Tag archives for Google Search

  1. Really, FairSearch?

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    Apparently, there is a new kid on the block – FairSearch.org. Here is a quote from their About page:

    FairSearch.org is a group of businesses and organizations united to promote economic growth, innovation and choice across the Internet ecosystem by fostering and defending competition in online and mobile search. We believe in enforcement of existing laws to prevent anticompetitive behavior that harms consumers.

    Further down on the same page is the list of companies involved.  Among them, some of those that should not even be allowed to use the word ‘fair’: Microsoft, Oracle, Nokia.

    So, this bunch of clowns (my apologies to the clowns) tried and failed to control the web search and the mobile markets, and now they are trying to bring Google down by joining their forces and attempting a government campaign.  Pathetic!  Here is what they write to the EU:

    Google’s Android is the dominant smartphone operating system, running in 70% of units shipped at the end of 2012, according to Strategy Analytics. Google also dominates mobile search advertising with 96% of the market, according to eMarketer. The complaint says Google uses deceptive conduct to lockout competition in mobile.

    “Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to deceive partners, monopolize the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data,” said Thomas Vinje, Brussels-based counsel to the FairSearch coalition. “We are asking the Commission to move quickly and decisively to protect competition and innovation in this critical market. Failure to act will only embolden Google to repeat its desktop abuses of dominance as consumers increasingly turn to a mobile platform dominated by Google’s Android operating system.”

    FairSearch is an international coalition of 17 specialized search and technology companies whose members include Expedia, Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, and TripAdvisor.

    Google achieved its dominance in the smartphone operating system market by giving Android to device-makers for ‘free.’ But in reality, Android phone makers who want to include must-have Google apps such as Maps, YouTube or Play are required to pre-load an entire suite of Google mobile services and to give them prominent default placement on the phone, the complaint says. This disadvantages other providers, and puts Google’s Android in control of consumer data on a majority of smartphones shipped today.

    What a load of bollocks!  Google Android devices aren’t all built by Google.  In fact, the majority of Android devices are shipped by other companies.  Are all of them producing below the cost?  Of course not.  That would just be stupid.   Secondly, Android is very much based on the Open Source Software, Linux and such.  I’m guessing that’s one of the main reasons it grows so fast and is cheaper to make.  Microsoft, Nokia, and Oracle are well-known foes of Open Source.  But guess what, it’s not up to them anymore.  People vote with the wallet.  The choice is here, and people can finally buy the devices that they like, not the ones that are being shoved down their throats.

    And as far the as the web search goes, that’s even more pathetic of a subject than mobile.   Just build a better search engine and people will switch over.  It takes nothing, absolutely NOTHING, to use a different search engine. But the truth is, Google is by far superior search engine to Microsoft’s Bing or anything else that popped up recently.  Result manipulation my a$$.  If people who use the search engine will lose trust in the results, they’ll just leave.  But as long as it works, who cares really?

  3. Goodluck Jonathan

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    For years Google has been working hard to bring relevant information to the user faster and faster.  One of the many features they’ve implemented was a quick look-up of a country’s president.  Just search for “russia president” or “chine president” and you’ll get name right there, on the first page of the results.  While playing around with this feature, I realized that I had no idea what’s the name of the Nigerian president is, even though I’ve heard plenty about that country.  Apparently, the Nigerian president‘s name is Goodluck Jonathan.

  5. Microsoft catching up with Google

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    Way too often do I hear from the Microsoft fans that the company is catching up with Google.  Each and every time I disagreed, but in the heat of the discussion it’s not always easy to find supporting facts.  Yeah, I know, I should come ready for such arguments, but I really take them when and where they find me.

    Anyways, Google Android and Microsoft Mobile is only one side of a discussion.  Advertising is the other.  And search is yet another one.  Well, I’ve heard the numbers before, but never bothered blogging them.  This time I will.  Slashdot links to a CNN Money article, which tells a really sad story.

    Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) has lost $5.5 billion on Bing since the search service launched in June 2009, but the company’s search losses actually pre-date that. In fact, the software giant has never made money in its online services division. Since Microsoft began breaking out that unit’s finances in 2007, the company has lost a total of $9 billion.

    There is even a little visual aid in case you prefer your trends simplified.  It doesn’t look good, and it will never will.  And the secret is very simple.  Microsoft is not an online company.  It never was and it is too large to change.  If it will ever change, it will be as different from what it is now as IBM is different from the company it used to be in the last century.

     

  6. Searching for Larry King

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    The other day I was having an argument about interviewers.  Of course, I had to mention Larry King, who’s name escaped me at the time.  For some reason, my tired brain was suggesting Stephen King, who is obviously a totally other person.  Google will tell you everything there is to know about a man, if you give it a name.  But how do you search for a person’s name when you don’t remember it?  Gladly, Larry King was easy to find.  A search for “interviewer glasses suspenders” answered my question in seconds.

  7. Content authorship is a new cool

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    Here is a quote directly from Google’s Inside Search blog:

    We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.

    If you run a website with authored content, you’ll want to learn about authorship markup in our help center. The markup uses existing standards such as HTML5 (rel=”author”) and XFN (rel=”me”) to enable search engines and other web services to identify works by the same author across the web. If you’re already doing structured data markup using microdata from schema.org, we’ll interpret that authorship information as well.

    [...]

    We know that great content comes from great authors, and we’re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.

    In simple terms, this means that you should make sure that all your content – no matter where it is published – identifies you as an author.  This will help link all your content together, create your author profile, and use that as yet another criteria in ranking and searching.  Those of you publishing with WordPress shouldn’t worry at all – adding authorship is either already done or will take a minor modification to the theme. WordPress provided both author pages and XFN markup out of the box for years.

  8. Recommendation engine that finally makes sense – Google +1

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    I’ve heard plenty of rumors about an upcoming Google social network.  I have no idea if they are true, and really I don’t care.  I have enough social networks as it is.  But what I haven’t heard about until now is Google +1 – a new recommendation engine that Google is trying out.

    At first, when I read about Google +1 and that it was yet another attempt for recommendation engine for Google search results, I didn’t think it was interesting at all.  There were a number of tries in that area – some of them long gone, some still alive.  I’m talking about results reordering via drag-and-drop, starring of result items, and others.

    All of them shared the same problem – promoting items from within search results doesn’t work very well, because the user hasn’t yet visited the page itself.  He’s eager to navigate away from the results.  And on top of that, page title, description, and a thumbnail aren’t always enough to make a judgement.

    On the other hand, recommendation engines are doing pretty well with social networks like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and others.  Every other page on the web has a share button that supports one or more social networks.  And people use those.  Even though sharing pages on Facebook and Twitter might be useful, it isn’t as useful as increasing the karma of those pages in order to rank them higher in your future search results.

    That’s where Google +1 comes in.  It makes perfect sense.  Now you can search Google, visit the results, and +1 those of them that you liked (and, of course, those of them that support the Google +1 sharing).  Not only it would be trivial to push those +1 to other social networks, but also now users have way more stimuli to share things, since that would improve their own search results.

    Google +1 is yet available to everyone. Google will take some time to roll it out.  But if you want to try it out now, you can enable it on experimental page.

  9. Custom background for Google search

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    The Next Web points out:

    Starting this afternoon, and rolling out over the next few days Google is releasing the ability around the US and the world to upload a custom image as the background of your Google.com.

    Obviously, there will be a lot of noise about it around the web.  I though have no idea why that is such a big thing.  I rarely ever see the front page of Google at all.  I always enter my search terms into the search or address bar of my browser and it takes me directly to the results page.