After the Yahoo-Microsoft alliance had officially been approved, Yahoo! wasted no time adding even more features to their brand. Twitter and Yahoo! will now enter an agreement where people can access their twitter feeds throughout Yahoo! from Yahoo! Sports to Yahoo! Mail. You can tweet and retweet anywhere within Yahoo! because of this integration. Yahoo! Search Results will also consist of public tweets on a variety of topics.
Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’
Google Revamps System with Caffeine Update
Sunday, August 16th, 2009
Google has introduced Caffeine, a new and improved version of its search platform (the update is currently available for use under an alternative link). The move is described as an “under the hood” update, meaning that nothing will change externally, and the average user will not recognize much of a difference.
Google Caffeine has proven to be more effective at incorporating recent information such as news stories into its top results. The update has also made Google search slightly faster. In his blog, Google software engineer Matt Cutts reiterated that the update will not bring extreme change: “This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback.”
The update may begin to address Google’s challenge to incorporate real time search. Results from social websites like Twitter are more common, but Microsoft’s Bing seems to still have the upper hand in this regard. There have been past talks of Google and Twitter working on a real time search deal.
Experts see the update as a response to the recent Microsoft/Yahoo! search deal, but Google says that the move has been in works for months. Google may control nearly 75 percent of the search market, but it is not about stop working on new innovations. “Nobody cares more about search than Google, and I don’t think we’ll ever stop trying to improve, Cutts said.”
Bing vs. Google: One Month Later
Friday, July 10th, 2009
Much has been made about Microsoft’s search engine Bing.com since its launch last month. Some experts see it as a credible search alternative to Google, while others see it as a passing trend. According to StatCounter, Bing’s use increased by 0.5 percent in June, while Google’s dropped by 0.24 percent. Bing has also gained a slight U.S. market share from Google.
While Bing’s market share has increased, Google’s position has not changed. It is hard to determine where Bing stands due to such a small sample size. In fact, Google’s use may actually be increasing.
Bing still has a long way to come in its challenge to Google, which already holds search toolbars in top Internet browsers and does not have any glaring weaknesses. Because both search engines have similar attributes, it will be difficult for Bing to take on such a titan.
Despite the challenge, Microsoft continues its push, illustrated by numerous national TV spots promoting Bing. Bing has added results from Twitter, which Google has yet to master. Bing has narrowed the search down so that only entries from well-known “Tweeters” come up, and the results will not appear when searching only the person’s name.
The continued competition among search engines and their constant push to improve is great for user experience. Microsoft has shown that it is serious about competing with Google, but Bing still faces a daunting, if not impossible task.
Google Adapts to Microblog Growth
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
The popularity of microblog websites such as Twitter has continued to increase in recent months. Despite this growth, users have found it challenging to search for specific posts throughout such sites. In response to this, Google is reportedly working to launch a new tool for these services.
Google has stated that real-time search is one of its greatest challenges. Links from Twitter rarely show up on a Google search results page, a problem that also confronts other search engines. Twitter has developed its own search tool to try to solve this problem, but results are limited only to Twitter entries and are sorted by date as opposed to by relevance.
While nothing has been confirmed yet, it appears that Google is working to address this situation. The search engine issued a statement expressing that their main goal was to provide all of the world’s information to its users: “While we don’t have anything to announce today, real-time information is important, and we’re looking at different ways to use this information to make Google more useful to our users.”
With the rapid increase of popularity to microblogging websites, Google’s new tool, if efficient, could greatly benefit the search engine. Along with the addition of Google Squared, the new microblog search tool could bring even more notoriety to Google, and recover some users who made the switch to Bing.
