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 Fleeting Nature Of Twitter: 17 Percent Of Top Searches Change Every Hour Nearly 20 percent of the top search queries on Twitter at any given moment won’t be a popular […]
With its latest iPad — “the new iPad” — Apple introduced voice dictation capability (via Nuance) but not its virtual assistant Siri. Now comes a report that Siri will soon come to the iPad with the iOS 6 update, which is also supposed to mark the debut of Apple Maps/iMaps. Next week is Apple’s WWDC […]
Oh, Google, you slay me. And it might slay you, too. Go do a search for “lionel richie” (or just click here) and — if you’ve been alive long enough — you’ll get a kick out of the joke that shows up in the Knowledge Graph box. That, for you youngins, is a reference to […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: 5 Ways Conversion Takes Market Share Like Candy From A Baby They are out there, and they are not nice. They seek to take food from the mouths of your children […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: 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 […]
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 […]
It wasn’t Siri that was recommending the Lumia as the best smartphone to some last week; it was Wolfram Alpha. That won’t happen again, now that Wolfram Alpha has made changes to to fix problems it had dealing with customer reviews. Reviews Weren’t Weighted To Account For Number When I looked into the Siri-Lumia issue last […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Smartphone Bot Case Study: The Google Smartphone Bot On Holiday In Australia While Google’s new smartphone bot has been announced, it does not appear to be widely deployed yet; at least […]
Apple’s Siri search feature for the iPhone 4S thinks the Nokia Lumia 900 is the best phone ever? Actually, it’s Wolfram Alpha that thinks this, based on all of four user reviews. While it’s a chuckle that Siri seemed to be recommending the Nokia, it’s a better reminder that Siri itself doesn’t answer questions but […]
Analyst firm BIA/Kelsey has projected that by 2015 there will be more local searches coming from smartphones than PCs in the US. It’s a bold prediction and one that has logical merit: smartphone search volumes are growing faster than search on the PC. While local search is at least 20 percent of total queries on […]
If Siri is the differentiating feature of iPhones, then Google Maps (and Navigation) are that for Android. It’s the most popular Android app as well as unquestionably the most useful. Today Google announced a new release of Maps for Android (6.5) featuring a richer UI and other improvements. Most of those have to be experienced, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Tips For Multinational Mobile Site Optimisation In previous posts in this column, I’ve covered the intricacies of multinational search from a technical SEO’s standpoint. Leveraging multinational markup while clearing up in-site […]
Siri is popular but its usage is limited, according new survey research from Parks Associates. The firm surveyed 482 iPhone 4S owners and asked about their usage of the virtual assistant. High level findings from the survey were published today by the Wall Street Journal. Parks Associates found the following: 87 percent iPhone 4S owners […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: New Ad Status Info Added To AdWords Google is providing AdWords users with a new way to figure out whether their ads are approved, or not, and why. The new feature […]
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 […]
We’ve heard the search-related mantra “answers not links” so many times over the past few years that it sounds like a cliche. However in a mobile context the phrase has more meaning: a page of Google search results is ill-suited to the mobile use case. While Google has done many things to make it easier […]
SMX West day two is just about over and I wanted to post the live blogging I have found throughout the day. Here are some of the sessions that were live blogged today. Beyond The Google AdWords Tool: Advanced Keyword Research Tactics, BruceClay.com Building Buzz On Facebook: Getting Liked & Shared, Search Engine Roundtable Building […]
Yesterday knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha announced an intriguing new paid service Wolfram|Alpha Pro. Gary Price wrote an overview of the new service, which will likely appeal to academics, data geeks and a range of other specialized users. Wolfram|Alpha is by no means a mainstream search engine, yet it has managed to establish something of a beachhead […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google: Paid Clicks Up 34% While Cost Per Click Down 8% YoY Google just posted their Q4 2011 earnings resulting in a massive quarter but not meeting expectations of investors. In […]
Our next Search Engine Land conference, SMX West 2012, comes to San Jose from February 28-March 1. This is my preview of what we’ve got on the agenda, over 50 sessions covering all aspects of search marketing. Consider it a personal invite of why you should come. SMX: All Search, All The Time SMX West […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Buys Clever Sense: An Answer To Siri? As is being widely reported Google has bought startup Clever Sense, which earlier this year launched the local-mobile recommendations app Alfred. Alfred is […]
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 […]
Google announced on the Google Maps blog that they are now powering their own map data in the UK, Germany, Finland and Sweden. Google maps data in the U.S. and many other countries is powered by Google’s own data. But this week, Google dropped their third-party map data provider, Tele Atlas, and switched their map […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Movember SEO Moustache Competition Raises $17,000 For Cancer Research What started out as a friendly rivalry between Bing’s Duane Forester and Google’s Matt Cutts resulted in $17,000 for the Movember, a […]
“I’m standing in front of a Planned Parenthood,” the CNN reporter says, “And Siri can’t find it when I search for abortion clinic.” No, it can’t. It’s not because Apple is pro-life. It’s because Planned Parenthood doesn’t call itself an abortion clinic. Welcome To Search Scandals, Apple It’s been interesting to watch the Siri Abortiongate […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: New “Save To Foursquare” Button Reaches Into The Real World Publishers and developers: are you ready for another button (or buttons I should say)? Joining the Facebook, Twitter, +1 and StumbleUpon […]
Yesterday there were several articles about how, if you asked Siri for help in finding a place to have an abortion, it wouldn’t show you abortion clinics. This is something of a false controversy. It’s really about understanding Siri’s modus operandi and its limitations rather than an expression of any political or social agenda. If […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Wolfram Alpha Offers New Twist On Flight Search: Literal Answers To What Planes Are Overhead You may not love this as much as I do, but that’s okay. Wolfram Alpha has […]
Somewhere between the “precision of search and the serendipity of social media” lies Trapit. Trapit is a “personal discovery engine” based on the same underlying technology that forms the core of Apple’s Siri virtual assistant. From the outside, however, it looks something like a cross between StumbleUpon and Flipboard or Zite. Co-founders Gary Griffiths and Hank […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: SEO Best Practices For HTML5: Truths, Half-Truths & Outright Lies During a panel at SMX Advanced 2011 in Seattle, I remember hearing a question about Schema.org tags. More specifically, I remember […]
Is Google is a malevolent monopolist or merely the beneficiary of consumer choice in an intensely competitive environment? Has Google created a “network effect” that locks people in or is competition truly just “one click away”? These opposing views are on display in a PR war between Google and its opponents, such as anti-Google coalition FairSearch.org (which includes […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Content Strategy Tuesday, Improve Paid Search on Thursday – Webcasts this week Search Marketing Now, our sister site, will host two webcasts this week. Tomorrow, November 1, Maria Pergolino of Marketo […]
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 Growing Need For SEO In Political Campaigns It’s going to be a while before we see a political campaign that’s “less digital” than the last one. Budgets keep getting bigger, […]
Earlier tonight Danny Sullivan discovered that Siri will also search Bing and Yahoo, though it searches Google by default. If you say, “Search the web for . . .” or you ask Siri a question it can’t answer it will search Google (the iPhone’s default search engine). But if you say, “Search Bing for Steve […]
It was pretty funny – Stephen Colbert started The Colbert Report last night talking to Siri on his iPhone 4S and not feeling particularly happy about the responses, all of which were real. Colbert began by asking Siri to “write the show” since, as he later explained, he’d been playing with it all day and hadn’t […]
With a wide array of new features and upgrades, Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”) launched last night in Hong Kong. The new version of the operating system unites Android for tablets and smartphones, though there are not yet any Ice Cream tablets. Honeycomb, which proved to be tablet-only, was largely a failure. (Android boss Andy Rubin says […]
It’s perhaps one of the strangest product pitches I’ve heard. Asked on stage at Web 2.0 Summit by John Battelle about his Bing search engine, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer encouraged the audience to try Bing because, well, it’s pretty much the same as Google. The Ballmer 70/15/15 Challenge “I would issue you all a kind […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Will Google See $6.25 Billion In Mobile Ad Revenue Next Year? During the earnings call last week after Google announced massive quarterly revenues ($9.72 billion), CEO Larry Page casually dropped the […]
When you first begin using Siri it’s not entirely clear what you can do with it. (It’s also not clear how to access it.) Yesterday Danny wrote up some initial thoughts/criticisms of the Siri local search experience. In this piece I’m going to offer some general thoughts comparing Siri (on an iPhone 4S) with Google […]
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 […]