In addition to her skills as the well known VP of search and user experience at Google,  a wardrobe including Oscar de la Renta and Armani helped land this girl from a (very) small town in Wisconsin on Glamour Magazine’s 2009 Women of the Year list.

Marissa Mayer, Glamour Magazine Woman of the Year

Marissa Mayer is profiled as a “visionary” in the magazine’s annual spread of influential women and newsmakers from 2009. CEO Eric Schmidt is quoted in the article as saying: “It’s pretty hard to overstate her impact…She built the team that designs the products we all use.”

This morning on the Today Show (video), she found herself in good company on the couch among other listmakers Serena Williams and Maya Angelou, and First Lady Michelle Obama earned a special recognition within the list.

Somewhat quietly, last week Kayak posted a new feature that opens up access to their search data using Kayak Trends. A key feature of Kayak Trend data is the KAYAK Travel Index™, an a statistical model that provides a measure of travel demand from analysis of searches on KAYAK sites, and aligns that with average combined prices people select for hotel and flights.

In Kayak Trends, you can get a snapshot of most popular destinations and search demand for them by day, week, month or year, as well as see a shift in seasonal trends by looking at the biggest upward and downward trends at a glance, or by Top 50 destinations.

Download and dissect data by destination

All of the trend data can be exported to CSV with average price data and demand averages, and one of the more interesting features of the Kayak Travel Index is the ability to look deeper into the search behavior surrounding target destinations. By putting in any airport code or city name and looking at 3 months, 6 months and 1 year trends in search demand for that location, it becomes  a useful baseline tool for a travel search marketer. You can get an at-a-glance overview of search origin data (useful for better geo-targeting in paid search ads and conversion factors), the most searched hotels in the destination, and the most popular hotel selections. Kayak says better labeling is coming next week.

Coming out of (private) and into public Beta today is a new hybrid travel and local search engine, Goby.com (GO-be), a new entrant into the foray of “deep web” search technology, led by a founding team with web and search experience from Endeca (CEO Mark Watkins), Lycos (Jim Fell) and Reprise Media (CTO Vince Russo), MIT (professor Michael Stonebraker, co-founder) as well as travel distribution experience with John Walsh (World Travel Holdings.) The start-up received its funding from Flybridge Capital and Kepha Partners.

Using a 3-box format for search queries, Goby’s intention is to help guide the user through task-centric discovery to answer queries relevant to “things to do nearby”, whether that location is a vacation destination or your local city area.

Throughout its (private) beta phase, Goby.com identified up to 250 categories of content surrounding popular themes and search queries that fall into these three categories of understood concepts. In addition to queries on things to do, outdoor recreation and activities, dining, entertainment, live music, museums, historic sites are top suggestions, as well as more travel specific concepts, such as hotels and lodging topics.

Currently using about 500 pre-qualified, authoritative data sources (or “deep web” databases) or known local sources such as Yelp.com, Goby contextualizes and organizes these results in a clean format, using Google Maps and images (also from Flickr) to enhance results.

Interestingly, Goby appears to cover a broad range of (and even some obscure) locations across the USA, as opposed to a beta launch with limited destinations. If you live in a large city like San Francisco, you can browse for things to do on a foggy day, or if are looking for a weekend getaway in a small coastal town for a food and wine festival, you might give Goby a try. Although some users may initially be disappointed to see a limited number of results to any query (very few test searches return more than 100 listings), it may not matter if the first ten to twenty are the most relevant and useful results.  An iPhone app is currently in development.

According to a post on the Bing Community blog, Bing should be your first stop for Emmy updates, starting now, leading up to the broadcast on Sunday, September 20th on CBS. A query on Bing for “Emmy Awards” and searches related to the Emmys will produce an Instant Answer result like this:

Bing Instant Answer

For now, you’ll see the quick details including links to information about host Neil Patrick Harris (provided by MSN Movies) and the nominees (provided by MSN TV), along with photos and videos, and recaps from the 2008 Emmy Awards. Following the broadcast, Bing will update the Instant Answer for quick and easy access to winners, photos and videos from this year’s event. Might we see a run of Bing commercials and promo slots during the televised event?

Bing is also asking users what other “Instant Answers” they would like to see in the future.

Comparatively, here’s how the same searches look on Yahoo! and Google:

Yahoo Emmy Awards Searches

Google Emmy Awards Search

Microsoft has unveiled Bing 2.0 at TechCrunch50 today, also known as Bing Visual Search, which allows people to “search by picture.” After much speculation following Microsoft’s annual meeting last week in Seattle, many had expected to see an update to Bing Maps,  integrating  Silverlight technology to display images of local businesses and locations within map search results. We got a sneak preview of Visual Search in August, we can confirm this is the first in a series of tweaks and other major features set to roll out through the end of the year. Here’s a closer look at today’s launch.

What is Bing Visual Search?

Bing Visual Search lets searchers browse easily through a slick interface of “structured data sets from trusted partners” using Sliverlight technology. At launch, Bing Visual Search will earn a spot on the homepage search categories, just under Travel, although depending on the homepage image of the day, those links can sometimes get lost in the background colors of the photo. Like Travel, Visual Search is also missing from the top navigation once into Bing search results. For general web search queries where there is an applicable Visual Search data set, a teaser will appear within the results to explore related data visually.

The concept behind Visual Search is simple: use clear imagery to help users sort through large sets of data easily. Certain categories of search lend themselves more easily to this than others, likely the reason why Bing has launched this feature in beta with a fairly limited set of visual information: cars, animals, people and products. Users must have Silverlight installed on their browsers to fully experience Visual Search. According to Rich Internet Application Statistics, nearly 73% of users do, and Silverlight adoption has been growing fairly quickly since NBCOlympics.com relied upon Silverlight for live streaming and on-demand video coverage during Beijing 2008, and will likely use it for the upcoming Vancouver 2010 games.

Clearly, items in the merchandise category do have a natural fit with Bing Shopping – users can easily identify differences between digital cameras or handbags at the initial search, and then move on to the comparison stage. Other categories capitalize on the popularity surrounding common searches on celebrities and entertainment, namely popular music, books and movies, and typically can funnel users to shopping results and categorized search at the next level. Research-based topics including politicians, US States and items like the periodic table are useful applications, but perhaps only to a limited audience, such as younger students working on school products. However, this also affords Bing the opportunity to appeal to a new generation of searchers, who are highly dependent on visual cues and ease of use, as iPods and iPhones have shown us. Of course, visualization does have additional appeal to the middle demographic using those products as well.

Despite Steve Ballmer’s reported hatred of iPhones, one of the most interesting Visual Search data sets includes Top iPhone Apps, where the icons are sortable by popularity, price, release date, name, or category  (such as games or social networking). If you sort the apps by popularity and select the top result (currently “AppBox Pro by e2ndesign”), you get something akin to a instant answer-style result (example to the right), which immediately opens iTunes. Typically, this prominent placement might indicate an official iTunes affiliate relationship, where the publisher (Bing) would be earning a % of revenue on every app then purchased and downloaded from that click event. At launch, there no  such deal in place, Bing assures us. However, not every web search result for iPhone apps returns this instant answer format, so the criteria for instant answer display may be something other than an affiliate deal.

Features of Bing Visual Search

Bing Visual Search is understandable and intuitive. However, the initial galleries in this beta phase are primarily novelty-type searches. For that reason, these starter searches are a win for Bing. Case in point: A more serious NFL fan would go straight to NFL.com or a fantasy football/statistics driven-type site for in-depth statistics, but a casual fan might want to simply know the basics when looking at teams or players, which Bing Visual Search provides.

Visual Search gives you a quick, cursory look at all 32 teams and lets you sort through 2582 players by popularity. Unfortunately, Brett Favre is first, as Microsoft confirms that Bing is the determining factor for popularity, and not the data provider (though in some cases they may determine top results) but hasn’t yet confirmed the calculation method for this query. For instance, popularity could be generated by number of search queries, or by number of mentions in the search index. By either measure, it is surprising that Michael Vick does not show up in the popularity index, but does appear when searching by player name, although his profile data is incomplete. Bing says they are looking into why this may be the case.

If I want to see how my New England Patriots compare to their first opponent, the Buffalo Bills, I can do so at a glance, by rolling over the Patriots logo. I see what I need to know appear around the search box, and repeat the process for the Bills:

With the 5th ranked offense, and 10th ranked defense (not to mention 3 Superbowl wins), and a power ranking of 2, New England is the clear winner over Buffalo’s 25th ranked offense and 14th place defense, at least according to Bing.

Note: in the lower right corner of Visual Search, you’ll see the source of the data set (when available). In this case, It’s Fox Sports, an MSN partner, and STATS.

If I click through to see more information about the New England Patriots, I see essentially the same SERP from Bing 1.0, with categorized results below the top results. The notable exception is that Bing 2.0 has added social sharing tools that enable me to invite friends to watch the game with me below the instant answer and above the #1 result. No offense, I am really grateful for my nearly 1,000 followers on Twitter, but no way I am making clam chowdah and buffalo wings for all of them, nor could they all fit in my media room!

As a carryover from the initial Bing roll out, further categorized searches appear below the first set of results (which incidentally, include an unnecessary duplicate listing of the Patriots homepage, and a second, non-indented result from Wikipedia) and provide several (superfluous) results for Patriots schedule information, three-plus relevant results for merchandise, as well as three results apiece (+more option) for Rumors, Rosters and History. In Bing 2.0, the main image results move up from the bottom slot (just above video results featuring the infamous Snowbowl, among other relevant and more current results), yet they still don’t make the cut for an above the fold presence, even with my 22″ monitor and 1600×1200 resolution. And like so many others (besides Gisele Bundchen), I really want to see Tom Brady front and center when I go calling for him. Oh well, I suppose I should be satisfied that he is currently #3 in Bing’s popularity index of NFL Players in Visual Search. My only other criticism of this page might be that the plug to get Bing users interested in Visual Search happens again at the bottom of the page.

Bing delivers on travel destination decisions

As limited as the initial galleries in Bing Visual Search may be, this roll out does at least include 231 travel destinations, which in theory, should be a complementary section to Bing Travel. For now, clicking on a destination provides standard search results, and no integration exists with Bing Travel’s price predictor or other travel content other than image and video search results. The redeeming aspect is being able to sort travel destinations by popularity according to Bing and/or Fodors, the trusted data provider of this visual gallery, and this example produces some interesting results in the Top 10 travel destinations, although Las Vegas typically appears at the top of many leisure travel lists.

From a usability standpoint, I might  like to see the most popular items at the top, and the least at the bottom, but this arrangement does vary by collection and sorting criteria (even though we did see the most popular NFL player at the bottom of the screen.)  Bing likely has done some user testing on this feature, and will continue to do so and make tweaks as needed.

More impressive, is the data that appears in the search box when you roll over some of the choices available in the travel set. With Las Vegas, for example, it lets me know that I have approximately a  one hour flight time from Salt Lake City (SLC) to McCarran (LAS), seemingly basing that (very accurate) answer on IP location versus sign-in details. Several other locations I tried, such as Boston (BOS) and Portland, Maine (PWM) were spot on for flight times, even with the latter (PWM) requiring at least one stop over. But not all locations provide an approximate flight time.

Another interesting feature within the travel category, is filters by best time to visit. Selecting “February” and “North America”, I get a fairly broad list from Bing (43/231), but at this stage of the game, Bing doesn’t understand whether my intent is go skiing or lay on the beach. This layout does however, play nicely into the ‘inspiration’ angle of travel planning.

For the record, my chosen intent would have been skiing and snowboarding, so at least nine of those options are relevant results. But by this example, we can see that Bing still has ground to cover in terms of matching user intent, and more fully integrating Visual Search with other features in Bing Travel and web search results.

The end game

When we first saw Bing Visual Search in preview, it had even fewer data sets than its current collection at launch, so while this beta round is admittedly light on content, it is an interesting and creative play towards changing the expectations of searchers. However, many might argue at this point that Visual Search is simply adding an intermediate (and perhaps unnecessary) step before the most relevant results, something Bing simply cannot afford to do in the competitive landscape. They need to get to the right set of results, and quickly. Calling Visual Search a game changer may be premature, given this limited data set, but is it a step in the right direction? Possibly. In some cases, Bing is the clear winner here. For instance, viewing the Periodic Table in Visual Search is far more visually engaging and useful than an almost confusing search result in Google.

Undoubtedly, many of these novelty searches are fun and could potentially drive revenue directly to Bing, such as iPhone app search or other shopping applications. Beyond that, I would expect to see additional collections that might provide both novelty and utility, such as recipes, food and drinks, real estate (best places to live) or home and garden. And I can’t help but wonder why some  categories didn’t make the cut for the sake of utility, particularly since we are on the cusp of the holiday shopping season. You might think that toys and games (beyond electronics) or clothing/accessory categories (beyond handbags) would have made the cut. And especially since Zappos is the provider of this image set, why not shoes as well? If we aren’t seeing these categories roll out in the weeks immediately following this initial launch, Bing may have simply missed the boat on what otherwise would have been a hit with both users and retailers this holiday season.

Hitwise is reporting that Bing Shopping moved up to 4th place (from 8th) in the comparision shopping tools category last week, rising to 11% weekly market share. Combining the recent Double Cashback offer from retailers listed on Bing Shopping and the fortunate timing of the annual Back-to-School shopping rush has moved their weekly market share up from just 4% of visits prior to last week.

chart courtesy of Hitwise

Overall, Hitwise reports that visits to Bing Shopping have increased 169% since the week ending June 6th (the week of the official Bing Shopping launch) – Bing confirms an 3x increase in visits from internal data during the same timeframe.

Also in that same timeframe, Yahoo! Shopping, Bizrate and Shopzilla, currently the top 3 shopping comparision engines, each saw a drop of 2-5% in market share. Meanwhile, the only other shopping search engines in the top 10 to experience an increase were NexTag and Pronto.

Bing.com was responsible for sending 18.32% of visits, of those, 66.81% were new visitors (had not visited in last 30 days) and traffic from MSN accounted for another 11.34% of visits. Of last week’s visits to Bing Shopping, Google sent 5.86% and Yahoo! Search sent another 3.54% – an interesting number to watch change in the coming months as the integration of Bing and Yahoo moves forward.

For additional numbers and data on upstream / downstream traffic related to Bing Shopping, read Heather Dougherty’s post at Hitwise.

The editorial staff at Search Engine Land has just learned that over the weekend, on July 18th, Alan Rimm-Kaufman passed away following a 16 month long battle with leukemia. He bravely faced countless rounds of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant in hopes of a cure.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman was just 41 years young, and is survived by his wife, Sara, and two young children, Sam and Davida. A moving tribute to his life can be found on Legacy.com.

Alan was a valued contributor to Search Engine Land – his articles on paid search marketing and other search issues can be found here.

Co-founder and CEO George Michie, provided us with these thoughts about Alan Rimm-Kaufman:

We are deeply saddened by this loss. Alan was a man of integrity, intelligence, and humility, which he combined with nearly boundless energy and a joy of life few can match. We will miss his exuberance and his tremendous generosity of spirit.

The Rimm-Kaufman Group remains a strong and vibrant company. We remain committed to providing both thought-leadership in the industry and peerless results for our clients. Like any good leader, Alan built this team to be stronger than any individual member. Our growth and continuing success during his 16-month absence is a tribute not only to his vision, but also to our well-established shared vision for the company.

The family has requested in lieu of flowers, that donations be made to the Alan Rimm-Kaufman Legacy Fund, CBI Preschool, 501 East Jefferson Street, Charlottesville, VA 22902. In addition, they ask that individuals consider joining the bone marrow registry at www.marrow.org.

Since the spring of 2008, George Michie has been the acting CEO of the Rimm-Kaufman Group, and will continue to lead the company and its veteran leadership team. There are no plans to change the company name.

The entire SEL staff is terribly shocked and saddened by the news, and our thoughts are with his family and his colleagues at Rimm-Kaufman Group.

Kayak travel search launched a formal attack on Microsoft’s Bing Travel yesterday in an article that appeared on Wired, Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us!. Apparently, Kayak’s executives are more than a little steamed by the eerily similar look and feel, and even went so far as to put Microsoft on legal notice (presumably a cease & desist) to knock it off.

Wired implies that Kayak is concerned about the similarities causing brand confusion with its users, and even noted an “uncomfortable” comparison in their own review of Bing, and points out that others have noticed as well. You can see further evidence of others comparing Bing vs Kayak from a variety of sources, including TechCrunch’s early review, where commenters pointed out that Bing Travel gave lower airfares than Kayak, though they use the same airline data sources.

Microsoft spokesperson Whitney Burk denied the accusations , telling Wired:

“We are discussing the matter with Kayak,” Burk said in emailed statement. “Bing Travel is based on independent development by Microsoft and Farecast.com, which Microsoft acquired in 2008. Any contrary allegations are without merit.”

However, the Farecast technology which Microsoft acquired is not the issue here, since Kayak does not run a similar fare prediction service, they are not claiming an infringement on technology, but just the user interface, namely Bing’s use of “sliders”.

Sliders have become a popular tool on many “Web 2.0″ based sites, and Farecast did initially use them in design.  Last year, another start-up in airfare comparison, InsideTrip.com, debuted (May 2008) using sliders much like Kayak or Bing does. In Greg Sterling’s write-up, you can see the similarity:

Note that InsideTrip was also founded by Dave Pelter, who held two year executive position at Farecast.com. Is it the fact that InsideTrip.com has not gained (or rather, sustained) enough traction for Kayak users to be as affected by the similar slider options?

Hakia holds similar views

Kayak isn’t the only one crying foul, as hakia also blogged when Bing launched, hakia claimed that Bing’s categorized search is a similar version to its own hakia Galleries, using the example of a search for “Obama”:

“hakia Galleries prove 17 aspects of this query. We save the user time by answering 17 Obama related questions in one search. Compare the hakia Obama gallery with the same search at Bing.com (Bing provides only 7 aspects of this search query).”

Hakia’s COO, Melek Pulatkonak also recently told Investor’s Business Daily that they’d been in early partnership talks with Microsoft in July, and stated:

“We were approached by Microsoft to show them how the hakia galleries worked, and we did, and now they have a similar feature — we showed them how to do it,” she said. “We were surprised that it is a featured part of and the most differentiated part of Bing.”

Microsoft also denies that hakia had any part in the development of Bing’s categorized search, which Microsoft refers to as “faceted search”.

In February 2008, when Vanessa Fox wrote that Eytan Seidman, Program Management Director over core relevance at Microsoft Live Search (now Bing.com) was leaving Microsoft (and Seattle) for a start-up, she may not have known that he was jumping into murky waters of travel search. Today, Eytan’s start-up site was unveiled – Oyster.com, a site that generates professional, verified hotel reviews.

Shortly after that announcement, Oyster Hotel Reviews closed a Series A with Bain Capital and Accelerator Ventures (via TechCrunch) worth $6.4 million, to launch a start-up with his brother (Elie Seidman), Elie’s co-founder in another business, Epana, (Ariel Charytan)  and fellow Microsoft Live Search engineer (Andy Laucius).  The result:

Oyster Hotel Reviews

Many people looking at Oyster for the first time are undoubtedly going to say “so what?”. It’s small and is well behind its competitors in scale. True, there’s nothing immediately innovative about Oyster search itself, other than the content factor. But the value of relevancy in its algorithm depends upon the depth of content, which is what the search tool is ultimately churning through. In addition to a default ranking system based on several factors, Seidman also admits that what they really need to help refine the search algorithm at this point is user data.

Seidman points out that Oyster’s most valuable search asset is their unique content, that they are blending the inspirational aspect of travel search with specific data requests – whether they be traditional traveler requirements (spa, pets welcome, beachfront) to more experiential themes (if vodka, for example, is your #1 vacation must-have), and not least of all,  budget – travelers can hone in on the right vacation experience for their expectations. Oyster is also taking the approach to remove geography from primary search, and leave it to the user selects a particular destination to narrow results.

In the spirit of Oyster’s simplified Pro & Con style, here is a rundown of its features:

Pros

• Lightning fast search results as you select options.
• Clean user interface.
• Compelling content – imagery & copy.
• Pros & Cons are easy scannable by users.
• User comments are allowed.
• Depth of data.

Cons

• Lacking breadth of data / limited destinations.
• Less than 500 total reviews.
• Failure to highlight user query (terms) in results. Example: a search for ‘scuba‘ doesn’t immediately encourage users to click one result over the next.
• Pearl rating system isn’t yet explained to users.

Only time will tell if Oyster can scale to be a serious competitor in the hotel reviews space, and it will ultimately come down to time, scale and logistics for this small player to become a trusted resource in the space. As Greg Sterling says in this post, “assuming good SEO, Oyster could become a visible and more trustworthy source of hotel reviews.”

For additional insight and observations, I’ve gone into additional (and perhaps excruciating) detail in my in-depth review, Shucking Pearls of Wisdom Out of Oyster.com.

As a followup to the aggregate list of 2008’s Top Search Terms from the major search engines, Google has officially released its 2008 Zeitgeist, or “spirit of the times” list, covering the most popular searches of the year.  This year’s data includes a global look at the most popular search terms, gathering top 10 lists in 30 countries to give insight to search behavior around the world. YouTube, Facebook appear on many of the lists.

Prior to releasing the full Zeitgeist for 2008, Google highlighted the fastest rising search terms of 2008, where Obama topped the list of U.S. based searches. Yet in the full wrap-up, Sarah Palin won out across the globe as the fastest rising search.

Fastest Rising Searches on Google (Globally)

1. Sarah Palin
2. Beijing 2008
3. Facebook Login
4. Tuenti
5. Heath Ledger
6. Obama
7. Nasza Klasa
8. Wer kennt wen
9. Euro 2008
10. Jonas Brothers

Google Image Searches – Fastest Rising U.S.

1. Sarah Palin
2. Obama
3. Twilight
4. Miley Cyrus
5. Joker

Social Networks Get Searched

Top 10 Searches on Google for social sites, with almost half being global sites:

1. Facebook
2. MySpace
3. Hi5
4. Orkut
5. Linkedin
6. Nasza Klasa
7. Netlog
8. Mixi
9. Meetup
10. Odnoklassniki

Lycos Top Searches of 2008

Lycos also officially released its year end round-up of its Top 50 searches for its 9th annual list of popular searches, with additional trends published on Lycos’ daily stat tracker, the Lycos Top 50 (http://50.lycos.com) in 10 categories.

Lycos’ Top 10 Searches of 2008 (Overall)

1. Poker
2. Paris Hilton
3. YouTube
4. Golf
5. Sarah Palin
6. Britney Spears
7. Clay Aiken
8. Pamela Anderson
9. Facebook
10. Holly Madison

A complete wrap-up and analysis of both the Google Zeitgeist and the 2008 Lycos list will be added here.