“Replicating the Web: Will Google Dominate Mobile Search?”…02.23.09

 Michael Boland, of Search Engine Watch, in his posting Replicating the Web: Will Google Dominate Mobile Search? speculates:

“Google announced last week that it will offer a search box to mobile Web publishers to plant on their sites and share revenue from search results.

This is an extension of its existing AdSense for Mobile program, and is no surprise. Google is following the same path it did online many years ago: Partnering with publishers to share ad inventory and planting its search box all over the place…

Stepping back, we’re seeing mobile search providers stake claims that will soon become a much more substantial mobile Web. The name of the game will be landing publisher and carrier deals: For the latter, Microsoft recently became the search provider for Verizon; and Yahoo has a longstanding mobile deal (extension of its online deal) with AT&T for on-deck search applications.

But Google seems to be placing its bet on off-deck searches, which are growing as the mobile Web becomes more like the online Web…

Google is looking at a growth medium in mobile. The mobile Web holds more than 50 million users in the U.S. (about 25 percent of the number of online users), a figure The Kelsey Group expects will nearly double over the next five years…

Mobile behavior is quickly evolving, so it’s hard to say what standards will emerge. But if trends continue, Google could be positioned well with AdSense for mobile.

Generally speaking, it could be positioned well for search overall. As the mobile Web becomes more like the online Web, online search behavior could carry over to the mobile environment — a good thing for Google and its 63.5 percent market share.

It’s already starting to happen. Google’s 63 percent share of mobile search queries is eerily close to this online share. Now that it’s effectively positioned an early lead in the next big growth medium, we can expect many more years of Google dominance (if there was ever a doubt).”

Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC. 2009 All rights reserved.

Google Eye-Tracking Studies…02.08.09

Here is an excerpt from the Official Google Blog post Eye-tracking studies: more than meets the eye on their very interesting eye tracking studies using their universal search but read the whole posting:

“…To see what the eye-tracking data we collect looks like, let’s go back to the results page we got for the query [how to tie a tie]. The following video clip shows in real time how a participant in our study scanned the page. And yes, seriously — the video is in real time! That’s how fast the eyes move when scanning a page. The larger the dot gets, the longer the users’ eye pauses looking at that specific location.

Based on eye-tracking studies, we know that people tend to scan the search results in order. They start from the first result and continue down the list until they find a result they consider helpful and click it — or until they decide to refine their query. The heatmap below shows the activity of 34 usability study participants scanning a typical Google results page. The darker the pattern, the more time they spent looking at that part of the page. This pattern suggests that the order in which Google returned the results was successful; most users found what they were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page.

When designing the user interface for Universal Search, the team wanted to incorporate thumbnail images to better represent certain kinds of results. For example, in the [how to tie a tie] example above, we have added thumbnails for Image and Video results. However, we were concerned that the thumbnail images might be distracting and disrupt the well-established order of result evaluation.

We ran a series of eye-tracking studies where we compared how users scan the search results pages with and without thumbnail images. Our studies showed that the thumbnails did not strongly affect the order of scanning the results and seemed to make it easier for the participants to find the result they wanted.

The thumbnail image seemed to make results with thumbnails easy to notice when the users wanted them (see screenshots below — page with the thumbnail image on the right)…

 

Click the images to  view them larger.

…and the thumbnails also seemed to make it easy for people to skip over the results with thumbnails when those results were not relevant to their search (page with the thumbnail on the right). 

For the Universal Search team, this was a successful outcome. It showed that we had managed to design a subtle user interface that gives people helpful information without getting in the way of their primary task: finding relevant information…”

Google Zeros in on the “Deep Web”…02.03.09

Here is an excerpt from a LibGig post entitled Google Targeting Structured Data On “Deep Web“ :

During a talk at the New England Database Day conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Google’s Alon Halevy admitted that the search giant has ‘not been doing a good job’ presenting the structured data found on the web to its users. By ‘structured data,’ Halevy was referring to the databases of the ‘deep web’ – those internet resources that sit behind forms and site-specific search boxes, unable to be indexed through passive means.

Halevy should know – he heads the “Deep Web” search initiative at Google. This hidden web is currently being indexed in part by Google’s automated systems that submit queries to various databases, retrieving the content found for indexing. In addition to that aspect of the Deep Web – dubbed ‘vertical searching’ – Halevy also referenced two other types of Deep Web Search: semantic search and product search…

The question that remains is whether or not Google’s current search engine technology is going to be adept at doing all the different types of Deep Web indexing or if they will need to come up with something new…

The challenges facing Google today are also being addressed by their nearest competitor in search, Yahoo. In December, Yahoo announced that they were taking their SearchMonkey technology in-house to automate the extraction of structured information from large classes of web sites. The results of that in-house extraction technique will allow Yahoo to augment their Yahoo Search results with key information returned alongside the URLs.”

Google Ends Up With 90 Percent Of All U.S. Search Growth…01.29.09

Interesting results about Google search from Google Gobbled Up 90 Percent Of All U.S. Search Growth In 2008 on TechCrunch today:

“…The chart above tells a clearer story. It comes out of the comScore 2008 Digital Year In Review, and shows the share of raw number of search queries in the U.S captured by the five major search engines. All the lines are pretty flat, except Google’s (the purple one). Of the 137 billion estimated total searches performed in the U.S. last year, 85 billion were done on Google.

What’s even more impressive is that nearly 90 percent of all the growth in search volume was also captured by Google. Most of that growth came from increasing the number of searches per person, rather than bringing more people to Google.”

Google Search Wiki With “OFF” Button Soon…12.10.08

From TechCrunch today [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/10/google-search-wiki-to-soon-include-an-off-button-thank-you-marissa/]:

“Hallelujah. Google Search Wiki will soon have an off button.

I spoke with Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer this afternoon at the Le Web conference in Paris, France. Among the topics we discussed: Google Chrome (it’s coming out of beta) and Google’s new social and wiki features…

Mayer also said that it is ‘very likely’ that they will add a toggle button to allow users to turn the feature off. When pressed on timing, she said ‘early Q1.’…”

Redux on Obscure Google “Search Tricks”…11.29.08

Earlier this year before I began this blog, Lifehacker [http://lifehacker.com] listed what it called the “Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks” which are listed here briefly:

10. Get the local time anywhere

9. Track flight status

8. Convert currency, metrics, bytes, and more

7. Compare items with “better than” and find similar items with “reminds me of”

6. Use Google as a free proxy

  

5. Remove affiliate links from product searches

 

When you’re sick of seeing duplicate product search results from the likes of eBay, Bizrate, Pricerunner, and Shopping.com, clear ‘em out by stacking up the -site:ebay.com -site:bizrate.com -site:shopping.com operator. Alternately, check out Give Me Back My Google (original post), a service that does all that known reseller cleaning up for you when you search for products…

4. Find related terms and documents

Ok, this one’s direct from any straight-up advanced search operator cheat sheet, but it’s still one of the lesser-used tricks in the book. Adding a tilde (~) to a search term will return related terms… 

3. Find music and comic books

Using a combination of advanced search operators that specify music files available in an Apache directory listing, you can turn Google into your personal Napster…

2. ID people, objects, and foreign language words and phrases with Google Image Search

Google Image search results show you instead of tell you about a word. Don’t know what jicama looks like? Not sure if the person named “Priti” who you’re emailing with is a woman or a man? Spanish rusty and you forgot what “corazon” is? Pop your term into Google Image Search (or type image jicama into the regular search box) to see what your term’s about.

1. Make Google recognize faces

If you’re doing an image search for Paris Hilton and don’t want any of the French city, a special URL parameter in Google’s Image search will do the trick. Add &imgtype=face to the end of your image search to just get images of faces, without any inanimate objects…”

Google Search Wiki Disappears…11.23.08

Michael Arrington reported on TechCrunch [http://www.techcrunch.com/]:

Users are reporting that the recent changes to Google’s search engine, called SearchWiki, have simply disappeared from the site. It’s certainly gone from my account.

I was (and remain) highly critical of SearchWiki, which wasannounced two days ago and became the default search interface for anyone who opted into it. The changes allowed users to move search results up or down on a page (or remove them entirely), add public comments, and add entirely new results to the page (there is a good overview of all features here).

User reactions were mixed but weighted heavily towards “this is lame,” and there was no way to turn off the features other than to conduct Google searches without being logged in. Another way to turn it off was to switch search engines.

I’ve emailed Google for a comment.”

Review of Changes to Google Search…11.21.08

This an important post from TechCrunch [http://www.techcrunch.com/] titled “Google, It Wasn’t Broke” about changes to Google search by Michael Arrington:

Bucket tests and experimental products are one thing. But to mess with the real Google search is serious stuff. Why did they do it?

Google’s overall search share has grown substantially this year (and all other years since it went live). Their share of search advertising dollars is likely even higher.

The changes Google made to search today certainly make it more interactive and social. I can now write comments on search results, and read comments from everyone about TechCrunch (or anything else – see the awesomely useful TechCrunch comments in the image below, along with my votes on each) and vote them up or down. I can move search results around on the page – up, down, or off the page entirely. I can also add other URLs into search results.

In fact. Google paid Wikia Search the highest compliment possible today. They copied most of their features.

So, why did they do it?

In their blog post, Google says they’ve created a way to customize search results, and share (via the comments). They say they are striving to improve the search experience, and giving people tools to make search even more useful to them in their daily lives.

But Google search wasn’t broken. It’s one of the few things on the Internet that isn’t. I love it, as does 62% of everyone on the Internet. This new stuff is a mess of arrows and troll comments and stuff moving around the page. That doesn’t make my search experience more useful. It makes it move to another search engine.

My guess is they’ve made the changes to see what kind of data they get, and how it can be used to make their overall search results better. So when Google says “The changes you make only affect your own searches,” I think they’re only being half-truthful. All this data, in aggregate, will certainly be used to improve Google search results in general.

The worst part of the new stuff is you can’t turn it off. Once you click “Yes, continue” you’re in. And as far as I can tell, you can’t get back to the good old Google that worked just fine.

Google, I’m begging. Please pull a Lively and get rid of this thing fast…”

 

Google Search Results to Include Scanned Documents…10.31.08

TechCrunch [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/30/google-now-indexes-scanned-documents/] reported today:

“Google has announced that it will now begin including scanned documents in its search results – a feat that requires an immense amount of processing power and advanced image recognition technology. Unlike standard text documents, scanned files don’t contain any text data that Google’s spiders can index. Instead, Google has employed Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, converting photos of words into digital text files.

In the past Google would attempt to index these image files as well as possible, but could typically search only file titles and nearby metadata – not the contents of the documents. From now on Google searches will include the text within these scanned images in normal search results. When you encounter a scanned document you’ll be able to view it in its original form as a PDF, or as a converted text file (click “View As HTML”).

Such technology has existed for quite a while, but accuracy has always been an issue – and the fact that Google is doing it on such massive scale makes it a very impressive accomplishment. It also opens the doors to much more thorough searching, especially for content that is often found in printed documents (like academic papers)…”