Knowledge – Inside Search – Google. Google Wants To Build The Ultimate Personal Assistant. Google Search is changing rapidly. Given the company’s love of small, rapid-fire updates, its sometimes hard to keep track of where the company is going, but earlier this month, at the LeWeb conference in Paris, Google Engineering Director Scott Huffman presented a pretty compelling overview of the direction Google is taking in search. Here’s the gist of it: Google knows our expectations of what a search engine should be able to do is quickly changing. The old “ten blue links” search results page is quickly going away for something far smarter that, according to Huffman, will resemble a personal assistant more than the search tool Google that launched over fifteen years ago.
Indeed, that’s what Huffman considers Google’s goal: creating the ultimate personal assistant. The next generation of search, he said, is all about making “all your tasks as you go through the day simpler and quicker.” Image credit: meneame comunicacions, sl. Google Appears To Arrest The Decline in Cost-Per-Click; Page Is Hopeful That Mobile CPCs Will Rise. One of the reasons that Google’s shares might have popped about 5 percent in after-hours trading is evidence that the company is stabilizing declines in cost-per-click. The closely watched metric is a measurement of how much advertisers are paying on average when consumers actually click through on paid search keywords or on other ads. It declined dramatically throughout 2012, raising concerns that the shift toward searches on smartphones was cannibalizing pricier ads on the non-mobile web. Cost-per-click was up 2 percent quarter-over-quarter, but down 6 percent year-over-year, according to today’s earnings.
If you exclude the impact of foreign exchange fluctuations, they were up 1 percent quarter-over-quarter, but down 4 percent year-over-year, according to the earnings call. While the annualized declines don’t look great, they’re far lower than year-over-year declines from the second and third quarter of last year, which were 16 percent and 15 percent respectively. Google Just Got A Whole Lot Smarter, Launches Its Knowledge Graph. Today, Google is launching one of its most ambitious and interesting updates to its search engine in recent months. Starting in a few days, you will start to see large panels with additional factual information about the topic you were searching for take over the right side of Google’s search result pages. The panels are powered by what Google calls its new “Knowledge Graph” and they will serve two different functions.
Google will use this space to show you a summary of relevant information about your queries (think biographical data about celebrities and historical figures, tour dates for artists, information about books, works of art, buildings, animals etc.) as well as a list of related topics. In addition, Google will now allow you to clarify what exactly you are looking for and will use these boxes for disambiguation. Thanks to this, you will soon be able to tell Google you were looking for the L.A. Kings ice hockey team and not the Sacramento Kings when you searched for ‘kings.’ Google et Firefox ? C’est reparti pour 3 ans !
Mercredi 21 décembre Navigateurs - 21 décembre 2011 :: 13:20 :: Par Nicolas-Lecointre Google et Mozilla ont renouvelé hier — mardi 20 décembre — leur accord en ce qui concerne l’implémentation par défaut du célèbre moteur de recherche dans le navigateur, et cela pour au moins 3 ans. C’est bien connu, Mozilla et Google sont des partenaires de longue date. Depuis un certain temps déjà, c’est en effet Google qui occupe la place du moteur de recherche par défaut dans le navigateur du panda roux. Cependant, lorsque l’on est au courant de la guerre des navigateurs qui se tient en ce moment, on comprend facilement que certains aient été jusqu’à prédire la mort — lente mais certaine — de Firefox en cas de non-renouvellement de cet accord. Toujours est-il que le précédent accord avait pris fin au cours du mois de novembre.
Mozilla ne fourni pas énormément de détails au sujet de cet accord dans l’article publié hier sur leur blog officiel. Google et les Réseaux sociaux: preuve et enjeux de la corrélation des résultats pour le SEO. Google a sorti il y a quelques jours son bouton +1, afin de donner une teinte plus sociale aux résultats (comme aux publicités, puisque le bouton y apparaît également).
Le dit bouton n'est encore disponible qu'aux Etats-Unis (sur www.google.com donc) et le déploiement n'est pas encore opéré dans tous les pays. D'emblée, et c'était aussi justifié qu'inévitable, les commentateurs et les utilisateurs y ont vu la réplique de Google à Facebook et à son propre bouton "Like". Au-delà de la symbolique, il est évident que les enjeux économiques sont considérables: Google ne devant à aucun moment se laisser distancer sur le terrain "social" par Facebook qui commence à prétendre à une qualification de "search", partant de son identité de réseau social. Très schématiquement donc, le géant du search intègre la dimension sociale pour répliquer à un autre géant, "social" celui-là, qui prétend notamment à la compétence de search abordé sous l'angle social. Google précise donc que : Google Launches Search Education Hub for Teachers. Google has announced a new search education tool aimed at helping teachers pass on the necessary skills to young learners researching online.
Google Search Education has been providing classes for the past few years, aimed at highlighting existing Google Search tools for use in academic research. “Knowing how to search has so many benefits, but we know teachers need materials in order to teach these skills,” says Tasha Bergson-Michelson, a Google Search Educator. “That’s why we created our new Search Education hub.” Indeed, for the site, Google has produced a series of lesson plans for teachers, covering search literacy lessons and ‘A Google A Day’ classroom challenges, broken down based on level of expertise covering beginner, intermediate, and advanced. There’s also online webinars, designed to help teachers improve their own search skills. Meanwhile, check out Google’s new Search Education promo video below. Google chronicles the evolution of search (video) Have you ever wondered how Google’s search got so good?
An insightful new video released by Google uses employee interviews and engaging graphics to show how Google’s core search product has evolved since it began in 1997. While it’s easy to focus on evolving Google products like Gmail and Google+, Google still makes most of its revenues on search and advertising. And its core search product is still one of the most helpful ways to find content, pictures and videos around the web. The video features short interviews from Google employees such as Vice President Marissa Mayer, Fellow Amit Singhal and Director of Product Management Johanna Wright. Each person helps explain a piece of how Google’s search evolved, including landmarks like AdWords, Google News, image search and Google Instant. On top of adding new features, Google has stayed committed to delivering better and faster search results over the past few years.
And, finally, the fascinating six-minute video can be viewed below: How to Use Google Search More Effectively [INFOGRAPHIC] Among certain circles (my family, some of my coworkers, etc.) I'm known for my Googling skills. I can find anything, anywhere, in no time flat. My Google-fu is a helpful skill, but not one that's shrouded in too much mystery — I've just mastered some very helpful search tricks and shortcuts and learned to quickly identify the best info in a list of results. Sadly, though web searches have become and integral part of the academic research landscape, the art of the Google search is an increasingly lost one. A recent study at Illinois Wesleyan University found that fewer than 25% of students could perform a "reasonably well-executed search.
" Wrote researchers, "The majority of students — of all levels — exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process. " Thanks to the folks at HackCollege, a number of my "secrets" are out. Infographic via HackCollege Image courtesy of iStockphoto, LICreate.