Online Net Meeting

Google’s Varian: Search scale is ‘bogus’ | Relevant Results – CNET News

Google’s Hal Varian would likely have raised an eyebrow at a term paper submitted by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the search market.

Varian, currently on leave from the University of California at Berkeley to serve as Google’s chief economist, thinks a lot of the arguments advanced by Microsoft in justifying its 10-year deal for Yahoo search are, in a word, “bogus.” Microsoft has said that it needs “scale” to compete in the search market against Google, saying that larger amounts of traffic and data allow it to improve the quality of its search experience.

Hal Varian, chief economist at Google
(Credit: Google)

As might be expected, that’s not exactly the way Varian sees it. He’s perhaps best known for perfecting the ad auction system that generates the vast majority of Google’s huge profits, having worked for Google since 2002. But he also holds forth over the array of statistical data and processes that Google uses to make just about any decision.

Varian shared his thoughts on the Microsoft-Yahoo deal, the state of the economy, and the changing nature of innovation and Silicon Valley geography during a conversation at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., this week.

Q: One thing we’ve been talking about over the last two weeks is scale in search and search advertising. Is there a point at which it doesn’t matter whether you have more market share in looking to make your product better?
Hal Varian: Absolutely. We’re very skeptical about the scale argument, as you might expect. There’s a lot of aspects to this subject that are not very well understood.

On this data issue, people keep talking about how more data gives you a bigger advantage. But when you look at data, there’s a small statistical point that the accuracy with which you can measure things as they go up is the square root of the sample size. So there’s a kind of natural diminishing returns to scale just because of statistics: you have to have four times as big a sample to get twice as good an estimate.

Another point that I think is very important to remember…query traffic is growing at over 40 percent a year. If you have something that is growing at 40 percent a year, that means it doubles in two years.

So the amount of traffic that Yahoo, say, has now is about what Google had two years ago. So where’s this scale business? I mean, this is kind of crazy.

The other thing is, when we do improvements at Google, everything we do essentially is tested on a 1 percent or 0.5 percent experiment to see whether it’s really offering an improvement. So, if you’re half the size, well, you run a 2 percent experiment.

So in all of this stuff, the scale arguments are pretty bogus in our view because it’s not the quantity or quality of the ingredients that make a difference, it’s the recipes. We think we’re where we are today because we’ve got better recipes and we have better recipes because we spent 10 years working on search improving the performance of the algorithm.

Maybe I’m pushing this metaphor farther than it should go, but I also think we have a better kitchen. We’ve put a lot of effort into building a really powerful infrastructure at Google, the development environment at Google is very good.

So, how’s the economy look?
Varian: The news on the economy I’d say is pretty good. You look at the housing sales, they’ve leveled out, prices are up slightly. The auto sales and production are up, The financial markets have all stabilized, the initial unemployment numbers are down over 100,000. So everything is looking pretty reasonable, and it’s somewhat earlier than expected.

That doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods, because we’ve got a long way to go to go back up. But you look at a most of the economic statistics, they have really turned around in the last couple of months, not only here, but in Europe and Asia.

Has anything changed fundamentally?
Varian: Well, the savings rate is up. People had a negative savings rate for several years and now it’s more like 7 percent. In some sense, that’s a good thing, I know people are complaining about it but you have to restore some reasonable balance. Maybe it’s not so good that we had to get to it by going through this recession, but at least we’re coming out at a more balanced rate than we were going in.

How do you see things in Silicon Valley? We’ve been wondering about the growing cost of living in this area and what effects that has on business development.
Varian: Well, there are some outposts: I’ve been telling Diana (Adair, Google spokeswoman) that she should go buy a house in Pleasanton. That’s where PeopleSoft used to be, and Oracle has a big establishment there, it’s a nice town….

It’s 105 today in Pleasanton.
Varian: Actually, I live up that way, if you get hot, you jump in the swimming pool. Anyway, there are some outposts that are still closely connected to the Valley. I think it is getting awfully expensive to live here, and commuting is getting more and more unpleasant, so I think you will be seeing some expansion.

A year ago, I told Google they should buy in Stockton. But nobody listened to me. The deal is, you have to pay for your food but your house is free.

What did they say?
Varian: They said, nah, we couldn’t get anybody to live there.

Is innovation in the Valley as high as it was 10 years ago?
Varian: I’ll tell you an angle that I think is different from 10 years ago, and that’s what I call the micro-multinational.

One day I bumped into a friend of mine, and asked what she was up to. She said, I’ve got a company. And I said tell me about it, and she said there are 12 people, three in New Delhi, two in Mountain View, and there’s somebody in Spain.

And then two days later I ran into another guy, and he said I’ve got a company, and there are four people in Italy, two people in the Czech Republic, one in Spain, and three in San Francisco. And I said, whoa, what is this? A trend! It’s two of them!

But you talk to them and it’s amazing what you see in this area. I think the reason is that communication costs have basically gone to zero. We’ve got e-mail, Skype, Google Docs, wikis, doing round the clock continual communication and coordination that only the biggest multinational could have 10 years ago. The fact is that you have this essentially free communications and you’ve got entrepreneurs everywhere else in the world that can sync up.

So the question is, is it in the Valley? Well, in many cases, two or three of the people are in the Valley, but it’s not limited to the Valley.

I think it’s a crucial part because in a lot of cases you can find expertise, you can find venture capital. You’ve got the legal people to draw up the contracts, you’ve got the financing people, you’ve got the consultants and experts… But maybe it is part of the answer to this cost question, because you’ve got the expertise but the work can be distributed.

source >>

See more here:

There is an ongoing debate in search marketing about whether Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Optimization is more effective for driving traffic to company sites.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, involves getting links to web sites to rank higher in natural, or so-called organic search results on certain keywords. Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, involves buying paid search ads for specific keywords. Both are designed to catch users’ attention when they are searching, and prompt them to click through the ad or the link to a web site.

Through research, I have discovered that while articles that come up in organic listings get more clicks than do the paid listings on Google, individual business web sites receive more clicks from the paid listings than from the organic listings.

Confused? SEO companies like to use the numbers to prove that SEO is the way to go. However, they do this by not giving you all of the variables. If you look at the whole picture, then you can find the truth in the numbers.

Commercial Searches

Let’s say you are in the market for a BMW car. You go to Google and do a search for “new bmw 525i.” You would get results that look similar to this:

If you examine the paid listings (labeled “Sponsored Links” on the right and at the top), you will see that the paid listings list dealerships, price quotes, etc. The organic listings show concept cars, BMW 5 series information and more. So, in this search, which we call a “commercial search,” users tend to click on the paid listings.

Informational Searches

Now, let’s say you’re interested to learn more about a MySQL programming topic such as “mysql database table structure.” So you search Google for that phrase and get results that look like this:

Informational search results

Here you will not see any paid listings; instead, it’s all organic listings. This is called an “informational search,” which happens more often than “commercial searches.”

The last few times you used a search engine, were you looking to buy something or find information? If you answer that question, then you will understand the first part of my theory that organic listings receive more clicks than paid listings on search engines.

Applied to Business Needs

Let’s find out how individual businesses receive more clicks from the paid listings than from organic listings. The number of clicks that go to paid listings versus organic listings ranges from 30% to 75%. They range based on the search engine used, but let’s stick with Google, where the numbers range from 30% to 35%. Let’s be conservative and use 30%. So, of all clicks that take place on Google, 30% are conducted on paid listings.

Since it is difficult to know the number of clicks performed on Google each month, let’s use one billion clicks per month for this example.

Now, I know what you are saying to yourself: 700 million clicks go to organic listings and 300 million clicks go to paid listings — that’s what the SEO advocates show you. But what they don’t show you is how many sites share those clicks. That’s a huge part of the equation.

To keep it simple, Google indexes billions of sites compared to a few hundred thousand customers, which means there is much more competition for organic searches than for paid searches. This means your business will receive more clicks on paid ads than on organic ones.

If your business sells something, you want to bring in customers who are conducting commercial searches. So when an SEO firm says only 30% of the clicks that happen on Google go to paid customers, they are not looking at the full picture.

SEM Extends Beyond Search Engines

There is another very important variable to look at with regards to SEO and SEM; Google gets most of its traffic from sites other than Google!

Google puts its paid listings on sites such as PC Magazine, Wired, MLB.com, MySpace and YouTube. You can find more at https://adwords.google.com/select/afc/partners.html.

Now, imagine how many clicks are generated from just Google and your organic listings only benefit from that site. Meanwhile, SEM benefits from all of those top-ranked sites plus Google. When you add that into the mix, you’ll understand why SEM customers have access to so many more clicks than SEO could ever access.
Richard Kahn, CEO of eZanga (www.eZanga.com), founded the company in 2003 following a decade of experience in the online advertising industry. During this time, Kahn founded an ISP called First Street Corporation, which he later sold. He then held the COO position at PPC advertising network AdOrigin. eZanga specializes in helping companies drive their bottom line through online marketing, including search marketing and contextual advertising.

source >>

See original here:
SEO and SEM: Truth in numbers

Twitter Makes Hashtags More #Useful

You may have noticed that Twitter has started hyperlinking hashtags. Those are words preceded by a “#” which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. For instance, try searching for #realtimecrunchup. Now that they are hyperlinked, when you click on a hashtag, you are led to the search result page for the specific hashtag. Others have been implementing this; FriendFeed (big surprise) has been doing this for awhile. Some of the Twitter clients, including the desktop versions of Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop also provide hyperlinks to hashtags.

For Twitter, search is a navigation tool, and this functionality is yet one more way to allow people to easily discover new Tweets outside their group of followers. This trend started when they added the search box to everyone’s home page last April.

Real-time search is heating up. Just earlier today, FriendFeed launched its own real-time search. By linking to hashtags, Twitter is giving people another entry point into its existing search. Now, if you could only track mentions of specific hashtags over time.

Source

Credit:
Twitter Makes Hashtags More #Useful

Baidu Looking at Acquisitions to Extend Lead in China (Update2) – Bloomberg.com

June 22 (Bloomberg) — Baidu Inc., owner of the most popular search engine in China, is considering acquisitions to extend its lead in the world’s largest market for Internet users, Chief Financial Officer Jennifer Li said.

“People approach us and we get to look at a lot of things,” Li said in a June 19 interview from Baidu’s Beijing headquarters, declining to identify targets. “Internet is at an early stage of its development. It’s dynamic, and we need to stay ahead.”

The company is stepping up efforts in electronic commerce and mobile-Internet services in China, which has more than 300 million Web users. Baidu aims to widen its lead over Google Inc. in the country by boosting online searches for wireless phones, and its electronic-commerce business could develop into a rival for Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd.

“If they now start thinking about making acquisitions, it makes very good sense,” said Eric Wen, an analyst at Mainfirst Securities Hong Kong Ltd. who has a neutral rating on Baidu shares. The company is likely to buy Web businesses outside of the search market, he said. Baidu also may seek additional investments in Japan, where it started operations last year, Wen said.

Google, Taobao

Baidu faces rising competition in its main business, with Google forging a partnership with the country’s biggest wireless-phone company, China Mobile Ltd. Alibaba’s Taobao site also is encroaching on the search-engine market.

Taobao, Alibaba’s consumer trading site, offers an ad channel for small businesses in China, potentially forcing advertisers to choose between Baidu and Taobao, according to an April report from Morgan Stanley.

Any acquisitions won’t distract Baidu from focusing on its main search business, Li said.

There is “huge potential” to increase customers at Baidu, which had about 300,000 advertisers as of last year, Li said. The company will focus on offering Internet search services to the 40 million small and medium-sized businesses in China, said Li, who joined Baidu last year from GMAC LLC, the U.S. auto and home lender.

Baidu’s American depositary receipts fell $19.58, or 6.6 percent, to $278.02 today on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares have more than doubled this year, outpacing a 32 percent increase by Google, the world’s biggest search engine.

Google Deals

Google, based in Mountain View, California, gained exclusive rights to process Web queries for customers of China Mobile, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the country’s mobile-phone users. Last month, Baidu agreed to provide online search services for China Telecom Corp., which has less than 10 percent as many customers as China Mobile.

Baidu accounted for 62.2 percent of China’s paid-search market last year, an increase from 59.3 percent in 2007, according to research firm Analysys International. Google’s market share grew at a faster pace, to 27.8 percent from 23.4 percent, the Beijing-based company said.

Alibaba, whose biggest shareholder is Yahoo! Inc., will increase investments at Taobao to 5 billion yuan ($731 million) over five years, the Hangzhou, China-based company said in October. Taobao, which doesn’t charge users commissions on merchandise sales, is seeking to boost advertising revenue by allowing vendors to bid for the right to associate their products with keyword searches, Alibaba Chief Financial Officer Joseph Tsai said in February.

In September, Baidu bought an 8.3 percent stake in UiTV, a Chinese provider of Internet television services, for $15 million. Baidu may pursue investments in overseas companies, according to Li.

Baidu’s first-quarter profit rose 24 percent to 181.1 million yuan, beating analysts’ estimates, after the company added paid-search customers.

China had 316 million Web users at the end of March, the official Xinhua News Agency reported in April, citing Xi Guohua, vice minister of industry and information technology. The country overtook the U.S. in Internet users last year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Lee in Hong Kong at wlee37@bloomberg.net

Credit:
Baidu Looking at Acquisitions to Extend Lead in China

Apple iPhone 3G S and iPhone OS 3.0 | Walt Mossberg | Personal Technology | AllThingsD

Apple Inc.’s iPhone has been a smashing success, redefining the smart-phone market and creating a new hand-held computing platform that has attracted over 50,000 third-party apps, or software programs, in less than a year. With its nearly identical sibling, the iPod Touch, it has sold a combined 40 million units since June 2007, when the computer maker plunged into the phone business.

But the iPhone is drawing increasing competition from entrenched smart-phone makers anxious to emulate the upstart. The most significant of these is Palm’s (PALM) impressive new Pre, which is off to a good start with an estimated 100,000 or so units sold since it launched on June 6.

So, like a shark, Apple (AAPL) must keep moving. This week, it is introducing two new products designed to consolidate and increase its position as the leader in this new generation of hand-held computers. I’ve been testing both and I like them a lot, with some minor caveats.

One of the new products is a refreshed model of the iPhone itself, called the iPhone 3G S. It looks the same, but offers more speed, more memory, more battery life, and a few new features, including video recording and a better camera for still photos.

The second is OS 3.0, the third version of the iPhone’s operating system, which comes on the 3G S and also can be installed on all prior iPhones and Touches. It includes a much longer list of added features, some innovative and some long overdue catch-ups to other phones. These include such widely requested capabilities as cut, copy and paste; systemwide searching; a wider virtual keyboard; and a feature called MMS that allows users to send photos and videos directly to other phones without using email.
iPhone Chart

Apple last week also made a bold business move to complement these new products. It decided to keep making the current model, the iPhone 3G, and to slash its price by 50%, to $99. That’s an unheard-of price tag for a pocket computer of this power and versatility, and gives millions of additional consumers a reason to choose the iPhone instead of a competitor.

In my tests, both the new phone and the new operating system performed well, with a few small exceptions. I believe the two strengthen the iPhone platform, make it likely the iPhone will continue to attract scads of apps, and are good for consumers.

But I also regard these changes as more evolutionary than revolutionary, and I don’t think this latest iPhone is as compelling an upgrade for the average user as the 3G model was last year for owners of the original 2007 iPhone.

Current iPhone owners can get an improved product by merely sticking with their existing phones and upgrading to the feature-laden new operating system, which is free (it costs $10 for iPod Touch owners), rather than shelling out at least $199 for the new iPhone 3G S. And many new iPhone buyers can opt for the $99 3G model, which is not only cheaper, but also greatly improved by the new OS 3.0.

On the other hand, power users will crave the new model’s much-better performance, battery life, storage and other features. And some will want the new model because, unlike the current model, it’s capable of handling a new cellular network feature that, in the next few years, will offer double the current data speeds.

The new, free operating system is available for download starting June 17. The iPhone 3G S will go on sale June 19 for $199 for a version with 16 gigabytes of memory, and $299 for 32 gigabytes of memory. Those memory capacities are double the amounts offered on the previous model last year at the same prices, and far exceed the built-in memory on most competing smart phones.

These prices are for new U.S. customers on the AT&T network, plus current owners who are eligible for what AT&T (T) calls a “standard” upgrade. If you already own an older iPhone, you could pay $200 more to upgrade, depending on how far along you are in your two-year service contract and how much you spend monthly. But AT&T, stung by criticism in recent days, has just decided to offer the lower, new-customer prices at launch to iPhone 3G owners eligible for upgrades at any time up to Sept. 30 of this year, even if they were originally told they’d have to pay the $200 premium.

Before I detail the new features and how they worked in my tests, let me state up-front what the new iPhone and its new operating system don’t deliver. The iPhone still lacks a physical keyboard. It still can’t run more than one third-party app at a time, as the Pre does. Its otherwise excellent Web browser still can’t play videos created in Adobe’s Flash software, which is widely used on the Web. And it still isn’t available on any U.S. carrier besides AT&T.

Also, AT&T won’t enable MMS until late this summer, even though dozens of other iPhone carriers in other countries are doing so immediately. And AT&T hasn’t set a date by which it will offer tethering, a new iPhone feature that allows the device to be used as a modem for a laptop. Other carriers in other countries are allowing this right away.

Here’s a rundown of the most important new features of both the new hardware and software, and how they performed in my tests.
The iPhone 3G S

Speed: To me, this is the most important feature of the new iPhone 3G S. In fact, the “S” in the name stands for speed. During my week of testing, the new model proved dramatically snappier in every way than my iPhone 3G. Its processor is 50% faster than in the prior model, and it sports a new graphics chip.

Applications opened much more quickly. Web pages loaded far faster. The camera was ready to use almost instantly. And I never once saw the occasional, annoying iPhone behavior where you strike a key while typing and it sits there, seemingly stuck, before you can continue.

Cellular-data speeds were about the same, but in repeated testing on different Wi-Fi networks, the 3G S racked up speeds 30% to 50% faster than on the 3G running at the same time on the same networks.

Battery Life: On my 3G iPhone, I usually could make it through the day, but it was often a close call, with the battery indicator winding up in the red. By contrast, the new model did much better, never hitting the red zone and rarely requiring interim charging at the office or in the car, even though, because I was testing it, I was pounding it much harder than usual, making more voice calls, playing lots of videos and music, trying numerous apps, constantly downloading email from two accounts, and syncing two calendars over the air.

Apple claims about the same talk time for the new model as on the old, and about the same Web-surfing time over the cellular network. But it says the 3G S gets about 50% more battery life when playing videos or surfing the Internet over Wi-Fi and 25% more time — an astounding 30 hours — for continuous music playback.

Memory: With the new 32-gigabyte model, I was able to store over 3,000 songs, more than 1,600 photos, 74 videos, 67 applications, 400 emails, nearly 1,000 contacts, months of calendar data, and dozens of documents, and still have 5 gigabytes left over—more than most phones offer out of the box.

Camera: The new model’s camera has a 3 megapixel resolution, up from 2 megapixels, and has autofocus and a feature that lets you tap the screen to change the focus to an object or person in the background of a shot. It still lacks zoom or a flash, though it does better in low light. It also has a macro feature for close-up shots. In my tests, all of this worked, but I didn’t think the pictures it took were dramatically better than those on the old model, and it can’t compete with phones like Nokia’s (NOK) new $700 N97, which has a 5-megapixel camera with zoom.

Video: The new video recorder worked well, even in low light, and lets you post videos directly to YouTube, among other places. You can also trim your videos right on the phone. This all worked well, but the videos aren’t high definition, and pale in comparison to those on the latest HD model of the popular $229 Flip pocket camcorder.

Voice Control: By simply holding down the new iPhone’s home button, you can dial contacts and control music playback by uttering voice commands. The phone will even tell you which song is playing. Like most voice-recognition systems, this one isn’t perfect. But it worked most of the time.

iphone-3gs-compass

Compass: I don’t consider this important for most users, but it did work when I was walking or driving. It can orient maps in the direction you’re heading.

Small Touches: You can optionally turn on a new battery indicator that shows a precise percentage of battery life left. The screen has a new coating that resists oil and grease from fingerprints.

Downsides: The new phone crashed on me twice during my tests. Once, the voice-control feature killed the sound on the built-in iPod, requiring a reboot. But I couldn’t replicate this problem. Another time, the phone froze while downloading a TV show. Apple blamed this on a prerelease server issue, and it didn’t happen again.
iPhone Operating System 3.0

Copy, Cut and Paste: Apple is late with this common feature, but it’s the best implementation I’ve seen on a phone. In a text page, you just double tap on a word, and it is selected with little handles around it that let you expand or contract the selected area. Then, you just click on a copy icon that pops up over the selection. To paste, you tap elsewhere in the page, or even in another app, and a paste icon pops up. Click that icon, and the selected text is pasted in. It worked well in all my tests.

The feature works a bit differently for some Web pages, where you hold down your finger over an area and it selects a whole block of text, like a paragraph, but still has the handles that allow adjusting the selection. It also allows copying and pasting photos. You can also just select a word or a section or a whole page of text and delete it. And if you want to undo a paste, just shake the phone.

Some Web pages and third-party apps don’t yet support this feature, but most do.

Search: Before, you could search only in the Contacts app. Now, there are search features in Mail, Calendar, the built-in iPod and Notes. And there is a way to search the whole phone at once. You just hit the home button, slowly, twice, and a special search screen appears. Type in any phrase, and it brings up every instance in multiple apps.

This is another catch-up feature, but it works well. For instance, when I searched for the word “Phil,” it brought up songs by Phil Collins, a note about Philadelphia, calendar items mentioning people named Phil or Phillips, emails to or from people with those names, and contacts for people named Phil or Phillips.

In email, the search function will even find messages that aren’t on your phone but that are stored on the servers of certain email services. For instance, I was able to almost instantly find emails from two years ago stored on Google’s (GOOG) Gmail.

One downside — in email, search looks for words only in email headers, not in the body of the messages.

Landscape Keyboard: In older iPods, the only built-in program that supported a wider, landscape keyboard, which is better for thumb typing, was the Web browser. Now, you can turn the phone horizontally and use a landscape keyboard in the Mail, Messages and Notes programs as well.

Find My iPhone: If you belong to Apple’s $99 a year MobileMe service, you can now locate a lost iPhone on a map on any computer, send the iPhone a message saying how to return it to you, and cause it to emit a beep, even if the sound is turned off. I tested this and it worked well. You can even remotely wipe all your data off the phone.

Voice Memos: The OS includes a Voice Memo app that lets you dictate reminders or other messages, and then edit and email them. I found it worked well.

Navigation: Another catch-up feature, turn-by-turn navigation with voice prompts, is also now supported. I tested this with a third-party app called Gokivo, and it did OK, though the developer admits to a prerelease bug I encountered.

Auto-Authentication: In the new OS, the iPhone can remember your log-in credentials for commercial Wi-Fi hotspot services, so you don’t have to enter them again and again. Unfortunately, in my tests with the AT&T Wi-Fi service, this failed repeatedly in several Starbucks (SBUX) shops. Apple blames a glitch in my prerelease phone’s SIM card.

Push Notification: To make up for its lack of multitasking, the new iPhone OS has a feature where third-party apps can notify you of new events, like a sports score, or a new invitation to an online game. I tried this with a game called TapTap Revenge, and it worked fine.

Stocks: The built-in stock application now has much more detailed data, including market cap, news headlines and price/earnings ratio for each stock.

MMS and Tethering: I couldn’t test these useful features because my tests were all done on AT&T, which hasn’t rolled them out.

Minor Touches: You can now move an icon among screens with one continuous motion, instead of stopping at each screen. And there are two more screens to house icons. You can finally synchronize Notes with your PC or Mac. You also can now maintain both calendars and contacts synced wirelessly with online services and those synced via cable with your computer. And you can play games and transfer files wirelessly over Bluetooth with other iPods or Touches that are nearby.

Bottom Line: Both the new iPhone and iPhone OS are packed with features that make a great product even better. But, for many users, the software may be enough of a boost to keep them from buying the new model.

from here

Go here to read the rest:
Apple iPhone 3G S and iPhone OS 3.0

Bing Continues to Show Growth in Search Activity, According to comScore – comScore, Inc

Read more here:
Bing Continues to Show Growth in Search Activity, According to comScore

Twitter Finally Integrates Its Real-Time Search Engine – ReadWriteWeb

twitter_logo_Jan_09.pngTwitter just announced that it is slowly releasing a new interface to a subset of its users that will put Twitter Search and Trends right on users’ profiles. Until now, Twitter’s real-time search function, which was acquired from Summize last year, lived on a separate subdomain and was not fully integrated into Twitter. Clearly, Twitter has realized that real-time search is one of its core features if it wants to monetize its service successfully.

The only search function that was available from the profile pages until now was Twitter’s people search. For users who already have access to the new interface, a search box will appear at the top of the page, as well as a link to Twitter’s trends page.

According to Biz Stone, the integrated search will become available to all users in the near future, after “a bunch of us have kicked the tires a bit.”

twitter_search_integration.png

Until now, a lot of users were probably not even aware of the fact that Twitter had a search engine, and Biz Stone explicitly mentions that private accounts will not be indexed by Twitter’s search engine. According to Stone, over 90% of all Twitter users make their updates public.

Twitter’s real-time search is probably one of Twitter’s most valuable features, as it allows you to keep track of an event as it unfolds in real-time. Here at RWW, we use it daily – either through Tweetdeck’s or Twhirl’s built-in search, or directly on the web.

Are you on Twitter? Here are the accounts of ReadWriteWeb’s writers if you’d like to follow us.

SOURCE

Original post:
Twitter Finally Integrates Its Real-Time Search Engine

The Several Habits of Wildly Successful Twitter Users

Twitter is a deceptively simple utility. That said, Twitter isn’t for everyone. In fact it’s probably not even for half of everyone. But for those that have the patience to find their personal sweet spot, Twitter can be quite good indeed. If you’re not familar with Twitter, it’s pretty easy to describe. It’s instant messaging with a group. You post a short message via IM, web or other utility (see below) and other Twitterers who are “following” you will see your message. Some have called Twitter a form of microblogging and I think that’s a helpful way of looking at it. Most people don’t quite “get” Twitter at first. This post aims to give you a leg up on the learning curve. For starters, you’ll need an account and you can do that here (yeah, it’s free). Once you’ve got your account, you might feel lonely. I’m here for you, buddy. Just click “add”.

Just a little more intro before we jump into the Habits. Most Twitter newbies are underwhelmed by what they find there. It seems…useless. And unless you persevere a bit, you’ll probably walk away from your account wondering what the fuss was all about. This post aims to help give you a leg up on the Twitter learning curve. One last note: if you’ve never used instant messaging before, this may change your mind. It may also be the last straw that convinces you to become Amish. You’ve been warned.

Habit One: Make the right friends
This habit is pretty much the engine that drives many of the other habits. It is so easy to “follow” someone in Twitter that many folks go a little bit overboard at first. If you can handle the firehose of twittering, go for it. Otherwise, don’t get wrapped up in the “more is better” trap.

* Really think about what kind of info you want pushed your way. If you’re interested in what all the cool geek kids are doing, then go ahead and follow them–they’re all there.
* You can add friends on the web by going to their profile and clicking the “add” link.
* You can add friends via IM, if you know their username by sending an IM to the twitter@twitter.com contact and typing: follow USERNAME
* You can add your friends cell phone numbers by sending an IM to the twitter@twitter.com contact and typing: add CELLNUMBER (where CELLNUMBER is their number)
* Alternately you may be the only person in your social circle who does IM, in which case you might only want to get particular types of news pushed at you. There are currently several Twitter accounts that will serve up various flavors of news. You can follow the BBC (there are a bunch of flavors, just search for ‘bbc’ in the Twitter search box), the Digg frontpage, CNN breaking news (again, type ‘cnn’ in the search box to get the most updated options). There’s no ESPN, or Fark or Slashdot yet (at least that I can find, but I’m sure they’re coming).
* The search box is your friend, use it. Also, don’t be shy about bouncing around and looking at who’s following who. You’ll discover a lot of interesting people out there. Just remember that you can always turn down or turn off the firehose of information if becomes overwhelming. To turn it off, just send this IM to Twitter: off And I bet you can guess how to turn it back on…

Habit Two: Put it where you want it
In it’s most basic form, Twitter is a webpage with a text box where you can enter a little message. But you don’t need to stop there.

* Once you’ve got your account set up, you can add twitter@twitter.com as a contact in whatever IM software you use (I use Adium on the Mac, and it’s awesome).
* Additionally, you can get your Twitter pushed to your phone, if that’s how you want it. Just check the appropriate bits in your devices settings. You can send SMS to 40404 if you’re in the US. Outside the US use +44 7781 488126
* If you use Gmail and GoogleTalk, you can add twitter@twitter.com as a contact and get your stuff there.
* If you’ve got a Blackberry, you should check out the Google Talk client and use it there. As if you needed another reason to fiddle with that thing in meetings.
* Same deal with Treos, actually. Any of the Treo IM clients will work with Twitter. If you must, just Google “Treo IM” and you’ll get a lot of leads. I’ve tried a few, but it’s really more than I can take. Good luck to you.
* On the Mac you’ve got a couple of standalone options. There’s Twitterific and Twitterpost. Regardless of which one you use, be sure to add the corresponding Twitter user to your friends list in Twitter. Twitterific is at http://twitter.com/twitterific and Twitterpost is at http://twitter.com/twitterpost. You’ll get updates on bugfixes, etc by adding them.
* If you’re rocking the PC you might check out Twitteroo. As with the Mac options, add the Twitteroo user as a friend in Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitteroo. There are no updates as I write this, but I’m sure that’ll change.
* If you want to take all this just a little bit slower, you can just grab the RSS feed for all the folks that you’re following, or for individual users. If you don’t IM, and you just want to follow a few people, you can grab their feeds–just go to their Twitter page and look at the bottom left corner for the RSS link. Subscribing to your own RSS feed (the one that contains all the twitters from the people you’re following) is a good idea. It acts as an archive of the content which can be quite helpful.

Habit Three: Own it
If you’re unafraid of spreading yourself around the web, be sure to claim your Twitter page with Technorati and expand your digital empire. If you don’t have a Technorati account, just sign up (free). Once you’ve got your account go to your blog settings and at the bottom of the page there’s a place to put in your blog url. This is just http://twitter.com/YOUR-USERNAME. Replace YOUR-USERNAME with, you know, your Twitter username. You’ll then be presented with two options for claiming your blog (which is just your Twitter home page). Choose the posting method. Copy the code and send it to Twitter via any of the methods described above. Done.

Habit Four: Address your followers
By default, when you send a note via Twitter it goes to everyone that’s following you. If you just want to send a note directly to someone, you can get them via the direct messages web interface. Additionally, if you’re twittering via IM, you can use the direct command to send private-ish messages to a contact. Just type: D USERNAME your message here. That’ll send a message directly to that person without bothering all your other followers. If you don’t mind hitting everyone else with a private message, you can publically address that person by following the standard “@” convention. That is, just type: @USERNAME: your message here. That way everyone knows who you’re talking to.

Habit Five: Hack it
People are doing interesting and innovative stuff with Twitter. Feel free to leave a comment if you know about cool Twitter hacks that everyone should know about!

* Check out this recent post over at Lifehack.org that covers “five ways to use Twitter for good.” I particularly like the ideas of friendsourcing and quick human answers.
* Also, various mashups of Twitter search results, RSS feeds and jedi tricks with stuff like Yahoo Pipes can result in some very interesting customized info streams. Check out Christopher S. Penn’s post on Twitter Power Tips.
* Use your skills to take your favorite RSS feed (or spliced feed) and HTTP POST (via API) to create a custom Twitter account that anyone can befriend.(hint: this can be a nice traffic builder…but only if you have the skillz)

Habit Six: Play with it

* Use the Firefox Search Plugin to post directly to your Twitter account (so cool)
*
* Use the Twitter confessional to get clean
* Participate in the Twitter fan wiki (tons more tools in there)
* View info about Twitterers by posting: whois USERNAME This will return the standard Twitter bio for that user
* Try Steve’s Twitter search engine
* Search for friends and coworkers. Heck, search for the guy that just sent you his resume.
* Check out the Twitter help page for more tips on commands. Also see this Library Clips post for more of the same.

So there you go. This is by no means a comprehensive list of Twitterliciousness, but I hope it gets you thinking in new directions, and helps give you a leg up on figuring out Twitter. As a final sign off, here’s a brief wishlist that I’d like to see built into Twitter:

* A way to create an account with an RSS feed for auto-posting (rather than having to work with the API)
* A decent integrated search engine
* Some kind of groups feature with privacy options. It’d be nice to have a Twitter group for my office. I know this can be hacked, but we are not a technical people at my office.

SOURCE

Powered by ScribeFire.

The Several Habits of Wildly Successful Twitter Users

<!–
submit_url = “http://www.searchenginejournal.com/promote-your-site-on-facebook/8385/”;

// –>

To me Facebook is the place that unites my relatives, friends and colleagues – people that might build a great community around my website. Here are some tools that can help you share you website with your Facebook buddies:

1. Networked Blogs application allows to create a community around your blog.

What you can do:

• Verify your authorship by asking your friends to confirm it (send maximum 20 confirmation requests in a bulk):
• Invite friends: you can invite all your friends at once (of course, they will have to sign up for the app to both confirm your authorship and join your blog network).
• Add your blog details (blog name, URL, tagline and description, feed URL, up to 3 tags).

2. RSS connect application offers to add a blog or any RSS feed to your wall or boxes tab or create a fully customizable tab dedicated to your feeds.

You will be able to :

1. Add a box to your profile wall;
2. Add a box to your boxes tab;
3. Create a customizable tab for your feed.

3. Simplaris Blogcast (there are many similar apps but this one is my favorite) integrates an existing blog into Facebook “to increase your visibility and share your content with all your friends”. Make sure to configure it to make the profile links go to your site directly:

4. “Share a link” option can be accessed from your profile page:

• Specify the link;
• Hit “preview”;
• (Important) Choose the correct image;
• Click “post”:

Check out this post for more awesome Facebook apps for doing business.

Excerpted from:
Search Engine Journal

<!–
submit_url = “http://www.searchenginejournal.com/promote-your-site-on-facebook/8385/”;

// –>

To me Facebook is the place that unites my relatives, friends and colleagues – people that might build a great community around my website. Here are some tools that can help you share you website with your Facebook buddies:

1. Networked Blogs application allows to create a community around your blog.

What you can do:

• Verify your authorship by asking your friends to confirm it (send maximum 20 confirmation requests in a bulk):
• Invite friends: you can invite all your friends at once (of course, they will have to sign up for the app to both confirm your authorship and join your blog network).
• Add your blog details (blog name, URL, tagline and description, feed URL, up to 3 tags).

2. RSS connect application offers to add a blog or any RSS feed to your wall or boxes tab or create a fully customizable tab dedicated to your feeds.

You will be able to :

1. Add a box to your profile wall;
2. Add a box to your boxes tab;
3. Create a customizable tab for your feed.

3. Simplaris Blogcast (there are many similar apps but this one is my favorite) integrates an existing blog into Facebook “to increase your visibility and share your content with all your friends”. Make sure to configure it to make the profile links go to your site directly:

4. “Share a link” option can be accessed from your profile page:

• Specify the link;
• Hit “preview”;
• (Important) Choose the correct image;
• Click “post”:

Check out this post for more awesome Facebook apps for doing business.

View post:
Search Engine Journal : how to market your Facebook pages

See original here:
Unlock the Power of Twitter For Your Business in 3 Steps

Excerpt from:
Microsoft?s Manhattan Project

Finding cool Photosynth’s just got a heck of a lot easier. We’ve just introduced a new way to explore Photosynth’s as a part of our Collection Explorer feature on Live Search Maps.

2 things – (1) how do you find Photosynths and (2) how did they get there??

Alright, so in order to find Photosynths in Live Search Maps you’ll search for a location – Woodinville, WA, for example. In the welcome pane, you’ll see a link for “Explore Collections” which you click and begin seeing all kinds of collections. You can then improve your search using a helpful toolbar based on tags, collections with photos, collections with 3D models, collections with MapCruncher layers, and collections with Photosynths! Additionally, you can sort these by relevance (if you input a search term), distance from the center of the map, date added and last updated.

Click the Photosynth button and you’ll see a search result list of Photosynth collections. There are two places to launch the Photosynth viewer for a collection item from Live Search Maps – in the search results and in the rollover for each pushpin. These links will send you over to Photosynth.com to view the Synth.

Ok, second question, how did they get there? Remember when we launched Photosynth and Photosynther availability to the public and I wrote “Photosynth Released – Now, Let’s Mash it with Virtual Earth?” Well, in that blog I mentioned that if you would geo-annotate a synth it would be indexed into Live Search Maps in the future. Done.

If you’ve made any Photosynth’s you can go back to Photosynth.com, login with your Window’s Live ID and give the Synth a placement on the map. This will index into Live Search Maps and people will find your synths just like I found the Columbia Winery Synth I uploaded some time ago.

CP

Posted: Thursday, November 06, 2008 2:01 PM by Chris Pendleton Filed under: Photosynth, Live Search Maps

View original here:
Photosynth Exploration in Live Search Maps

Microsoft program manager Alec Berntson shows how Windows 7 allows programs to take advantage of location-based information, in this case the operating system’s weather gadget.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News)

LOS ANGELES–Windows 7 has a new programming interface designed to make it a whole lot easier for software to figure out where in the world a PC and its user are located.

That should make it easier for a whole new range of location-based services from finding nearby friends to LoJack-like PC tracking programs. Even search could be a whole lot better if the search engine knew where you were. Indeed, searchers often enter their city with their location to try and get just that benefit.

“There’s so many times you have to enter in where you are at,” said Microsoft program manager Alec Berntson.

At the same time, broader use of location-based services could also open up a range of privacy concerns.

Those issues–and how to handle them–was the subject of a discussion this week at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) here.

Microsoft does give a range of control options, such as turning off location services by default, as well as the ability to limit such services only to specific users or only to applications, as opposed to services that run in the background. However, the operating system doesn’t allow users the option of letting only certain applications access your location. So, for example, if you turn it on for a mapping program, any other Windows application running could also access that information.

The reason, Microsoft officials say, is that Windows doesn’t have a reliable means of determining that an application is what it says it is, so any attempt to limit the location to a specific application would be easily spoofable, Berntson said during the WinHEC discussion.

“We only promise the control that we can realistically give to them, rather than trying to promise more than we can deliver,” Berntson said.

That said, application-based control, “would be great to have and it is certainly on our Christmas list for future stuff,” he said.

But, not everyone felt that Windows 7 was doing all it could on the privacy front. One attendee suggested, for example, that Microsoft at least notify users when an application requests location information.

Although technically possible, Berntson said that’s not currently on Microsoft’s roadmap for Windows 7.

In fairness, location-based services are actually more secure in Windows 7 than in the past. That’s because in past versions of Windows, there was really no way to reliably turn off location information.

“The old way of doing it–there was no warning, there was no switch, there was nothing,” said Microsoft lead product manager Daniel Polivy. That said, it was so cumbersome that few people have enabled such location-based information or built services on top of them.

A pair of APIs
So just what is it that Microsoft is doing in Windows 7?

Well, at a low level, Microsoft has a new application programming interface (API) for sensors and a second API for location. It uses any of a number of things to actually get the location, depending on what’s available. Obviously there’s GPS, but it also supports Wi-Fi and cellular triangulation. At a minimum. Users can type in their location if they really want location-based services and don’t have any of those other sensors.

Applications can then use that longitude and latitude information to provide any number of services to the customer, of which mapping is only the tip of the iceberg. Most of those applications will be up to developers, though. The only location-based service in the current Windows 7 OS itself is the fact that the weather gadget will use your location, assuming you have such services available and turned on.

Masafumi Kuboyama, a senior manager in Sony’s Vaio PC unit in Japan, said he wants to know what’s going on in his system and would appreciate knowing what the location-based services were up to. Most computer users, though, don’t want to be bothered, he said.

“My relatives never understand what’s going on in a PC,” he said. “Everybody says, ‘Please do (it) automatically.’”

He also said he’s interested in the possibilities opened up by location-based services. “I’m looking forward to seeing more convenient applications for the Netbook.”

Tim Zinsky, a software architect at Hewlett-Packard, said he wasn’t all that disappointed that Microsoft isn’t providing all the pieces with its location API.

Zinsky, who stressed he was speaking for himself and not HP, said he isn’t convinced that there isn’t a way to track which applications are using the location information.

“They are underestimating the capability there,” he said. “I think they could do it.”

But that’s OK with him. “I don’t want it all to come from Microsoft,” he said. “If they can’t do it, maybe somebody else or another company can do it.”

Click here for more news on Windows 7.

SOURCE

Continued here:
Windows 7 knows where you are

SOURCE

The rest is here:
Finally! Google to Offer RSS Feeds for Web Search Results