Aardvark Acquired By Google
TechCrunch reports Google has acquired Aardvark, a help engine, for $50 million.
Aardvark allows you to ask questions, which then pushed the question out to a network of people who may be able to answer them. The answers are then sent back to you via instant message, email or even Twitter.
Aardvark was created [...]
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Goojje, A Google China Knockoff
The Chosun Ilbo reports a new Google China has launched, a knockoff, named Goojje.com. It was made in response to Google saying they may have to shut down their Google.cn search engine a few weeks back.
It is a basic search engine, not affiliated with Google in anyway. It does however play on the [...]
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Twitter’s New Year Resolutions: 1 Billion Searches a Day & an IPO?
Reading Biz Stone’s op-ed in the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper almost had me snoozing. Not that Biz is boring–he’s actually quite fascinating–but the article was just a recap of stuff we already knew. Then I saw these closing statements:
..It can be these things but primarily Twitter serves as a real-time information network powered by people around the world discovering what’s happening and sharing the news…In the new year, Twitter will begin supporting a billion search queries a day. We will be delivering several billion tweets per hour to users around the world…
(Emphasis added)
Er, did he just say billion? With a "b"?
Does Google know about this? You don’t need to answer that, I know it knows. But seriously, Twitter’s serving 1 billion search queries a day–and it’s not even a search engine? No wonder Google and Bing rushed to sign partnership deals with the micro-blogging site. No wonder neither of them could find the right price to acquire the company!
According to recent estimates, Google is handling around 300,000 to 500,000 million searches a day–about half of what Biz boasts Twitter is seeing. And, let’s not forget, Google IS a search engine.
I can’t make up my mind the exact reason Biz slipped that into the piece. I’ve narrowed it down to two reasons.
One: Twitter just wanted to fire a warning shot across the bow of traditional search engines. Put them on notice, if you will.
Two: We’ll see a Twitter IPO in the next 12-18 months. Twitter has far more users than Google had when it went public. If it can reveal revenues anywhere close to $100 million a year, then I think investors will be tripping over themselves to buy in.
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Google Offers Newspapers the First 5 Clicks Free to Keep AdSense Scrapers Alive
For this post, I need two volunteers!
Let’s take this announcement from Google:
…we’ve decided to allow publishers to limit the number of accesses under the First Click Free policy to five free accesses per user each day. This change applies to both Google News publishers as well as websites indexed in Google’s Web Search. We hope that this encourages even more publishers to open up more content to users around the world!
And yes, you sir. The Financial Times report on how much news scraping exists on the web:
The study of 101,000 articles published by 157 newspapers found that more than 75,000 sites reused 112,000 almost exact copies without authorisation, and a further 520,000 articles in part…The study found Google accounted for 53 per cent of the advertising being run alongside unlicensed stories…
I will now combine these two articles into an incredible–or incredulous–observation. 
Is it pure coincidence that on the day News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch was in Washington telling the FTC about the need to reform "fair use" laws to prevent the "theft" of its content, Attributor pulls out some heavy numbers in support and Google decides to bend a little?
I think not!
Forget the fact that Bing is rumored to be courting the newspaper industry to dump Google, the search engine plans to lose a significant slice of revenue, if the publishing industry faces any kind of mass reform. Think about it, Google offers to change the "First Click Free" terms in order to save the AdSense revenue it makes from bloggers, and the more nefarious scrapers.
It’s a small sacrifice, right?
You’ve heard of the expression "an irresistible force meets an immovable object," right? News Corp. is about to meet Google head-on!
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Google Testing Permanent Sidebar
Search Engine Land talks to Marissa Mayer about Google testing a new search interface among a select few users. The new interface uses a left-hand pane to display search options—but instead of being off by default, with a link to turn on the pane, the new search options will be on permanently, and Google will lose the top blue bar over its results.
Other options, including results from other Google properties (Images, News, Maps, Books) will join the left-hand panel. Search Engine Land has screenshots of the news options test:
Meanwhile, as a refresher, here’s the present Search Options (first tested a year ago, added to the SERP in May):
In the new screenshot, sitelinks are also homogenized—rather than appearing inconsistently (at any position, indented or on a single line, or possibly not at all), they appear in this test on the first two results as a single line.
So the new layout is pretty cool—it standardizes many things that weren’t, it puts many popular options all together, and it predicts what category of results you want (images, video, etc., though that may or not work out for you). But is it just me (no, because Matt McGee said this, too) or does this look a little familiar?
Mayer suggests that not only is a three-column layout becoming a default in search engine results pages, but it’s also a “universal truth.” (Kind of like using the magical 28 words on the home page?)
In other news: Mayer says the fading homepage has slowed users down.
Google Custom Search Mobile For iPhone, Android & Palm Pre
The Google Custom Search Blog announced the release of a mobile friendly Google Custom Search engine interface support for devices such as the iPhone, iPod Touch, Android and Palm Pre.
Google will now automatically detect the device you are using to access the Google Custom Search Engine and serve up a mobile friendly version, [...]
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Google Analytics New Features: Intelligence Engine, Custom Alerts & More
Google has just announced a number of new features for Google Analytics, including more powerful reporting capabilities, greater customization options and a new “intelligence engine” that Google says can help search marketers drive smarter data insights. Here’s a rundown of the new features, and why they’re important.
Analytics intelligence
Google Analytics new “intelligence engine” comes with default [...]
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StumbleUpon: Now We’re Social Search, Like Google + Twitter
Remember StumbleUpon, the recommendation engine that lets you surf the web for random sites—but mostly sites that other people liked in your areas of interest? (If you haven’t tried it, it’s pretty fun). Well, since they bought themselves back from eBay in April, they’re changing things up. According to TechCrunch, StumbleUpon is revamping itself as a service “between Google and Twitter” with its new search features.
With 8 million users Stumbling, StumbleUpon has amassed 35 million pages that at least one person likes. Now they’ve indexed these pages so you can search recommended pages. In a sense, it is a bit like Google and Twitter—recommendations from your friends get a boost in the rankings, while you still get to search millions of pages for relevant results.
If this catches on, this could constitute the first real, meaningful steps toward social search. They already have a decent user base, so if they can get that base accustomed to the new features (and add more users, of course), they could dominate the fledgling social search arena.
Using an established social site that’s already cornering the market on social discovery to premiere social search might just be the stroke of genius social search is waiting for. However, ultimately, social search will most likely constitute a narrow niche. (You might want your friends’ recommendations for, say, muffin recipes, but they might not be so helpful in finding the population of Bora Bora.)
Although you don’t have to have one to stumble, StumbleUpon isn’t abandoning their toolbar, either. A new version will release this week, with new features. Their recently-launched URL shortener, su.pr, will integrate with the toolbar for sharing links on Twitter and Facebook through the bar.
They’re also getting a new homepage, which highlights your friends’ most popular recent stumbles:
Of course, StumbleUpon is still going to let you randomly surf the web (I think . . . ) and thumb up new pages to add to their index.
What do you think? Will this be the first steps in social search? Or will it never catch on?
Google Sitelinks Now In Snippets
The iCrossing blog noticed Google is trying displaying anchor based links directly in the Google search engine snippets (site descriptions). For example, a search for [pension contributions] returns a Wikipedia result with a link directly in the snippet. Here is a picture:
Google recently added anchor based Sitelinks, so this seems to be some [...]
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Google Still No. 1 Search Engine On Earth; Search Activity Way Up, comScore Says
Search activity around the world jumped 41 percent between July 2008 and July 2009, and Google remains the most popular search engine with 67.5% global market share. Those are some of the stats that comScore shared today about the global search market.
According to comScore, Google is not only No. 1 around the world, but it [...]
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