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Amazon Growing, But Will Need to Fend Off Google in Retail

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February 27, 2013

Back in 1990, Walmart suprassed Kmart in sales. In 1992, it passed up Sears. By 2011, it had higher worldwide sales than the combined total sales of the next six biggest retailers: Kroger, Target, Walgreens, Costco, Home Depot and CVS. That same year, Amazon was 15th on the list of top retailers. This year, it’ll likely end up in the 7th spot, just a few billion behind Target. But is Google stealing online retail from Amazon? Continue reading Amazon Growing, But Will Need to Fend Off Google in Retail

Samsung to Launch TV Discovery for Video, Live Television

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February 25, 2013

Samsung’s new TV Discovery service will enable viewers to search for and watch live TV, on-demand video and online videos from outlets such as YouTube. The company plans to unveil the new platform at Mobile World Congress this week in Barcelona. TV Discovery will work on Samsung’s line of smart TVs and its mobile devices. The service will learn user preferences and give recommendations based on each user’s viewing history and interests. Continue reading Samsung to Launch TV Discovery for Video, Live Television

Google Algorithm Change Not Effective, According to RIAA

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February 25, 2013

According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the change to Google’s algorithm, which is designed to takes sites with higher rates of copyright-infringed material and give them a lower search rating is not helping ongoing piracy problems. A new report from the RIAA notes that none of the sites were demoted in a significant way and search results were nearly unaffected. Continue reading Google Algorithm Change Not Effective, According to RIAA

Information Gravitation: A More Personalized Search Future

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February 11, 2013

The future of search may have very little to do with traditional search. “Rather, next-generation applications will surface the information we need when we need it — whether we know we need it or not,” writes GigaOM. “We’re talking about doing a video chat, sending an email or just surfing the Web, and seeing relevant content appear before your eyes.” The article refers to the model as “anticipatory computing” or “information gravitation.” Continue reading Information Gravitation: A More Personalized Search Future

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Talks About the Future of Mobile

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February 5, 2013

New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wants to improve the company’s mobile search, which trails far behind offerings from search giants like Google and Bing. In her first one-on-one interview since being named CEO, Mayer spoke with Bloomberg Television about the future of Internet search technology, data portability and strategic partnerships. She sees personalization as the key to mobile for Yahoo. Continue reading Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Talks About the Future of Mobile

Facebook: Struggling Graph Search Feature May Be Improved

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January 28, 2013

Facebook’s new Graph Search feature may benefit from upcoming upgrades. When Graph Search was first released, the feature relied primarily on “likes” and check-ins to provide results, but these are ineffective tools since most people do not check-in when they go to places they like, and others like pages ironically rather than honestly. But bringing in further analysis of comments of posts could help improve the accuracy of Graph Search. Continue reading Facebook: Struggling Graph Search Feature May Be Improved

Facebook Returns to Roots: Launches Beta of Graph Search

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January 16, 2013

Facebook has announced a new tool for searching all of the social network’s content for items tailored to your profile. Called “Graph Search,” it will also incorporate Bing search results. “Graph Search is meant to answer very specific questions like ‘Who are my friends in San Francisco?'” explains Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It rolled out in a limited beta yesterday. Continue reading Facebook Returns to Roots: Launches Beta of Graph Search

Are Amazon and Google on a Collision Course for 2013?

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January 3, 2013

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos got a “wake-up” call a decade ago, when he got word of a project at Google to scan and digitize product catalogs. “He saw it as a warning that the Web search engine could encroach upon his online retail empire, according to a former Amazon executive,” reports Reuters. That was just the beginning of a rivalry that will continue heating up in 2013. The two will compete even more fiercely in the online advertising, retail, mobile gadgets and cloud computing realms. Continue reading Are Amazon and Google on a Collision Course for 2013?

Larry Page Talks Future of Search and Company Projects

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December 13, 2012
  • Google CEO Larry Page, who rarely agrees to interviews, sat down with Fortune to discuss the future of search, clashes with Apple, the company’s numerous Google X projects, and more.
  • Page acknowledges the change in advertising models, but views disruption as a good thing. Google still devotes 70 percent of its effort into search and ads.
  • “The perfect search engine would really understand whatever your need is,” he says. “So one of my favorite examples I like to give is if you’re vacation planning. It would be really nice to have a system that could basically vacation plan for you. It would know your preferences, it would know the weather, it would know the prices of airline tickets, the hotel prices, understand logistics, combine all those things into one experience. And that’s kind of how we think about search.”
  • On Google’s competition with Apple, Amazon and others: “I’d like to see more cooperation on the user side. The Internet was made in universities and it was designed to interoperate. And as we’ve commercialized it, we’ve added more of an island-like approach to it, which I think is a somewhat a shame for users,” Page says.
  • “I think it would be nice if everybody would get along better and the users didn’t suffer as a result of other people’s activities. I try to model that. We try pretty hard to make our products be available as widely as we can. That’s our philosophy,” he notes.
  • The remaining effort at Google is split between apps (20 percent) and new projects (10). “I think investors always worry about this. You know, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to spend all their money on self-driving cars.’ I feel like no matter how hard I try, I can never make the 10 bigger, because it’s actually hard to get people to work on stuff that’s really ambitious. It’s easier to get people working on incremental things.”

Mind Your Facebook Comments: Soon Accessible via Google Search

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November 7, 2011
  • Google has developed a new indexing plan that marks a shift in its traditionally passive approach.
  • “Mind what you say in Facebook comments,” reports Wired, “Google will soon be indexing them and serving them up as part of the company’s standard search results.”
  • “Google’s all-seeing search robots still can’t find comments on private pages within Facebook, but now any time you use a Facebook comment form on other sites, or a public page within Facebook, those comments will be indexed by Google.”
  • The article suggests the new policy may upset developers and users alike.
  • “There are two primary requests you can initiate on the Web,” explains Wired. “GET requests are intended for reading data, POST for changing or adding data. That’s why search engine robots like Google’s have always stuck to GET crawling. There’s no danger of the Googlebot altering a site’s data with GET, it just reads the page, without ever touching the actual data. Now that Google is crawling POST pages the Googlebot is no longer a passive observer, it’s actually interacting with — and potentially altering — the websites it crawls.”

Future of the Innovation Economy: Anticipating the Great Tech War of 2012

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October 27, 2011
  • There was a time when Apple was a consumer electronics company, Google was a search engine, Amazon was an online retailer and Facebook a place to connect with friends. Now each of these companies is growing into the space of the others as they compete for new and expanding markets in mobile, social and cloud services.
  • Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Fire tablet will compete directly with Apple’s iPad. Google+ has taken on Facebook. Android and iOS are direct competitors. And Facebook has been considering its own mobile phone while it also looks to offer content, advertising and retail services.
  • Fast Company analyzes the “future of the innovation economy” in this regard, with a particular emphasis on the inevitable war and its major players.
  • “Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google will not last forever,” the article suggests. “But despite this oncoming war, in which attacking one another becomes standard operating practice, their inevitable slide into irrelevancy likely won’t be at the hands of one of their fellow rivals. As always, the real future of tech belongs to some smart-ass kid in a Palo Alto garage.”

Google Development Experimentation Often Leads to Cancelled Projects

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October 18, 2011
  • According to The Next Web, 90 of the 251 products (36 percent) that Google released in the past 12 years have been cancelled.
  • “Experimentation is a part of Google’s culture,” indicates TNW. “Launching in beta habitually creates a fearlessness that continues to serve them well. Even though Google knows that tons of their products won’t make the cut, their success is partially due to throwing a fist full of darts, and seeing what sticks.”
  • In a related TechCrunch post, the company plans to focus on Google+, and as a result will be killing off Google Buzz in a few weeks as well as iGoogle’s social features come January 15, 2012. Google Labs was shut down on Friday.
  • Additional services are also reportedly getting the axe by January 15: Code Search (for open source code on the Web), Jaiku (for users to send updates to friends), and the University Research Program for Google Search (available to select academic researchers).

Google+ Announces Three New Features in Response to User Feedback

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October 10, 2011
  • Google+ users can now lock posts or disable comments before sharing. Previously, users could share to selected circles, but would then have to close comments after the post was made.
  • “This feature comes in response to popular user feedback, reassuring the G+ community that the platform does, indeed, have its privacy and best interest in mind,” reports The Next Web.
  • TNW also reports there is a new unread notifications number displayed on the tab bar, so that users no longer have to download third party apps.
  • Additionally, Google+ now has searchable hashtags, although the hashtag results are mixed in with regular key word findings.

Yelp CEO Speaks Out on Google Monopoly: We Had No Choice

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September 23, 2011
  • This week’s Senate hearings on “The Power of Google: Serving Customers or Threatening Competition?” barely scratched the surface, suggests CNNMoney.
  • “What Google did to Apple — copying Apple’s touchscreen operating system and offering it to Apple’s competitors for free — never came up,” indicates the article. “Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) used much of their time to suck up to Google chairman Eric Schmidt, practically begging him to bring Google’s fiber-to-the-home experiment to their states.”
  • However, testimony from Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp, was compelling, especially in regards to his take on the search giant’s apparent new mission.
  • “Let’s be clear. Google is no longer in the business of sending users to the best sources of information on the Web,” explained Stoppelman. “It now hopes to become a destination site itself for one vertical market after another, including news, shopping, travel, and now, local business reviews. It would be one thing if these efforts were conducted on a level playing field, but the reality is they’re not.”
  • “The experience in my industry is telling,” he added. “Google forces review websites to provide their content for free to benefit Google’s own competing product, not consumers. Google then gives its own product preferential treatment in Google search results.”
  • Stoppelman suggested the company’s actions were essentially part of an ultimatum: “Google first began taking our content without permission a year ago. Despite public and private protests, Google gave the ultimatum that only a monopolist can give: In order to appear in Web search, you must allow us to use your content to compete against you. As everyone in this room knows, not being in Google is equivalent to not existing on the Internet. We had no choice.”

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