It is once again Thanksgiving, the time of the year when we thank our Lord for his abundant blessings and grace upon us. And also a time for most of the search engines to come out with their creative logos to depict how they perceive this day to be.

The famous Google Doodle for Thanksgiving has Snoopy at its star donning the chef’s hat and the equally famous roast Turkey and mashed potatoes. The logo exudes warmth and homeliness, two qualities which capture the main essence of this day.

Yahoo’s logo for the day was quite mellow with autumn leaves strewn around and also showed a pumpkin, a vegetable for the rich and poor alike. AOL had a logo which was predominantly blue and was more of Halloween than Thanksgiving. A witch’s hat was displayed along with pumpkins as if to say ‘trick or treat.’

Bing displayed a screensaver than a logo which depicted a giant turkey walking down the road held by many people with ropes. There was a caption that said ‘Don’t let today’s turkey dinner spoil tomorrow’s waistline. Can you feel the burn?’ But this line takes away the entire concept of a turkey dinner where diets should be forgotten completely.

Ask.com also depicted turkeys which have become synonymous with Thanksgiving; the picture showed two turkeys waiting near the shore looking out a ship sailing by and a caption that said ‘Why do we eat turkeys on Thanksgiving?’ Dogpile.com showed a bunch of doggie buddies around a table having a feast along with the caption ‘Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy the traditions of this festive holiday!’

Cre8astie forums had a picture which showed turkeys and a tray filled with fruits and a goblet of wine. A man carrying a tray of roast turkey was the logo on PPC Heros. And to end, Search Engine Roundtable displayed pumpkins and turkeys along with the caption ‘Pulse of the Sear.’

Once again, wishing everybody a Happy Thanksgiving.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Bing has finally confirmed its long-rumored partnership with Wolfram Alpha and announced the launch of the new collaboration recently. The web site mentioned that this joint venture aims to cover the two specific areas of mathematics and nutrition.

Microsoft Bing reported that their association with Wolfram Alpha will enable them to help their users make smarter and intelligent diet choices as they will now be able to visualize a new nutrition tab that offers more information about any type of food product or item that is being searched. The user will also be able to see nutrition facts labels displayed at the bottom of the search results page which is very similar to the kind seen on the labels of packaged food products. Bing also intends to display a Body mass index (BMI) calculator from Wolfram Alpha to help its users easily calculate their BMI while using the webpage.

The Bing-Wolfram Alpha deal will also enable users to search for any kind of computational results and data which is what the latter company is famous for. Bing commented that these new features driven by Wolfram are expected to roll out for the US users in the next few days. Three video interview clips with Stephen Wolfram who is the founder of Wolfram Alpha can be seen on the Bing website.

In another blog post, Bing has also shared a report of the state of the search engine, the new features and tools that were added since its launch and what the site has learnt through usage patterns and focus group testing. The company also intends to add several more new features and tools to its search engine to make it more users friendly. And as with the Wolfram deal, these new changes in the search results will also be rolled out in the coming days.

Popularity: 2% [?]

The three major search engines, Yahoo, Google and Bing have removed GeoCities.com domain from their search indices but you can still find some zombie GeoCities sites online. Anyone who searches for the site geocities.com on Yahoo, Google and Bing Search will see a message displayed that this site does no longer exist.

Yahoo had announced earlier during this year that it planned to close down the domain GeoCities, a free web hosting service, on October 26th of this year. But most users were still able to access this site after this date too; finally Yahoo pulled the plug on GeoCities by the end of October. And along with it disappeared millions of WebPages, images, URL’s and everything else associated with the domain. But most importantly, millions of links have also vanished which is huge when seen from an SEO perspective but small in the web’s overall link graph.

Google was the first website among the three to remove GeoCities from its search index. A Google spokesperson reported on Friday that once the domain was shut down, the pages were fragmented and broken; so the company took immediate action to avoid users from landing on broken pages and not finding the right information.

Yahoo followed suit and zapped the domain by early morning on Friday and Bing removed GeoCities by the end of the weekend. It was also removed by Ask.com and AOL search by November 3rd from its indices. But the fact remains that the domain is still not completely buried and you could find a few websites still active if you use Yahoo search.

Some of these zombie GeoCities pages are www.geocities.com/bolerama/ and www.geocities.com/bradreviews/. You could also find a couple others which were tweeted by Range Online Media through Twitter. These seem to be GeoCities Plus sites which the user can still access but cannot use the tools required to manage the site.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Twitter has once again confirmed the fact that they are not going to allow other search engines access to their private tweets. Because of the recurrent confusion regarding this matter, the website has decided to do something more concrete so that such false rumors do not do the round any more.

The report about the so called ‘Twitter hole’ appeared in the LA Times; according to this report, Google had some kind of a special access to all the private tweets which have been actually protected by its owners from being made public. In reply to this, TechCrunch clarified that this access to protected tweets that Google was given was before these account holders had locked down their accounts and protected their tweets. If the account has been made private after the tweets are released then they cannot be un-cached; this should pretty much clear the confusion that arose out of the whole Google episode.

Twitter has made this point quite clear on its help page where it says that if you have a public account and has decided to make it private, then all the updates after the time of protection will be locked and made private. But all the tweets before the time of protection will still be public to any other user. This rule goes for all websites including Google and Topsy which is a Twitter-specific search engine.

Google always relies on the last information it has in hand and hence will keep re-visiting the tweets that were posted before the account was locked and this will go on for a few weeks or months. But Topsy only displays public tweets; once the account is protected, a click on the refresh button and all the tweets vanish.

It is finally up to the account holder to make sure your tweets are accessed by only those who you want to follow you or you might end up getting retweeted for some of your private tweets.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Let me introduce you to five search tools on the Twitter webpage which may have gone unnoticed till now. These are useful and definitely worth a try.

The first one which has great local search implications is Schmap: Trending Restaurants and Bars search tool which can give you information and tweets about restaurants and bars in thirteen different cities across the world. You can also browse by the category of food and also by geographical location like district or neighborhood. This is definitely an interesting search option for all the food connoisseurs out there.

Areaface is the second interesting search tool on Twitter which allows you to search for other Twitter users in a specific town or city. You can click anywhere on the map provided to read recent tweets from that particular location. What makes this tool highly interesting and unique is that you can also narrow down the results by keyword enabling you to connect with other users who have similar interests.

TwitterJobSearch.com is the third tool through which you can search for thousands of jobs that are advertised on the site. There are several filters in place like job category, location, salary etc. which can be put to good use in these recession times.

Searchtastic is yet another search tool on Twitter which is quite new and allows users to search deep into the archives of the website. Only one thing though, the tool is limited by Twitter API and hence all the tweets cannot be indexed.

Yet another of the search tools is TweepSearch which is quite similar to Areaface but does not connect to like-minded Twitters through tweets but instead searches the bios of these users thus providing better results.

These lesser known search tools of Twitter are actually quite interesting and exciting for the avid Twitter.

Popularity: 2% [?]

AllThingsD and Reuters reported on 9th of October that Twitter has once again started independent discussions with both Google and Microsoft about a possible integration. These talks have taken place before too without any successful outcome by which the companies will be able to license a full feed from the blogging service which can then undergo integration into the results obtained from the competing search engines.

Both Microsoft Bing and Google had earlier expressed and indicated their interest in ‘real time search’ and reported that they soon intend to make it a part of their business agenda and these talks with Twitter can only add to accelerate those efforts. If you remember, Bing had earlier added ‘Twitter Smart Answers’ to its webpage. Both the companies also have third party tools to add the results of Twitter on their respective homepages.

And as we already know, Google has recently added new options to its Search tool by which users can filter results from the past hour. Google’s Larry Page also commented recently about how important ‘real time search’ has become to all web users.

If these search integration talks between Twitter, Google and Bing come through successful, it could spell disaster for the massive amount of other real-time engines out there which primarily rely on Twitter for all the news feeds, search results and other content. In my opinion, there are about twelve or more search engines whose business could be affected severely to the point of closing down if the deal comes through. Collecta is a website which may not get so affected as it does not rely entirely on Twitter API but all other search engines may have to come up with something new and creative to survive in this community.

Popularity: 2% [?]

The launch of Bing was in such a manner which made everyone stand still for a while and think about it. It certainly showed up a steady shoot up on its clinging onto the market thus proving out to be a good competitor for Google. Recently, the studies from StatCounter and Net Applications state there has been a decline in the shoot up by Bing since its launch.

But there is nothing to be too much worried about as there would certainly be uproar in the beginning and then a fall or a slight variation. This is something common experienced by all. With this news on line, we should never conclude the results as it might be something with this season. The same should be monitored for a period of time and only then the final conclusion must be brought about.

Bing is not just being stable; they are in the process of bringing up newer things to attract more users to them. There is no doubt that they are a bonafide competitor for Google. Latest releases and enhancements are in the queue for Bing to make its hit on the search engine traffic. Microsoft knows what is to be done after all they are new to the search engine field.

The Yahoo deal is yet to be finalized and hopefully with the positive clearance of the same, everything might work out to be perfect and even more for them. Something new which is being talked about is the mobile which is soon to steam up the season.

To check on the other side, if the growth of Bing has been stabilized, it would certainly high time that Microsoft think of something to get back to this. Microsoft should start thinking about this right now so that they do not regret at the end.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Microsoft unveiled its latest venture, Bing 2.0 also known as Bing Visual Search on the 14th of this month at TechCrunch50. This is a unique tool which allows users to ‘search by picture’, hence the name. Since the highly speculative annual meeting of Microsoft at Seattle, many had expected Bing Maps to get updated by using Silverlight technology.

Instead Microsoft rolled out Bing Visual Search using Silverlight technology which allows users to easily browse and navigate through ‘structured data sets’ obtained from key partners. This new tool can be found just below Travel on the homepage under the search categories but there is a high likelihood that the links can get lost in the vivid colors of the homepage image of the day. Similar to Travel, Visual Search link also cannot be found on the top navigation once the Bing search results are displayed. Along with general web search queries, users can also make use of the Visual Search data set to explore the visual images accompanying the data.

Bing 2.0 Visual Search intends to provide its users clear imagery to sort through a vast amount of data that is available. This feature has been launched in beta and the visual information is currently limited to a few things like cars, animals, people and products. It is necessary to have Silverlight application installed on the browser for users to experience the visual richness of Bing 2.0.

This tool will fit in perfectly with Bing shopping as users can now visualize the various items in the merchandise category before purchase. Unlike other categories, Visual Search targets the younger generation who are increasingly dependent on their iPods and iPhones. This novel idea from Microsoft definitely stands to win as visually enriched data is always interesting to the human eye.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Trust Google to come up with really spectacular and exciting stuff each time. Right from its days of Google Search, every single application at Google has been revolutionary. Google, the original search giant decided to do something better in what it is best known for - Search. So what can be “Better than the Best?” The answer came in the form of Google Caffeine. Google Caffeine is available at this URL, for you all to try out.

With the growth in competition for search engines (Bing) Google’s new strategy was to better its search engine. Google Caffeine was the result of that. Google defines this project as “A Next-Generation Architecture for Google’s Web Search” on their blog on 10th august 2009.

As the Google blog puts it:

To build a great web search engine, you need to:

• Crawl a large chunk of the web.
• Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
• Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible.

Although looking at this statement you might wonder, whats so different from the earlier Google Search we had? The answer is ‘Much Much More’.

Google Search has been recently challenged on four things by competitors Microsoft’s Bing, Twitter, Yahoo and Facebook:

1. Real Time Search.
2. Microsoft’s Bing proving to be something of almost an equal level to Google Search.
3. Partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft on Search.
4. Facebook’s interest in Real Time Search.

Google Caffeine is an attempt in the right direction by Google to answer to these challenges.

But the prime question about Google Caffeine is… Is it Better than the earlier search?

Before I answer that. Lets take a look at the points which make the Current Google Search great.

1. Accuracy - This was the most brilliant thing about Google. Even when it indexed only a few thousand or even million pages, its search results were accurate and obviously much better than the search results given by the search engines of those times.
2. Speed - With every result, Google showed you the time it had taken to come up with it. Now that was something really cool. There was absolutely no need for Google to display that, as people did not have anything to do with it. But this was a brilliant strategy on Google’s part, when initially it was trying to make its mark as a search engine. Speed impresses people when they are trying something like search and the when they saw the total time taken, it only added to the confidence people were starting to have in Google.
3. Total Web Pages Indexed - More the number of web pages indexed, more are the number of web pages returned for a particular query. And more is the number of web pages returned, easy it is for the user to find what he is looking for. And the quicker he finds out, the more satisfied he leaves from Google and more are his chances to come back to Google to search something else. Google initially indexed few thousands of pages, something which has grown phenomenally in the past years with Google now indexing more than 8 Billion Web Pages. No other website comes in comparison to the number of web pages indexed by Google.

But if there was one thing which Google didn’t address (it would be wrong to say that they failed in this) was real time search. This is what Twitter has brought up. With real time results Twitter is best for searching the current events or breaking news. Google quickly added that feature in their web results to come up with something like this:

So lets take a look at the new Google Search Engine and compare it with the current one in terms of:

1. Total web pages indexed
2. Speed
3. Accuracy
4. Real time?

1. Total Web Pages Indexed:

So I entered a simple search query : India

And this was the output

Google Caffeine Current Google

Clearly The newer Google has indexed lots more pages than the Current Google and that’s evident from the fact that its returned much much more number of results.

I went ahead and entered a complex search query: “most number of tweets on twitter”

Google Caffeine returned : 10,800,000
Current Google returned : 21,300,000

Wow, that’s reverse now! But considering this is still in beta and the Google searches for most of my test queries resulted in Google Caffeine emitting more results, I guess this should be OK.

2. Speed:

Again a simple query “Indian Cricket Council” gave me more number of results. But look at this!!!

Google Caffeine Current Google

The current Google takes 0.32 seconds to return the results and the new Google is 0.16 seconds, thats like double!!!

WoW!!

Now this is change, although I am sure it is going to be the least noticed, is the one of the best things about the new Google.

Ok, so now I entered a complex query : “who will win the ashes?”

Google Caffeine : 0.22 seconds
Current Google : 0.25 seconds

There you go, the time difference did reduce over there. It also did for some more complex queries, but again a great update in this new Google.

3. Accuracy:

Hmmm! So how do you test the accuracy of something, which is known for its accuracy.

Simple search results like “India” or even “Twitter” did not reveal much although I did find out that there is a slight toggling in the search results for “Google News” results, “Google Pictures” results and “You Tube” results.

Nothing great!!!

So I entered a complex term like “what is the future of search”

Again, although the number of web pages returned and the time taken were impressive enough with Caffeine, I didnt find much difference in the output of results.

Simply toggling of the web pages is what I would call it.

Like for example with the above search query

As the first result :

Google Caffiene had :
Official Google Blog: The future of search

10 Sep 2008 … One answer is clear: search engines of the future will be better in part because they will understand more about you, the individual user. …
googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/future-of-search.html - Cached - Similar -

Current Google had :
Future Search - The Method - What is Future Search?

Future search is a PLANNING MEETING that helps people transform their capability for action very quickly. The meeting is task-focused. …
www.futuresearch.net/method/whatis/index.cfm - Cached - Similar -

This same result is found in the Google sandbox as the second result

Future Search - The Method - What is Future Search?

Future search is a PLANNING MEETING that helps people transform their capability for action very quickly. The meeting is task-focused. …
www.futuresearch.net/method/whatis/index.cfm - Cached - Similar -

Again more complex queries did not reveal much change and looks like there is no significant change when it comes to altering of web pages in the results.

Maybe being in the beta stage, probably this feature is not implemented to the fullest. May be?

4. Real Time:

Real time is the current hot topic among internet users. Twitter started all this. With a simple question “What are you doing?” Twitter single handedly put real time search on the map when it started indexing its tweets.

Almost immediately Google put an “Show Options” link on its search result page, giving the users option to look at queries that were old by some hours, days or months.

But when talking about Google Caffeine you can see the “Real Time” results embedded into the heart of the algorithm.

Clearly Google Caffeine is much better than the current Google Search when it comes to displaying real time results like breaking news and current event.

A good thing in the right direction makes this new tweak victorious in Google Caffeine.

Here is a quick output of the above comparisons :

Comparison:

1. Total web pages indexed
Winner: Google Caffeine

2. Speed
Winner: Google Caffeine

3. Accuracy
Winner: Not much difference, but still expecting the obvious change from Google Caffeine

4. Real time?
Winner: Google Caffeine

Conclusion:

So overall, Google Caffeine is a much better product than the current Google Search. Keeping the latest trends in internet and competition in mind, Google has come up with a better product and its certainly posing as a challenge to Bing, Twitter and Facebook.

More Resources on Google Caffeine:

1. Google Caffeine: Google’s New Search Engine Index
2. Google Caffeine Test Suggests Too Much Emphasis on Real-Time Indexing
3. Is Google Caffeine Faster?
4. Google Caffeine Search Index & Algorithm Update
5. Google Building Bing-Killer Search Engine
6. Google Caffeine: A Detailed Test of the New Google
7. Google’s Caffeine May Cause Corporate Jitters
8. More info on the Caffeine Update
9. Google Caffeine Wakes Me Up
10. Google Caffeine: A Comprehensive Analysis

Popularity: 7% [?]

Hitwise announced the results of a Canadian search landscape that, Bing is the search engine that produces the best and most successful searches. This report showed that Bing beat Google and Yahoo as well as the other Canadian counterparts.

The report produced a chart which showed that Bing is the sixth most popular search engine in whole of Canada and it has the highest success rate which is at 78.61%. This value is about 2% higher than Yahoo Canada and more than 6% higher than Google Canada.

Hitwise defines a successful search as one where the consumer leaves the particular search engine after the search results arrive. An argument can be made with respect to the fact that some searches are successful even when the user does not leave the search engine, especially in the occasion where there are search short cuts and instant answers that are available on the search page.

Without having knowledge about the number of search queries that lead to this particular short cuts and other answers it is not possible to find the impact of such issues on the Hitwise produced reports. It is also plausible that the searchers leave the search engine even after the appearance of the shortcut and this would lower the impact on their definition of a successful search.

On the whole, Hitwise projects that an average of 70% of the searches across all the search engines were successful in the twelve weeks till June 27th, 2009.

The odd fact is that Canadian searches seem to be far behind the US searchers when we consider the complexity involved in the search queries. Hitwise says that a lot more than half of the search terms in Canada have only one or two words.

It would be good if we remember that US searchers say that Google is the best. The Hitwise survey is not based on the consumers but on the behavior of the searcher. It is difficult not to wonder what the Canadian searchers will say if they were asked about their search satisfaction.

Popularity: 2% [?]