• Can we pretend that Airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars?
• Vicki Chang, do you have something fun planned for the weekend?
• Ordered macho fries and double cheeseburger, but now I feel like tacos. Tacos?
• Is it just me or does Nicolas Cage sound like he’s FREEKING tired of makeing movies? He uses the same monotone voice in every movie DX!
• I am professional to ask and discuss about complicated questions, such as this one : What is a miracle?

I didn’t even have to scroll through dozens of sensible questions to get those – there were literally 4 that I deleted in between to get to those! Not exactly added-value content is it?

I know I’m probably being a bit of a moan-a-lot here, but can’t Facebook concentrate their efforts on trying to make existing elements of the site better, before branching out and trying to reinvent every wheel they can find? I’m not so stupid as to imply that people will leave the site because of this service, because let’s be honest, they’re not. But I’m pretty sure there is going to be a lot of head-scratching going on when it rolls-out in full.

Facebook questions – revolution, or doomed to fail? is a post from: Tamar

A  nice spot from Bill Slawski that Google have finally had a Trust Rank patent approved. This after abandaning their previous request for a patent going back a few years.

Trust Rank is something which gets mentioned a lot and is often confused, so here is our take on it.

Yahoo! Trust Rank

The original Trust Rank patent was given to Yahoo! which, in order to combat spam, defined a small number of pre-approved sites which were deemed trustworthy. These ’seeded’ sites passed a decresing measure of trustworthiness to sites they linked to and so on as the link chain lengthened. So the nearer the original seeded site you were the more trust ( juice) your site got.

Google Trust Rank

The new Google version of Trust Rank pays more attention to determining the authority, or trust, of individuals or sites as they label web pages through annotation.

What Google seems to be doing is trying to identify experts, say through ratings on auction sites or comments on forums, and apply a weighting in their favour over other less trusted opinions. And by combining information from different sources this new trusted ‘profile’ may well be used to reorder rankings.

It may be coincidence that the Google Sidewiki was launched around the same time as the patent was granted but getting indpendent views, from experts, on a web page would be seen to be increasingly helpful to those searching and it may make sense to factor that expertise into how a page is finally ranked.

Thanks again to Bill Slawski, no hat tip as that term bugs me, just a straight forward thank you for some good patent insights.

Google Trust Rank – new version is a post from: Tamar

The new search capabilities in Internet Explorer 8 will offer relevant suggestions as you type words into the search box to help save time. Click on a suggestion at any time to immediately execute the search without having to type the entire word or phrase.

Internet Explorer 8 is partnering with top search providers like Bing, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, Amazon is a post from: Tamar

Finally Yahoo! and Microsoft have decided to join forces no doubt hoping the synergy they create will be enough to take on Google in both natural search and through their online advertising platforms.

By trading search engine technology (Bing to Yahoo!) and advertising platform (Yahoo! to Bing) the plan would be to have an offering that will utilise the best of both companies and create a viable alternative to Google. Whether either one of these properties is good enough to challenge Google is a moot point, and has been for the last 5 years. So whether the new entities will actually eat into Google’s share significantly is doubtful, at least in the short term.

What worries me is the fact that we are now down to effectively two main search engines. Who knows, maybe Ask will step up here but I am not convinced. But I hope they do!

It was interesting to see that new Chief Executive Carol Bartz, who some see as vital to getting this deal done. has pulled this off in a relatively short space of time. Bartz then went on to made a predictable rally call of “This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo, our users, and the industry. And I believe it establishes the foundation for a new era of internet innovation and development”.

Fine, lets see it and see it soon. As impressed as I have been with Bing its been a long time coming so just how quickly will they join forces and we start to see real changes for the better remains to be seen.

Still, good luck to them in this 10 year deal which may be more centered around costs savings than innovation. And who knows, maybe the antitrust regulators will have the last say and block the deal? Where then for them and us?

Search Engines join forces, Google worried? is a post from: Tamar

Here on the Tamar blog we’ve remained relatively quiet on the subject of Michael Jackson up until now – mainly because we wanted to let the dust settle before looking for any trends or interesting outcomes. Now that the internet has had a few days to get back to normal, it’s clear that the claims that Jackson’s death had “brought the internet to its knees” were a little over-exaggerated to say the least. So how well *did* the internet cope?

Google: After an initial “hiccup” which saw the Google News systems mistaking the increase in search volumes for an automated attack (quickly rectified, according to the official Google Blog) the big G seemed to cope quite well – Google news is never the most real-time of search services, but this is mainly due to the sources it gets its information from, rather than their infrastructure. Google also reported a big spike in search on mobile devices, which nicely illustrates the changing way that people are accessing information in these days.

One thing Google didn’t quite get right was user-intent. Google Trends was reporting (on the Friday) that the most popular search term at the time was “Michael Jackson Died” – but as you can see from the screenshot below, the top result being delivered for this search wasn’t particularly useful for fans of the late singer:

Another interesting “quirk” that Google trends (now) highlights is the propensity for false rumours to spread quickly. As any Twitter users last week will have seen, less than 24 hours after MJ had died, rumours of Jeff Goldblum’s death were making both the trending topics and Google trends own “hot list”. If you’re looking at Google Trends today you’ll see that Rick Astley has also suffered the same unfortunate effect (neither are dead by the way, as of the time of writing this post!). Thankfully the same sites that helped spread this mis-information also helped to clear it up fairly quickly – the actor Kevin Spacey was quick to post on Twitter that he’d spoken to Goldblum’s agent and all was fine. I suppose this highlights the power for “bad” that social media has, as well as the power for spreading news quickly and effectively. Still, I’m sure Rick Astley’s album sales won’t have suffered as a result!

Anyway, back to the internet. The guys at Bing don’t seem to have released any official word on how well they coped with the Jackson surge, though as of today a search for “Michael Jackson” gives a wealth of useful results on Bing. The search term “Michael Jackson” is also ranked #1 on Bings “xRank” search popularity radar.

Yahoo report on their search blog that they also saw some interesting trends after Jackson’s shock death. According to the blog: “searches for his legendary music surged. “Thriller,” “Man in the Mirror,” and “Billie Jean” were among the top lyrics, songs, and videos that people looked for on Yahoo! Search. As details of Jackson’s death emerge, searchers are looking for details on prescription drugs including Demerol, the hospital Jackson was taken to after he collapsed (UCLA Medical Center), and other lingering questions (”why did Michael Jackson die”).”

So no great problems to report with Yahoo! then – though they do add that their news story “Michael Jackson Rushed to Hospital” was the highest clicked story they’ve ever had. But that’s not a massive surprise really – with the internet growing at a huge rate every day, records like that are going to keep coming with big stories like this. I find that sort of “stat” very similar to when weather forecasters tell us that we’ve just had “the hottest day of the year so far!”… in mid March…!

The internet as a whole didn’t see the “spike” that many people claimed (aside from the site that broke the news, TMZ) and Rory Cellan Jones has a very good explanation for this in his blog on the issue:  Unlike other recent news stories that evolved online, such as the Obama inauguration, most people were looking to sites like Twitter for their updates on the story, and Twitter (being mainly text based) doesn’t eat up a lot of bandwidth. The Obama inauguration saw a lot of people watching streaming video online, but due to the lack of video available, most people who heard the news about Jackson would have most likely turned to their TV news station for coverage.

So it looks like the internet didn’t suffer quite as much as the headlines would have you believe. But then again, “Internet not affected much by Michael Jackson’s death, all seems to be coping” doesn’t make quite as good a headline does it?!

The Internet is not dead… and neither is Jeff Goldblum is a post from: Tamar

So what is an API and what can they do for my business?

API stands for Application Programming Interface and is a way for application developers to open up access to their applications to other developers and organisations.

API’s can be be best thought of as a contract between two parties.  When a user creates an application they can publish an API which says exactly how other applications must call it, and how they can expect it to respond.

The reason that API’s are important is that more and more large organisations are opening up their proprietary software and making data available for users to use as they see fit.

Google and Yahoo have long had API’s that allow users to query information including:

• Analytics data;
• Adwords data;
• Indexed pages;
• Site backlinks.

Microsoft has also joined in and made a BING API available which allows users to query the Bing search results and use them in whatever way they like.  There are also many other API’s out there ranging from weather forecasts to financial market data.

So how can this all work together? Imagine I run an online business selling air conditioners and  want to understand what drives my sales.  I could just look at google analytics to compare my traffic volumes with sales, however this would only give me part of the picture.  Instead I could build a custom application that retrieved my traffic volumes from google analytics and then graphed it alongside the weather for the same time period?  A sudden hot spell might better explain why sales jumped for a particular time frame as opposed to a small rankings move.

So in a nutshell API’s allow you to easily access vast quanties of data which can then be mashed together to give you higher quality information to answer your business needs.  Now all you need to do is find a problem that needs solving!

The ABC’s of API’s is a post from: Tamar