Google: Inside Search

How To Change Siri's Default Search Engine


How To Change Siri's Default Search Engine
AppAdvice
Whether you're new to iOS, or just want to pick up some useful tips and tricks, we're here to help. This is iOS Advice. Using Siri to search the Web can be very helpful. By default, Apple has given Siri the ability to search Google. Luckily, there's a ...

All web pages 'are 19 clicks away' - Telegraph: " . . . . The finding has been compared to the “small world” experiment, which found Americans were linked by an average of between five and six others. The famous research was later adapted as the basis of the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”, which aims to connect any actor to the prolific star of Footloose and Tremors via as few other actors as possible. According to Smithsonian magazine, Professor Barabási credits the small world of the web to humanity’s tendency to organise based on region, country and subject area. Online, the role of “Kevin Bacon” is played by search engines, aggregators and other big nodes in the network."

Following Interflora SEO punishment Google issues “a reminder about selling links that pass PageRank” | The Drum: "Google has published a “reminder” about selling links on sites that pass PageRank following the penalisation of Interflora and UK newspapers. Google issued the warning on a blog post from Matt Cutts, the head of search spam. Cutts told readers this is a “reminder” as in 2007 Google issued a warning that selling paid links can lead to a penalty. . . ."


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Avoid selling and buying links that pass PageRank

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: A reminder about selling links that pass PageRank: " . . . If you receive a warning for selling links that pass PageRank in Google's Webmaster Tools, you'll see a notification message to look for "possibly artificial or unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank." That's an indication that your site has lost trust in Google's index. To address the issue, make sure that any paid links on your site don't pass PageRank. You can remove any paid links or advertorial pages, or make sure that any paid hyperlinks have the rel="nofollow" attribute. After ensuring that no paid links on your site pass PageRank, you can submit a reconsideration request and if you had a manual webspam action on your site, someone at Google will review the request. After the request has been reviewed, you'll get a notification back about whether the reconsideration request was granted or not. We do take this issue very seriously, so we recommend you avoid selling (and buying) links that pass PageRank in order to prevent loss of trust, lower PageRank in the Google Toolbar, lower rankings, or in an extreme case, removal from Google's search results."

Microsoft preparing Windows Blue public preview with significant search ...
The Verge
We're told that the Bing team is working closely on Windows Blue to improve search in a significant way. A number of scenarios are being targeted, including the ability for users to search for a movie and have apps surface that content and provide a ...

A Shocking Expose of China’s Black PR Industry Implicates Government Officials, is Quickly Deleted from the Web: " . . . . Charging money to delete posts is illegal — this came as a surprise to many of Xinxun and Yage’s employees, according to the Caixin article — but some black PR firms employ even darker tactics. In a pinch, some firms have been known to create fake government stamps and use them to send faux-official takedown notices to get articles pulled from the web. Another tactic is a more classic form of blackmail: the PR firm uses its connections or bribery to place a negative article online, then approaches the company that’s the subject of the article and offers to have it removed — for a high fee, of course. Yage’s client list apparently includes very high profile companies including China Mobile, Pizza Hut, and Hengda Real Estate among many others. Corporate entities aren’t the only people making use of black PR firms to delete negative stories, though. According to Caixin’s report — and this is probably why it was deleted — government officials are also willing to pay to get embarrassing posts about themselves and their administrations deleted. . . . "


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Facebook Graph search limited

You're not gonna Like it: Facebook's new search struggles with the real world | The Verge: "Facebook launched Graph Search at a big press event at its Menlo Park, CA headquarters almost exactly one month ago. CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivered a large part of the event keynote himself, highlighting the feature as one of three “pillars of Facebook” alongside the News Feed and Timeline. Graph Search is supposed to help you gather friends for a Twin Peaks marathon, find photos taken in London on your last trip, and see which sushi places are most popular among your friends. After a month of testing Graph Search, I’ve found that it’s fantastic at finding people and photos, but not so good at finding anything else. And it’s for one simple reason. . . . Likes have become so commoditized that I, a self-professed Facebook fanatic, have become stingier with them, and so have many of my friends. When I like Nike or a restaurant nearby, I am acutely conscious that I'm signing up for News Feed updates for life  . . ."

Yandex Just Passed Bing to Become 4th Largest Global Search Engine - Search Engine Watch (#SEW): "Yandex began passing Microsoft in November, but the difference was tiny and initially it could have perceived looking like a statistical error. There are only two out of Top-5 search entities which grew higher last year: Baidu (13 percent) and Yandex (27.8 percent) while the total number of search queries worldwide decreased by 4.6 percent since December 2011. Exploring this deeper, reveals a few interesting data points. The audience growth continues to evolve and grow in Russia, however, global growth in Western markets where Microsoft has most of their share has slowed down."

Russia’s Yandex stacks up against Google - John Dvorak's Second Opinion - MarketWatch: "I’ve been playing with the Yandex YNDX +0.86%  product (short for Yet ANother inDEXer). I can see using this in place of Google or Bing. In fact, it may be better than both. Although it targets the Russian market it shows up in English if you are coming in from the U.S. and seems to produce excellent results on every search. I prefer the layout of the results when compared to Google and Bing. It’s a bit more straightforward with an appealing layout and, at least for now, not noticeable advertising. The engine uses a similar algorithm as Google for misspelled words and automatically considers your location for its results. They do not seem to be caching the entire Internet the way Google does and they are attacking the search differently."

Google's Enhanced Campaigns Inspire Love, Hate And Hope For The Next Version: "Of course, beyond the planning work will be the actual inputting of new campaigns and combining of desktop and mobile campaigns into a single campaign — no simple task. Google says it’s stepping up education and support to help marketers cope with the changes. It has developed an “upgrade guide” PDF and is planning a series of webinars. More blog posts are also forthcoming, and support personnel will be on duty, as well. Of course, some marketers are opting to sit back, do some research, and wait for while others explore the new features and report on their successes and failures. The automatic conversion of campaigns is still a few months off, after all."

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Yahoo CEO says Microsoft search deal underperforms

Yahoo CEO says Microsoft search deal underperforms | Reuters: " . . . Yahoo Inc Chief Executive Marissa Mayer said the company's search partnership with MicrosoftCorp was not delivering the market share gains or the revenue boost that it should. "One of the points of the alliance is that we collectively want to grow share rather than just trading share with each other," Mayer said at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. In her first appearance at an investor conference since taking the reins of the struggling Web portal in July, Mayer said she planned to prune a sprawling lineup of mobile apps and she reiterated her focus on enticing consumers to spend more time on Yahoo's online properties, in order to display more money-making ads. . . . "

The Misleading Sinister Surge in Traffic Before Google Panda & Penguin Struck - Search Engine Watch (#SEW): "Don’t fall victim to the surge. Understand your site, your efforts, and your traffic levels. You should know how and why new organic search traffic is hitting your site. And above all, make sure it should be hitting your site in the first place! Because if it shouldn’t, there are several mechanisms that Google can use to understand what’s going on. Remember, that surge in traffic could reverse itself faster than you can say “Panda” or “Penguin”. And at that point, you won’t have much to look at in your reporting. Ask questions, do your own detective work, and avoid a major hit. Fear the surge."

Google Warns SEO & Businesses to Avoid Fake Reviews - Search Engine Watch (#SEW): "Google warns business owners that “fake glowing testimonies” written by SEO or reputation management companies will be taken down. Also, “if a business accepts paper comment cards it might be tempting to collect them and ‘digitize’ them by posting the reviews on Google+ Local,” Google says in its advice for SEOs. “We ask that all reviews come from first hand experience and do not allow posting reviews on behalf of others.” On a related note, Google advises against companies asking customers to write a review on a computer or tablet located on the business’s premises. Google said businesses should send reminder emails to customers encouraging them to review the business on their own time – just don't go so far as to give free gifts or discounts in exchange for encouraging them to leave positive reviews, Google warned."

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The Amazon Commerce Search Engine vs Google

Shopping? Where do you start--Google or Amazon?

Google's Plan to Snatch Shopping from Amazon Is Working | Wired Business | Wired.com: " . . .  online shoppers today tend to start in one of two places for product information: Google or Amazon. In effect, Amazon has become a “commerce search engine,” which cuts into Google’s core function. To compete, Google wants to give shoppers every reason not to go straight to Amazon by becoming as reliable a destination not just to learn about products, but to buy them. “What you’re going to see them do is do everything they can to enable marketers to sell through their platform,” Lawson says. Not that Google likely plans to set up its own warehouses, he says. But he adds that the days when merchants see Google as a conduit for clicks to their own sites is fading. If Google can package the sale from search to checkout, merchants can handle the inventory and shipping themselves. If Google and retailers — especially brick-and-mortar Amazon competitors — can come together in that way, suddenly online shoppers have another broad, deep Amazon alternative. At the same time, Lien says, the competition between Google and Amazon isn’t all-or-nothing. Shoppers are too smart for that. “Consumers are looking on Amazon and they’re looking on Google,” Lien says. “I think most thoughtful consumers are to take the best deal.”

You would think Walmart, or some other big retailer (with warehouses and distribution) would be dying to partner with Google.


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Nonprofit Common Crawl is a Free Database of the Entire Web

Search is evolving way too fast for government regulation--FTC, EU, etc.--government is slow, technology is fast--

Nonprofit Common Crawl Offers a Database of the Entire Web, For Free, and Could Open Up Google to New Competition | MIT Technology Review: "A nonprofit called Common Crawl is now using its own Web crawler and making a giant copy of the Web that it makes accessible to anyone. The organization offers up over five billion Web pages, available for free so that researchers and entrepreneurs can try things otherwise possible only for those with access to resources on the scale of Google’s. “The Web represents, as far as I know, the largest accumulation of knowledge, and there’s so much you can build on top,” says entrepreneur Gilad Elbaz, who founded Common Crawl. “But simply doing the huge amount of work that’s necessary to get at all that information is a large blocker; few organizations … have had the resources to do that.” New search engines are just one of the things that can be built using an index of the Web, says Elbaz, who points out that Google’s translation software was trained using online text available in multiple languages. “The only way they could do that was by starting with a massive crawl. That’s put them on the way to build the Star Trektranslator,” he says. “Having an open, shared corpus of human knowledge is simply a way of democratizing access to information that’s fundamental to innovation.”


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A different kind of search

Facebook's Graph Search is a different kind of search
San Jose Mercury News
Looking for a reason to spend more time on Facebook? CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his crew of social-software gurus are convinced their new Graph Search function is just what you need. Zuckerberg has touted Graph Search as a "third pillar" of the popular ...

SEO content for Websites | Tips to spicy it up with content marketing: "If you are approaching the content marketing and SEO for your "boring" industry by making posts that all revolve around selling your product, it's no wonder people continue to find your industry boring!  It's time to take the ideas you found in the first step and start to craft content that at first glance might seem unrelated.   Are you in the financial products business?  What's the history of your industry?  Are there any stories where one of your industry's products made a difference in a family's ability to make ends meet or achieve a dream?  What are some tips related to the most pressing or urgent questions of your customers?  Lead by providing value for your customers!  Your customers will see you as their preferred choice when they're ready to spend money on the products or services you provide if they've grown to trust you as a result of the free information you've given them over time.  "

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SkyPhrase and Natural Language Understanding

Natural Language Search is just beginning--

SkyPhrase Is Bringing Natural Language Understanding to the Web | MIT Technology Review: "Natural language search could make it easier for people with little or no training to ask complicated questions that typically require searching through large stores of data. Besides Facebook’s efforts, Wolfram Alpha can answer natural language queries, and Apple’s virtual assistant Siri also encourages users to speak questions aloud in complete sentences (some of its answers come from Wolfram Alpha). Percy Liang, an assistant professor in Stanford’s computer science department who studies natural language processing and machine learning, thinks SkyPhrase’s idea is a good one, but cautions that there is a lot of work to be done to make natural language processing work. He says challenges include determining what a word or phrase means based on its context—such as knowing that Obama is not just the U.S. president’s name, but also a city in Japan—and the ability to pick up on sentiment—such as a Yelp restaurant review that says, sarcastically, “I had to wait an hour for this!”"


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Facebook Graph Search will poison Facebook as a social media platform

For now, Facebook is still #1 in social media, but Google+ is now at #2 and YouTube is at #3--will Facebook Graph Search hurt or help?

Watch Out Facebook, With Google+ at #2 and YouTube at #3, Google, Inc. Could Catch Up - Forbes: "In another post from Trendstream, Google is compared to Facebook’s new Graph Search. Its data indicate a marked decline in the percent of Facebook users who are actively sharing information about their daily lives—a significant source of data for Graph Search. GWI observes that, “Growth of active usage is concentrated in passive or frictionless sharing actions and behaviours, like “purchasing a product or service” or watching a TV show or film, which have grown massively through 2012.” The post concludes that, “The future of social is far more passive, less about interacting with friends and more about watching or utilizing the social data to navigate and discover the web as well as the world around us. This means the data will not be user contributed but, aggregated about the user. This leaves Google with the upper hand.” In terms of Facebook’s Graph Search, Trendstream’s Tom Smith writes, “It is far easier to lay social and personalised data over a search product that aggregates the entire internet and links that to users. Facebook is only aggregating what exists in the Facebook eco-system or what consumers have opted into share. To bring this data, which will be coming from Facebook’s partnership with Bing, into the Facebook’s Graph Search will be a far bigger technology challenge and most crucially, an immense privacy challenge.” The other thing boosting Google+’s active user count is the way that people are being made aware of its value in a business context. Google has added pop-up labels that help to identify people in your company as you post updates, for example. But, beyond these mechanical features, Google has promised that Google+ profiles will factor more in search rankings over time, so more and more people are beginning to pay attention and at least fill out their profiles and link them to their content so as not to miss out. . . ."


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You are the query

A deeply customized web experience to whomever might best provide it?--that's Google, Marissa!--

The 10 Things We Learned At Davos - Corporate Intelligence - WSJ: "Marissa Mayer‘s New Strategy:  “You become the query.”. . .a Web user’s entire search history and web profile should be “portable” to different providers in the manner of mobile phone numbers. This history, Mayer suggested, would form the basis of a deeply customized web experience to whomever might best provide it. Of course, it’s convenient for Yahoo, a laggard in the web game, to suggest such a plan."


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Facebook Search and the Loss of Privacy

On Facebook? Then forget about your privacy--

Where Facebook Search Will Go Next – Crawling Your Comments and Integrating with Open Graph | MIT Technology Review: "The social networking giant has two valuable data stores that it has yet to connect up to its prominent new search box (so large that it displaces the company’s logo). Accessing these data stores could change how people find information online—not to mention the fortunes of arch rival Google. First, Facebook could analyze the substance of user comments and other text people have added to the site, such as photo captions. That could help Facebook find many more recommendations not logged through check-ins or “like” button clicks, and to sift out misleading likes. Second, Facebook’s search tool has yet to move outside the social network’s own borders (and into Google’s territory) by tapping into the Open Graph, a system developed by Facebook in 2010 as a way for it to understand the products, services, or other entities described on Web pages and in mobile apps. Open Graph allows Facebook to understand, for example, the artist, song, and album you are interacting with each time you click a song in a music service such as Spotify. That kind of knowledge could help Facebook search apply to more than just content from your friends. . . . "


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Google Panda Update

Google Panda Update Version #24; 1.2% Of Search Queries Impacted: "Google has announced a new Panda refresh, making this version number 24. This refresh has a noticeable impact 1.2% of English based queries according to Google. The previous confirmed update was #23 and it impacted 1.3% of English queries on December 21, 2012. Prior to that was a refresh on November 21st that impacted 0.8% of queries. It seems like Google is now rolling out these updates every 4 weeks or so."


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google search - Google News

SEO OR search engine optimization - Google News

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