The label, “TV Guide for the internet,” doesn’t fully capture the intent or the extent of Clicker. We first wrote about the site when it appeared at the TechCrunch50 event. It was then in a closed beta. However today, a mere 58 days later, the site launches to the public with a number of new features and additional content.

Former Ask CEO Jim Lanzone, now the CEO of Clicker, has described the site as “the first structured, comprehensive and unbiased programming guide for internet television.” And in today’s press release the site calls itself “Complete Programming Guide for Internet Television.”

Clicker may look like a more organized version of YouTube or a broader version of Hulu or a video search engine; and while there have been TV programming guides online, the gestalt of Clicker is something new. It both expresses where video programming is today and anticipates the “converged future.”

Increasingly people are watching movies and TV programs online. According to comScore, “more than 168 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during [September] . . . with nearly 26 billion videos viewed during the month . . .”

Clicker doesn’t compete with any of the video sites or destinations listed above; it aims to sit on top of all this content and serve as a comprehensive guide to them. Clicker also features movies, music video and made-for-Web video. Some of this content can be viewed on Clicker (if the video player is embeddable) but mostly Clicker refers people to the original sources.

Though it may not be entirely obvious, Clicker has a bright social future with a long road map of community features that will be built out over time. Imagine playlists and favorites “curated” by aficionados and experts in genres or sub-genres. And Clicker’s structured data approach provides lots and lots of information about programs and ways into content and related content:

The new features making their appearance with the public launch include:

• More content: 400,000 full episodes from over 1,200 sources in more than 1,200 categories [and] over 30,000 movies from Netflix Instant Streaming and Amazon VOD.  (Clicker also catalogs more than 50,000 music videos from over 20,000 artists.)
• Improved DVR-like Playlist functionality, including new episode alerts and full “season passes”
• Facebook Connect integration, so anyone can create a Clicker account with Facebook and/or tie their Clicker account to their Facebook profile
• User-Generated Content: fans can contribute their own thoughts, observations, and facts about any show or episode
• Search Within: The ability to restrict a search to topics within a specific program. For example, searching “Warren Buffett” within the show Charlie Rose specifically brings up those episodes where Buffett is interviewed
• Related Search: Machine-learning based suggestions on related programs. For example, 30 Rock, The Office and Larry Sanders Show are offered as related suggestions for the show Seinfeld

As mentioned above, Clicker also anticipates the coming era of the internet in the living room (on TV). As mentioned in our original post, Clicker CEO Lanzone told me that almost immediately after the demo he did at the TechCrunch50 event he was getting inquiries from the mainstream broadcasters and cable companies. Below is a “TV interface” that Clicker mocked up that could replace the kludgy cable programming guides of today.

There’s no doubt competitors will come out of the woodwork and existing companies will reposition themselves to match Clicker’s positioning and claims. However Clicker is in a very solid if not unique position to realize its ambition to be a comprehensive programming guide for video and entertainment content whether online — or on TV.

Already widely reported from yesterday the Pew Internet & American Life almost 20 percent of US Internet users are on Twitter or updating their status with another social network: LinkedIn, MySpace or Facebook. According to the report:

Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. This represents a significant increase over previous surveys in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service.

Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users – those under age 44.

Here’s Pew’s demographic breakdown:

According to the report, parsing by network:

The median age of a Twitter user is 31, which has remained stable over the past year. The median age for MySpace is now 26, down from 27 in May 2008, and the median age for LinkedIn is now 39, down from 40. Facebook, however, is graying a bit: the median age for this social network site is now 33, up from 26 in May 2008.

The Pew report paints a slightly different and younger picture of Twitter users than earlier studies:

Source: comScore, February, 2009 (via MarketingCharts)

Here’s the breakdown of social networking more generally compared with Twitter usage:

The report also found that mobile users and those who have more devices are more likely to use Twitter or a comparable service for status updates.

These data illustrate the growing importance of integrating social media into search marketing strategies.

Google’s Marissa Mayer has announced at the Web 2.0 Summit that Google Social Search will be launching in the coming weeks. I’ve seen an early release of it. It’s way cool. Below, what details we have now about this plus some follow up on today’s Google-Twitter search deal that was announced.

NOTE: Google Social Search is now live. See our Google Social Search Launches, Gives Results From Your Trusted “Social Circle” post.

I’m in a bind because I can’t say more about the product than what Mayer released today. I wasn’t able to make it to Web 2.0 nor were her remarks on the product broadcast live. TechCrunch was there and summarizes what she said this way:

There’s a new Google product called Social Search that is launching in Google Labs. This is a new feature that allows you to see results for queries from people in your social network. This works by using your Google Profile. If you fill it out with the other social networks you’re a member of, such as FriendFeed, Google will scan who you are connected to and give your results from those people.

For example, I have a Google Profile here. On that page, I’ve listed my Twitter account. This means when I’m signed into Google, it can tell who I am and what my Twitter account is with certainty. Then when I search, it can offer to show me web pages that are related to other people in my Twitter profile.

More specifically, if I were do to a search relating to journalism matters, because I follow a number of people in the journalism field (not everyone might see this Twitter List yet), I’d get back both “regular” search results as well as those that are from people who I follow. News.com notes that Mayer said these would appear at the bottom of regular search pages.

Other links from social sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn could also be added to your profile (any link can be added to it). To the degree Google can see your network, those can be used to filter your results.

Our Search 4.0: Social Search Engines & Putting Humans Back In Search article from last year talks more about how search results potentially can be influenced by your friends in general, plus it revisits the personalization that Google already does based on your own behavior. In some ways, the new social search that’s coming is like personalized search extended to tap into your friends and followers network.

I wish I could get more specific, but as I said, I’m limited to the details already released (and everything above is based on what’s out there from Google itself). I wish even more that I had some screenshots to show. But when I saw it last month, I joked on Twitter that I had a Scoblesque tear running down my cheek. OK, it wasn’t THAT awesome. But it was pretty impressive. I don’t see a lot of things that make me go “wow,” that’s useful. This did.

The social search product also predates today’s news that Google has a partnership with Twitter to tap into its data. That means Social Search doesn’t depend on the Twitter deal, but it certainly should help.

What exactly will Google do with the Twitter data. Are we getting a dedicated Twitter search engine like Bing Twitter Search launched today?

Google’s kind of cagey on that front. Mayer said at Web 2.0 that it will be integrated in to regular results. But what’s that mean? Integrated only using Universal Search, which could mean there’s also standalone Twitter search engine out there (just as there’s a standalone image search, news search, blog search and so on)?  Integrated to use Twitter data as part of the core ranking data?

I couldn’t get clarity on whether there will be a standalone Twitter search. Personally, I think there will be, or that there will be a combined microblog search service. We know Google has at least gotten people to translate a name for that service.

Whether that type of dedicated search for microblogged content service gets integrated into the completely different Social Search service that refines results on your social network remains to be seen.

Certainly Google sees the microblogged content as something that needs to be gathered and somehow integrated alongside web pages. Johanna Wright, director of product management at Google, talked to me today about this.

“There are things on Twitter that you can only find on Twitter,” she said, especially local happenings that might never see an actual news article written about them.

One example Wright gave, of stories she says Google is collecting, was about an art project where 2,000 “invisible dog” leashes were handed out in Manhattan. You know, those solid leashes that look like  you have an invisible dog holding them up? No one wrote a news article about this, but if you were trying to figure out what was happening if you saw people with them, the information was blogged on Twitter.

“Typically, there’s not going to be a news story on this,” Wright said. “So most people wouldn’t know why everyone around them has invisible dogs. This is the kind of information that can be found on Twitter.”

I agree. Our What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players article goes into more depth about microblogged content and its value to regular search. But there’s also the other major aspect, mining data of URLs that people are tweeting. Is Google planning much there?

“I think you can use them both. One thing to highlight is the background signal from Twitter, whether or not a story is breaking at Google, we have a number of signals that will tell us when a story is fresh,” Wright said.

Take That, Twitter: Google Hot Trends Integrated Into Google Search is another article from us that covers a primary signal that Google has if something is a hot topic — actual searches on Google that happen. And while Google’s has a “query deserved freshness” algorithm that can very quickly find new pages and rank them in top results, Twitter’s data potentially could make that even faster.

Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.

For related discussion, see news on Techmeme.

Aardvark has redesigned its site and repositioned somewhat as a “social search engine.” The site can be accessed directly, via IM, Twitter and the iPhone. You can also sign in using Facebook Connect, which sends your activity on Aardvark back to your news feed on Facebook.

What Aardvark is trying to do is not new — there have been Q&A sites for some time — but it’s trying to execute as a better version of the concept of peer-to-peer advice or answers. Once could also call this “human powered search.” Services like kgb and ChaCha also try to do something similar but with trained “guides” or agents rather than one’s network or friends of friends. Yahoo Answers is arguably the incumbent in the space.

Aardvark’s IP is all about question routing and management. I’ve been using Aardvark off and on for a few months and it generally works well and delivers answers (up to four) in a few minutes. The most compelling incarnation of the service is on the iPhone in my view.

The big challenge for the service is to prove that it can deliver more trust, precision or value than a Google search.

StumbleUpon wants to be a search engine. Kind of. It also wants to be more like Twitter and Facebook. Kind of. Better search and better social elements are the two cornerstones of StumbleUpon’s new web site, which was announced this week and will roll out to all during the next month.

There’s no doubt the site looks better. Beyond the cleaner layout, StumbleUpon says its new features include:

• search for sites within your own favorites
• search your friend’s favorites
• improved friend search capabilities
• improved site navigation
• improved navigation within user profiles

There are other changes, too. The old “What’s New” page has been replaced by a “Recent Activity” page; StumbleUpon borrows from Twitter lingo by calling this a page of “nearly real-time updates.” Friend requests have been replaced by “subscription” — when you subscribe to a user, that person’s stumbles will appear in your Recent Activity page. The old “Similarity Meter” is gone, and StumbleUpon Groups has been diminished — it’s now only available through a footer link.

The main thing that hasn’t changed is that new pages must still be added (stumbled) via the StumbleUpon toolbar. This seems odd to me, given that StumbleUpon’s changes seem to encourage more use of its web site. If StumbleUpon wants to position itself as a sort-of search engine, it would be the only search engine where a “submit URL” forum would actually matter; sites and pages don’t get into StumbleUpon without someone submitting them.

I’ve been a StumbleUpon user for several years, and I rarely visit the web site; my activity is almost strictly toolbar-based. StumbleUpon says a new version of the toolbar is on the way, and will also integrate many of these new features.

Nielsen offers a blog post that shows the various ways that people discover content online. Search is at the top, followed by “portals” (which feature search boxes); at the other end are blogs and social networks. However Nielsen argues that certain categories of people are increasingly social media tools as content discovery sources:

We saw the power of opinions posted online in our global study earlier this year about trust in advertising, and the point came up again in our recent findings. Social media is becoming a core product research channel. Almost 15 percent of Socializers most trusted information they found on blogs when researching new purchases online, while nearly 20 percent trusted most the information they found on message boards.

Then the provocative question is asked: “So are social networks replacing portals or search engines?” Nielsen then says:

Perhaps. Regardless, if we don’t understand and address people feeling increasingly alienated by the amount of information on the Internet, and the need for a human guide, yes, your favorite social network (or something like it) will become the next great content gateway.

But it’s not an either/or, zero-sum situation. There may be some number of queries that people pose to their networks before or in addition to their use of search engines. Overall, “word of mouth” on social media sites is a complement to search engine usage. No doubt social media tools will continue to grow as content sources; however I don’t think we’ll see Facebook or Twitter replace Google or Bing any time soon.

No discussion of social media’s effect on organic search results is complete without considering Facebook’s well-laid play for “search” domination, in a closed-loop-members-only end run around Google’s public algorithmic crawl.

With 250 million users, the recent purchase of friendFeed and newly offered ability to search at macro and/or granular users’ network levels, Facebook’s internal community-search platform may well threaten other search models by sheer magnitude of participation and users’ trust of their friends, extended networks and themed groups.

Why SEO for Facebook is now crucial

Whereas most SEOs think “Google” and other mainstream engines when gauging the effect social media profiles on organic SERPs, Facebook is quickly becoming a massive walled-garden parallel organic internet. Think Facebook internal search results won’t matter? Think again and start “optimizing.”

According to its publicly released statistics, Facebook claims 120 million of its registered members log in at least once each day. Every month friends share 1 billion photographs and 10 million videos. In any given week users post over a billion content blocks, news stories, links and blog posts. There are over 45 million active user groups. Little-to-none of Facebook’s is activity is indexed by Google and other mainstream engines. It’s easy to see why Facebook’s members-only organic search results deserve attention!

At the root of this new consideration is the reality that Facebook is now allowing users to search the last 30 days of their news feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by friends and the Facebook pages of which they’re fans.

Check out my personal Facebook search results (from among friends) for “Indian food.”  I see my friend Reem ate Indian food  for lunch.

If other users have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people’s profiles as well as pertinent Facebook Pages, groups and applications. Also note the cool ability to filter your personal  “search visibility” by various Facebook internal channels: links, status updates, wall posts and notes.

There are  commercial results in my Facebook wide “everyone” SERPs from a restaurant promoting their participation in the San Francisco Food Festival.

Here’s another commercially-tinted result, R2 Indian Buffet. The listing was was sourced from R2’s Facebook Indian Buffet page.

Look at these 2 results for the search “seafood in New York.” Chef Andrew Hunter’s listing comes as a result of his using the words “seafood & New York” in the most current wall post.

Next, Andrea Cohn’s profile comes up #2 for “seafood in New York.  She’s promoting the Bongo seafood lounges, in West Village and Chelsea, with a wall post of  a martiniboys.com listing. Facebook is showing the title tag of the Bongo post Andrea bookmarked.

One other important observation: Bing is the official Facebook “web results” search engine. With the recent Microsoft/Yahoo deal Bing will be also be powering Yahoo. Consider the branding and traffic implications of Bing powering Facebook behind the garden wall, especially when one click actually takes users to Bing.com.

Ten Facebook SEO tips

1. Search results continue to include people’s profiles as well as pertinent Facebook pages, groups and applications. Therefore what you’ve done to date still works. The gravity of Facebook groups, which some thought lame, will increase as Facebook internal search is adopted.

2. Facebook gives us some clues regarding its algorithmic ranking factors.  Read it and understand. Stay up to speed on changes in the Facebook blog, as they will certainly occur.  Hopefully as Facebook grows they’ll make a search quality team ambassador available like Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Sasi Parthasarathy. As people learn to spam these results, Facebook will react and SEOs will want more information.

3. In addition to wall posts, think SEO in tendering status updates, links and notes. You never know who will find it, searching for whatever.

4. Wall-post external content like blog posts and news should be optimized for important keywords, especially the content’s title tag.  If possible post content where the call to action and/or contact information is actually in the title tag. This gets your pitch to the search results as opposed to requiring a second click through to a profile page.

5. If you want your promotional data indexed in the wider Facebook, outside of your friends, make sure you select “everyone” in privacy settings > search. Though it’s possible users might not be happy if they were aware, existing accounts default to “everyone,” understanding this is a cool inside tip for early success.

When “everyone” is selected, others may see your data regardless of whether or not you are friends.  Reciprocally, users should uncheck if they want to exclude their profile from wider Facebook SERPs.   It would not be surprising if users protest when folks start to discover that all of a sudden some of their personal sharing is visible to everyone.

7. Remember that it’s not only wider (non-friends) Facebook search that matters. Your friends, friends of friends, networks and networks of friends are likely to trust you a bit more since you’re “local.”  It’s fascinating to extrapolate the implications of a “trusted local personal search network.” As a user or searcher, be aware of how Facebook search privacy settings function.

8. Seek advice from other tools Facebook gives us regarding users common social graphs. Lexicon, which is about to get deeper, and the Facebook paid search platform offer cool insight regarding what’s hot.

9. Contribute continually.  A good portion of the physical search results are comprised of social graph points generated within the last 30 days.

10. Be there or be square! Stay tuned for attributes, in and out of Facebook, may factor in the search results as Facebook evolves.

A crucial new channel for search marketers to master

All of this has potentially massive repercussions for how marketers view Facebook chatter.  By really digging deep into how Facebook is searching internal content, you’ll be tapping into the next level of the web’s development, uncovering a gold mine of data about what people are talking about, what they like and dislike, and how they are influencing the opinions of others. This is clearly an important search frontier.

Dig around. Learn the specifics in form and functionality of Facebook’s newly enhanced organic search results. In order to “optimize” for Facebook internal search, it’s important to learn precisely what areas of participation to focus on for the most influence. Facebook gives us a bit of ranking criteria information regarding how the engine is wired. Facebook groups will matter more than before, as a result of the new search algorithm, if & when Facebook internal search achieves wider adoption.

As always in social media marketing, leveraging friends’ (and your own) recommendations, without being a spammer, is sticky business.  Follow the timeless axioms of social media participation. give more than you take by contributing unselfish & recurrent content recommendations for others to consume. Be holistic in how you promote your own content and (as always) think in terms of supporting the community first.

Whenever the subject of real-time search and/or Twitter search comes up, someone inevitably argues that there’s too much noise to make it worthwhile; there are too many random conversations and meaningless chatter to find anything of value. It’s a generally fair argument. But one company thinks it’s found a way to cut through some of that noise.

OneRiot, a real-time search engine for web and video content, has launched a new Twitter search engine with a unique angle: Rather than focus on what people are saying, the search engine focuses on the web pages people are linking to.

“Our approach is, you’d go to Twitter for the conversation,” says OneRiot GM Tobias Peggs, “but you’d come to OneRiot for the content.”

How It Works

One Riot indexes tweets, looking for messages with embedded links, then crawls and indexes the content being linked to. The OneRiot algorithm includes spam analysis and has checks for timeliness, relevance, and a “hotness”/freshness factor for URLs that are being talked about a lot in recent tweets. Here’s what it looked like yesterday on a search for iPhone:

As you can see, the focus is on content — on the URLs people are discussing and sharing on Twitter. Search results are displayed in the familiar Title-Snippet-URL format. But Twitter is a social site, so OneRiot’s search results also include some social elements for anyone who wants to dip into the conversation. Each result includes a reference to how recently the URL was shared on Twitter, how many tweets mention it, and who first found it on Twitter. Clicking on the “Shared in (N) tweets” link displays the tweets that mention this URL:

(you can click for the larger version of both images on Flickr)

It’s a unique approach to Twitter search that should prove particularly beneficial to the growing business community on Twitter. In my short time testing the service, I found that it does bypass a lot of the noise and chatter, and leads more quickly to relevant content. And there’s a convenience factor, too, in that OneRiot’s search expands shortened URLs, so you can see the actual content people are talking about without having to click first on a TinyURL or some other link.

An alpha version of their Twitter search engine is available now at twitter.oneriot.com. The company plans to get user feedback for at least a few weeks before eventually moving Twitter search to the main OneRiot.com search engine. You can message @OneRiot on Twitter to give feedback.

News.com reports that Wikia Search is giving up and closing up shop. Search Wikia launched an alpha release in January 2008, where Chris Sherman gave it a poor review.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia, told News.com “It was going to take at least an another year to two before it’s usable by the public, and we can’t afford that right now.” Due to the economy and the need to get to “profitability” right now, Wikia Search needs to shut down. Two full-time employees will be out of a job due to the decision. Wales said that Wikia Search only had 10,000 unique users a month over the past six months.

Is this the end of Wikia Search? Wales said no, he said “return to this again when the economy is good.”

Postscript: Here is the blog post from Jimmy Wales on the news.

Did you Twitter something embarrassing? Don’t think deleting your tweet or locking your Twitter feed means what you said goes away. Twitter Search still makes it available, which one job applicant may have found to their loss.

Hutch Carpenter covers how one Twitter user named TheConnor said on Twitter that Cisco offered them a job. But the full message is what may have gotten this person in trouble:

Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.

Soon after, Tim Levad, Business Development Manager at Cisco Systems, spotted the tweet and replied, saying:

@theconnor Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.

That caused @theconner to take their Twitter account private, but as Carpenter points out, the tweet could still be found in Twitter Search.

Making a feed private from the start does appear to keep it out of Twitter Search, of course, But bear in mind that it’s common that other people retweet what their friends say. That can put your “private” post out into the public eye.

Overall, Twitter is not instant messaging or private communication. Be careful what you say in a public setting and use social media tools to help you, not hurt you.