Wolfram Alpha isn't the "Google killer" that many hyped it up to be prior to its 2009 launch. Instead, the self-described computational knowledge engine takes a completely different approach to letting users find and analyze information. Rather than scouring the Web and ranking everybody's pages in the order it thinks we'd find them useful, it uses its own data sets and computational power to return detailed reports and analysis about whatever topics users query it for.
Tomorrow, the service will ramp things up a notch when its "pro" version launches. For $5 per month, Wolfram Alpha Pro will allow users to do way more with its data, as well as enable them to upload their own. The premium offering will be discounted for students and enterprise users.
When Google shipped its Search, plus Your World update earlier this month, it turned out better than expected. Google left users the ability to click back and forth between personal and global modes or opt out altogether. Google's personal search draws in the user's Google+ relationships to tailor the results. When it launched, Google took the position that other social networks were welcome to participate, they just had to make a deal.
Google does make some effort to identify content from other networks. But some SPYW features only highlight Google+ material, even when other services are more relevant. If Google favors its own product over a better result, users get the short end of the stick. Some engineers from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace have built a browser extension called Focus on the User to prove the point. But what about Google+ users? For them, Google+ results are the better result. Arguably, Google should cater to them, as users of its service.
Much spleen has been vented over the launch of Google's Search Plus Your World this week. As was inevitable, Google has merged its new Google+ social signals into its Web search, an act that the blogosphere waited until this week to be upset about. Before this launch, the integration of Google+ into search looked like the complete destruction of Google search, forcing social crap into everything. Instead, we got two modes: personalized and global. And now, unlike before, you can shut off social search entirely.
Search has a toggle switch now. One side recommends things based on your friends and connections, the other is a plain old search engine. Many bloggers still feel that it's terrible, whether you can turn it off or not. Others find it useful, if you're good about managing your contacts. One objection to the change is that it privileges Google content over objectively better results. Others find evidence that Google's definition of "Your World" is bigger than Google+. What about you? Are you mad enough to dump Google?
Well, that didn't take long. Bing, Microsoft's three-year-old search engine, has officially edged out ahead of Yahoo, according to the latest data from ComScore. In December, Yahoo dropped 0.6 percentage points over the previous months, giving Microsoft a slight lead, despite the fact that Bing didn't grow that much during the same time period.
Bing now commands 15.1% of the search market, while Yahoo has dropped to 14.5%. It's not even a full percentage point, but this is the first time Yahoo has been ousted by Microsoft for that #2 slot behind Google.
It may take awhile to figure out if Google has alienated some of its long-term search fans with yesterday's launch of Your World. But if they did, Microsoft's Bing may be poised to pick up some of the castoffs.
Jon Mitchell has details on Your Way, but in a nutshell, the new service better integrates Google+ content into Google search. That could have some looking for more objective ways to search, while also raising the ire of some big Web players.
Google has "shipped the Google part" of Google+, and everything went better than expected. Today, Google launches Personal Results, Profiles in Search, and People and Pages, new features of its core search product that mark the real beginning of Google's social search era. Google search now has two modes: global and personalized. Personal search results show content from your Google+ network, and global search results appear as though you're logged out of Google+.
If you're like me, you've dreaded this day. Just last week, I wrote that Google+ was going to mess up the Internet by turning Web search into a popularity contest. But the new Google unveiled today leaves the user in control. "Search, plus Your World," Google has called it. It's two kinds of search, and they're separate. If you don't want Google+-flavored results, just switch to global mode. You can even turn off personalized search altogether.
Google's monthly search improvement digest is a whopper this month, describing 30 highlighted changes to the way Google search works. This month, Google has started adding code names to make the changes easier to remember and follow.
The tweaks are a little bit scattered, affecting all different aspects of Google's search returns. Most of them affect the actual presentation of results. A couple affect the way results are ranked. There are two new kinds of results for entertainment-related searches. And there are a few back-end improvements and adjustments affecting site administrators.
Google Chrome made a booboo, and now its own company is punishing it. Yesterday, the news broke that bloggers were being paid to use SEO spam tactics to boost the Google Chrome website's page ranking in search. Hundreds of paid articles, many of them totally incoherent, were used to promote Chrome. At least one of them violated Google's policy against paid links. As Google's search guru Matt Cutts wrote in 2009, "paid posts should not affect search engines."
So that was awkward. Fortunately for Google, the infraction could be blamed on Unruly Media, the third-party company Google hired to promote Chrome. Links from the paid posts were supposed to use the rel="nofollow" tag, so they wouldn't affect page rank. At least one blogger didn't, even though Unruly "advised" them to. In order for Google to get out of this mess, it would have to punish itself as it has done to others. Sure enough, Google says it will reduce Chrome's page rank.
Last week, Google released it's Zeitgeist 2011 report, offering insights into how the world searched. The top searches overall are predictable - Rebecca Black, iPhone 5, Casey Anthony - but drilling down into specific categories reveals some pertinent trends in what interested Web searchers this year.
Sentiment analysis firm General Sentiment looked at some of these trends through a different lens. Using over 60 million sources across the Web, General Sentiment analyzed how Web users felt about these top terms. It produced side-by-side comparisons of how popular a term was on Google versus how often it was mentioned on the Web overall. It also noted how positive or negative overall sentiment was. Google searches are clearly not the only judge of a topic's importance on the Web.
It's not even three years old yet, but Microsoft's Bing search engine now has about the same share of the market as Yahoo, which has been around since 1995. Bing hit 15% of the search engine market in November, according to ComScore. Yahoo had 15.1%.
Both sites trail far behind Google, which holds onto more than 65% of the market. While that position isn't threatened by any other search engine, it's interesting to note how quickly Bing has risen in the last few years.
