Jun 11, 2013 at 9:19am ET by Sean Carlos

[caption id="attachment_158516" align="alignright" width="300"] Social search optimization should be part of your social media strategy. Image: CC BY-SA 2.0 by olarte.ollie[/caption] Successful communication is all about getting the right message in front of the right people at the right time. In the first part of this two-part series on search and social media sites, I noted the undeniable importance of social media as evidenced by the sheer volume of social media updates posted daily on Twitter and Facebook (not to mention lesser-known sites like VK in Russia and Sina Weibo in China). [...]

The Future Of SEO in a Socially Driven World

May 14, 2013 at 9:15am ET by Mani Karthik

If SEO is dead, social media will be, too, in another five years. So, keep calm and tweet on. Hold that thought for a second – I can explain. In today’s search world, there's a lot of talk about how social is "taking over," how "content is king," and how search engine optimization is "dead" -- with search updates like Penguin and Panda hitting the final nails on the coffin. Sounds very dramatic, doesn't it? SEO is "Dead" -- Or Is It? Yes, social is more significant than ever. But, it is too early to draw any conclusions about the death of SEO based on the patterns that we’r [...]

Microsoft’s ViralSearch: Search Engine For Measuring Tweets & Viral Content

Mar 6, 2013 at 2:45pm ET by Barry Schwartz

VentureBeat reports Microsoft announced a new research project named ViralSearch. ViralSearch lets you search and navigate cascades of people passing content on social media and distinguish between things that are not just popular but also became viral in a sense that they are being passed from one person to the next over many generations. ViralSearch does this by analyzing news, videos, and photos shared within Twitter. It looks to see how many shares there were throughout the user base, over time and over generations of users. For example, in this screen shot, it shows a story Tim O [...]

Facebook’s Graph Search & YourTrove’s Social Search: 5 Questions With Jesse Emery

Jan 18, 2013 at 2:02pm ET by Matt McGee

[Ed. note: This is the first of what will be an ongoing interview series called "5 Questions With...," in which we'll publish brief interviews with interesting and important online marketing newsmakers. Depending on the topic, the interviews may be published on Search Engine Land or Marketing Land and, depending on the topic and interview subject, we may occasionally ask more than five questions.] Facebook made a splash this week when it announced Graph Search, an upgrade to its long-neglected search tool. It's very much a beta product. Facebook emphasized that the product will expand to in [...]

Bit.ly Releases Search API To Discover Hot Stories & Discussions

Jan 9, 2013 at 9:21am ET by Barry Schwartz

Bit.ly announced a new set of APIs named Social Data APIs. The new APIs allow you to search for top stories in real time over the Bit.ly URL network. You can quickly see the top URLs and stories for any specific query right now, in real time. The three types of functions include: (1) True Realtime Search: Search for top stories and URLs in real time by query and geographic area. (2) Attention Spikes: This doesn't require you to search by keyword, instead the "bursts API" returns the current phrases that are receiving a burst in attention beyond what we would expect. (3) Meta [...]

Library Of Congress Struggling To Make A Searchable Twitter Archive

Jan 7, 2013 at 8:02am ET by Matt McGee

The Library of Congress is still working on plans to create a searchable archive of nearly every public tweet ever sent, but the challenges inherent in that task are making it a slow process. Understandably so, considering the substantial growth in tweets in recent years; the LoC is essentially trying to tame a very rapidly moving dataset. If it ever happens, a searchable archive of tweets could prove valuable to researchers, analysts, marketers and others. You can imagine brands wanting to search for Twitter trends surrounding major product/service announcements, or researchers looking [...]

Introducing Trove: Already The Best Facebook Search Around & Set To Tackle Other Social Networks Next

Sep 14, 2012 at 8:55am ET by Matt McGee

It's no secret that Facebook's existing search engine is bad; that drum has been beaten to death. But you don't have to wait for Facebook to make it better; there's a pretty darn good Facebook search engine out there now. It's called Trove, and it's officially launching on Tuesday. But you can connect your Facebook account and get started now; the site had a soft launch about two weeks ago. I've been testing it, and it's easily the best Facebook search experience I've seen. There are a few missing features that I'll mention below, but Trove's potential is obvious. Seth Blank, Trove's fou [...]

Zuckerberg On Search: “At Some Point, We’ll Do It” & Be “Uniquely Positioned”

Sep 11, 2012 at 5:50pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Waiting for a Facebook search engine? Eventually, it'll arrive, says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But it might not be what you expect. Speaking in an interview today at TechCrunch Disrupt with Mike Arrington, Zuckerberg said that Facebook is doing a billion searches per day, "and we're not even trying." Most searches are, as we’ve heard in the past, really people searching for other people. But there are also searches for brands. "There’s a big opportunity there," Zuckerberg said, of going beyond people search. But the opportunity might not be to build a search engines as they� [...]

New Search Engine Attrakt Focuses On Curated Content

Apr 24, 2012 at 9:20am ET by Sean Carlos

Ever amassed a collection of Web bookmarks on a particular subject and then wanted to search through their contents? Delicious users will be familiar with link curating and sharing, but there's no ability to actually search the contents of the bookmarked pages and sites. A few Florentines, mostly former colleagues from the Italian internet company Dada, set out in April 2011 to develop a new search engine, Attrakt, which would focus specifically on hosting specialized search engines curated by the Web community. Attrakt's Index Relies On Curator Contributions As such, Attrakt isn't a [...]

Social Search Engine Volunia Faces The Critics

Feb 14, 2012 at 9:16am ET by Sean Carlos

In a first look at the social search engine Volunia, I considered the main features which differentiate Volunia from existing search engines – and noted the steep road ahead faced by any new search engine. Volunia founder, Massimo Marchiori, has said that one of the main reasons to launch Volunia now was to gather feedback from beta testers. I spoke with Marchiori to find out what Volunia has learned after a week of exposure to users and to understand where Volunia is headed. I also asked him about Volunia's support for webmasters. Volunia Users Say Search Result Quality & UI Need Im [...]

Volunia, A Social Search Engine, Says The Web Has Come Alive

Feb 7, 2012 at 2:20pm ET by Sean Carlos

Google might be synonymous with the word search in most of the world, but that hasn't dissuaded others from bringing new search engines to the market, usually aiming to innovate in an area where Google has somehow let up its guard. Volunia, launched this week, promises to help searchers with three distinguishing features: High level site previews in search results A multimedia search within a site function A social layer which, among other things, allows Volunia users to share information and connect to one another My sense is that it is the social layer which will be most apprecia [...]

Bitly Launches Search Platform & Reputation Monitoring For Shortened Links

Oct 17, 2011 at 11:16am ET by Greg Finn

Bitly currently is the leader in shortned URLs, minimizing 80 million URLs each day. Not only is Bitly shrinking URLs, but they are now "crawling & classifying" each shortened URL thanks to a a new social search platform. An index has since been created that will allow searchers to view the most distributed, viral and highest clicked links on the web. Currently these results can be seen when using the new "reputation monitoring" tool that is being released to enterprise users; a traditional search engine will not accompany this platform. Bitly makes a case for their real-time sear [...]

Clever Sense: A Mobile Search Engine That’s Like “Pandora For The Real World”

Jul 21, 2011 at 7:01pm ET by Greg Sterling

I suspect someone is going to successfully build Google's "contextual discovery engine" before Google does. The newest company to make a run at what Marissa Mayer was talking about is Clever Sense with its new app "Alfred" (formerly called Seymour). Intended to be a demonstration of Clever Sense's underlying data extraction and machine learning technologies, Alfred creates a personalized "interest graph" that then serves up local recommendations for places you'll like. But you can also search in a more conventional way. Of course Clever Sense isn't the first company to create a "recommen [...]

Google’s New Official Google Only Short URL: g.co

Jul 18, 2011 at 4:22pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google announced they have launched a new URL shortener just for official Google use. The new URL is g.co. Google said this URL will only be used to link to official Google properties, explaining it is reserved "just for Google websites." Google explained that "you can trust that it will always take you to a Google product or service." Back in December 2009, Google launched a URL shortening service at goo.gl for public use. Google said that non-Google properties can be linked to using the goog.gl URL shortener but g.co is only for Google use. TechCrunch says that single letter .co [...]

Google Adding Local Product Data To Place Pages

Apr 6, 2011 at 9:29am ET by Greg Sterling

Since early 2006 I've been writing about the "offline future of online shopping." And since that time a collection of startups has been working, mostly under the radar, to bring real-time local product inventory data to the internet. In November of 2010 Google joined that effort with local product search. Now when you do a product search Google will show you local store availability -- mostly at large retail chains. However, Google just said in a blog post that it's also going to make local product availability a feature of Place Pages: When you provide Google with local product availabil [...]

Meet +1: Google’s Answer To The Facebook Like Button

Mar 30, 2011 at 1:43pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Nearly a year after Facebook Like buttons spread out across the web, Google has announced its own rival, the +1 button. It launches today as part of Google's search engine, allowing you to "+1" the search results and ads that you like. And in a few months, it'll be arriving at a web site near you. Is +1 (pronounced "Plus One") part of the new social network that Google's long been rumored to be building? Or is +1 simply that "social layer" that Google has said would come and isn't really meant as a rival to Facebook? Yes. Come along -- let's see how it works now, where it might go, an [...]

Whrrl Upgrades Personalization Engine To Fuel Discovery

Mar 10, 2011 at 3:23pm ET by Pamela Parker

How can you find a new restaurant, a well-curated boutique, or a artisanal cheese shop, if you never even knew it was there? Local search works well when people know what they're looking for, but companies like Pelago, with its Whrrl application, are looking for alternative ways to enable those serendipitous discoveries. The start-up company today released version two of its software, which can be accessed on the Web and via apps for iPhone, Android, and, with the new release, BlackBerry. Through a system of rewards and by encouraging social behavior, Whrrl enables people to check-in, make [...]

OneRiot Brings Social Targeting to Mobile Devices

Feb 25, 2011 at 12:10pm ET by Greg Sterling

Social ad network OneRiot is introducing the ability to target mobile audiences by interests, demographics and influence on its ad network of Twitter clients. The company produces an influence score for individuals and organizes them into buckets based on several targeting variables. Advertisers can then buy audiences according to those groupings. In a case study released this morning the company worked with GM/Chevrolet's ad agency to target male sports fans discussing the Chevy Super Bowl ad on Twitter. The objective was to gain additional exposure for the TV ad. The OneRiot campaign help [...]

Data: StumbleUpon Beats Facebook As Top Social Referrer

Jan 5, 2011 at 3:18pm ET by Greg Sterling

Facebook and Twitter are getting most of the ink, attention and money of late in the social media world. However StatCounter indicates that the venerable StumbleUpon has now become a larger social media referrer than either Facebook or Twitter. Here's the data, showing StumbleUpon with a 43 percent share of social media referrals, while Facebook has 38 percent according to StatCounter: Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Social Media Market Share This may be momentary or it may hold up over time. But it's a surprise. Webmasters, agencies/marketers and developers: are you [...]

Report: Google May Buy Groupon

Nov 19, 2010 at 1:26pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Kara Swisher reports Google is looking at Groupon as a possible acquisition. She said she has "multiple sources" close to the deal that say Google is very interesting in making a bid on Groupon. Google did not confirm the rumors but did reply to Kara's press request in Google fashion: Per usual, we don’t comment on rumor or speculation. If we did we’d be busy 24/7! Groupon is a local deals coupon site that has grown in popularity. Clone after clone has been created trying to replicate the model. To learn more about Groupon, see our article named A Look At Social Shopping With Grou [...]

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