Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words.</p><p>
But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.

You’re walking down a busy street in New York City, and suddenly you have a craving for a chocolate muffin. You pull out your iPhone, type in “chocolate muffin New York” – and the magic of search kicks in. Your mobile device’s GPS tracker locates you instantly, finds a list of bakeries and coffee-houses nearby that sell muffins, and presents them for you to select from.</p><p>

Beside (or beneath) each result is an icon. A starry icon, which in a universally understood language, rates the result as ‘Great’, ‘Not so hot’ and ‘Terrible’ – through the simple expedient of yellow colored stars.</p><p>

You pick the 5-star rated bakery, get directions to it from Google Maps, and arrive at the store. You bite into the muffin and the delighted grin you wore as you stepped in turns into a wry grimace of dismay.</p><p>

It tastes awful!

We’ve heard it before, heck, we’ve said it before. Yahoo has been weighed down for years by way too much product. Thompson’s light-bulb moment came after discussions about what it would take to change Yahoo: “Yahoo has been doing too much for too long … We need to be clearer going forward about what we won’t do.” How is he going to fix this? Fifty properties that “don’t contribute meaningfully” are being shut down. I’ve been told most of them are outside the U.S. but Yahoo won’t confirm that or provide details. Hard to imagine that 50 will be enough but Carol Bartz did give him a head start.</p><p>

Instead Yahoo will focus on the properties that contribute the most engagement and revenue — news, finance, sports, entertainment and mail. R&D and resources will go to owned-and-operated sites, halting third-party efforts.

How and where the company will make large-scale cuts in staff, which I have previously reported were coming and will perhaps be numbering in the thousands; which businesses to sell off and which to keep, including its ad tech unit; the correct structure for the reconfigured entity; and who will be left to run it all when it is all settled.

Also up for debate is the best course of a two-pronged effort — being led primarily by CFO Tim Morse and members of his corporate strategy team — to renegotiate its search and advertising partnership deal with Microsoft, while also engaging in active discussions with Google about it taking over Yahoo’s search business.

The right to be forgotten is not an absolute right. The proposed Regulation, which the European Commission adopted on 25 January 2012, provides for very broad exemptions to ensure that freedom of expression can be fully taken into account. This will allow, for instance, news websites to continue to operate on the basis of the same principles.

Practitioners should realize the following about text advertisements:

Users demonstrate text advertisement “blindness” when viewing web pages. This means that information displayed in areas of the page dedicated to text ads (e.g., top of the page, right side) is generally ignored or viewed last.
Users are less likely to find information on a web page if it is located on the right side of the page than on the top of the page if both areas resemble text ads. This is especially true when they are searching for specific information.

When conducting an informational, or semantic, search, users have equal amount of difficulty finding information that is embedded in an ad either at the top or on the right side of the page.

According to Yandex.Metrica, by the end of January 2012, at least one million of all online visitors to websites in the Russian internet4 were iPad users. More than 700,000 of them were from Russia.

The iPad was officially released in Russia in November 2010. By that time, several tens of thousands of iPads were already in use in the country. In early 2011, their number exceeded 100,000 and then it increased six times during the year. Over the same period, the number of both mobile phone users and PC users also went up, but the progress was significantly slower than the growth in the number of iPad users – the number of mobile phone users increased 2.5 times, while the number of PC users grew only 1.4 times.

Google has a confession to make: It does not understand you. If you ask it “the 10 deepest lakes in the U.S,” it will give you a very good result based on the keywords in the phrase and sites with significant authority on those words and even word groupings, but Google Fellow and SVP Amit Singhal says Google doesn’t understand the question. “We cross our fingers and hope someone on the web has written about these things or topics.”

The future of Google Search, though, could be a very different story. In an extensive conversation, Singhal, who has been in the search field for 20 years, outlined a developing vision for search that takes it beyond mere words and into the world of entities, attributes and the relationship between those entities. In other words, Google’s future search engine will not only understand your lake question but know a lake is a body of water and tell you the depth, surface areas, temperatures and even salinities for each lake.

As part of our continued effort to be more transparent about how search works, we're publishing video footage from our internal weekly search meeting: "Quality Launch Review." We hold the meeting almost every Thursday to discuss possible algorithmic improvements and make decisions about what to launch. This video is from the meeting that happened on December 1st, 2011, and includes the entire uncut discussion of a real algorithmic improvement to our spell correction system.

For years, Google was famous for its clean, uncluttered layout and its excellent search algorithms. Those days are long gone.

Google <a
href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsoft-apple-and-google-where-does-the-money-come-from/4469">gets 96% of its annual revenue</a> from advertising. Search results produce no revenue. That has led to some tremendous distortions and a horrifying breakdown in the once-clean Google experience.</p><p>I present Exhibit A, which I discovered thanks to <a
href="http://twitter.com/#!/trevin/status/176451086985601026">Twitter</a>.

If you’re signed in to your Google+ account and you search for <strong>pet meds</strong>, a little ad module appears at the top of the search results, with your email address already filled in.

As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.

AOL today announced that its video search results are powered by blinkx. In turn, blinkx will incorporate AOL's premium video assets into its current index of over 35 million hours of content, making them easily searchable and accessible to users around the world.

The partnership expands the quantity and quality of AOL's video search results and also delivers integrated Safe Search tools that block adult oriented content from minors.

On Wednesday, February 8th, Wolfram Alpha will be adding a new, "Pro" option to its already existing services. Priced at a very reasonable $4.99 a month ($2.99 for students), the new services includes the ability to use images, files, and even your own data as inputs instead of simple text entry.

In more than a dozen countries Google already <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/helping-you-find-emergency-information.html">does something similar</a> for users who are searching for terms like "ways to die" or "suicidal thoughts" by placing a prominent red note urging them to call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. It may seem paternalistic, but this is the kind of nonintrusive paternalism that might be saving lives without interfering with the search results.

a source tells us that CEO Larry Page, who seems to be hell-bent on competing with Mark Zuckerberg whether it’s the right thing for Google or not, had this to say to employees at a Friday staff event after the Search Plus Your World launch: “This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else.”

The quasi-ultimatum caught our source by surprise and underscores just how important this new direction is for Page. It also helps explain why Google’s PR was so silent since evidence of the Don’t Be Evil toolbar came out yesterday. If this is the future of the company and it flies in the face of Google’s stated values, what can they say?

ComScore says there were 18.2 billion explicit core searches in the U.S. in December. Some quick math indicates, then, that DuckDuckGo’s query volume is about 0.00004 of overall search activity — or about one in every 25,000 searches.

So again, props to DuckDuckGo on the new records and for even showing query data to the public at all. (Wouldn’t it be great if Google and Bing did the same?) But wow … still such a long, long way to go.

"This is a tool meant to directly expose Google’s recent moves with Google+ as biased, hardcoded, and against Google’s core philosophy (which besides “don’t be evil,” has always been about “focusing on the user”)."