Bigmouthmedia search engine news: personal-search

Microsoft approaches Facebook in wake of Yahoo! disaster

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 12:00:00 GMT

It's now common knowledge that Microsoft has withdrawn its 3-month-old bid for Yahoo! Inc, after failing to reach an acceptable price agreement. Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer had offered to pay $33 per share, or $47.5 billion, for Yahoo!, up from an initial bid valued at $44.6 billion, or $31 per share. Yahoo!'s board wanted $37 per share - a price that the company's stock hasn't reached in more than two years.

Microsoft trails Google and Yahoo! in the US $41-billion market for online search and internet advertising - and the bid for Yahoo! was clearly an attempt to turn things around. Buying Yahoo! would have more than tripled Microsoft's share of searches and stepped up competition with Google, which has grown faster than Microsoft in every quarter since Google's 2004 initial public offering. Microsoft, on the other hand, posted a US $228-million loss last quarter.

The software maker now needs to prove that it can innovate without Yahoo! as a partner. But 'without Yahoo!' doesn't necessarily mean without anybody. Bill Gates has expressed Microsoft's intentions to make 'advances' in its own search offering and to expand through 'strategic transactions' - and it seems he's quick to act on his word.

Just a few days after walking away from its Yahoo! bid, Microsoft has already reportedly set its eyes on Facebook - the second-largest social network behind MySpace. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has mentioned that Facebook would give the company some Web scale. Moreover, Microsoft already owns a 1.6 percent stake - worth $240 million - in the social networking site. According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft's bankers have contacted Facebook to see if Mark Zuckerberg and company would be interested in selling the company. There are apparently no active discussions regarding the issue as of yet.

Microsoft's investment always implied an eventual Facebook valuation; but is it a mere coincidence that the proposition has arrived just a few days removed from the Yahoo! debacle? Perhaps the folks at Microsoft are looking to turn up the heat on Jerry Yang and his investors at Yahoo!, should Microsoft decide to put forth another proposition. Or maybe it's simply an effort on Microsoft's part to save face after having $47.5 billion turned away. Microsoft may even just be looking to acquire some hot Web 2.0 names, in which case the likes of Digg or LinkedIn might satisfy their appetite. Whatever the reason, one thing is certain - Microsoft currently holds a significant want for scale and a whole lot of capital to get it. Will Facebook take the bait?

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Google and Facebook - battling for friends to connect

Fri, 16 May 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Google Friend Connect has hit a stumbling block only three days after its release - Facebook has banned the application.

On Friday 9th May Facebook announced their "Facebook Connect" initative which allows third party sites to implement features of Facebook. On the following Monday Google announced Google Friend Connect, a similar application that can access multiple social networks through the OpenSocial developer community.

Just three days after Google's announcment, Facebook have revealed that Google Friend Connect has been banned from using the Facebook Platform in its current form. Facebook have intimated that the reason for this is that Google Friend Connect breaks the Facebook terms of service by passing user information to third parties without the user's knowledge.

"In the past, when we found applications passing user data to another party (for instance, to ad networks for the purpose of targeting), we suspended those applications and worked with those developers to ensure they respect user privacy. Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we've had a chance to evaluate the technology. We've found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge, which doesn't respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Just as we've been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we've had to suspend Friend Connect's access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We've reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose."

As one of the most popular and active social networks, the loss of Facebook to Google Friend Connect will be a significant blow to the number of prospective users. For now we are left to wonder and wait for a response from Google. Coming hot on the heels of rumours that the search giant is suffering a brain drain as Google loses big names to Facebook it seems that the two have plenty to scrap about at the moment. But will Facebook's ban be nothing more than an easily remedied bump in the road, or does it signify a more serious trend?

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Search engines - an innovative tool in tackling cyber bullying

Thu, 15 May 2008 12:00:00 GMT

We've all heard of how destructive bullying can be to the victim, and cyber bullying can prove no less damaging. Cyber bullying is a form of bullying encountered on the internet; rather than in the workplace or school ground.

When such social media sites like YouTube, Bebo, MySpace etc. started to increase in popularity, cyber bullying flourished in the new environment. As more and more people started using such social media sites to chat, interact and share with others, bullies found a way to inflict misery in a way that seemed to have no repercussions.

Cyber bullying has come in the form of:

Users uploading derogatory videos
Violent comments on blogs
Unpleasant or abusive messages on social networking sites

But what does this all have to do with search engines?

Well, many people might not know this, but search engines are the greatest data mining machines ever made by man. Google, Yahoo! and MSN all use powerful data mining techniques to find out which pages they should return for specific search terms - and why.

The technology behind it

Search engines such as Google send out spiders to crawl the internet and find all the web pages that populate their index. Every time a search engine spider is sent out to a web site and it encounters a change in the page e.g. the addition of new content like a photo or text entry, it will then save an electronic copy of the page and thereby create a record which will remain accessible. You can see an example of this by searching in Google or Yahoo! and clicking on the 'Cached' button next to the webpage provided.

How will this help stop cyber bullies in their tracks?

If a cyber bully logged onto a social networking site like Bebo, for example, and sent a victim a threatening message and later realised that they may get into trouble for bullying, they might decide to delete the message, or even (potentially) the entire site, in the hope that they were removing the evidence.

That's when search engines come riding to the rescue. Because it's possible for search engines to track back through the large amounts of data in the electronic copy downloaded and saved to their large indexes, they could use this ability to locate the cached abusive comments and report them to the authorities.

Unethical users who sign up for social networking sites with mischief on their minds should think twice about the electronic footprint they leave behind as, especially with search engines on our side, everything is traceable.

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Rumours confirmed: Comcast buys Plaxo.

Thu, 15 May 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Rumours of who will acquire Plaxo, including talk of possible interest from search engine giant and Google and social network darlings Facebook, can now be put to rest. Plaxo have signed an agreement to be acquired by Comcast, with whom they've been working on a number of interesting projects over the past year.

This seems to be another savvy move for Plaxo. Their internet acumen was last demonstrated when Plaxo Pulse went live with Google's OpenSocial application back in November 2007, an embrace of new technology that resulted in a sudden boost in traffic.

This new acquisition deal by Comcast is suspected to have cost between $150 million to $170 million, according to Techcrunch, and is a good strategic move for the company's internet portfolio which already includes Fancast and Fandango. All of this is said to be leading towards making social media more widely available by various means, including your own TV. Plaxo gives an example in its own blog about the recent acquisition:

"...you should be able to securely post family photos online in Pulse, and have them viewable by any of your family members, whether they are online, at work, on their mobile device, or in their living room watching TV. And you should be able to discover new shows to watch, based on what your friends and coworkers have recommended."

Their blog also states that Plaxo will remain an independent operation in Silicon Valley, reporting into Comcast Interactive Media. With Comcast's high traffic portal Comcast.net, popular interactive entertainment properties such as Fancast, and Fandango, it will be a big help in bringing Plaxo's innovations to life. This should be great news for the Internet industry as a whole as Plaxo have already proven to be a strong advocate for opening up the Social Web.

The latest developments in the online social sphere leave us wondering what will be next for the home networking experience - will our televisions join computers and mobiles and become the latest way to stay in touch with our friends? We'll certainly stay glued to our screens until we find out.

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Google confirms Friend Connect

Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 GMT

It seems that Google has joined the drive to make the web more social by introducing Friend Connect - a service designed to enable people to interact with their friends.

The unveiling of Friend Connect follows similar services announced last week by the world's two biggest social networking sites, MySpace's Data Availability and Facebook's Connect, allowing users to move their personal profiles and applications to other websites.

During a conference call at Google's California headquarters, David Glazer, Google's director of engineering told reporters: "Google Friend Connect is about being the 'long tail' of sites becoming more social. Many sites aren't explicitly social and don't necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard."

Using Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running right away without complicated programming knowledge. These social features can be anything from member's galleries and message walls to reviews, in addition to applications built by third-parties connected through the OpenSocial developer community.

As an example of how Friend Connect will work in practice, the service has been added to the website of independent musician Ingrid Michaelson. Visitors can see comments by friends from their social networks, add music to their profiles and see who is attending local concerts.

As to what is motivating this move into social networking, Charlene Li, principal analyst at Forrester told BBC News: "As 99% of sites are not currently socially enabled, Friend Connect has a big potential market in front of it" and Ms Li says the route to all things profitable in this space will be through tapping into "the deep profit and user data flowing through Friend Connect." - In other words, mining that information through advertising.

Facebook and MySpace are expecting to roll out their offerings over the next few weeks, and with over 270 million users between them, it is clear Google Friend Connect is facing some stiff competition ahead.

Google says it is being cautious about approving sites to use Friend Connect and is creating a waiting list for requests to use the new code. The search engine says it expects to give the go-ahead to a few dozen sites in the next few days. As to opening out to a wider audience, Google says it estimates that will happen over the coming months.

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Facebook - sucking the talent out of Google?

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Yesterday saw another senior Googler depart to take on a new challenge at the darling of the social media world, Facebook. From vice president of global communications and public affairs at Google, Elliot Schrage, has been put in charge of communications, government relations and corporate marketing for Facebook.

With this, Google's third high level departure of the year so far and the second to Facebook, there are murmurs that there is a brain drain occurring at the search giant's core. Before 2008, only three senior executives had left their posts, one of whom remains at the company as his successor has yet to be found. The official Google response references their "deep management bench", but just how deep does it go and what if this departure rate remains, or worse, what if it increases?

While many will discard the brain drain theory straight off, the other half of this story must also be considered. Facebook is now seen by some (VentureBeat, Forbes, USA Today & John McCrea to name but a few) as the hottest company in Silicon Valley, a title until recently reserved exclusively for the search engine from Mountain View. This shift is bolstered by the recent international increase in social network usage and the inevitable talk of money making potential, but only time will tell if this moniker sticks.

Maybe the grass is greener in Palo Alto, maybe Google is too comfortable with it's dominance of search and internet advertising, no one can say for sure. What is clear is that despite the rumours of social networking sites losing momentum and impending implosion in the sector, they are still able to attract the big guns of the internet business age to their ranks. This is however, unlikely to seriously affect Google in the long run with its market value continuing to grow as its market share does.

But it would surely be foolish to discount Facebook's potential to wrest the title from Google in the future. Another recent high level hiring was Gideon Yu, formerly YouTube's chief financial officer, and subsequent Google-to-Facebook transfers from Ethan Beard and Benjamin Ling. All that can be said for now is that social networking is an area of great potential in internet usage and advertising, a fact not lost on Zuckerberg and co.

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Yahoo! rolls out SearchMonkey

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Yahoo! has rolled out a limited preview of its SearchMonkey platform.

The new facility comprises a set of open source tools that enable publishers and users to annotate and enhance search results that are associated with specific websites.

It is intended as a means by which third-party web developers can improve the functionality, usefulness and appearance of Yahoo! search results.

The project was first announced during a Search Marketing Expo West conference in February.

Speaking at the event, Amit Kumar, product lead for SearchMonkey, said: "Traditionally, we talk about results and results only. The interesting thing we're adding here is the ability to annotate someone's results," Search Engine Land reported.

According to Yahoo!, the new enhancements offered by the open search platform enable publishers to add additional information that will be displayed with web search results.

For example, retailers can include product information, merchants can post details of opening hours and restaurants can include links to menus and reviews.

Writing on the Yahoo! search blog, Mr Kumar states: "Site owners can build enhanced search results that will provide searchers with a more useful experience by including links, images and name-value pairs in the search results for their pages."

Additionally, users can customise their personal search experiences using applications built by or for their favourite sites.

Yahoo! says that the SearchMonkey platform is part of its theme of opening up the web for publishers and users.

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Ladies love Yahoo's Buzz more

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Yahoo Buzz was launched late in February 2008 as a social news and meme tracking site. Through Buzz, Yahoo works with hand selected publishers to feed stories to the community and then allows the community to vote for the stories which should make the headlines.

The most popular stories may make it onto Yahoo's homepage - potentially a generator of formidable traffic - and, as a result, publishers are queuing up to be included by the site.

The fact that publishers need to have prior approval from Yahoo before their stories appear is the main differentiator between Yahoo Buzz and well-established social news sites like Digg and Reddit. To some, this aspect of Yahoo Buzz may lend it a strong degree of legitimacy, while others might see it as a site that takes away the variety and unpredictability that make social news sites like Digg so popular.

Nevertheless, comScore's Media Metrix has figures for Yahoo Buzz's performance in March, which reveal that the new site is already a strong competitor to Conde Nast's Reddit.com - an impressive achievement in its first two months of existence. According to the statistics, Digg clocked up 1, 617 000 visits in March, Reddit pulled in 54, 000 and Yahoo Buzz made 43, 000.

The demographic analysis of visitors reveals the true differences between Digg and Yahoo Buzz. Digg is largely a male dominated site with female visitors making up only a quarter of the audience. Yahoo Buzz, on the other hand, is roughly evenly split between male and female visitors.

Moreover, Yahoo Buzz does particularly well in engaging its visitors. The average amount of time spent on Yahoo Buzz per visit is much higher than that of either Reddit or Digg. Women spend the most time on Yahoo Buzz with an average visit length of 1.7 minutes. This is nearly six times longer than the 0.3 minutes men tend to spend on Reddit.

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Google launches developer sandbox

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Internet giant Google has announced the launch of a new sandbox which developers will be able to use in order to start making social networking gadgets.

The new environment is available on the search engine provider's personalised homepage iGoogle.

According to a company statement, the sandbox is intended to help developers build richer gadgets for iGoogle "which will offer users more powerful and interactive features".

Additionally, Google has launched an updated developer website which, it says, guides people through the process of building and distributing gadgets to iGoogle's "growing audience".

Commenting on the development, Google states: "Developers are an important part of Google's innovation ecosystem and we're always striving to provide tools to help them innovate in new directions that will ultimately make the web richer for all users.

"By building more powerful and interactive gadgets for iGoogle, developers will have an opportunity to share their gadgets with the tens of millions of iGoogle users."

Among the new features to be seen on iGoogle are left navigation, a maximised option for gadgets, and social features for gadgets which use OpenSocial application programming interfaces.

These social features include a friends list and activities displayed through a special updates gadget.

Meanwhile, in a ZDNet blog, Garett Rogers says that the new sandbox environment is a "mashup" of the best of Facebook and iGoogle, adding the development "should be interesting".

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Google Earth undergoes revamp

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:00:00 GMT

In anticipation of Earth Day, which is set to take place next week, Google has revamped its Earth application to include new features, it has been revealed.

According to a company statement, with Google Earth 4.3, the search engine provider has "completely rethought how [users] might interact with the 3D world".

Google said: "We've redesigned the navigation to make it much easier to fly from the heavens down to the streets of your town. And with all of the great user-created buildings in the 3D Warehouse, we wanted to make it easy for you to get right up close to see the rich detail."

Among the new features of Google Earth are improved navigation capabilities, including a better zoom control which enables users to travel from images of outer space to street-level views in a "single seamless motion".

Additionally, new 3D content has been added, such as photo-textured cities and towns in the US and elsewhere.

Web surfers will also be able to find Google's Street View feature on the application as it makes its Google Earth debut.

Meanwhile, the service is now available in 12 new languages, including Danish, Spanish, Indonesian and Romanian.

In related news, Google announced earlier this week that it has expanded its Maps application by adding a feature which showcases embedded YouTube videos. Such videos have been available in Google Earth since October last year.

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