Google Search

Microsoft catching up with Google

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.

Searching for Larry King

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.

Content authorship is a new cool

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.

Recommendation engine that finally makes sense – Google +1

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.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAyUNI3_V2c]

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.

Custom background for Google search

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.