Why search queries and location data could trump polling as political tools in 2020
Location intelligence will be used to identify and target voters, and predict election results.
Topic: Data mining
Microsoft adds Reddit data to Bing search results, Power BI analytics tool
Reddit posts will appear in Bing's search results, and its data will be piped into Power BI for marketers to track brand-related comments.
YP brings search and location data together in “audience cartography”
The dominant use of location data in mobile display advertising has ironically become more about "who" over "where."
Ingress: Is Google’s AR Game A Stealth Local Data Effort?
I recently got a new Android phone and found a little card in the box advertising Ingress, the “massively multi-player location-based alternate reality game from Niantic Labs at Google.” Ingress had slipped past my notice despite Greg Sterling’s mention of it nearly a year ago. Yet, here it was, already preloaded as an app in […]
Up Close With Facebook Graph Search
We’ve covered the launch of Facebook Graph Search, explored how it differs from Google search but now it’s time for the hands-on. Come along for a tour of how it works. Sign-Up & Wait To get started, you have to sign-up, where you’ll be added to a waiting list. There’s no particular ETA of when […]
DuckDuckGo Adds Zero-Click Info From Zanran
DuckDuckGo has added new “zero click” information from Zanran to its search results, giving users quicker access to some of the deeper web content that Zanran offers. You may remember Zanran from my profile last year, Zanran: New Search Engine That Unearths Data In Charts, Graphs & Tables — it’s essentially a search engine for […]
Google Launches Knowledge Graph To Provide Answers, Not Just Links
Hinted at for months, Google formally launched its “Knowledge Graph” today. The new technology is being used to provide popular facts about people, places and things alongside Google’s traditional results. It also allows Google to move toward a new way of searching not for pages that match query terms but for “entities” or concepts that […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 12, 2012
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: The 1940 U.S. Census: Soon, A Searcher’s Treasure Trove Big news for genealogists, historians and even for people just curious about their own families: the 1940 U.S. Census is now available […]
Yelpy Insights: Yelp Adds Two New Search Filters, Looks To Add More
Is there a battle brewing in the area of searchable local content and reviews? Foursquare has been making some interesting moves in this area, and today Yelp has announced two new search filters that it says will let users more easily find the right local business. Yelp is calling the new technology “Yelpy Insights.” The […]
Survey Paradox: People Like Google But Not What It’s Doing
Last week the Pew Internet Project released findings of a survey on search, personalization and targeted advertising. In a nutshell, survey respondents had a very positive view of search and the quality of search results. Yet the majority gave an unequivocal thumbs down to search personalization (and behavioral targeting). This isn’t necessarily a contradiction or paradox […]
Pew Report: 65% View Personalized Search As Bad; 73% See It As Privacy Invasion
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 & […]
The Technology Behind Autobidding: Q&A With OptiMine’s Dr. Rob Cooley
Autobidders. Every SEM management tool has one. The promise is powerful: simply input the performance you’re trying to achieve and sit back, have a sody-pop, and smile as the little robots make your job easy. Ha! If it was only that easy! Most of you reading this post have used one in the past. Have […]
Google, Smartphone Contacts & Social Graphs: Has Eric Schmidt Crossed The Creepy Line Again?
Things have been a little quiet — perhaps even boring — since Eric Schmidt stepped down as Google’s CEO to become the company’s Executive Chairman. The strange quotes and not-so-funny attempts at cracking privacy-related jokes have slowed down in the past couple months. But Schmidt may have just added another one to his collection of […]
Zanran: New Search Engine That Unearths Data In Charts, Graphs & Tables
A few days ago, I was looking for a very specific piece of data: the average age of professors in the US. I did a Google search for “average age of us professors” and, after the obligatory and unhelpful Wikipedia result at the top, found some data that was good enough further down the search […]
Search Marketers Intrigued By Google’s +1
It’s difficult to gauge the potential impact of Google’s new +1 initiative on marketers because of one somewhat mysterious factor: consumer behavior. When compared to Facebook, with its “Like” button, Google likely has relatively few users who’ve bothered to set up profiles. And, if a consumer doesn’t have a profile, using +1 isn’t an option […]
Study Asks, Can You Trust Google’s Personalized Search Results?
New research designed to analyze Google’s personalized search results and make the process the search engine uses more transparent has generated interesting and controversial findings. The study examined a number of commonly held notions about personalization, including the idea that personalization is subtle, that it can often surface more long-tail results, and that personalization is […]
DuckDuckGo Challenges Google On Privacy With DontTrack.us
DuckDuckGo, a small search engine that’s largely flown under the public radar, has started the new year by taking a public shot at Google on the issue of search privacy. The company has launched DontTrack.us, an illustrated guide showing how Google tracks its users … and how DuckDuckGo doesn’t. The site: shows how a search […]
Twitter Selling Tweets For Analysis, Not Display
Twitter’s business plan has taken another step today: Twitter and Gnip, a social data provider, have partnered to offer up to half of the Twitter “firehose” of tweets for sale with a couple conditions: Companies buying the tweets can’t display them, nor can they resell them; they’re for analysis only. According to Gnip’s announcement, the […]
Google Enhances Analytics Intelligence Tools
Last year, we covered Google Analytics’ launch of Google Analytics Intelligence, an engine that helps the analyst by applying data mining and other techniques. Today, Google Analytics announced a major upgrade to the intelligence engine through a feature called “Major Contributors.” From the Google Analytics blog post: “When Google Analytics detects causes to a major […]
Why You Need To Track On-The-Phone Conversions
If you’re in a service-based business, chances are that your SEM campaign generates phone calls. Hopefully, you’re taking advantage of call tracking to tell you how many phone calls your campaigns generate, and using that data to help you evaluate the success of your campaigns. That’s a great start, but you’re still missing a key […]
Transcript: Stephen Colbert Interviews Google’s Eric Schmidt On The Colbert Report
Last night, The Colbert Report featured Stephen Colbert interviewing Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. Colbert got in some expected digs (four years to decide they didn’t like Chinese laws?), jokingly asks when the computer algorithm will take over and touches on some serious issues, such as how much Google remembers. Schmidt, I’d say, held his own […]
Call Analytics Bring Sophisticated New Data, Insights to Search Marketing
Many search marketers have experimented with call tracking and measurement as a way to capture online-to-offline consumer activity and determine which ads and campaigns are generating calls. But there has also been debate about whether unique phone numbers required by call tracking harms SEO especially for local advertisers. Some new developments in the field make […]
Google CEO Schmidt Fuels Critics With Controversial Privacy Remarks
Yesterday at the “Techonomy” conference in Lake Tahoe, California Google CEO Eric Schmidt made a number of remarks about user-generated content and data-mining that were somewhat controversial: “If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use Artificial Intelligence,” Schmidt said, “we can predict where you are going to go.” “Show us […]
Google, US Gov’t Back Same Data Mining Startup
Their objectives may be different but both Google and the “investment arm of the CIA” are funding the same startup: Recorded Future. According to a piece in Wired both In-Q-Tel (the CIA investment firm) and Google will have a seat on the company’s board. This is reportedly the first time the government and Google have […]
Can Google Tell Us What Men and Women Are REALLY Thinking?
Last week, a post on the Predictably Irrational blog described the differences in what boyfriends and girlfriends were looking for their beloveds to do based on Google Suggest. Google Suggest can provide hours of fun. Just spend some time at Autocomplete Me or QuestionSuggestions. But can it provide useful audience analysis for understanding our customers, […]
Researcher Jim Jansen On The “Sex” Of Search Queries & Personalization
In this column, I’ll follow up on my conversation with Dr. Jim Jansen from Penn State and his recent investigation into behavior patterns that lie within a large data set of visitor and search advertising campaign data from a high traffic ecommerce site. In part one, Jim and I explored whether a search funnel actually […]
Report: Most People Don’t Want Online Tracking Even If It Means Relevant Ads Or Savings
Get ready marketers: a credible new report with sweeping implications from the University of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley is likely to be the nail in the coffin of self regulation of online advertising. Specifically I’m talking about behavioral targeting, which largely concerns online display advertising but does marginally touch search at Yahoo and Google. The […]
Microsoft’s adCenter GM & Search Researcher Eric Brill Moves To eBay,
eBay has announced they have hired Dr. Eric Brill as their vice president of research and applied science to lead up eBay’s research labs team. Prior, Dr. Brill was General Manager of adCenter Labs at Microsoft and before that, he Director and Principal Researcher and head of the Text Mining, Search and Navigation Group at […]
Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”
Much attention has been focused on the forthcoming Wolfram Alpha search service. Will it be as important as Google has become? Perhaps! A new search paradigm? Yes! Or at least a new way of gathering information. A Google-killer? Nope! But when the service launches, it should become an essential in anyone’s search tool kit. Wolfram […]
Google Insights For Search Adds Valuable New Features
Three new features just announced this week will make the already valuable Google Insights for Search an even stronger keyword research tool. Here’s a look at what’s been added: 1.) New data sources In addition to web search, you can now do keyword research for Image, News, and Product search, too. This opens up new […]
Making Sense Of All The Data: Google, Hadoop & Cloudera
The article, Hadoop, a Free Software Program, Finds Uses Beyond Search, explains the very interesting history behind Hadoop. What is Hadoop? It’s distributed computing software that enables data mining and analysis on a huge scale. It also, apparently, is an open-source version of proprietary software developed by Google to process and analyze massive volumes of […]
Consumer Groups Trying To Preempt Behavioral Targeting For Mobile Ads
The Center for Digital Democracy and U.S. Public Interest Research Group, the same groups that initiated the FTC’s investigation into “behavioral advertising” online, have “amended their complaint” with the FTC to extend to mobile advertising. According to the 50+ page document filed yesterday: Right before the commission’s eyes, many of the same consumer data collection, […]
Behavioral Targeting Under Fire As ISP Backs Away From Tracking Subscriber Activities
Privacy is dead, get used to it. In the effort to rescue display advertising from its historically dismal performance and so-called “banner blindness,” behavioral targeting (BT) was born a few years ago with Tacoda. It has both increased in popularity and infamy since that time. Consumers prefer more “relevant” ads but they also dislike being […]
Yahoo Paper: Finding The Local “Center” Of Search Queries
A new research paper from Yahoo and Cornell University — with search legend Jon Kleinberg as one of the coauthors — provides a fascinating look at how a search query such as "red sox" or "hurricane deal" can be centered around a physical location — including one that changes over time.
Zillow Direct Ads Turn Site Into Dynamic Ad Platform
Zillow has always seen itself as a media company. The real estate site, which launched in early 2006, has continued to add features and listings that are very real-estate centric. But with the introduction of its “DirectAds” program it has become something else — a site that uses its considerable data and data-mining capabilities to […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 12, 2007
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Farecast Offers Hotel Search
In the context of a larger discussion of how data mining is being used by several Internet sites, Gary Price posts about the introduction of hotel search on the Farecast site. Farecast’s core service has sought to save consumers money by using historical information and other data to determine whether airfares are rising or falling […]
Tracking Hot Topics On Wikipedia
Wikirage is yet another Wikipedia data mining tool. This one lets you see what topics are hot by quickly identifying the 100 most edited articles for the last hour, day, week, or month. If you like to track rising keywords and memes, this tool is a fine place to start.
Facebook To Launch Personalized Ad Program
Facebook Gets Personal With Ad Targeting Plan from the Wall Street Journal reports Facebook will be launching a new ad service as early as late fall. The ad service will generate very personalized results, based on the wealth of information Facebook has on their users. The ads will not just be generated based on gender, […]
Everyone Fears Google (Again) & Will The Last Googler To Leave Turn The Lights Out?
Back at the beginning of this year, my 14 "Is Google Evil?" Tipping Points Since 2001 covered the history of how Google has been deemed to be too Big Brotherish or too dominant over the years. Another wave of Google hatred and fear is washing across the great sea of Blog. Here’s a look at […]