Google announces cards, discovery tools, revamped image search at 20th anniversary event
Most of the new features were for mobile devices and focused on structured data and machine learning.
Topic: Information retrieval
Google launches new expandable featured snippets with more information
The new featured snippets provide aggregated access to additional sources about a search query.
What do Google and a toddler have in common? Both need to learn good listening skills.
Contributor and patent explorer Dave Davies reviews a recently-presented paper that suggests Google is grouping entities and using their relationships to listen for better answers to multipart questions.
Ask the SMXperts: The latest in advanced technical SEO
SMXperts Dawn Anderson, Bastian Grimm and Brian Weiss answer technical SEO questions on time to first meaningful paint, indexation and crawling controls, challenges associated with voice search and more.
Multifaceted featured snippets begin rolling out in Google search results
Google updates the search results features with an expanded featured snippet targeting broad, nuanced queries
Google publishes comprehensive guide to featured snippets
Learn more about how Google’s featured work, the variations and some of the challenges Google faces with these snippets.
Google’s latest search updates brings more content to Featured Snippets & Knowledge Panel info
“Search is not just about answering your questions -- it’s also about discovery,” writes Google product manager Michael Galvez.
Google reaffirms 15% of searches are new, never been searched before
Google processes trillions of searches every year, and still, 15% of those queries have never been seen by Google before.
How AI will shape the future of search
Artificial intelligence is changing the way users access information online. Columnist Justin Freid discusses where the trends are heading and what this might mean for search marketers.
Search Results
Search Results
Google now offers real time earthquake information in search results
Google announced they are now showing richer earthquake related information right at the top of the search results for earthquake related queries. They want to give people who feel a tremor quick and authoritative information about what they just felt. Google said the “information will include a summary of the size of the quake, a […]
Wikimedia Foundation: “We’re Not Building A Global Crawler Search Engine”
Two executives refute recent reports that Wikipedia is planning to build its own search engine to compete with Google.
Google Introduces Candidate Cards In Search For Presidential Election Season
Google is giving Republican and Democratic candidates a privileged place in search in 2016. The company has launched what it says is an experimental feature we’ve dubbed Google Posts that will create a prominent placement for the candidates’ own messages and content in a horizontal carousel in search results. This is not an ad unit. […]
What Time Is The Super Bowl? Google & Bing Are Confused
You might get information for 2015, depending on how you ask.
Powerball Numbers? You’ll Be Surprised Which Search Engines Knew Them
It was the biggest lottery drawing in US history, and neither Google nor Bing showed searchers the winning numbers. Here's who did.
Google’s Not Sure What Day Super Bowl 50 Is Happening In 2016
Google sometimes makes it Super Bowl Saturday rather than Super Bowl Sunday.
Facebook Adds Public Posts To Search, More Frequent Updates May Be Coming
Facebook has announced some incremental search improvements and a new “channel” for its newsroom (Search FYI) that will provide updates on the evolution of search at Facebook. This suggests to me that we’ll be seeing more “search activity” going forward. In a blog post announcing the improvements, Tom Stocky, Facebook’s VP of Search, said that […]
Bing News Adds “Smart Labels” For Mobile, Making It Easier To Find Related Headlines
Located at the bottom right corner of a news story, the new "Smart Labels" help users explore connected articles.
Etsy Boosts Search For Better Content Discovery, User Engagement
Etsy has more than 30 million items for sale from more than one million sellers globally. There are no SKUs, and most of the data is unstructured, creating a messy and massive discovery challenge for both Etsy and its users. Accordingly the company is today rolling out more sophisticated search functionality, after a month-long beta test […]
Google Now Shows Quotes For Famous People Without Sourcing Them
Google now gets in the business of answering queries on famous quotes with a new quotes answer box that doesn't link to the source of the content.
Yahoo Has Their Own Knowledge Graph, Not Without Their Own Embarrassing Issues
Yahoo has their own knowledge graph box at the top of the search results, but some of the results make you wonder if they need to rethink their algorithms.
Google Researchers Introduce System To Rank Web Pages On Facts, Not Links
Will Google someday rank web pages based on how accurate they are? A new paper suggests they might.
Bing Insights Integrated Into Microsoft Office Word Online
Office Word Online adds Bing Insights to your document creation process.
Facebook Search Finally Lets You Search For Posts Again
More than a year after promising to give users the ability to search for posts, Facebook is finally coming through. The company today announced an update to Facebook Search that will make it possible to find that thread congratulating you on your new job, the hilarious comment you made about Walking Dead last month or […]
Twitter Search Now Indexes Every Public Tweet
Twitter history will soon be more accessible. The company announced today that it is giving users the ability to search within the full archive of public tweets. From a blog post by Twitter search infrastructure engineer Yi Zhuang: Since that first simple Tweet over eight years ago, hundreds of billions of Tweets have captured everyday […]
Pinterest Evolving Into A Personalized Search Substitute
This evening, at its San Francisco headquarters, Pinterest hosted a talk and Q&A session with the company’s head of engineering, Michael Lopp. No one from Search Engine Land was able to attend on short notice; however the company shared a number of updated stats. Much more than a “scrap-booking” site (its origins) or even a […]
Apple Webcrawler: More Potential Evidence Of Search Ambitions
Apple Insider reports on the discovery of a web-crawling bot originating from Apple’s servers. It was first “outed” by developer Jan Moesen. This is what Moesen saw: Moesen reports that the bot is only crawling HTML, “not the CSS, JavaScript or image files.” Then he asks whether this is an “official Apple project” or just “someone crawling the web […]
U.S. 2014 Elections: Google & Bing Both Deliver Quick Answers For Election Results With An Interactive Map
As promised, Google and Bing are both offering quick answers for election-related queries. Searching “election results” on Google provides a quick answer box with a color-coded map of the U.S. to show which states went red and which went blue. Users have the option to click on House, Senate and Governor election results, as well […]
Google (Now) Beats Siri And Cortana For Direct Answers — Study
Stone Temple Consulting (STC) published a study in which it compared mobile answers to “3086 different queries” on Siri, Google and Cortana to determine how each performed relative to the others. Google was the winner with more direct answers and more complete information. Eric Enge, who wrote up the results, says this was not a “personal assistant […]
Want Scotland Election Results? Don’t Bother Asking Google Or Bing
It’s not often you have a vote that might create a new, independent nation. But that’s what’s happening today with Scotland. It’s such a big event that you’d think Google and Bing would be doing something special to provide election results. That’s not the case. Both search engines have long done special presentations for U.S. elections or […]
Google “Knowledge Vault” To Power Future Of Search
Google’s Knowledge Graph is being used to supply increasing amounts of structured content in PC and mobile search results. It’s part of an evolution that began with “universal search” and accelerated with the requirement for “answers not links” in mobile. Now Google is developing a successor knowledge base of content that will eventually supersede Knowledge […]
Google Made 890 Improvements To Search Over The Past Year
In a Google+ post from Google head of search Amit Singhal, Google shares they have made “more than 890 improvements to Google Search last year alone.” In 2009, Google told us they made between 350 to 400 changes to search and in 2010, they said they made 550 improvements to search in the past year. […]
LinkedIn’s New “Galene” Search Platform Offers Broader, More Relevant & Faster Results
Last week, Linkedin announced it had rolled out a newly upgraded search platform Galene, designed to offer broader searches and more relevant results that are now delivered twice as fast. According to the announcement, LinkedIn began building Galene more than a year ago, and is now leveraging it to power the site’s multiple search products […]
Bing Expands Snapshot With New Food & Drug Entities
Bing is getting smarter today with the addition of food- and drug-related entities to its library of facts. The new at-a-glance information for these searches will appear in the Snapshot area on the right side of Bing’s search results. In some cases, like the hamburger search shown below, the Snapshot includes a dropdown to further […]
Google’s Knowledge Graph Expands Into Google Maps
Google is expanding its Knowledge Graph into Google Maps. The company has confirmed to Search Engine Land that some locations in Google Maps will now get a new “Quick Facts” info card, and that the data are from Google’s Knowledge Graph. This new feature began appearing on Monday (May 12). The info card appears in […]
VIDEO: Pinterest Guided Search, A Visual Discovery Tool For Mobile Devices
Pinterest wants to help its users find what they are looking for even if they don’t know what exactly that is. The company’s solution, Guided Search, is a predictive search engine powered by social curation. Announced last night at Pinterest’s San Francisco headquarters, Guided Search was presented by CEO Ben Silbermann as a breakthrough for […]
Bing Snapshot Adds 150 Million New Entities & Relationships To Search Engine
Dr. Richard Qian from the Bing Index and Knowledge Team announced that they’ve added an “additional 150 million entities” to power Bing’s Snapshot results. This is part of Microsoft Bing’s efforts to improve and grow their knowledge engine they named Satori. Most recently, they added tax help and famous people data to the engine. Now, […]
Google Alerts Adds Filters For Regions & Languages
Google has added two more filter and delivery options to Google Alerts. Google Alerts informs you of updates within Google results via email or RSS feed. The two new filters let you refine those alerts by language or region. You can tell Google you only want alerts for specific keyword phrases within a specific region […]