Alex Chitu noticed that Google’s Knowledge Graph has now added a “related topics” for certain types of queries. The example provided shows a search for [equilateral triangle shows a Knowledge Graph that also adds topics for equilateral polygon, square, regular polygon, and pythagorean theorem. Clicking on each brings up the knowledge graph answer for each […]
Who knew a simple question would be so hard to answer? Yesterday I searched across all three engines to find out more about the Olympic opening ceremonies and when they start. I quickly discovered that the official website of NBC, which is broadcasting the games in the U.S., had nothing about the ceremonies or when […]
Along with the Super Bowl, there’s another annual big game that happens — sites trying to be number one for “What Times Does The Super Bowl Start?” This year, I want to win by pointing out that no one should click on any of the articles competing. Just look up, searchers — Google already won. […]
Yandex has announced that it has signed a deal with Facebook which will give the leading search engine in Russia access to the Facebook firehose for “public” content published in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, other CIS countries and Turkey, where Yandex also operates. Content will be available for indexing by Yandex as soon as it has […]
Dr. Richard Qian from the Microsoft Bing Index & Knowledge Team announced some major updates to Satori, Bing’s version of Google’s knowledge graph. The updates are vast and incredibly smart, making the Bing knowledge repository a lot more useful and interactive. The new features include: Links to TED Talks when people searches return the talks […]
Google announced a new feature within Google Scholar named “My Library.” This new section lets you save articles right from the search page, organize them by topic, and search full-text within your library to find what you are looking for. To enable this feature, you need to click on the “My Library” link on the […]
Bing has rolled out a new music video search results page today. From now on, when searching for a music video by song title, artist or album, users will see the following box at the top of their search results, showcasing the “most popular” music video related to the search, along with details and a […]
It’s been less than a month since Facebook expanded Graph Search to include status updates and posts, and the feature still isn’t available to all users. Nonetheless, Facebook search engineer Ashoat Tevosyan shared an “under the hood” look at how it works — and why it took so long to become reality. There’s nothing incredibly […]
Facebook has started rolling out Graph Search to all US English users, a move that comes about seven months after the product first launched to a small number of users in mid-January. Graph Search has gone through some changes since then, perhaps none more obvious than when Facebook changed the search box white to make […]
I went on a BuzzFeed diet about a month ago, where I stopped following the site and reading the content there. I should have stuck to it, because I wouldn’t be wasting my time now dissecting one of its stupid, pageview-baiting stories. In this one, Pinterest is positioned as a better search engine than Google. […]
Institute for Information, located in Taipei, Taiwan, has brought a patent lawsuit against Google in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. According to the case, the research institution claims Google Search, Google+ Local and Google Places infringes on the Institute for Information’s patented information retrieval system. The patent in question was […]
For the 20th anniversary of CERN making Web technology available to anyone royalty-free, the European science lab has restored the very first website to its original location. Could today’s search engines of Google and Bing, which didn’t exist when the site was first posted, find it now? Time for a test. The answer turns out […]
With Google Now coming to iOS, a whole new audience using iPhones and iPads are about to meet Google’s predictive search service. It’s a feature that’s gone from interesting novelty to being downright amazing, in less than a year. Here’s a look at how the “predictive search” service has evolved and where it may head […]
Technical University of Denmark researchers have designed a search engine that indexes specific sets of databases to help identify rare diseases. Users can query patient symptoms on FindZebra.com which crawls over 31,000 medical articles focused on rare and genetic diseases to deliver medically relevant search results. While the search engine’s homepage includes a notification stating […]
Starting today, LinkedIn members will begin seeing a number of enhancements to the professional networking site, including a new unified search feature and a smarter query intent algorithm that continuously serve up more relevant results. With over 5.7 billion searches performed on LinkedIn last year, the new unified search experience is one of the most […]
Last month, I wrote my Dear Google Alerts: Why Aren’t You Working? story. Soon after, Google told me things were improved. That’s not been the case for me; and now, another open letter about how poorly the service is working has appeared. The latest letter is from The Financial Brand, a website for financial marketers. It writes, […]
As part of today’s big “How Search Works” reveal, Google also took the big step of sharing its Search Quality Rating Guidelines for the first time. This is the document that Google’s human search quality raters use when grading Google’s search results. But the new, public document is actually an edited version of the old […]
One of Google’s oldest features is Google Alerts, where you can enter keywords you want to monitor and get an email report each day about any new search results that match those terms. It was awesome; but for several weeks, it’s become nearly useless. My long-standing settings have been for Google to check each day […]
In August, Google introduced a field test that brings Gmail content in your search results. So if you searched for [my flights] and you had a flight confirmation email in your Gmail account, Google would show you upcoming flights. This is still an opt in field test available to a limited number of US users […]
It’s been one of the biggest problems Twitter has had for years, that it’s difficult to find your own tweets on the Twitter. The new Twitter Archive service that Twitter launched today goes a long way in solving this issue. Step-By-Step: How To Download All Your Tweets With The New Twitter Archive Service is our story […]
Quixey and Ask have entered into a deal in which apps from Quixey’s database, whether for mobile or the PC, will be integrated into search results. It’s going live today and should be rolling out now, although it’s not yet live for me. Apps in Ask search results will be from Android, iOS, Windows Phone and […]
Who’s winning in today’s US presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney? Who’s ahead for the many House of Representatives and US Senate seats that are up for grabs? Who won in the many state and local elections happening? The major search engines of Google, Bing and Yahoo have you covered with answers. Bing […]
Google is considering offering its search quality rating guidelines to the public. The news comes near the end of the latest webmaster video just posted today on YouTube. In it, Google’s Matt Cutts answers a question about how Google uses the data it collects from its human search evaluators — in short, “those folks don’t […]
Trying to keep up with Hurricane Sandy? Below are a variety of resources which may help. Storm Tracking Google Super Storm Sandy Map Google Super Storm Sandy Maps: NYC Close-up ESRI’s Hurricane Information Map Weather.com Hurricane Tracker Local TV Live Stream Boston: CBS NYC: NBC Philadelphia: CBS Washington DC: Fox Washington DC: NBC Radio A […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, a name familiar to most of the readers here, was inducted into University of Kentucky’s Arts and Sciences Hall Of Fame last Friday. This was reported in the Kentucky Kernel. The article explains that Matt Cutts attended the University of Kentucky while working for the Department of Defense […]
The final debate between U.S. presidential candidates Obama and Rommney airs tonight. Until the election next month, a lot of attention will continue to be on the presidential and vice presidential debates. Here’s an easy and free way to keyword search debate video and then immediately view the video online. In fact, all of the […]
It would appear that Siri will be getting a little more searchy. As AllThingsD reported this afternoon Apple has hired William Stasior, the guy who took over at Amazon’s search engine A9 after Udi Manber left for Google. While Siri isn’t a search engine it can operate like one from a user perspective. With Stasior’s […]
A web page that definitively satisfies a searcher’s intent is “Perfect,” and should appear at the top of Bing’s search results. On the other end of the scale, spammy web pages and pages that almost no searcher would find useful are deemed “Bad.” That’s a bit of how Bing instructs the people in its Human […]
Google released a “field trial” today allowing people who enroll to do Google searches and get information from their Gmail messages mixed in with their web results. Don’t worry. Only those enrolled see their own messages this way. Below, a look at how it works. If accepted into the program, after you do a search, […]
Google announced in this morning’s Google Search Breakfast that it is integrating Gmail emails directly into Google search results. This means you can search Google and find emails from your Gmail (not Google Apps) account directly in the search results. The Gmail results show on the top right section, collapsed neatly and ordered by relevance of […]
Want to know the how various countries are doing in the London 2012 Olympics? For finding out using a major search engine, I give the gold to Yahoo, with Google narrowly missing to earn silver and Bing getting bronze mainly by virtue of being third in a three contestant race. Ready, Set, Search! Checking for […]
Twitter is working on a project that will give users access to an archive of all of their own tweets. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told the New York Times this week that the company is building a tool that would let Twitter users download their own tweets. He didn’t provide a timeframe for such a […]
Google’s knowledge graph which launched a little over a month ago is reportedly often wrong. Conductor ran a study showing that for trending terms, the knowledge Google is providing via their knowledge graph is wrong about 20% of the time. By trending, Conductor looked at the top 50 ‘people’ in Google Trends and Google Insights […]
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 […]
Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman are on the stage at SMX London to interview Amit Singhal. Amit is a Google Fellow, a honorary title reserved for Google’s most accomplished engineers, and he has spearheaded Google’s core ranking team since 2000. He’s also a key influencer of Search Plus Your World, Google’s search experience centered around […]
Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, posted a 8 minute video on how Google search works. From crawling, indexing to ranking, he gets into a brief overview of how Google’s search engine does its job. Matt explains how PageRank is used, crawling timelines, frequencies, priorities, indexing and filtering processes within the databases. Here is […]
Google’s latest round of search quality updates is now available, and — at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old SEO — this month’s seems even more difficult to grasp than normal. There are a lot of words in this month’s list of 50 changes, but it appears to me that there’s not really […]
The Wall Street Journal is out with a story saying that Google is about to make one of the biggest changes in its history of offering web search, providing more direct answers and gaining “semantic” smarts to understand more about what words mean. I’m scratching my head, since Google already does this. Methinks Google’s PR […]
Yandex is the next in line to gain access to the Twitter “firehose.” The Russian search engine is announcing that it will begin integrating the Twitter feed into its search results. Twitter reported the deal to us late last week but declined to disclose its terms. As part of their agreement Yandex will have access […]
A couple of weeks ago, Google eliminated the “+” operator from its set of tools that allow you to more precisely specify what you’re searching for. The “+” operator previously allowed you to require that certain words were found in your search results. This was useful if you wanted exact matches for search terms that […]