Last week we talked about Googles Metaweb acquisition, asking if this was an effort for Google to stem the tide of search innovation creeping up around it.
Stephen Arnold wrote an interesting piece basically saying that maybe Google’s innovation has peaked. More accurately, Google’s “internal engineering solutions don’t work in the morphing social search world.”
One thing Google has always had an eye for is smart and talented people. It makes sense that the incumbent–and perhaps vulnerable because of it–search leader would look to find innovators to carry it through this industry evolution. Churning and recruiting–or acquiring–the talent isn’t usually a bad thing.
Google (GOOG) announced today that it had acquired Metaweb, which indexes things or “entities” in the world.
In a video explaining what they do, Metaweb talks about how the internet is not just words and for search to be the most relevant, it should be able to determine the context of the search term.
Google is obviously trying to improve the relevancy if its search. Last year PC World authors even called Google’s approach to search “aging” and talked about the search giant’s strategic moves to revamp its algorithms using semantic search.
This may be the best time for Google to refocus on its core product and make it better. Bing is already slowly chipping away at Google’s huge piece of the search engine pie. Could this be what Google needs to maintain its stranglehold on the industry?
According to a recent post on TechCrunch, mobile search is still a burgeoning sector of the mobile industry, and heavy hitters in the industry are squaring off to stake their claim on the market.
Just last week we talked about our mobile device search. While Apple, Yahoo!, Bing and Google duke it out to be king of mobile internet search, Perfect Search is the first to provide a search engine for device content.
That’s right, this mobile device search indexes content and enables quick searching with minimum energy demand. In fact, the best any other provider can provide a clunky OS, so power intensive, it slows the entire device down.
The Perfect Search Mobile Device Search is available for Windows Mobile devices and will be available for Android, iPhone and Symbian platforms soon.
Hitwise recently released a report indicating social networks receive more traffic than search engines, which prompted Kingpin-SEO Webmaster magazine to ask the whether or not social networks are becoming “more important” than search engines.
The question is really moot because it pits communication against utility. The fact is that search engines are a tool for finding information while social networks are a means of communication. Sure, people might use certain social networks as a way to find information, however, it is highly unlikely that social networks will ever become the main means of doing so.
This is the case mostly because social networks are designed to help people connect with like-minded individuals and (for now) do not have the capability to search the web for authoritative and/or non-biased information. If you want a recommendation on a particular product or service, you can tap your network for the opinions of people you’re connected to. Depending on the types of people in your network, these may or may not be scientific observations.
Where do you go for scientific observations? You have to dig a little deeper and often the first place people will go for authoritative, more objective information, is to a search engine. Search engines index a larger capacity of web information and have algorithms to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Facebook may be looking to bridge this gap with its new Open-Graph search engine, with its own set of SEO standards, analysts expect to spark a “full scale” search engine war. Facebook’s new social semantic search will filter information, not just based on SEO but by relevance to the searcher as well.
It looks like Google’s status as the king of search is being challenged on all fronts and with Facebook already being the most trafficked site in the world, it will be interesting to see who will come out on top.
Will social semantic search be the next evolution of search? Time will tell.
