Mar 9, 2012 at 10:00am ET by Danny Sullivan

Personalized search? Both Google and Bing will tell you that it provides better results. But two-thirds say they don't care. They view personalized search as a "bad thing," a new survey finds. Nearly three-quarters also view gathering data to personalize results to be a privacy invasion. The findings come out of a survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Around 2,000 adults in the US were questioned between January 20 and February 19 of this year as part of a wide-ranging poll about search engine use, though fewer may have answered particular questions. Personalized Sea [...]

Trapit Aims To Be Your Search “Personal Assistant”

Nov 15, 2011 at 2:22am ET by Greg Sterling

Somewhere between the "precision of search and the serendipity of social media" lies Trapit. Trapit is a "personal discovery engine" based on the same underlying technology that forms the core of Apple's Siri virtual assistant. From the outside, however, it looks something like a cross between StumbleUpon and Flipboard or Zite. Co-founders Gary Griffiths and Hank Nothhaft are quick to rebut each of those comparisons by pointing to Trapit's underlying technology as the differentiator. Users input keywords or entire URLs and create "traps," which are content modules drawing upon approxima [...]

Bing Gets More Personal With Adaptive Search

Sep 14, 2011 at 4:07pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Bing has announced at SMX East today a new personalization feature named adaptive search. It seems a lot like Google's previous query feature but supposedly, it goes well beyond just the previous query. Bing said the "more you search, the more Bing can learn" and thus adapts the search results for YOU based on your past searches - not just your immediate previous search. Here is a video that explains it, we hope to have more information on this new feature soon: Video: Adapting Search to You Note, it is rolling out slowly over the next few days in the US. Stefan from Bing add [...]

Walmart Buys Former Search Engine Kosmix To Power Social And Mobile Shopping

Apr 19, 2011 at 10:18am ET by Greg Sterling

For those who follow search it was initially one of those "WTF moments": Walmart acquiring erstwhile Google challenger Kosmix. However AllThingsD reports that the price was $300 million-plus vs. $55 million raised. So the founders and investors get a seemingly nice exit. Kosmix will now become part of the newly established "@WalmartLabs." When it launched in 2006 Kosmix was building a better search engine that organized results by category and added numerous filters allowing users to drill down for more relevance and control. Below is an early Kosmix search results page (via DailyTech [...]

Search Technology Behind iPad Magazine “Zite”

Mar 9, 2011 at 9:27am ET by Greg Sterling

Discovery Engine Worio has taken its search technology and reinvented itself as an iPad magazine along the lines of Flipboard. Called Zite (after Zeitgeist), the iPad app uses the same search and machine learning capabilities developed at the British Columbia-based Worio to create a personalized magazine that "gets smarter" as you use it. (CEO Ali Davar says the company's servers "are getting crushed" right now because of the publicity the app has received.) It starts by taking Twitter and, curiously, Google Reader feeds -- though not Facebook because of the "noise" in that feed -- to creat [...]

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