AllThingsD » search results

Visa’s Blueprint for Targeted Advertising

Emily Steel — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:00:52 +0000

Visa has filed several patent applications that provide a blueprint for using credit-card transaction data to target digital ads and personalize other content, such as search results.

The company is pitching the ability to use cardholders’ anonymous buying histories, in aggregate, to tailor the ads people see online, according to an ad executive who discussed the plan with a Visa official recently. That would let advertisers, for instance, show cat-grooming offers to people in one area, and dog-grooming ads to people somewhere else, based on the group buying behavior in the areas as a whole, the ad executive said.

A spokeswoman said Visa “is continuously assessing its strategies including ways trend data could help create more effective online advertising.” She said the company doesn’t discuss “Visa’s intellectual-property strategies.”

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Site Claims to Loosen Google "Death Grip"

Amir Efrati — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 18:32:52 +0000

Since Google in February began changing the way its search engine ranks sites in order to weed out “low-quality” content and “article vomit,” thousands of negatively affected website publishers have scrambled to recuperate. Now HubPages.com, one of the largest sites hit hard by Google’s new “Panda” ranking algorithm change, said it may have found a solution: divide itself into thousands of smaller sites.

The five-year-old HubPages, which publishes content from hundreds of thousands of authors and primarily relies on Google search to obtain Web traffic, has seen “early evidence” that its overhaul may be able to “lift the Google Panda death grip,” said Paul Edmondson, its chief executive, in an interview.

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New Filter Tip From Google

Voices — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 22:02:19 +0000

Google today started rolling out a new feature that allows users to block any site they choose from appearing in their search results. The feature aims to further personalize the search experience by letting users eliminate sites they find offensive or useless. Google said it won’t be factoring that data into its search rankings–for now, at least.

Plastic Surgeon Figures in Google Face-Off in Spain

Paul Sonne, Max Colchester and David Roman — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 08:00:39 +0000

In 1991, the Spanish newspaper El País published an article centered on a dispute between Madrid plastic surgeon Hugo Guidotti Russo and one of his patients over an allegedly botched breast surgery. The headline: “The Risk of Wanting to Be Slim.”

Nearly 20 years later, Dr. Guidotti Russo, backed by Spain’s privacy regulator, contends that the tale of the dispute is personal information and wants to purge the article from Google, where it shows up on the first page of results when his name is searched.
His complaint accounts for one of about 80 instances in which the Spanish regulator has told U.S.-based Google Inc. to remove personal information about individuals from its search results.

Google says it plans to challenge most of those orders, arguing that the agency is overstepping its authority.

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Google on Bad Search Results: "We Can Do Better"

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 19:45:33 +0000

Have you been frustrated lately by search results on Google? If so, you’re not alone, and Google knows it.

There’s been a drumbeat of criticism of Google’s search results coming out of Silicon Valley–and now the Internet giant has responded, saying it has heard “the feedback from the Web loud and clear” and believes it “can and should do better.” In particular, the company is talking about stopping “content farms,” which provide low-quality, often unreliable and sometimes plagiarized information on a certain topic, just to get traffic from search.

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Google Tightens Copyright Protection Efforts

Beth Callaghan — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 20:22:35 +0000

Google today announced four changes aimed at making copyright protection easier: Copyright takedown requests will be acted upon within 24 hours, AdSense anti-piracy review will be improved, terms “closely associated” with piracy will be prevented from appearing in autocomplete and the company will endeavor to make authorized preview content more available in its search results. The changes will take place over the next few months.

Apple's New Job: Marketing Apps Through Google

Peter Kafka — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:57:33 +0000

Google and Apple may be fighting each other on multiple fronts, but they’re deeply linked, too. Another example: Apple is flooding Google search results with the contents of its iTunes store.

That’s the result of a small but consequential move Apple (AAPL) made last fall when it began showing Web searchers full-fledged previews of the stuff it sells at its online stores instead of directing them immediately to the store itself.

The biggest impact appears to be on the 140,000 apps Apple sells, which seem to be getting increased visibility from Apple’s links. So says Weldon Dodd, who has put together an interesting study of apps and search results over at The Apple Blog.

For most of Apple’s best-selling apps, Dodd found, Apple’s preview links are likely to turn up on the first page of Google (GOOG) results, and usually much higher up than the developers’ own pages.

So Apple, in effect, is performing search engine optimization on behalf of its developers. That’s the good news. The bad news is that developers don’t have control over or insight into the process. Which means it’s that much harder for them to direct traffic in a retail environment that’s already tightly policed by Apple.

[Image credit: Stig Nygaard]

China: We Are in Talks With Google. Also, We Are Not in Talks With Google.

John Paczkowski — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:02:54 +0000

Like so many of its services, Google’s so-called “New Approach to China” appears to be in perpetual beta. Though Google has said repeatedly that it is in discussions with Chinese officials about its plans to end censorship of search results in the country, the Chinese government claims Google hasn’t yet initiated talks.

Over the weekend, Vice Minister Miao Wei of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology told Xinhua, the state-run news agency, that “[Google] never informed the ministry that it was planning to withdraw from China, [nor has it] filed reports over alleged Internet regulation and cyberattacks to the ministry or requests for negotiations.”

Odd to hear, considering Google’s rather definitive Jan. 12 announcement that it will stop censoring its Chinese search site and may withdraw from the country altogether. More so given the comments of another MIIT minister just a day earlier. On Friday, Li Yizhong told reporters attending the National People’s Congress that the ministry is in talks with Google about its plans to operate an unfiltered search engine in China.

Sources close to the situation confirm that this is the case: Google (GOOG) has been in private talks with Beijing, though not formally. Of course, though nearly two months have passed since Google first said it would stop censoring search results in China, queries to Google.cn continue to return censored results.

As I noted here a month ago, “we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results” is about as definitive a statement as they come. Is Google going to follow through or not? Why all the mystery and dawdling?

Could it be that Google is now backing off its initial threat? Because, as Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz suggested last week, that threat seems increasingly empty the longer this thing drags out. “It looked to me like it was more of a statement than an action,” she told CNBC. “If they wanted to pull out, they should have pulled out.”

Reached for comment, Google offered none beyond this now typical refrain: “Thanks for reaching out, but as you might suspect, we will not be commenting on any discussions with the Chinese Government.”

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Google Tries Redialing "Click to Call" Again

Peter Kafka — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:24:22 +0000

Here’s an interesting side note to GPhone (a.k.a. “Nexus One”) Day–Google is still experimenting with its “click-to-call” program for advertisers on “high-end mobile devices.” Coincidence?

From Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land:

Google sent out notification to its AdWords advertisers that this month “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. You’ll be charged for clicks to call, same as you are for clicks to visit your website.”

Note that this offer doesn’t appear to be specific to phones running Google’s (GOOG) Android operating system. And it appears to be running in addition to Google’s practice of providing phone numbers in organic search results, which also essentially provide “click to call” options for smartphone users.

In Sterling’s words: “This is a version, effectively, of “pay-per-phone call” but the cost per call is the same as a click–a bargain (generally speaking) for the advertisers to receive a ‘warm lead.’”

Google first started playing around with “click to call” programs for conventional Web search four years ago. In that scenario, you gave Google your phone number (this was designed for landline use, really), and it connected calls to advertisers on your behalf.

Google eventually moved on, since no one seemed to use this option (though you can still see traces of the program here). But connecting mobile users with advertisers ought to be a very lucrative proposition, so no surprise that Google is still chasing after this.

A Very Short List: Publishers That Have Actually Told Google to Take a Hike

Peter Kafka — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:08:00 +0000

Publishers love to gripe about Google. But they almost never, ever, do the one thing that could put their money where their mouth is: Tell the search giant to leave them out of its results.

If you follow the media-versus-Google meme, you know this instinctively. But here are some numbers that spell it out: Of the 25,000-plus sources cataloged by Google News, “less than 100″ have opted out of the index, says Google’s Josh Cohen, who runs the service.

It is theoretically possible, of course, that more publications have opted out of Google’s main search results than out of the narrower Google News product. But I doubt it.

I also doubt that we’re going to see a significant number of publishers opt out of Google (GOOG) in the future, despite noisy saber-rattling from media outlets–most notably the Associated Press and News Corp. (NWS), which owns this site.

That said, if we are going to see some movement, it will be in the next few months. The AP, for instance, has a licensing deal with Google that runs out in the very near future.

I chatted Friday with Cohen (see video interview below) about the negotiations, and he gave me the polite equivalent of a “no comment.” But from what I can tell, the two sides remain pretty far apart on just about every point of contention.

Some other items of note from my conversation with Cohen:

A reminder that even publishers that put their stuff behind a paywall don’t want to cut themselves off from Google, which is absolutely true. Just ask News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal, which has gone through considerable effort and expense to boost its presence in search results.
Even though Google is already integrating “real-time” search results from Twitter (with Facebook and MySpace on the way), those results have not worked their way into Google News, and Cohen and his team are still trying to figure out the best way to do that.
I got an English-language explanation of the “Living Stories” project Google is working on with the Washington Post (WPO) and the New York Times (NYT).

Apologies: I still have not mastered vagaries of audio for Web video, or at least for our Web video publishing system. You’re probably going to want to turn the volume down during the introduction in this clip and then turn it back up once the interview starts.

[ See post to watch video ]

Bing's Take on Twitter Trends Differs From Twitter's

Andrew LaVallee — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:34:04 +0000

What Bing says is a hot topic and what Twitter says is a trending topic are not necessarily the same thing, a look at the two services shows.

Microsoft (MSFT) in October began showing tweets in Bing’s search results, calling it a way to make Bing more useful as a real-time search service (Google responded by announcing a similar deal).

A beta version on Bing lets visitors see relevant Twitter posts in addition to standard Web search results. It also displays a cloud of “hottest topics” that Twitter users are discussing, similar to Twitter’s “trending topics.” On Monday, for example, Bing’s hottest topics included Black Friday, Chelsea Clinton and Afghanistan.

According to Twitter, however, its users were more concerned with Music Monday (a weekly tweet-exchange of popular songs), Google Wave (GOOG), Cyber Monday and vampire movie “New Moon.”

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It's a Free Country…

Nick Wingfield — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:50:50 +0000

Does this sound familiar?

At the office, you’ve got a sluggish computer running aging software, and the email system routinely badgers you to delete messages after you blow through the storage limits set by your IT department. Searching your company’s internal Web site feels like being teleported back to the pre-Google (GOOG) era of irrelevant search results.

At home, though, you zip into the 21st century. You’ve got a slick, late-model computer and an email account with seemingly inexhaustible storage space. And while Web search engines don’t always figure out exactly what you’re looking for, they’re practically clairvoyant compared with your company intranet.

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Microsoft Bails on “Family Guy” Special

John Paczkowski — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:00:12 +0000

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Ask.com's Newest Offer: Discount Search

Peter Kafka — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:49:21 +0000

Barry Diller has tried just about every gambit possible to boost his Ask.com search engine, but he keeps coming up with more. The latest: Coupons.

IAC (IACI) has rolled out Ask.Deals, a dedicated section for bargain hunters and coupon clippers. The site has its own tab on the search engine, but Ask is also featuring it prominently in regular search results: Plug in “cheap ipods,” for example, and you’ll have to work very hard not to end up in the new section.

Can’t hurt. Can it help? Ask has been mired at just under four percent of the U.S. search market for a long time and it seems unlikely that rejiggering its search results will attract new users in significant numbers. It is possible that Ask can boost click-through rates, and thus dollars, though, which would be nice.

Then again, Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) are trying variants on the same idea. And perhaps more tellingly, Google (GOOG) isn’t doing much with this stuff at all.

Is Google Insurmountable?

Andrew LaVallee — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:55:25 +0000

After Google (GOOG) unveiled new features to its search results yesterday, one analyst is saying that the company’s leadership position has become virtually unshakable.

In a research report, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said that while the new products–Google Search Options, Google Squared and Rich Snippets–were “more evolutionary than revolutionary,” they demonstrated the company’s continued ability to innovate. “The bottom line is that we expect Google’s continued product improvement to allow the company to maintain its leadership position in search for the foreseeable future,” he wrote.

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Digg Changes Its Toolbar Amid Publisher Complaints

Andrew LaVallee — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:35:17 +0000

Digg modified the toolbar that it launched two weeks ago, a response to Web publishers concerned that it could affect their visibility.

The social-news site released the new feature on April 2. It adds a thin strip to the top of pages submitted to Digg that includes the number of times other users voted on, or “Dugg,” the link, the number of times the page was viewed and other statistics and browsing options. The toolbar also created a shortened Web address, like http://digg.com/d1ooR7, that appeared instead of the original URL.

The changes alarmed some publishers and Web developers, who worried that sites could lose traffic–which can affect advertising dollars–if visitors were bookmarking Digg URLs and not their own, or if the Digg addresses would appear in Google (GOOG) results.

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Yahoo Lets Users Take Notes

Jessica E. Vascellaro — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 23:47:51 +0000

If Yahoo’s search engine made it easier to organize a ski trip or research a new cellphone, would you use it more frequently?

The search engine–a distant second to Google (GOOG) in usage–is hoping so. Yahoo (YHOO) announced plans Wednesday to start testing a new research tool that tries to detect when someone is doing a research-related search and offers to save Web pages and notes in a separate document for future recall.

The service, Search Pad, is similar to Google’s new SearchWiki, which allows users to promote and take notes on search results they find useful and view them later.

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What Is StopBadware.org?

Marisa Taylor — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:05:34 +0000

Bewildered Google users frenetically posted inquiries on blogs and message boards wondering what to do when, for a brief window of time on Saturday morning, the search giant deemed every search result to contain malicious software and warned users that clicking on any one of them “could harm your computer.”

As it turned out, the issue was “human error,” as noted by Google exec Marissa Mayer on the official Google blog.

But Mayer updated her blog post after Maxim Weinstein, manager of the nonprofit malware watchdog organization, StopBadware.org, wrote on the group’s blog that Google (GOOG) had erroneously implied that its list of malware URLs comes directly from StopBadware, a claim that indirectly caused the nonprofit to take heavy flak for Google’s malware snafu. To clarify the relationship between the two, he wrote, Google partners with StopBadware to create the criteria that determine which sites make its malware list, but does not actually come up with specific sites that should be there.

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A Search Engine With a Real Eye for Videos

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:52:03 +0000

Web video has transformed the way the Internet is used, but finding the exact clip you want can be incredibly hard. And it’s no wonder, considering that sites like YouTube conduct their hunts by looking at a clip’s “contextual metadata” — tags, video title and description — and thus can often be misled by false information. For example, a homemade video about cooking might be inaccurately tagged with a popular search word like “Obama” so as to get more traction.

At the top of a VideoSurf results page for ‘Mad Men,’ users can search for clips featuring specific characters.

This week I tested VideoSurf.com, a site that claims to be the first to search videos by “seeing” images that appear in these videos. The company says its technology can analyze a clip’s visual content, as well as its metadata — especially when searching for people. VideoSurf has analyzed and categorized more than 12 billion visual moments on the Web to understand who the most important characters and scenes are in a video, and it uses this knowledge to sort clips according to relevancy.

Search results on VideoSurf spread out videos in a filmstrip-like format, distinguishing one scene from the next. Users can choose an option to show only faces, which helps if you’re looking for a specific person in a long video or movie. And when looking at videos from certain sources, you can select a scene from the filmstrip and jump ahead to that scene rather than sit through the entire clip.

When it works, VideoSurf is one of those technologies that make you wonder why someone didn’t think of it sooner. The site aggregates content from about 60 sources, including YouTube, CNN Video, Hulu, ESPN and Comedy Central, and a sorting tool weeds out unwanted results like the irksome slideshows that are labeled as videos. VideoSurf can find videos on all kinds of subjects, but it really shines when it finds well-known people.

But VideoSurf has some rough edges and doesn’t always work as it should. In its defense, the site is still in its public beta, or trial, stage, and plans to be full-blown by early next year. Right now, one of its best features, the ability to jump ahead to specific scenes, works with video from only a handful of sources including YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion and Google (GOOG) Video. Videos from Hulu.com confusingly allow jumping ahead only from certain screens.

Additionally, I came across a couple of videos that were no longer available, though they were listed in search results. And a customizable VideoSurf home page for users with accounts on the site saves searches but not specific clips; VideoSurf plans to fix this next week by adding a favorites page where users can store and share favorite videos with others.

Still, I really grew to like VideoSurf’s clear way of displaying content that would be otherwise buried within videos. Rather than trying to guess a video’s contents by looking at a single representative image, VideoSurf’s filmstrip views showed me exactly what I’d be watching. In many cases, I viewed a video I might not have otherwise watched because its filmstrip showed shots of scenes that looked interesting.

On the left-hand side of the search-results page, VideoSurf users can narrow results according to Content Type, Categories and Video Sources to see just what they’re looking for — or, often more important, what they’re not looking for. Content Type, for example, includes slideshows, Web series, full television episodes and full movies; a search can include only videos in a particular category (say, slideshows) or exclude that category altogether by unmarking the box beside it.

Most search-results pages include tiled still images at the top representing the characters in the videos. By selecting one of these characters, users can refine search results to show only videos with that character. For example, I typed the title of a favorite television show, “Brothers and Sisters,” into the search box and saw the names and images of seven actors on the show at the top of the screen. I selected Sally Field and was redirected to results of videos featuring only the mother she plays on the show.

I used VideoSurf to search for Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” music video, and then changed the date parameters to find only videos posted this week. This retrieved a Saturday Night Live skit in which the pop singer spoofs her own video with help from three men in tights — including Justin Timberlake. While the SNL skit ran, a list of related videos appeared in a column on the right, including clips of J.T.’s past SNL skits.

Occasionally, annotations appear on videos, but these come from the source — not VideoSurf. If overlaid text appears on YouTube videos, it can be turned off using an icon in the bottom right of the YouTube screen. Video-sharing sites that use introductory pages such as pre-rolls before each video will still show those pages.

VideoSurf makes it easy to send specific clips of videos to friends. I did so by selecting a Share option and adjusting slide bars to trim the clip to start and end at scenes I preferred. Clips shared with friends via email are sent with the VideoSurf filmstrip, giving others the ability to also know what the video will include so that they, too, can discern whether or not they want to watch it.

Clips can be shared on social-networking sites like del.icio.us, MySpace and Facebook, though VideoSurf’s helpful filmstrip didn’t show up on these sites like it did in emails.

I also tested an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser called Greasemonkey that works with VideoSurf. When installed, this displays VideoSurf’s helpful filmstrip beneath search results from Google Video, YouTube, Yahoo (YHOO) or CBS.com (CBS). Once installed, filmstrips illustrating important scenes appear along with the normal text results for videos, and some of the filmstrips enable jumping ahead to specific scenes. This somewhat techie Greasemonkey extension can save people the extra step of making a separate visit to VideoSurf.com to watch a specific clip.

VideoSurf uses smart technology that can save people the aggravation of watching videos that aren’t what they appear to be. Since so much Web content now includes videos, a visual search tool that can better assess videos like VideoSurf is a good idea. When this site improves its now-flaky ability to jump ahead to specific scenes in videos, it will be even more valuable.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

Baidu Bars Some Unlicensed Medical Firms From Paid Listings; They Account for 10-15 Percent of Revenue

Eric Savitz — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:55:06 +0000

Baidu (BIDU) today issued a press release to address allegations in a China Central Television report that yesterday drove down the Chinese Internet search company’s shares $44.80, or 25 percent.

As I noted in several posts yesterday, a CCTV report broadcast on Nov. 15 and 16 asserted that some unlicensed medical companies appeared high in the company’s search results due to their willingness to pay for popular keywords. Baidu’s search engine mixes paid and unpaid search results. The company was also accused of pulling from its search index some organizations that declined to buy keywords.

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Verizon Searches for Google

John Paczkowski — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:00:59 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]