to the public disapproval over Google integrating social into its search results. Obviously, Google has retained its iron grip on search for some time, but, with its redesign Bing is positioning itself an unbiased, pure alternative. In this vein, Bing is taking steps to offer a cleaner, pared down experience, in an effort to clean up its search results . As Josh noted at the time , the redesign essentially divides its search results into three groups: Simple, text-based, algorithmic results placed front and center; maps, reviews, and input fields are placed on the right side; and social context from friends and one’s social network in a panel on the far right. As Bing said in its blog post today, this dedicated social sidebar is a response to Google search’s G+ integration, serving actionable information from friends and experts. Bing now suggests friends on Facebook that might be relevant to your search — based on what they “like,” their Facebook profile information, and the photos they’ve shared. This will work in varying degrees of effectiveness, meaning that the “right” friends may not always show up, because the search engine is using public Facebook information along with the content you’ve given it permission to access. According to its blog post, it “won’t match friends based on other Facebook content, such as status updates or check-ins,” in an effort to respect privacy settings. Which means that you won’t see information from friends who have opted out of Facebook instant personalization or that have blocked the Bing app. For those who do choose to opt-in to Bing’s Instant Personalization partnership with Facebook, you will be able to see if friends have “liked” search results. But, an important qualification of this feature is that those “likes” do not alter search rankings, nor do they add to the clutter of results with social identifiers, names, and faces. Instead, you’ll just see that thumbs up icon adjacent to Bing’s algorithmic, center pane, with the ability to hover over the icon to see who liked those results. Furthermore, its intermediate section, the one that lies between algorithmic results and social, shows stuff like maps, product reviews, restaurant ratings, and allows users to book flights. Bing has struck a number of partnerships with startups like OpenTable and FanSnap to make booking tables and finding tickets easier. Bing now has a whole lot more social functionality, but the key is that its social integration doesn’t get in the way, the goal being, in Bing’s words, to create a new way to search that “lets you share, discover, and interact with friends like you do in real life.” If Bing is going to be a “decision engine,” as its mission statement declares, boosting its results with the right amount of social influence and direction is paramount. To address this, Bing’s new social pane includes an “Ask Friends” field, which allows searchers to enlist the service of their friends. Bing posts your submitted questions to your Facebook wall, whereupon you’ll get a notification if a friend swoops in to the rescue, and guides you to the best nightspot for margaritas, or the best hotels to check out when in Los Angeles. You can also go further, requesting help from “Friends Who Might Know” — those who’ve “liked” your search results, but aren’t in your friend list. Bing has taken some major steps forward to get itself back in the ring with Google, but it’s still got a lot of ground to make up. Don’t be surprised if you find a massive Bing marketing campaign show up on taxis, TVs, and billboards near you. For more, give the new Bing a try here . Sorry international Bingers, it looks like you’ll have to wait a bit longer.

Honestly.com Becomes A ...

Honestly.com, a startup that allowed professionals to submit anonymous reviews of their coworkers, has been pretty quiet for the past couple of years. Turns out that’s because the company has been busy reinventing itself. Today it’s unveiling a new product and a new name — TalentBin . Co-founder Peter Kazanjy says TalentBin addresses one of the big problems with Honestly, namely the lack of content. Rather than relying on users to create all the reviews, TalentBin looks at the content that already exists on the Web — specifically, people’s activity on a variety of social networking sites. Kazanjy calls that activity your “professional exhaust,” and argues that it contains lots of relevant information about your professional interests and accomplishments. So TalentBin aggregates a person’s activity across sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Meetup, Quora, Github, Sourceforge, and Bitbucket, then uses that data to create a searchable profile for recruiters. Comparing the product to LinkedIn’s recruiting tools, Kazanjy says, “we’re kind of like that for the rest of the Web.” In other words, recruiters can use TalentBin to take their search beyond LinkedIn, finding new candidates and new information about existing candidates. For example, Kazanjy says he conducted a search for Ruby on Rails in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he found 4,500 matching profiles on LinkedIn, 156 profiles on BranchOut, and 22,000 profiles on TalentBin. He also argues a TalentBin profile can be much richer than what you’d find on LinkedIn or a traditional resume. A profile might just say that someone was an engineer at Company X and then at Company Y, with no additional detail, but TalentBin might show that they’re constantly tweeting and posting on Quora about Ruby and therefore rank them highly in a search for Ruby engineers. And since recruiters theoretically get a better sense of your real interests and passions, that may mean you’re more likely to get approached about jobs that you actually find exciting. For now, TalentBin is focused on technical talent, but Kazanjy says it could expand into other fields where this data is relevant, which he predicts is “any knowledge worker.”  It’s also entirely recruiter-facing for now, meaning that only recruiters see the profiles, but Kazanjy says it might add features that allow people to see and correct their profiles in the future. ( Coderwall is also trying to create an aggregated profile and reputation system for programmers , but rather its model is inverted, starting out as a site for coders then maybe eventually moving into recruiting, and the name, at least, implies that it’s pretty focused on programmers.) Recruiters can access TalentBin via the website, or as a plugin to Human Resources Information Systems, Recruiting CRM programs, or Applicant Tracking Systems. This is actually the company’s second rebranding, because back in 2010 it  changed its name from Unvarnished (at the same time it announced $1.2 million in funding from First Round Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Charles River Ventures, and others). Hopefully this will be the last. Kazanjy says early signs are positive — even though today is the official relaunch, TalentBin has been in private beta testing for months, and already has 60-plus corporate customers including Intuit, Groupon, and Yahoo.

Consumers Say No to a F...

Facebook is many things to many people but there are two areas they can’t seem to get right, e-commerce and search. Now, e-commerce is a complicated thing, but search shouldn’t be. Surely Facebook has the brainpower and talent in their pocket to create the world’s greatest search engine, but if they did, would it matter? Greenlight set out to discover the answer through their “Search & Social Survey (2011-2012).” Before we see the answer, you should know that they only surveyed 500 people. I’m not sure that’s enough to get a true picture, but it certainly is enough to get an indication of the way a group is moving. When asked if they would use a Facebook search engine (meaning a full search like Google’s, not just an internal engine), 48% said “No” or “Probably Not.” That means that the most Facebook could hope to capture would be 22% of searchers if they gobbled up all the “Definitelys,” “Probablys,” and half the “Don’t Knows.” That’s not so good, is it? As for Google search, we already know of its awesome power but the Greenlight survey found that 23% of searchers have been clicking the Google+ button in the search results. That’s a data bonanza for Google.  One thing, though, 28% of those surveyed said they didn’t know what +1 meant. Greenlight’s Andreas Pouros comes to this conclusion: “Brands and e-retailers need to be encouraging +1′s in Google, as it isn’t something that might be important in the future – it already is! It affects natural search rankings and will have an increasing impact over time across every Google product they utilise – AdWords, price comparison, Shopping, YouTube, etc., and Facebook could be a major search engine overnight. As such a brand’s performance on Facebook today (likes, visits, etc.) will likely have a decisive impact on how well exposed it is on that new search engine.” In other words, don’t count Facebook or Google+ out just yet. If you’re really into search, Greenlight has a nifty, free magazine you can download. This month they’re talking about foreign language searches and Facebook advertising. It’s a good read. Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community