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 [...]

SearchReviews: A Search Engine For 40 Million Reviews (And Counting)

Feb 15, 2011 at 9:00am ET by Matt McGee

SearchReviews has just launched a search engine with more than 40 million reviews in its system, and plans to hit 100 million reviews by the end of 2011. Those 40 million reviews cover about four million products and come from more than a thousand sites such as TripAdvisor, Amazon, Zappos and others. Those are impressive numbers, but is SearchReviews any good? More on that below along with a look at how it works. How SearchReviews Works SearchReviews appears to have the largest searchable database of strictly review content anywhere. Buzzillions advertises having 13 million reviews; Baza [...]

Is Google Baraza A Test Drive For A New Google Q&A Product?

Nov 16, 2010 at 7:35am ET by Greg Sterling

Google Blogoscoped pointed our attention to Google's Baraza, a Yahoo-Answers-like Q&A site for Africa. The expressed rationale behind Baraza is that it will help generate "local content" across the continent. There's a relatively elaborate point system (a "currency") used to pay for answers and as a reward for participation otherwise. Because it's globally available in English we're likely to see broad participation from outside of Africa in Baraza. The more interesting question in my mind is whether this will become a model for a larger Q&A effort at Google. The company cour [...]

Mobile Answer Engines Battle Search Engines

Oct 20, 2009 at 2:39pm ET by Greg Sterling

A class of mobile "help" or "answer engines" has arisen as an alternative to traditional search engines. They hold out the promise more efficient, relevant or direct responses to queries than search engines can provide on the small screen. In several cases they involve the use of live human agents or a community of users to answer questions. Examples include Aardvark, ChaCha and kgb Answers. This "community answers" capability is also nascent within Facebook and Twitter. Also in this category is the yet to launch "personal assistant" Siri, which taps artificial intelligence rather that rea [...]

Marchex Releases Powerful SMB Reputation Management Tool With “Search Inside”

Oct 13, 2009 at 9:14am ET by Greg Sterling

Consumers care about online reviews; small businesses (SMBs) care about what's being said about them online. Most small businesses that are aware of the phenomenon of online reviews (and care) try to monitor those reviews by using a search engine or alerts with their business name. They also visit specific sites like Yelp or Citysearch to see what's being said about them. It's an awkward process that is time consuming, but increasingly necessary. Large corporations have had various "buzz tracking" tools at their disposal to monitor "brand chatter" but these have not been available for SMBs. [...]

Will Social Nets Replace Search For Content Discovery?

Oct 6, 2009 at 8:56am ET by Greg Sterling

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 trust [...]

Idearc Brings True Local Search To Twitter

Sep 2, 2009 at 10:02am ET by Greg Sterling

A version of local search has existed on Twitter for some time: asking your followers for local recommendations about places to stay, things to do and so on. One can also use Twitter search itself, though it's very hit and miss in terms of the quality of results. And there are also the third party search engines that use the Twitter API. Yet those typically produce the same uneven results. But in what is a first (to my knowledge) Idearc's Superpages has brought true local search to Twitter through Twitter.com/sp411. Twitter users can now conduct searches of the Superpages database and get r [...]

FriendFeed Joins The Real-Time Search Race

Jul 2, 2009 at 7:28pm ET by Matt McGee

Add FriendFeed to the long and growing list of players who are trying to win the race for comprehensive and quick real-time search. FriendFeed has always had a real-time element -- the ability to track social activities almost as they happen. But the company has announced the addition of real-time search today. If you've used search.twitter.com, you'll be familiar with FriendFeed's real-time search -- the interface is almost exactly the same. One difference that FriendFeed is quick to point out is that its results update automatically and scroll down the page, without the need to click [...]

Twazzup: New All-In-One Twitter Search Engine

Apr 14, 2009 at 2:26pm ET by Matt McGee

While the major search engines continue to sit in the proverbial driveway, real-time search is in high gear and speeding along without a speed bump in site. And with Twitter offering what's becoming the default real-time web experience (more so than Facebook or FriendFeed, in my opinion), it's no wonder that Twitter search engines are starting to pop up on a regular basis. Earlier this month I profiled the new OneRiot Twitter search engine, and now via Louis Gray, we learn about Twazzup, another new entry into the Twitter search race. Where OneRiot is focused on sorting through the Twitter [...]

OneRiot Offers Twitter Search … With a Twist

Apr 2, 2009 at 12:00pm ET by Matt McGee

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 approa [...]

Twitter Embraces Its Inner Search Engine

Apr 2, 2009 at 7:33am ET by Greg Sterling

Twitter is a search engine after all -- or make that a "discovery engine." The folks at Twitter are saying that the experiment with integrating a search box into Twitter pages will rolled out with some interesting twists and new dimensions. It won't be at the top of the page, but rather on the sidebar: Currently, a small subset of Twitter users are trying this new search feature in the sidebar of their Twitter home page. When you do a search, you don't go to another page, the relevant tweets instantly show up where you'd expect them to—right on your home page where tweets love to be. Twist [...]

Search Veteran Gerry Campbell Becomes CEO Of “Real-Time” Search Engine Collecta

Mar 24, 2009 at 10:52am ET by Greg Sterling

Gerry Campbell was at Alta Vista and later spent several years in the search unit of AOL before joining Reuters as "President/Global Head of Search & Content Technologies." Among other roles, he was an advisor to Summize, acquired last year by Twitter. And now Campbell has joined "real-time" search service Collecta as CEO. Collecta hasn't launched yet. But Campbell made clear to me that he didn't see it as a "Google killer" or replacement for web search. Collecta is focused on the emerging arena, now getting lots of buzz, called "real-time" search: delivering content within minutes of i [...]

New Tool Adds Twitter Search To Google

Mar 2, 2009 at 3:07pm ET by Matt McGee

A new tool takes us one small step closer to bringing real-time search, i.e., Twitter search results, to the Google interface. It's called Twitter Search Results on Google, and it adds the most recent five tweets for your search query above Google's regular search results, like this: (The tool is actually a Greasemonkey script for Firefox. But don't let that intimidate you. Personal note: If I can learn how to install and use Greasemonkey scripts, anyone can!) While Google is able to index content within minutes of publishing, there continues to be a push for improved searching of th [...]

How To Track Keyword-Based Tweets Within Your Twitter Stream

Feb 11, 2009 at 10:56am ET by Danny Sullivan

With our SMX West search marketing conference happening this week, I wanted to keep track of the real-time buzz for SMX on Twitter. I knew how to do this manually by checking Twitter Search, but was there a way to have this flow into my regular Twitter stream, along with posts from people that I normally follow? Thanks to suggestions from people on Twitter, there was! Ideally, I wanted Twitter itself to let me create a "person" that was really a search term, so that I could follow that person and have the matching posts appear in my stream. I still think that's an important feature [...]

The Rise (And Fall?) Of Real-Time Search

Jan 22, 2009 at 1:03pm ET by Matt McGee

Blogging and micro-blogging represent a stream of real-time web activity; from important real-life events to random personal thoughts, more Internet users are putting what they see, hear, think, and feel into this stream. Twitter, in particular, is a river of information. Breaking news is often reported there first, ahead of any other media -- online or not. Just last week, Danny Sullivan wondered why the major search engines don't offer a search service that taps specifically into this stream of information. Two other services are aiming to do just that, but Twitter itself could prevent re [...]

Why Don’t Google & Yahoo Offer Twitter Search?

Jan 16, 2009 at 2:26pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Yesterday, we got a new news search engine which taps into Twitter that Yahoo's excited about, as it uses their BOSS system. That kind of annoyed me. Why didn't Yahoo just build the service themselves? Or a regular Twitter search service, for that matter? And where's Twitter search from Google? BOSS is Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service product, which lets anyone take Yahoo's data and create their own search engine. It's grown into part of Yahoo's "open strategy" where it hopes to make gains on the web by supposedly pulling in data from everywhere as well as being open to others [...]

Google Blogs & Other “Front Pages” For The Blogosphere

Oct 2, 2008 at 3:40pm ET by Danny Sullivan

When Techmeme opened in 2005, I'd found a new online newspaper to begin my day with. It quickly and neatly organized top stories as reported by various blogs and news sources for the area I cover. But if you weren't into technology, you seemed kind of out of luck. Now Google Blog Search has stepped in to bring Techmeme-like organization for all subjects buzzing in the blogosphere. Below, a look at how it compares along with other resources such as Technorati and Blogrunner. Major Search Engines & Blog Search Google's new service has only been out for less than a day, so I don't [...]

From My Inbox: Some Search Tools To Check Out

May 7, 2008 at 10:17am ET by Danny Sullivan

After Yahoo-Microsoft madness, there's been a bit of a lull so I'm cleaning out my inbox and wanted to mention a few items that might be of interest. Below, a way to quickly search blogs & social media sites all at once, a new video search tool, a study into automatic search queries, an awesome Twitter search tool, a way to track search rankings over time, and a compilation of Google help info for site owners, from Google, in PDF form. Plus, a way to see headlines from blogs and news sites in a variety of subjects, including search marketing. Addict-o-matic From Dave Pell of Rollyo, it l [...]

Google Hot Trends, Yahoo Buzz Index: Tracking Tools For Traditional Marketing

May 24, 2007 at 10:12am ET by Greg Sterling

Search Engine Journal compares Google's recently introduced "Hot Trends" database with the Yahoo Buzz Index. (Barry Schwartz wrote extensively about Hot Trends previously.) These tools, while fun and interesting, are also potentially important as business intelligence and data mining tools and increasingly useful to track the efficacy of offline marketing. Whatever their problems and challenges today, these tools will ultimately improve and become important to marketers as they coordinate "integrated" campaigns across traditional and Internet media. Yahoo has very self-consciously used its [...]

Keyword Research And Consumer Demand

Feb 6, 2007 at 9:13am ET by Greg Sterling

Kevin Delaney at the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) today has an interesting article that borrows a page from John Battelle's "database of intentions" idea of search as a kind of repository for consumer demand, buzz meter and perpetual focus group all in one. The article discusses how marketers are using search to help conduct research and development, launch new products and predict potential product success based on perceived consumer demand -- all via search volumes: There is evidence that data about consumer searches could prove valuable to businesses in other ways. As part [...]

Get Our News, Everywhere!

Follow @sengineland

Got a tip? Tell us here!

Most Likes
Most Tweets
Comments

Our Stories Being Liked on Facebook

Search Engine Land Sponsors

Advertise With Us

Free Daily Search News Recap!

SearchCap is a once-per-day newsletter update - sign up below and get the news delivered to you!

Click to watch SMX conference video

Join us at an upcoming SMX event:

North America

SMX Advanced - June 11-12, 2013
SMX East - Oct. 1-3, 2013
SMX Social Media Marketing - Nov. 20-21, 2013
SMX West - March 11-13, 2014

EMEA

SMX Paris - June 6-7, 2013
SMX Stockholm - Oct. 14-15, 2013
SMX Milan - Nov. 7-8, 2013
SMX Israel - Jan. 2014
SMX Munich - March 25-26, 2014
SMX London - May 2014

APAC

SMX Sydney - April 2014

Search Engine Land produces SMX, the Search Marketing Expo conference series. SMX events deliver the most comprehensive educational and networking experiences - whether you're just starting in search marketing or you're a seasoned expert.