One small step toward better internet content

And a giant leap for content producers (like myself, for instance.) The freelance writing world has been in crisis for a long while now, in part because of high unemployment. Anyone who’s taken freshman composition in college can suddenly declare themselves a freelance writer. The problem is you have to have clips to get work for the most part, and the easiest way to get clips is to work for nothing, or almost nothing, and go from there. Couple that dynamic with the internet’s need for content and unscrupulous business people who are more than happy to exploit people who want to write and you find a situation where companies are literally offering a penny-a-word or less for so-called SEO internet content. For writers, good luck on even finding the one-time bargain basement dollar-per-word rate for marketing communications. My current rates are down and my client list is a lot smaller than even a couple of years ago. Glad to see there’s some push back against this trend from places that might actually make a difference — search engines.

And if you’re looking at getting into freelance writing, I strongly, strongly urge you to avoid Demand Media, Suite 101, and the other content mills out there who are only going to exploit your talents, not pay you an even remotely a fair wage, and in the end leave with with clips that almost any legitimate media outlet will reject as more than worthless.

From the link:

Gabriel Weinberg, creator of upstart search engine Duck Duck Go (DDG), says that some time ago users requested that he remove from results from eHow.com. The site is owned by Demand Media, a $200 million a year “content farm” that produces 4,000 articles a day by playing freelance writers to churn out articles at bargain basement rates, based on what people are searching for and how much ads those search terms are worth.

Knowing little about the site and the discussions swirling around the quality (or lack thereof) of its content, Weinberg wasn’t moved to act on those requests until he discovered evidence that Demand Media, which owns eHow.com, was buying up domains for legitimate businesses and redirecting them to their own content.

“It pushed me over the edge,” says Weinberg.

Yahoo’s Carol Bartz must be high

That’s the only way to explain her very odd mischaracterization of Google in this BBC article unless she was massively quoted out of context. If she’s running the company and has that poor of mental grasp on the competition, I’d be very, very concerned as a shareholder for the future of the company.

From the link:

“Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search,” said Ms Bartz.

“It is only half our business; it’s 99.9% of their business. They’ve got to find other things to do.

“Google has to grow a company the size of Yahoo every year to be interesting.”

Find other things to do? I’m no Google cheerleader (although I absolutely love the Chrome browser), but is she serious? I think I answered that in the previous parenthetical reference. Now I know Bartz was talking about monetized business, but even facing the Facebook threat to online ad revenue I seriously doubt Google has any short- or even mid-term concerns to remaining enormously profitable.

Maybe the tone of the interview was driven by a little industry jealousy. Just for fun let’s compare the recently released Q1 earnings reports for each.

Yahoo! (released April 20, 2010)

revenue: just under $1.6M, up one percent over first quarter 2009

Google (released April 15, 2010)

revenue: $6.77B, up 23 percent over last year’s first quarter

Now that is a difference in revenue. Yahoo is below two million and Google is below seven billion. Good interview, Carol. It’s always smart to call out your competition when you’re operating from a position of strength. Oh, wait …

$713 million

That’s how much Microsoft lost in Q3 with its Online Services Division. (Read: Bing)

From the link:

During Microsoft’s fiscal third quarter, which ended March 31, the Online Services Division, or OSD, reported a 12 percent increase in revenue, which rose to US$566 million on the back of higher advertising revenue. That wasn’t enough to offset a surge in operating expenses during the period. The division’s quarterly loss grew by 73 percent to $713 million, compared to a loss of $411 million during the same period last year.

OSD includes Microsoft’s online advertising business, the Bing search engine, and its various MSN websites.

Google and China …

… a good move? Looks like at least some analysts think it’ll help Google’s image.

From the link:

People using Google.cn are now redirected to Google.com.hk, where they are given uncensored search results in simplified Chinese. Google is running Google.com.hk off of servers located in Hong Kong.

“Google made a smart move,” said Augie Ray, an analyst at Forrester. “Rather than unilaterally pulling out, they took an action that puts the ball back into China’s court.”

“While Google feels redirecting Chinese users to their Hong Kong site and search results is ‘entirely legal’, it seems unlikely the Chinese government will see this as anything other than an attempt to bypass their laws and direction. Given the impasse that Google and China came to on the issue of censorship, this move by Google seems a little less brave than inevitable,” Ray said.

Google had taken its lumps for agreeing earlier to follow Chinese law and censor search results in China . That wasn’t a popular move with critics in the West.

Monday’s move, however, may go a long way to cleaning some of that tarnish off its image. “Google is generating a great deal of press for taking on an issue that many in the U.S. care deeply about,” Ray said.

Bing gaining search engine market share …

… but just barely. I’ve seen more than a few tech stories covering Bing’s modest gains in search engine market share. All well and good, but it’s worth looking at the actual numbers and some of the reasons for that gain. Let’s just say I think the Redmond bunch should probably keep the champagne on ice and heed the advice of Winston Wolf. (In case you don’t remember Wolf, he’s the “Pulp Fiction” character who used a rather colorful idiom to keep Vince and Jules’ ego in check.)

Microsoft is gaining market share, but at a very high cost. Bing has had the living hell marketed out of it, particularly on television. If all that money creates converts who consistently use Bing over Google, and market share keeps growing, it’ll be worth the cost. Right now I’m guessing whatever money Microsoft is earning from Bing is dwarfed by the search engine’s marketing budget. Microsoft has a long and proud history of losing a ton of money in a market area they want to enter and challenge a rival (see: Xbox gaming console.)

Now let’s look at the actual numbers and see just how far behind Google Bing really is, and how it may not be chipping away at the targeted rival at all, but actually stealing market share from its now partner, Yahoo.

From the first link:

	December 2009	January 2010	February 2010
Google	72.25%	71.49%	70.95%
Yahoo	14.83%	14.57%	14.57%
Bing	8.92%	9.37%	9.70%

Source: Hitwise

And:

	January 2010	February 2010
Google	65.4%	65.5%
Yahoo	17.0%	16.8%
Bing	11.3%	11.5%

Source: comScore

Also from the first link:

Bing search engine may still be a bit player in the lucrative online search business dominated byGoogle, but it’s slowly and steadily gaining users. And it appears that Bing’s share is coming at the expense of both Google (GOOG) and Yahoo, the latter of which recentlyteamed up with Microsoft to be more competitive in online search.

A commenter at the link made a great point that some of this gain could be from Windows 7 users retaining — at least for now — the Bing default search engine option.

Google goes real-time …

… by adding Twitter and Friendfeed to search results, plus making updates in seconds rather than minutes.

From the link:

It seems that Google’s recent deal with Twitter is already bearing fruit. Today, Google announced that in response to English searches it will now return a “latest results” section that will include posts from Twitter and Friendfeed, along with seconds-old headlines from newspapers and blogs.

It’ll be interesting to see how well this content will supplement Google’s regular results, which change at a much slower pace. There isn’t much room in a 140-character Twitter post to provide the context that search engines typically use to judge relevancy.

Protecting your privacy when using search engines

Sounds like a useful tool in this world of massive data collection by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and many others.

The release:

A new system preserves the right to privacy in Internet searches

		IMAGE: A new system preserves the right to privacy in Internet searches. Click here for more information.

A team of Catalan researchers has developed a protocol to distort the user profile generated by Internet search engines, in such a way that they cannot save the searches undertaken by Internet users and thus preserve their privacy. The study has been published in the Computer Communications magazine.

Just imagine someone from Company X who uses the Google search engine to obtain information about a certain technology. If Company Y, a competitor of X, should discover this situation, it could infer that the abovementioned technology is going to be used in X’s new products, and with that information it could obtain a competitive edge. In the same way, a mass media enterprise that finds out the searches undertaken by the competition’s journalists could infer what news items they are working on and beat them to it. A personal report could also be drawn up on someone based on their searches.

In order to solve these types of situations, a team of researchers from three Catalan universities (the Rovira i Virgili University, the Autónoma of Barcelona and the Oberta of Catalonia) has developed a system which preserves user privacy via a new computer protocol, whose details are published in the Computer Communications magazine.

“It is a model based on cryptographic tools which distort the profile of users when they use search engines on Internet”, explains Alexandre Viejo to SINC. He is one of the authors of the study and a researcher at the Computer Engineering Department of the Rovira i Virgili University, “in such a way that their privacy is preserved”.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live search save the profiles of their users (via an analysis of the searches they undertake) with the argument that they are more familiar with their interests and offer a more efficient response.

There currently exist types of software which provide anonymous navigation, such as the Tor network, but the new system “offers a clear improvement in response time”. Nevertheless, Alexandre Viejo acknowledges that the application of the protocol delays searches slightly, “but it can be perfectly assumed by the user”.

The tool prototype has already been tried in closed (research centre intranets) and open (internet) environments, “and the results allow us to be optimistic with the global implementation of the model”. The researchers are now working on the development of a final user version and trust that it will soon be easily integrated into the main platforms and browsers.

###

References:

Jordi Castellà-Roca, Alexandre Viejo, Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí. “Preserving user’s privacy in web search engines”. Computer Communications32 (13-14): 1541�, 2009.

Expanding your search engine horizons

There’s more out there in the online search space than Google, Microsoft’s Live … — er, Bing, and Yahoo. The new Wolfram|Alpha decision engine comes to mind.

Here’s five more search options from CIO.com.

Number three from the link:

Hunch

Hunch is all about a decision engine, asking the user 10 questions or less to arrive at a solution to a problem or concern. At the core of the search site is a question selection algorithm built by Hunch’s small collection of Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientists with backgrounds in machine learning.

The design is such that questions are asked just like a human would structure a line of questioning. The questions asked vary based on what has already been asked and how it was answered.

And Hunch is another search engine with a social aspect. The smarts are a collection of common knowledge derived from users who can submit new topics, questions to ask and decision outcomes.Hunch says its algorithm is a mathematical framework married with a group of users who provide “personality by contributing to it and making it clever, funny, and nuanced.”

Collecta, the latest in real-time search

Via KurzweilAI.net— Twitter has made the idea of real-time search a very hot topic. Collecta is the most recent entry in this web search specialty area. I haven’t tried it yet, but search in general is becoming a very crowded field once again with Microsoft rebranding its search as Bing, Wolfram|Alpha and the rest of the usual suspects.

Google actually already does a pretty good job with real-time searching of blogs and news aggregators. I’m betting we’ll see some type of “real-time” search function that’s highly tied into the back end of Twitter at Google sometime soon. And there the monetization of Twitter will be off to the races.

Collecta Launches *Really* Real-Time Search Engine

BusinessWeek, June 18, 2009 Collecta draws informationstreams from blogs using WordPress, news services, social aggregation sites, Flickr, and Twitter to provide what it claims is the first truly real-time search engine.   Keywords: search engines Read Original Article>>

Infovell mines the deep Web

This may turn out to be a very important tool specifically for research, but really even for basic web searching for detailed information.

From the link:

According to a study by the University of California at Berkeley, traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo index only about 0.2% of the Internet. The remaining 99.8%, known as the “deep Web,” is a vast body of public and subscription-based information that traditional search engines can’t access.

To dig into this “invisible” information, scientists have developed a new search engine called Infovell geared at helping researchers find often obscure data in the deep Web. As scientists working on the Human Genome Project, Infovell´s founders designed the new searching technology based on methods in genomics research. Instead of using keywords, Infovell accepts much longer search terms, and in any language.

 

And:

Infovell is being demonstrated at DEMOfall08, a conference for emerging technologies taking place in San Diego on September 7-9. Users can sign up for a 30-day risk-free trial at Infovell´s Web site, and Infovell is initially available on a subscription basis. Later this year, Infovell will release a free beta version on a limited basis without some of the advanced features in the premium version.

Wikipedia to enter web search space

Currently 90% of all web searches are conducted through Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, wants to broaden the search marketplace, and take on some internet giants in the process.

From the PhysOrg.com link:

Wales said Wikia Search will run on an open platform, similar to the principles behind Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia in which entries can be made and edited by anyone with an Internet connection.

“All of the existing search engines are proprietary black boxes,” said Wales. “You have no idea how things are ranked and what’s going on.”

With Wikia Search, users “can participate in meaningful ways” when they browse the Internet, he said.