After taking its Windows Phone 8.1 with Cortana to China last month, Bing announced today the launch of XiaoIce (“little ice”), a Chinese-speaking social assistant chatbot for Windows Phone users. According to the announcement on Bing’s search blog, XiaoIce’s technology is far beyond a normal chatbot. [blockquote cite=”Bing Search Blog”]XiaoIce is a sophisticated conversationalist with […]
Around the world, millions of people are multilingual or partly so. In the U.S., census data reflect that 20 percent of the population speaks more than one language at home (though this really only captures immigrants). But in what I imagine is something of a speech recognition breakthrough, Google’s search app can now understand commands […]
Jon Wiley, Principal Designer for Google Search, participated in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) discussion, where in one question, he was asked to share something cool he is working on. He shared that Google is working on a feature to listen to multiple languages at the same time and be able to process them […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said in a video that backlinks, over time, will become a little less important. Matt did say that backlinks in the Google ranking algorithm still have many years left in them. Matt explained that Google is focusing a lot now on working on ways to determine if a […]
Another SMX is in the books! This show definitely had one of the most engaged attendee groups I have ever seen at any conference in recent memory. The polite, attentive search engine marketers weren’t there to just network and enjoy the San Jose sun. They were interested and looking for answers. And on day three […]
Good evening/afternoon (or early morning for our European readers!) from sunny San Jose, Calif., where day one of our SMX West conference is almost finished. We’re wrapping up the Marketing Land Digital Marketing Summit with a keynote conversation between Google’s Amit Singhal and Danny Sullivan, founding editor of both Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. […]
If Ray Kurzweil is right, computers will be smarter than humans 15 years from now. It’s called “technological singularity” and a big part of his job at Google is making sure that vision becomes reality. Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist that became Google’s Director of Engineering in late 2012, recently told the Guardian that his […]
Millions of us have asked Google to play weatherperson. In order to get an answer to one of our oldest and most basic questions, we type a variety of words and numbers — city names, neighborhoods and ZIP codes, plus words like “weather,” “forecast” or maybe “temperature” — into the Google search box, and Google […]
Google announced an international upgrade to the Google Search App, which enables the voice response answers that work currently in English to also work in French, German or Japanese. So not only can you ask your question in English, French, German or Japanese or other languages via voice search — Google will respond to that […]
When Microsoft’s next-generation gaming console, the Xbox One, comes out on Friday, it will arrive with Bing built-in to power a range of searches from games to music to television programs — and searches you can do just by speaking to the Xbox. Today, Bing shared a preview of how this will work. On the […]
Google now lets you search your private photos and the photos your friends on Google+ share with you. All you need to do is search on Google for keywords such as [my photos] or [my photos sunset] to bring up matching photos. You can even search for your friend’s photos such as [danny’s photos sunset] or […]
The “conversational search” that Google demonstrated at last week’s Google I/O conference is now available to users of its Chrome browser, and it’s a significant leap in how we use search engines. I’m 17 years now into writing about search, and I’ve seen all types of things that have promised to revolutionize the space, especially […]
At Google I/O today, Amit Singhal, Google VP of Search, announced that statistics and four new languages are being added to the Google Knowledge Graph. Knowledge Graph is already supported English and eight other languages: French, Italian, Spanish, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Korean. Now, Polish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese are the latest […]
Since its launch in January of this year, Facebook has been rolling out their Graph Search, allowing a limited number of users to perform queries with the natural language interface. In a post on their engineering blog today, Facebook explains how their natural language interface works, providing an in-depth look into the mechanics behind it. […]
Several sites are touting a new voice search feature on the CheapAir.com app. The company says that it uses the iPhone’s own speech recognition capability on the front end, but then does some semantic parsing on its side to deliver flight search results. I tried the app and found that its voice search fell quite […]
The growth of mobile search is like seeing a second child grow up. SEO isn’t bull. The knowledge graph, speech recognition and natural language are search’s biggest challenges. And, he really, really likes Star Trek. That’s just some of what the head of Google’s search efforts, Amit Singhal, shared when talking at SXSW today. Singhal is […]
Last Friday, Lars Rasmussen, Facebook’s Director of Engineering, did an AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit to discuss the ins-and-outs of Graph Search. Lars answered 20 questions from fellow Redditors shedding some light on the history, importance and technology behind Graph Search. According to Lars, the initial Graph Search was internally launched in Summer of […]
Just when you thought competition in search was effectively over, it starts to get interesting again. Over the past two weeks I’ve spoken to no less than four companies that say they are trying to reinvent “mobile search” for smartphones or tablets. I would almost guarantee there are more out there as well. These companies […]
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 […]
Ask.com has 3.5 percent of the search market according to comScore. Ask.com CEO Doug Leeds told Bloomberg that number may seem small but it makes his site the seventh largest in the US, “with 100 million people every month.” Rather than claiming that his search market share will continue to grow, Leeds proclaims that “the search wars […]
As is being widely reported Google has bought startup Clever Sense, which earlier this year launched the local-mobile recommendations app Alfred. Alfred is like “Pandora for the real world” and was dedicated to creating a comprehensive “interest graph.” Clever Sense assigns or maps physical places to one another based on styles, characteristics and attributes in the same way […]
It sounds great. Speak into Siri about some local need, get nice results from Yelp’s reviews. In reality, it’s pretty easy instead to end up stuck with only a phone number and directions from Google Maps. From Siri To Yelp To Google Maps Consider this example, which illustrates the situation I’ve repeatedly found to be […]
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, […]
If you search for “cashmere sweaters under $100” on Bing or Bing Shopping, the search engine now understands what you mean, returning results for products in the category under the price point specified. Microsoft announced the ability to recognize price constraints today, describing the innovation as “a small step in our journey to make search […]
Like many people, I was amazed to watch IBM’s Watson supercomputer playing Jeopardy this week against past human champions. But could Google have done the same thing? Let’s go behind the scenes of these two search masters to understand what they can — and can’t — do.
A question I get asked all the time is “what’s the future of search?” Everyone wants to know what’s coming next. I mostly tend to answer that search has become so ubiquitous that it’s becoming part of nearly everything we do and we probably won’t always recognize the future of search as “search”. Urban Spoon’s […]
In my last column, I had the chance to chat with Bing Director Stefan Weitz about how Microsoft is approaching search as it sits today. But the question I asked that lead to the interview in the first place was “Where does search go from here?” Microsoft’s Bing team certainly has its own ideas of […]
Google leaps language barrier with translator phone from The Times Online reports Google is working on a new tool that would bring instant translation to people. It appears that Google is a couple years away from this coming but they would build on their existing Google Translate and Google Voice features to create an instant […]
When I’ve spoken in the past to people at Siri we’ve discussed and they’ve struggled a bit with how to present and “position” what they’re doing. Described as a “virtual personal assistant” — and called the “Siri Assistant” in fact in its formal launch — the company’s much anticipated iPhone app has arrived. There will […]
Recently IDG News Service asked Google’s Marissa Mayer about the “perfect search engine.” Here was the question posed: “What is the perfect search engine? If you had a magic wand and could create it, what would it look like? What would it do?” Mayer replied: “It would be a machine that could answer that question, […]
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 […]
Netbase is an enterprise-facing software and search company that appears to have one of the most advanced search platforms in the market. Earlier this week during a briefing Netbase marketing and product VP Jens Tellefsen asserted that no other search provider in the consumer or enterprise segment was as advanced — an audacious claim. Tellefsen […]
A little more than three months after its launch, Wolfram Alpha is getting smarter, bigger (in a couple ways), and busier. That’s the word from Stephen Wolfram in a blog post about the site’s progress so far. Not mentioned in his post is an unconfirmed report from TechCrunch that Wolfram Alpha also has a licensing […]
A new report finds that mobile search and answers service ChaCha beat Google and Yahoo’s voice search tools in terms of overall accuracy and reliability across a range of query types in a controlled study. The study was conducted by Albright Communications/MSearchGroove in January of this year. The report, which can be downloaded from the […]
The already much discussed Wolfram Alpha official launch is Monday May 18, though the company has said they plan a “soft launch” starting tonight, with access gradually becoming available to everyone throughout the weekend. Some members of the press, like myself, have been able to directly use a preview version to test it out. Expect […]
Microsoft (so far) has been unable to buy Yahoo or Yahoo search assets, so it instead continues to take search talent away from the company. Last year Microsoft successfully lured engineering lead Qi Lu from Yahoo to become head of the company’s Online Services Group. Redmond also recently nabbed Sean Suchter from Yahoo. Now Bloomberg […]
The future of search by Google’s Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience, discusses what she thinks the next ten years of search holds. I think she summed it up incredibly well in her last paragraph: So what’s our straightforward definition of the ideal search engine? Your best friend with instant access to all […]
A new generation of search engines is starting to become publicly available, so it’s time to start thinking about how it will affect SEO efforts. The new search engines I’m talking about are the semantic search engines, meaning they are search engines that can be queried using natural language (not keywords like when using Google). […]
Consistent with the rumors last week, Microsoft confirmed today that it has acquired Powerset for an undisclosed amount (speculation put it at around $100 million). The company was reportedly valued at just over $40 million. It appears that Microsoft was motivated to acquire Powerset as much or more by the team as it was any […]
After nearly two years in the making — and plenty of hype — Powerset has finally rolled out a "natural language" search engine. It’s not a Google killer. It’s barely a business model right now. But at least it’s something the world can finally play with, and under the hood, there’s lots of potential. By […]