Google’s Search Pages Evolve

originally appeared in The New York Times:

Google’s look has changed significantly since it started in 1997. While the search engine originally returned basic blue links to other Web pages, it now also shows ads, photos, maps, answers to questions and other information. While Google says this helps users get the information they want as quickly as possible, some of its competitors say Google is poaching potential visitors to their sites by showing its own content and including eye candy like photos and maps. Antitrust regulators are investigating. Below is a look at how Google search results pages have evolved.

Most Google searches used to return results like this one for "theory of relativity" — a list of blue links to other Web pages. In 2007, Google started what it called universal search by including things like videos from YouTube, which Google owns, in search results.

Shopping searches, like this one for "patio furniture," are one of Google's most lucrative sources of ad revenue. Above search results, it shows ads related to the search, labeled as ads and shaded in beige.

Google started its own comparison shopping service in 2002. This fall, it began requiring that retailers pay for their products to appear there, so Google makes money when someone clicks or buys a product. Antitrust regulators have questioned comparison shopping competitors like Nextag about competition from Google.

When users search for local results, Google shows nearby businesses with addresses, Zagat ratings and Google reviews from its Google Plus Local service. (Google owns Zagat.) Regulators have interviewed competitors like Yelp, whose executives say that Google has filled prime real estate on the search results page with its own listings. In that same search, by hovering a mouse over a listing (in this case, the top result), the right side of the page shows a Google map, reviews and ratings of the business from Google Plus Local and photos of the store, some shot by Google. Below that are links to reviews from other review sites that compete with Google Plus Local. Under the "People also search for" header, users are shown similar listings and photos from Google. Places.

In 2010, Google started plucking answers to common questions from around the Web (like "How old is Barack Obama?") and showing them on the top of search results, so users would not have to click on another Web page and scan to find the answer. This year, Google started showing more information and images about the search topic on the right side. It is part of what Larry Page, Google's co-founder and chief executive, has described as a shift in Google's mission to helping people understand the world, not just find a Web page to answer a query. As part of what it calls the knowledge graph, Google pulls information from around the Web that is relevant to the search. It also shows the most recent post from Barack Obama on Google Plus, its social network.

Bing Features Yield Results
Story from WSJ

Google is to search what Kleenex is to tissues. Even if you're in the habit of using another search engine like Yahoo to look up something online, you probably say you "Googled" it because everyone knows what you mean. Microsoft Corp. is hoping you'll change your habits and start "Binging" for that which you once Googled.


Last week, Microsoft announced Bing as the name of its new search engine. The company describes Bing as delivering more answers to your search queries directly on the search-results page, so you don't have to keep hunting around for what you want to find. And, like Google, Bing can be used as a verb.

I've been using Bing for more than two weeks now, and this search engine really did retrieve on-target, useful information on the first try. But what I like best about it is that it does so in a user-friendly manner that looks and feels more inviting than Google.

A feature called Hover displays a brief summary of each Web page when your cursor is hovering over the right edge of a link, and this can save you from visiting a useless page. As another time-saving feature, to further save searchers from clicking to another page, Bing answers medical queries by featuring information from the Mayo Clinic at the top of the results page. Videos on Bing start playing when you move your cursor over a thumbnail still image from the video, without requiring you to press play or go to a new page; the videos stop when you mouse elsewhere. A query about a company usually returns its customer-service phone number at the top of the results page. Shopping, restaurant reviews and travel are also significantly enhanced by Bing.

Google isn't going away. Both search engines stick to plain, white backgrounds and proudly proclaim the total number of results at the top of the page, a competition that Google almost always wins. Google also is steadily delivering more of its own useful data right in the results, but those efforts feel minimal compared with Bing.

It's a given that many people will try Bing once, get frustrated by the unfamiliar environment and switch back to Google. Others will use whatever their Web browser's search box is set to (Google, for many people) because they don't know how to change their options or they're too lazy to do so. Microsoft's Live Search engine has been replaced by Bing.com.

You can bring up Bing the old-fashioned way by going to Bing.com. This Web page is a perfect example of the search engine's engaging, attractive style. Bing.com evokes the cover of a glossy magazine with a stunning photo that takes over the page. This photo, usually slightly off-beat and somewhat alluring, changes every day. If you move your cursor across the photo, blurbs filled with interesting text and Web links materialize on-screen to teach you something related to the photo. It's a shame that many people will never see the Web page because they search using the box built into their browser.

From this home page, you can dive directly into searching videos, like TV shows, news and sports videos, or browsing music by watching music videos arranged by artist, genre and popularity. I browsed through episodes of "The Office" and watched the "People Are Crazy" music video by country singer, Billy Currington.

The Bing results page has a left-side panel called the Explore Pane, which includes suggestions of terms and categories to select. A search for Abraham Lincoln, for example, showed links to speeches, childhood and library -- among others. The Explore Pane includes related searches of terms that people searching for the same thing as you also looked up.

The related searches were sometimes helpful, like "Paul McCartney Tour Dates" when I Binged the famed musician. But the related searches also could be confusing, like when I searched for my own name and found "Jan D'Esopo" listed as the top related search suggestion. (D'Esopo is a painter and sculptor who is active in Puerto Rico, according to Wikipedia.)

I tried comparing Bing with Google in side-by-side searches for tennis player Roger Federer. Bing showed me six colorful images of Federer atop its results page, along with an Explore Pane full of links to his biography, posters, quotes, blog and more. The third listed related-search term, "Roger Federer Shirtless," made me laugh.

Google didn't automatically embed images of the tennis great on its results page (for that, of course, you have to go to its Image search page), but it did display Federer's winning score for that day's French Open match -- information that was extremely useful to me.

Bing presents photos in a more eye-pleasing way than Google. The Roger Federer image search on Bing filled the page with images only -- none of the messy text descriptions that appear in the same Google search results. By selecting visuals in the top right of the Bing results page, I changed the size of the photos to small, medium, large or detailed. As I moved my cursor over an image, the image popped forward in a larger version with text details.

Microsoft wants people to use Bing for shopping, and the search engine brings product reviews right to the results page, making it look a bit like Amazon, complete with images, ratings and links to online stores. Bing Cashback, a money-rewards program that works with certain items, is less complicated than its confusing predecessor, but it isn't as clear as it should be.

For people looking up airline flights, Microsoft integrates a technology called Bing Travel into the search. This tool predicts whether a fare will go up or down in the future based on data aggregation and analysis. A built-in tool works similarly with hotels, analyzing data to tell if you're getting a good deal.

After I got over my initial resistance to Bing's unfamiliarity, I really enjoyed using it and found that searching with it was less of a chore and more of an interactive experience. Microsoft gives users a true service by bringing rich content directly to the search-results page.

Yahoo To Redefine What It Means To Search
Story from Information Week

The company hopes bolstering its semantic search capabilities will help it better compete with Google for ad dollars and happier customers.

At media event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Yahoo Search executives insisted that Internet users don't want to search.

"Nobody really wants to search," declared Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy. "People want to run their lives."

The stated theme for the press briefing was "The End of the 10 Blue Links," a title that reflects an evolution of Yahoo's search strategy beyond document retrieval. As described by Raghavan, Yahoo is directing its search efforts toward assessing user intent.

When a user types "Star Trek," Raghavan said, he doesn't want 10 million documents, he wants actors and show times.

Yahoo's bid to redefine search as a matter of intent rather than index size can be seen as an admission that it can't match Google's index.

In August 2005, index size mattered to Yahoo. "[O]ur index now provides access to over 20 billion items," Yahoo's Tim Meyer boasted at the time. A month later, Google's Marissa Mayer answered Yahoo's challenge, stating that Google's index was three times larger than anyone else's. And in July 2008, Google said that its index had reached 1 trillion unique URLs.

So it's perhaps understandable why Yahoo might want to reframe the debate. Given its lack of success challenging Google directly -- Google's April search share in the United States reached 64.2%, a 0.5 point gain, while Yahoo's search share fell to 20.4%, a 0.1 point decline, according to ComScore -- Yahoo wants to change the game.

And to some extent, the game has changed. Everyone is focused on mobile applications now. And in mobile search, user intent is easier to determine because location data often provides a clue about what users want. A search for "Star Trek" from a mobile device is more likely to reflect a desire to find a nearby theater and purchase tickets than it would be from a desktop PC, for example. To understand user intent better, Yahoo is developing its semantic search capabilities. Raghavan describes the process as building a Web of objects in the real world and understanding how they relate to each other. In other words, Yahoo is adding structure to its data to make inferences about user intent more accurate and to define relationships between search terms and things in the world.

Rather, its partners are doing that through initiatives like SearchMonkey. SearchMonkey allows developers to share structured data with Yahoo, enabling the display of search results enhanced with related information. Thus, a Yahoo SearchMonkey search result for a restaurant might include not only a link to the restaurant's site, but star ratings, reviews, map links, and related data, all in one search listing.

This is similar to what Google does with its OneBox search results enhancements, but Yahoo is relying on its partners to feed it with structured data.

The gambit appears to be working, too. Since October, the amount of RDFa structured data available through SearchMonkey has increased by 413%. Yahoo reportsthat 70 million SearchMonkey-enhanced search results are viewed by users every day, in 23 markets around the world. And these search results deliver more traffic to site owners, too. Some site owners say they've seen a 15% increase in click-through rates, according to Yahoo.

Yahoo's BOSS (Build your Own Search Service), the company's open search platform, has also been growing. Having recently been upgraded to allow developers to access SearchMonkey structured data, the BOSS API now handles three times as many queries as it did six months ago. With daily query volume in the 30 million to 35 million range, according to Raghavan, BOSS alone is just shy of the estimated 40 million queries handled by Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Windows Live Search.

Looking ahead, Yahoo is testing new search enhancements based on its improved ability to understand user intent. One of these, for example, draws on Yahoo's data about locations to suggest related queries. Larry Cornett, VP of consumer products for Yahoo Search, demonstrated how a future search for "Paris" might produce a rich set of pictures and links of other Parisian landmarks like the Musée du Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, data not normally brought up for that keyword.

Yahoo's focus on user intent could lead to happier users, if Yahoo Search can guess user intent accurately. It could also help Yahoo make more money from advertising.

"If we can divine the user's intent, that's obviously of great interest to advertisers," said Raghavan.

Testimony of Marissa Mayer Vice President, Search Products and User Experience Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet Hearing on "The Future of Journalism" May 6, 2009

Chairman Kerry, Ranking Member Ensign, and members of the Subcommittee. Thank you for inviting me to contribute to this discussion. My name is Marissa Mayer, and I work as Vice President of Search and User Experience at Google. I manage Google's efforts in search -- including Web search and Google News -- and I also guide user interaction design across Google's products. In addition, I co-chair the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. In both roles, I've reflected on the intersections of journalism and technology and I will speak to that this afternoon.

In my testimony today, I would like to cover three main points:
First, I'd like to discuss how Web search acts as a conduit for journalism by connecting individuals to the news stories they are seeking.
Second, I'll address our commitment to create economic opportunity for publishers and to provide tools to create more engaging presentations of their content.
And finally, I'll talk about how the very structure of the Web itself represents some challenges to, but also opportunities for, the future of journalism.

Search: a conduit for online publishing
Every day, millions of people search the Web for relevant answers to their questions. In response, search engines strive to connect each user with the right results, and those results can come in any number of different forms: a Web page, an image, a video, a map, or a news story – something of particular relevance to today's hearing. In each of those cases, search engines play the role of connecting users with high-quality content -- often journalistic -- ultimately sending traffic to the publisher's Website. Google is one such search engine that people use to find answers online. Another service we offer is Google News, our specialized service that's designed specifically for users who are looking for news articles. Stories on Google News are selected and ranked by computers based on the freshness, location, relevance, and diversity of their content. As a result, these stories are sorted without regard to political viewpoint or ideology, and users can choose from a wide variety of perspectives on any given story. We offer links to several articles covering a topic so that users can choose to read the story from the publishers and sources they prefer.

Both Google search and Google News connect users to answers and information as quickly as possible. We show people just enough information to invite them to read more -- the headline, a line or two of text, and a link to the news publisher's Website. A user clicks on the headline of interest and is taken directly to the site that published the story.

Together, Google News and Google search provide a valuable free service to online newspapers specifically by sending interested readers to their sites at a rate of more than 1 billion clicks per month. Newspapers use that Web traffic to increase their readership and generate additional revenue.

In terms of publications appearing in search indexes, we believe they have the right to control their content. That's why we allow site owners to choose whether or not Google can index their sites. Using what's called a “robots.txt” file, which has been an industry standard for many years, a publisher can block its Web content from any search engine's crawl. As a result, that site will not show up in Web search results. Effective use of "robots.txt" and other metatags gives publishers control over how their content is searched at a number of levels by allowing publishers to restrict: search across the entire site, individual directories, pages of a specific type, or individual pages only. So, while we think inclusion in a search engine can drive a lot of beneficial traffic, our policy first and foremost is to respect the wishes of content owners.

Creating economic opportunity for publishers
Because our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, high-quality content is incredibly important to Google. Our most basic goal is to connect users with high quality and reliable information. Credible, factual, trustworthy content -- that is, journalism -- is critical to the millions of users who search for news stories on Google. Google connects Internet users to journalists' work while at the same time helping journalists generate
income to support their work, and providing tools to make news more compelling to readers and viewers. Most importantly from an economic perspective, once readers arrive at publication sites, our Google AdSense advertising platform helps publishers generate revenue from their content. By providing relevant ads and improving the connection between advertisers and our users, Google AdSense creates billions of dollars in annual revenue for publishers. In fact, in 2008, that figure exceeded $5 billion in revenue for AdSense publishers. Users get more useful ads, and these more relevant ads generate higher returns for advertisers and publishers. We recently launched interest-based advertising, which we believe will be particularly helpful to publishers as it takes into account each individual user's interests in the hopes of making advertisements even more relevant.

In addition to providing revenue opportunities, Google also offers many tools for sharing information that are being used by newspapers. For example, the Los Angeles Times Website last year followed the path of Southern California wildfires using Google Maps at the site. Google Image Search brings the Life Magazine photo archive to light for a whole new generation of readers. National Geographic and The Holocaust Memorial Museum have created interactive educational content layers in Google Earth. And NASA has partnered with us to allow anyone to virtually travel the stars in Google Sky. Our Web technologies are powerful information tools, and we hope to continue to empower content creation through them.

The structure of the Web and its impact on publishers
The structure of the Web itself requires the presentation of news in a way that's fundamentally different from its offline predecessor. The Web has caused some parts of the news to be presented more easily and effectively. For example, Web pages can link to voluminous supporting materials without worrying about column inches. In addition, the always-on, always-updating nature of the Web means that real-time news updates can appear throughout the day without being tied to print production deadlines. However, other aspects are more challenging, particularly in regard to how users arrive at a news story, and how authority on a particular topic is established. I'd like to offer a few observations on what I call the "atomic unit of consumption" for online news, the prospect of creating living stories online, as well as a few simple steps online publishers can take to keep readers engaged.
The atomic unit of consumption
The atomic unit of consumption for existing media is almost always disrupted by emerging media. For example, digital music caused consumers to think about their purchases as individual songs rather than as full albums. Digital and on-demand video has caused people to view variable-length clips when it is convenient for them, rather than fixed-length programs on a fixed broadcast schedule. Similarly, the structure of the Web has caused the atomic unit of consumption for news to migrate from the full newspaper to the individual article. As with music and video, many people still consume physical newspapers in their original full-length format.

But with online news, a reader is much more likely to arrive at a single article. While these
individual articles could be accessed from a newspaper's homepage, readers often click directly to a particular article via a search engine or another Website.

Changing the basic unit of content consumption is a challenge, but also an opportunity. Treating the article as the atomic unit of consumption online has several powerful consequences. When producing an article for online news, the publisher must assume that a reader may be viewing this article on its own, independent of the rest of the publication. To make an article effective in a standalone setting requires providing sufficient context for first-time readers, while clearly calling out the latest information for those following a story over time. It also requires a different approach to monetization: each individual article should be self-sustaining.

These types of changes will require innovation and experimentation in how news is delivered online, and how advertising can support it.

The living story
The Web by definition changes and updates constantly throughout the day. Because of its ability to operate in real-time, it offers an opportunity for news publishers to publish on changing and evolving stories as they happen. Web addresses (known as URLs -- uniform resource locators such as http://www.google.com) were designed to refer to unique pieces of content, and those URLs were intended to persist over time. Today, in online news, publishers frequently publish several articles on the same topic, sometimes with identical or closely related content, each at their own URL.

The result is parallel Web pages that compete against each other in terms of authority, and in terms of placement in links and search results. Consider instead how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity. We see this practice today in Wikipedia's entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com. The result is a single authoritative page with a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time.

Keeping users engaged
A much smaller but important factor for online newspapers to consider in today's digital age is the fundamental design and presentation of their content. Publishers should not discount the simple and effective navigational elements the Web can offer. When a reader finishes an article online, it is the publication's responsibility to answer the reader who asks, "What should I do next?" Click on a related article or advertisement? Post a comment? Read earlier stories on the topic? Much like Amazon.com suggests related products and YouTube makes it easy to play another video, publications should provide obvious and engaging next steps for users.

Today, there are still many publications that don't fully take advantage of the numerous tools that keep their readers engaged and on their site.

Conclusion
Chairman Kerry, Ranking Member Ensign, and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for having me here today to participate in this important discussion. Preserving robust and independent journalism at the national and local levels is an important goal for the United States. Google is doing its part by driving significant traffic to online news publishers, by helping them
generate revenue through advertising, and by providing tools and platforms enabling them to reach millions of people.

There are certainly many challenges to face in adapting the long tradition of journalism to the online world. I am hopeful, though, that innovation will help preserve journalism and its vital function in our society.
Thank you.

MSN Working Hard To Improve Keyword Search System

MSN Live Search Goes Through Upgrade.



Microsoft has been quite busy rolling out new updates on the MSN search engine as they try to better compete with Google and Yahoo.

Microsoft is now searching deeper and gathering more urls, in fact the MSN search databases have recently quadrupled in size, and the core algortihm of the msnbot spiders that power MSN Live search results have undergone an overhaul according to corporate vice president for Microsoft’s search and advertising group, Satya Nadella.

MSN keyword search updates will be pushed 'live' in stages as the 4th quarter progresses. MSN Live Search will be improved to interpret misspellings, and variations from the original word structure. Nadella also claims that Live Search will be better at detecting “stop words” which are phrases or keywords that are not considered unless they are in a specific context or combination.

Microsoft continues to place at a distant third in the battle for keyword search share.

The Most Recent Keyword Search Share Numbers Are:

# 1 Google 70+%
# 2 Yahoo 19%
# 3 MSN 9%

Microsoft hopes to increase their share of search by improving local searches, maps, health, shopping and entertainment, while they revamp and clean up the look of MSN search results pages.

Some of the fun new gadgets on Live search include: products ratings with links to products, improvements to b2b business search, maps, a health search site (move over webMD) called MedStory, and many new interactive entertainment features designed to hook searchers and spice up keyword search.

General Manager of Microsoft’s search business group, Brad Goldberg said that the company is first focusing on the 70 million users that already go to Live Search as opposed to the users who usually search on Yahoo and Google, creating incentive programs for loyal customers.

The task to dethrone Google is substantial, and MSN is preparing for a long battle. Rumors of a Yahoo acquistion/merger are still very hot in Sunnyvale as Microsoft continues to work towards pulling Yahoo into the "Redmond Realm" and instantly secure 30+% of the lucrative keyword search pie.