Topic: Search
Behind the Decline at China’s Tech Giant Baidu — The Information (Mar 29, 2017)
This is a fascinating piece, and well worth a read if you’re interested in the Chinese tech market. It’s a market I follow less closely, but I was struck by Baidu’s recent decline in fortunes and Alibaba’s rapid rise in the ad business when I was doing research for a recent piece on global ad revenue leaders. Baidu has always been referred to as the Chinese Google, and although that’s a horrible oversimplification, it’s hard to avoid the sense in reading this article that part of its trouble stems from pursuing many of the same areas and strategies as Google but with less success. Even the resentment among the successful search advertising employees of higher profile but non revenue generating businesses is reminiscent of the situation at Alphabet, though the latter has been reining in some of its excesses lately. Even outside the Chinese, context, though, this is a good cautionary tale on how quickly seemingly indomitable Internet companies can see their fortunes turn south.
via The Information
Google starts flagging offensive content in search results – USA Today (Mar 16, 2017)
Human curation feels like an interesting way to solve a problem with an algorithm, and it’s striking that Google pays 10,000 people to check its search results for quality in the first place. As I’ve said previously, the specific problem with “snippets” in search is better solved by eliminating them for obscure or poorly covered topics, but the issue with false results is certainly broader than just snippets. It sounds like this approach is helping, but it doesn’t feel very scalable.
via USA Today
Google’s featured snippets are worse than fake news – The Outline (Mar 6, 2017)
This is the second of two fake news stories this morning (the first concerned Facebook), and this one doesn’t look so good for Google. Google has long pull excerpts out of search results in order to provide what it deems to be the answers to questions, as a way to get people to what they’re looking for faster. For undisputed facts, like what time the Super Bowl starts or how old a movie star is, that’s very useful and unobjectionable. But the problem is that Google has algorithms designed to find these answers for almost any question people might ask, and in an era of fake news, some questions and the ostensible answers are driven entirely by conspiracy theories and false reporting, which means that the right answer doesn’t even appear anywhere online. So it’s snippets serve up answers exclusively from fake news and conspiracy sites, as if these were incontrovertible, lending them an air of considerable authority, and causing many users to take those answers as gospel. The simple solution here is for Google to back way off from this snippets approach and limit it to questions that are both frequently asked and also answered by a wide range of sites including reputable ones. I don’t know whether Google will take that approach, but it’s going to be very hard for it to solve the problem in any other way.
via The Outline
Google debuts Cloud Search, a smart search engine for G Suite customers – TechCrunch (Feb 7, 2017)
The article doesn’t mention Microsoft once, but talks about Google’s consumer products several times, which makes it feel like this is rather missing the point. This is an enterprise offering and therefore goes head on against various Microsoft products and services intended to achieve similar aims (as well as those from Box and other smaller, more specialized enterprise software and service providers). Both Google and Microsoft are focusing on their AI skills as a source of differentiation in enterprise file management, by promising to help employees find the files they need. Search is, of course, a core Google skill, but it operates very differently in an enterprise file system from on the open web, and Microsoft may actually be better placed here given its long history and the massive investment many companies have made in Microsoft tools in this setting.
via TechCrunch
Pinterest introduces Search ads with Keyword and Shopping campaigns – Marketing Land (Feb 1, 2017)
I don’t follow Pinterest closely, but this has been a long-anticipated change to its ad products, and an important one – search advertising continues to be the best way to deliver the killer combination of timeliness and relevance to a user. Most of Pinterest’s ad products so far have been focused on relevance – pins within the context of a topic-based board or within the overall feed of new content, which are somehow related to other things the user has looked at or pinned recently. This move also reinforces the idea that search is in some specific categories migrating off general purpose search engines and into specialized ones, with Amazon and shopping being the most prominent example. The article says that Pinterest sees two billion searches a month already, and that’s a massive base to insert ads into.
via Marketing Land
There are too many ways to Google on Android – The Verge (Jan 30, 2017)
I’ve tagged this post against three different narratives, because this little mini-review taps into several broad threads. Firstly, this is about Google and parent Alphabet’s tendency to allow lots of people to work on the same thing in different parts of the company in different ways, which results in a confusing user experience because there are many ways to do the same thing (see especially messaging). Secondly, there’s the fact that on Android Google’s own messy set of services is often duplicated (or worse) with competing services and apps from OEMs and/or carriers. And lastly there’s the fact that even on Google’s own hardware, the Pixel, which is supposed to represent the epitome of Android at its best, this confusion still reigns. I was half-tempted to tag this post against the Google is Ahead in AI narrative too, because though Google does fantastically well at the back-end AI piece, it often falls short on the user interfaces and experiences that present the functionality to the user. The point is, the situation described in this article is far from ideal, but it grows out of several cultural quirks at Google/Alphabet combined with several of the downsides of the approach Google has always taken with Android, and a solution doesn’t seem imminent.
via The Verge
Reversing Course, Amazon Testing Google Product Listing Ads, May Be Ramping Up Efforts | Merkle (Dec 28, 2016)
This is just third-party observation in the wild at this point, so it should be taken with a pinch of salt, but this would be a big win for Google and conversely a big concession for Amazon, which has stayed out of Google’s shopping search since it became a paid placement product. Third party data we linked to in September suggested 55% of online shopping searches start on Amazon, but 28% still start on search engines like Google. Amazon is here attempting to divert some of that 28% back to its site.
via Reversing Course, Amazon Testing Google Product Listing Ads, May Be Ramping Up Efforts | Merkle
55 percent of online shoppers start their product searches on Amazon – Recode (Sep 27, 2016)
This data – from a survey by BloomReach – shows just how powerful Amazon has become as a shopping destination: over half of online shoppers start with this single destination, versus just 28% at a search engine like Google, which would give them multiple destination options. Other retailers combined accounted for just 16% of the total, so Amazon is totally in a class of its own here.
via 55 percent of online shoppers start their product searches on Amazon – Recode