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Should Google Favor Google+ More Or Less In Search Results?
Google faces unique obstacle vs. unlikely competitor Facebook
By Chris Crum
In a letter to investors this week, Google CEO Larry Page expressed Google’s goal to create “a beautifully simple experience across Google”. That’s what the company’s controversial privacy policy change is all about. It’s about tying all of Google’s products together as one Google.
Should data from the various Google services you use be integrated with one another? Tell us what you think.
“Think about basic actions like sharing or recommendations,” wrote Page. “When you find a great article, you want to share that knowledge with people who will find it interesting, too. If you see a great movie, you want to recommend it to friends. Google+ makes sharing super easy by creating a social layer across all our products so users connect with the people who matter to them.”
“When you sign up for Google+, you can use Circles to group people into different categories, such as ‘Friends,’ ‘Family,’ or ‘Rocket Scientists,’ and then engage with them just like in real life,” he continued. “You can recommend great news articles, websites, and videos to specific Circles, or share photos with ‘Family’ straight from your Android device. And the photos are even uploaded for you automatically! To follow people with shared interests, such as photography, just add them to your Circles. And you can share your own ideas with the world, or a smaller group, via the Google+ Stream and have others respond.”
“It’s still early days, and we have a long way to go,” he noted. “But these are tremendously important changes, and with over 120 Google+ integrations to date (including Google Search, YouTube and Android), we are on the right track. Well over 100 million users are active on Google+, and we’re seeing a positive impact across the Web, with Google users being able to recommend search results and videos they like—a goal we’ve had ever since we started the company.”
Now imagine that Google+ had over 800 million users like Facebook. You might be surprised to know that in some ways it already does.
Google’s Vic Gundotra recently explained that Google counts active users as users who sign into Google+ and use another Google product within a month. Google may not be up to the 800 million mark in that regard (though they’re an 1/8 of the way there apparently – not bad for less than a year), but if Google+ is really just a social layer over Google products, you have to consider that Google has a lot more users than that. YouTube itself, in fact, has over 800 million.
Now consider that Facebook is working on its own search engine. It may only be internal (at least at first), but at 800 million users, even that in itself is enough to potentially take some searches away from Google. In a recent article on this subject, I wrote:
I’ve long maintained that the biggest threat to Google’s search market share is likely not the threat of a single competitor, but the diversification of search in general. People are using more apps than ever (from more devices than ever), and just don’t have to rely on Google (or other traditional search engines) for access to content the way they used to. Take Twitter search, for example, which has become the go-to destination for finding quick info on events and topics in real time. When was the last time you turned to Google’s realtime search feature? It’s been a while, because it’s been MIA since Google’s partnership with Twitter expired last year. Sometimes a Twitter search is simply more relevant than a Google search for new information, despite Google’s increased efforts in freshness.
One Googler told me he thought this paragraph was “dead-on”.
Even if Facebook doesn’t come out with an actual web search engine in the style of Google or Bing, significant improvements to Facebook search (with the right marketing behind it) could chip away a nice chunk of searches that would otherwise go to Google.
But, before we get too far off base here, the point is that Facebook as a whole is a direct competitor to Google as a whole. If you look at it from this perspective (which seems to be the way Google looks at it), search is just a feature. Facebook certainly favors Facebook results in Facebook searches. Web searches are only added on at the end via Bing.
“Activity on the Google+ Stream itself is increasing too,” said Page. “We’re excited about the tremendous speed with which some people have amassed over one million followers, as well as the depth of the discussions taking place among happy, passionate users—all evidence that we’re generating genuine engagement. When I post publicly I get a ton of high quality comments, which makes me happy and encourages me to keep posting. I strongly encourage all of you to follow me on Google+—I love having this new way to communicate and share with all of you!”
In a different portion of his letter called, “next-generation search,” Page basically discussed Search Plus Your World, and a bit about delivering more direct answers in results. Search Plus Your World, if you’re unfamiliar, is the personalization that Google launched earlier this year, which initially put a great deal more emphasis on Google+ content in search results.
It still does this, but Google seems to have toned it down a bit. At one point, Google was ranking Mark Zuckerberg’s Google+ Page over his public Facebook profile, which made no sense in terms of relevancy. Google was also ranking the WWE’s Google+ page over its Twitter account, even though the Twitter account was much more popular.
In both of these cases, the Google+ Pages are no longer outranking their more relevant counterparts, with SPYW toggled on or off. This may or may not be a direct result of a recent algorithm change. Earlier this week, Google posted its monthly list of algorithm changes. One of the things on the list was:
Better indexing of profile pages. [launch codename "Prof-2"] This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.
Plus, as another Googler recently told us, “Search plus Your World builds upon existing search features such as Social Search, personalized search, and authorship,” some of which Google has had in place for much longer. “You will continue to see existing Social Search features including +1s and content shared by your connections on Google+ and other sites. We’ll continue to look at your Google+ profile to see other content you’ve published online and linked to your profile.”
So what makes one profile more relevant than another? That’s a tricky question that Google is likely to continue to struggle with. It’s not always as easy as the Facebook CEO and his Facebook profile vs. his Google profile. It’s not necessarily as simple as which one has more followers either. The WWE’s Twitter account may have more followers than its Google+ account, but if you don’t use Twitter and you use Google+, the latter is most likely more relevant to you.
Google will likely continue to struggle with relevance vs. social/personalization. It must be hard to grow a social network when you have to promote a rival social network’s content ahead of the content from the one you’re trying to build. Facebook doesn’t have that problem. You wouldn’t go to Facebook and complain if you searched for “Larry Page” and it delivered you a Facebook Page for Larry Page rather than his Google+ profile.
So, as Google has already established itself for years as a web search engine, it faces some major hurdles in this chess match with Facebook that Facebook may not have to worry about, and even if both companies are headed to similar futures (at least in the social and search space), they come from very different backgrounds. They’re both working to the middle of one spectrum from opposite sides – Google from search moving towards social, and Facebook vice versa.
Facebook, at least has the social data to begin with, and is able to partner with another major search engine in Bing, along the way.
From Page’s letter, it is clear that Google is still more focused on search than on social as the overall strategy, with social simply being a means to improve search. But if Google+ is its social strategy, and Google is already favoring Google+ less in its search results, can Google win this battle?
Posted under Google, Marketing | No Comments
AdWords Contextual Engine Gets Biggest Upgrade Ever
AdWords also gets Display Network tab
By Chris Crum
Google announced changes to AdWords, which the company says will simplify the way advertisers buy and run display ads through AdWords.
“For nine years, AdWords customers have been buying display campaigns through an interface designed for search,” says Google’s AdWords team in a blog post. “This is like trying to run in glass slippers — it might work, but it’d be a lot more effective with the right running shoes. So we’re giving display its own tab within AdWords.”
The tab will roll out over the next few weeks.
In addition to the tab, Google announced a new contextual engine (the system that matches ads to pages based on keywords) update for AdWords, which the company calls the “biggest enhancement ever”. The company uploaded the following video of Director of Product Management for Display, Brad Bender, talking about both the tab and the updated engine:
Some might say, however, that precision and search aren’t quite as synonymous as they oncer were in the online advertising world. There’s no question that Facebook is able to get much more precise when it comes to targeting based on demographic and interest. Google will no doubt try to improve on this with Google+ and its revamped privacy policy, but it just doesn’t have the data about web users that Facebook does.
That said, the advantage and precision of search, in comparison, comes with the fact that search ads deliver on timing when the user is actually looking for something in particular. Imagine if Google is able to get the Facebook-type data and have the best of both worlds.
On the update engine, Google says, “For example, let’s say you’re running display campaigns for a Travel Agency who offers a vacation packages in several Caribbean islands. In the past, you would have created themed ad groups targeting vacations to Turks and Caicos and the Caribbean. Now, with this new keyword level transparency you might realize that the keyword ‘Turks and Caicos vacations’ is 4 times more profitable than the keyword ‘caribbean vacations’. You can optimize your campaigns to aggressively target these high performing keywords, and be more conservative on ‘caribbean vacations’.”
Along with all of this, Google is launching a “targeting diagram” feature, to help advertisers better visualize the reach of campaigns, and see how they’re impacted by combining various targeting types.
Posted under Google, Marketing, Web Development | No Comments
Google Gives Search a Refresh
By AMIR EFRATI
Google Inc. GOOG +0.89%
is giving its tried-and-true Web-search formula a makeover as it tries to fix the shortcomings of today’s technology and maintain its dominant market share.
Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page.
![[GOOGLE]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MK-BS913_GOOGLE_DV_20120314190006.jpg "Website Development Google Search")
Google’s Amit Singhal, shown in 2009, sees better matches for queries.
The changes to search are among the biggest in the company’s history and could affect millions of websites that rely on Google’s current page-ranking results. At the same time, they could give Google more ways to serve up advertisements.
Google isn’t replacing its current keyword-search system, which determines the importance of a website based on the words it contains, how often other sites link to it, and dozens of other measures. Rather, the company is aiming to provide more relevant results by incorporating technology called “semantic search,” which refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.
Amit Singhal, a top Google search executive, said in a recent interview that the search engine will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of “entities”—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. Semantic search can help associate different words with one another, such as a company (Google) with its founders ( Larry Page and Sergey Brin).
Powering up the Search Engine
Google is adding semantic technology to its keyword search system.
Keyword Search
- Determines the importance of websites based on the words it contains, links to those sites and dozens of other measures.
- Also factors in the person searching, such as his location and the time of day.
Semantic Search
- Refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.
- Can differentiate between words with more than one meaning, such as the car brand ‘Jaguar’ and the animal ‘jaguar.’
Google search will look more like “how humans understand the world,” Mr. Singhal said, noting that for many searches today, “we cross our fingers and hope there’s a Web page out there with the answer.” Some major changes will show up in the coming months, people familiar with the initiative said, but Mr. Singhal said Google is undergoing a years-long process to enter the “next generation of search.”
Under the shift, people who search for “Lake Tahoe” will see key “attributes” that the search engine knows about the lake, such as its location, altitude, average temperature or salt content. In contrast, those who search for “Lake Tahoe” today would get only links to the lake’s visitor bureau website, its dedicated page on Wikipedia.com, and a link to a relevant map.
For a more complex question such as, “What are the 10 largest lakes in California?” Google might provide the answer instead of just links to other sites.
To provide answers that aren’t already in Google’s ever-expanding database, the company will blend new semantic-search technology with its current system to better recognize the value of information on websites and figure out which ones to show in search results. It would do so by examining a Web page and identifying information about specific entities referenced on it, rather than only look for keywords.
The coming shift has major implications for Google, which dominates the Internet search market with around 66% market share and more than 75% of all search-ad revenue. The Mountain View, Calif., company has succeeded because of the strength and ease of its keyword-search technology, which in turn fueled Google’s search ads, which appear next to search results. That business now generates the majority of Google’s $37 billion in annual revenue.
Now Google is taking action to maintain that lead. The Internet giant is trying to stay ahead of Microsoft Corp.’s
MSFT +0.21%
Bing in Web search, catch up to Apple Inc.’s
AAPL -0.68%
Siri voice-activated mobile search, and beat back rivals in niches such as product search.
Some semantic-search experts also believe the move will help Google to keep up with Facebook Inc., the social network that also has amassed a database about hundreds of millions of people, places and things but hasn’t offered a robust search service.
Google also hopes the change to semantic search will entice some people to stay longer on the search site, said people briefed on the plans, amid competition with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter Inc. that are claiming more Internet users’ time.
For instance, people who search for a particular novelist like Ernest Hemingway could, under the new system, find a list of the author’s books they could browse through and information pages about other related authors or books, according to people familiar with the company’s plans. Presumably Google could suggest books to buy, too.
A Google spokesman declined comment about the potential changes.
Google says it is still tinkering with the new look and function of its search engine, so it’s unclear exactly what this might mean for Google users and website owners. But the move could spur millions of websites to retool their Web page—by changing what’s called a “markup language”—so the search engine could more easily locate them under the new system, said Larry Cornett, a former Web-search executive at Yahoo Inc.
One person briefed on Google’s plans said the shift to semantic search could directly impact the search results for 10% to 20% of all search queries, or tens of billions per month.
It’s also unclear exactly how Google’s search ads—which appear next to search results and are handled by separate teams inside the company—would change in response to the overhaul. But people briefed on the initiative said that if the search engine better understands the meaning or intent behind people’s search queries, Google could find a way to show them more relevant ads.
As people spend more time on Google’s search site looking through its extensive “entity” database, there would also be more pages, or inventory, on which to place ads, said a person with knowledge of the initiative.
Google’s advertising executives have knowledge of the initiative and have considered ways to capitalize on it, said a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Singhal said his team is working independently of any advertising considerations.
Google has previously updated its core Web search technology. Most recently, it began tailoring search results to individual users based on their activity on Google+, the company’s social network, and it is now instantly showing search results before a person has finished typing their search query. Google also can scan thousands of sites and give a “best guess” answer for limited sets of questions, such as, “Who is the chancellor of Germany?”
Google also currently has some other semantic-search elements, such as the ability to assess what the web collectively thinks are the most significant items associated with certain keywords. For example, a search for “30 Rock,” the name of a popular TV series, will bring up a section called “Actor searches for 30 Rock” at the bottom of the search-results page. There, people can find a photo of each actor and a link to execute a new Google search for that name.
But the newest change is expected to go much further, coming as a result of Google’s acquisition in 2010 start-up Metaweb Technologies, which had an index of 12 million entities, such as movies, books, companies and celebrities. By comparison, online encyclopedia Wikipedia has 3.5 million English entries, though they include more detailed information.
Mr. Singhal said Google and the Metaweb team, which then numbered around 50 software engineers, have since expanded the size of the index to more than 200 million entities, partly by developing “extraction algorithms,” or mathematical formulas that can organize data scattered across the Web. It also approached organizations and government agencies to obtain access to databases, including the CIA World Factbook, which houses up-to-date encyclopedic information about countries worldwide.
Posted under Google, Marketing, SEO, Web Development | No Comments
9 top tech companies Apple no.1 No. 2 …
Which technology firms have the best reputations? These nine firms are the envy of their peers everywhere. Here’s why.
Apple
Apple is gearing up for another huge year. It is on the verge of announcing the third generation of its stalwart iPad, no doubt with additional plans to conquer consumer’s wallets. Last year was a banner year, despite the passing of the company’s iconic founder, Steve Jobs.
Under CEO Tim Cook, the company’s annual revenues climbed to $108 billion, led by an 81% increase in iPhone sales — a jump that doesn’t factor in the runaway success of the iPhone 4S — and a 334% spike in iPad sales, due in no small part to the revamped iPad 2. Increased sales across the board explain why shares soared 75% during the company’s fiscal year to $495.
NEXT: IBM
By JP Mangalindan @FortuneMagazine
Posted under Apple, Marketing | No Comments
7 Sneaky Ways to Use Facebook to Spy on Your Competition
via Kristi Hines @ KISSmetrics
Previously on KISSmetrics, I covered the art of 7 sneaky ways to use Twitter to spy on your competition. I don’t really consider it spying so much as simply competitor research, but spying makes it more James Bond-like. And who doesn’t want to pretend to be a secret agent every now and again?
If your competitor doesn’t have Twitter, or you’ve exhausted what you can learn in 140 character bites, let’s continue by learning how to use Facebook for competitor research. Here are some sneaky (or little known) ways to use Facebook to learn more about your competitor’s online marketing strategy.
1. Find out your competitor’s strength on Facebook.
When it comes to competition, the first thing people want to know is if their competitor is using something and how well are they using it.
Facebook offers a simple link.getStats console that will give you basic statistics about any domain’s popularity on Facebook.
For example, if you wanted to check out the popularity of Southwest.com on Facebook, enter southwest.com and click on Call Method to get the following:
This shows the number of likes and shares for their root domain, along with other interesting tidbits of data.
You can also enter the fan page URL in the Test Console of your competitor to get some basic popularity data about their fan page as well.
Note that you’ll need to visit their Facebook fan page and grab the URL directly out of the browser as it won’t return any data for http://www.facebook.com/southwest but will for http://www.facebook.com/Southwest simply because of the capitalization of Southwest.
2. Get the competitor’s raw Facebook data using the Facebook Open Graph.
By using Facebook’s own Graph API, you can view the basic data setup of any Facebook entity.
Let’s say you’re in the process of setting up your fan page. Maybe you’re not sure what category you should place it in or what information you should fill out. By finding your competitor’s fan page and appending their username or fan page ID number to the http://graph.facebook.com/ URL, you can see all their basic details in one shot without even liking their page!
If you put one of my personal favorite restaurant fan page’s username into the URL, for example, you would get the following.
Fan Page URL: http://www.facebook.com/chipotle
Open Graph URL: https://graph.facebook.com/chipotle
For fan page URLs that don’t have a simple custom username, simply put their fan page ID number in place of the username. The fan page ID is the 15 digit number at the end of fan page URLs in this format: http://facebook.com/pages/page-title/123456789012345/.
You can see even more applications of this on the Graph API page. You can use it to grab basic information about events, groups, applications, status messages, photo albums, and much more. Basically, anything that isn’t private can be discovered.
3. Find out what freebies excite and encourage your competitor’s fans to like their page.
One of the best ways to get more likes on Facebook is to offer a freebie in what is known as a reveal tab or fan gate.
Red Bull, for example, found that extreme videos would attract more people into liking their page, and with 21 million fans, they must have been right! If your competitor has a similar tab with content promised to people who like their page and their page has lots of fans, you might want to try this strategy for your own fan page.
4. See what the competitor’s fans love and hate about their brand.
One of the best things about Facebook fan pages is that the majority of information is open and available for public consumption. You generally don’t even have to like the page to find out what people are saying – just go directly to the wall and ignore the welcome tab / reveal tab.
Once you’re there, you may only see updates from the page itself, and that’s not where the gold lies. Just below the photo strip at the top, you will want to select the Top Posts link and then filter with Most Recent. You’ll be able to see posts by the page and posts by fans on the wall in chronological order. Then you can read the updates and find out exactly what fans of your competitor love.
This includes everything about the brand like the products and services they provide as well as everything about their status updates, photos, videos, etc. This can give you a great idea of what you should be doing with your business and your Facebook strategy if you want the same love from fans too!
The flip side to seeing everything a fan loves about the competition is seeing what the fans despise. Surprisingly, a lot of people will like a fan page just to complain about the products and services of the brand who owns the page.
This can give you some key insights into what things your brand can improve upon in hopes that the people who are unsatisfied with your competitor may come check you out instead!
5. Learn how to respond to criticisms.
Whenever you see complaints on the competitor’s fan page, you might want to laugh unless you have been struggling to find better ways to respond to criticism on your own fan page from disgruntled customers. If that is the case, you can learn how your competitors respond to negative posts on their wall.
Having the interaction lumped into one update makes it much easier to follow the conversation from complaint to resolution compared to when a customer and competitor are going back and forth on Twitter.
6. Follow all of your competitors in one place.
Ok, this one isn’t necessarily sneaky, but it helps you organize your sneaky spying. 
At the bottom of the left sidebar of a fan page (usually beneath the number of people who like the page or the list of pages that the fan page likes), you can find a Subscribe to RSS link.
Using this option, you can then subscribe to all of your competitors fan page status updates in your favorite RSS reader. This means you don’t have to like the page to see what their latest updates are and you don’t have to visit multiple pages regularly to check on their updates.
My preferred choice is Google Reader because you can also easily search the updates using the search feature for particular keywords and you can organize your pages into folders by type.
The only downside of this is you’re only getting the updates by the fan page itself, and not any updates posted by fans. But it’s still a nice way to monitor your competitors’ strategies without having to keep visiting their page routinely.
7. Advertise to your competitor’s fans.
This one is a bit of a dirty trick more than a sneaky trick, but I’ve seen other brands use it to some successful degree, so it felt wrong not to mention it.
Imagine your biggest competitor is having some kind of crisis. For hosting companies, it would be massive server downtime. For automobile makers, it would be major recalls. For a restaurant, it would be an outbreak of food poisoning. This is all stuff you can learn about if you are following your competitors closely via their fan pages as previously mentioned.
Now image you could put an ad right in front of all of their fans that addressed their biggest concern. For hosting companies, it could be an ad that says 99.9% uptime guaranteed. For automobile makers, it could be an ad that says your brand has the least recalls of them all. For a restaurant, it could be an ad that says they have a five star rating!
Well guess what? You can! Facebook Advertising lets you target ads down to specific demographic details.
The best part – you can also target your ad to fans of a competitor’s fan page using Precise Interests!
Once you enter a brand, it will estimate the people you will reach (assuming that you have a country selected). You can even add in multiple brands and competitors for each ad.
Your Sneaky Facebook Strategy
There you have it – seven great ways to use Facebook to learn more about your competitors and their Facebook strategy. How do you use Facebook for competitor research? Please share your thoughts in the comments, and happy spying!
Posted under Facebook, Marketing, Social Media | No Comments
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