Siri,Quora, And The Future Of Search Editor’s note: Contributor Dan Kaplan leads Product Marketing for Twilio and writes occasionally about the extrapolation of the present into the future. With the rise of Google+, the decrease in controversial posting activity by famous tech people and the allure of other shiny new things, the majority of tech press has turned the focus of their gazes away from Quora, my favorite startup of 2010. Well now that Apple has gone and integrated the most sophisticated piece of AI to ever to see the light of the consumer market into its iPhone 4S, I thought it was time to brush some dirt off of Quora’s shoulder and shine a light on what the future of the company could hold. By combining an answer voting mechanism and a reward addiction loop (upvotes are crack) with a strict identity requirement and a one-to-many follower model, Quora started solving the problem of extracting high-quality experiential knowledge out of humanity’s collective head and getting it into structured form on the internet.
Google Adds More Social SEO With +1'd News Articles Google News now highlights +1'd articles from people in your Google+ circles in its Spotlight section. Friends' faces and Google+ profiles are displayed next to the link, just like in Google's social search results. Earlier this month, Google News added the same feature for authors, showing Google+ info under their headlines. While today's new social features are limited to the Spotlight section, it adds another way in which Google News can personalize content for logged-in users using their social data. Google is rolling out these kinds of Google+ features across all its Web properties. Yesterday, Google converted Google Chat to be based on G+ circles rather than email addresses. Google Web search has treated public G+ posts as search results since soon after the social network launched. It's all part of an effort to redefine relevance in the way Google crawls the Web.
Armed With Social Signals, Google Moves Back Towards Real-Time Search Google announced a big change to its search ranking algorithm today that affected around 35% of searches. It now makes an effort to determine when a query should return more up-to-date, "fresher" search results, before more established but older links. For example, if you search for "olympics," you're likely to be looking for information about the upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics, rather than older or more general information. Google search is now fine-tuned to make that assumption. With Google+ indexed in Web search and providing real-time search data, Google now has strong signals for timeliness and relevance. By tweaking search algorithms on one side and gathering social data on the other, Google is working towards a clearer of picture of what's happening on the Web this instant. Today's updates are built on top of Caffeine, Google's new search infrastructure that first came online in 2009. Google Going Real-Time Google+ And Real-Time Search
Google's Matt Cutts: Good Content Trumps SEO This is a message that can't possibly be repeated often enough: Good content trumps SEO. Don't believe me? Fair enough, but how about the head of Google's webspam team? Reassuringly, no. "Even if you do brain-dead stupid things and shoot yourself in the foot, but have good content, we still want to return it," says Cutts. So if you're planning that 2012 site budget, you might want to think twice about hiring that SEO expert and find a content expert instead. 5 Google Paid Search Products You Need to Know Tessa Wegert | November 10, 2011 | 1 Comment inShare33 Google is nothing if not progressive, and for this reason many of the innovations made to AdWords warrant a closer look. For many digital marketers, the fall of 2011 might be remembered for bringing dynamic advertising to paid search. Google's newest offering, said to flip "the search engine on its head," does away with the traditional keyword advertising approach in lieu of matching landing pages with the right user search. Dynamic Search Ads is just one of dozens of innovations Google has made to its AdWords product over the past few years. Google Image Search. Google is infamous for experimenting with its AdWords products (not to mention giving them countless different names).
A Guide to SEO Salaries By Market [INFOGRAPHIC] Sometimes finding your dream job is like an Easter egg hunt: It's not only how you look for jobs, but also where you look for them. It seems like common sense, but in order to hedge your bets and ultimately nab a high-profile gig, it's all about location, location, location. This handy map, researched and developed by Onward Search ranks the cities where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) positions are most clustered and breaks down average salary ranges by rank, from entry-level to the big boss. It's unsurprising that the mantle for most available SEO gigs is New York City (with L.A. and San Francisco hot on its heels), but smaller markets like Atlanta are also willing to pay comparable salaries for top-notch talent. Are you hungry for a position in the SEO world? Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. Web Designer at Rodale in Emmaus, PASocial Media Coach at Socialbyte in Lake Zurich, Ill.Front End Developer (HTML) at Big Picture Group in Los Angeles
Siri is not search technology, but it can still hurt Google Steve Jobs was clear last year that he didn’t consider Siri a search company, but instead, an artificial intelligence company. But that doesn’t mean that Siri can’t serve as a threat to Google on iOS devices. With the rollout of Siri on iPhone 4S, the voice-recognition and virtual assistant service is even more robust than when it first appeared last year before Apple bought the company. And it’s showing that while Siri isn’t search technology, when paired with other services including Wolfram Alpha, Wikipedia and Yelp, it has the potential to divert significant traffic away from Google and other search engines. Apple showed off how users can easily ask questions of Siri: anything from inquiring about the weather to getting definitions of words. Siri can also do things like set alarms, schedule appointments and dictate text messages: tasks that don’t deal with search. “On a mobile device, search is not where it’s at, not like on the desktop.
4 Ways to Boost Your SEO With Google+ If you use Google regularly — and who doesn't? — you've probably noticed that the company has been using various ways to coerce you to join Google+, its incipient social network. The plugs have been pretty overt and include a call-to-action on Google's homepage and automatic G+ registration for new Gmail accounts. For businesses, the sell has been more subtle. Companies that specialize in search engine optimization are used to rapid change, but this is something different. 1. Unwrapping Google's gift is pretty easy: Just set up a Google+ account for your business. 2. This part is a bit trickier. There's nothing you can do to make other people put your business in their circles, but making people in your segment aware that your page exists is a good idea. Don't get desperate, though. 3. As with step 2, there's a tempting way to cheat — just fill your page with all your relevant keywords — but you should avoid it since you might run afoul of Google. 4. Will all this improve your SEO?
Can watching Twitter trends help predict the future? There’s been a lot of talk recently about Twitter trending topics, and how they fail to reflect evolving events such as the Occupy Wall Street movement (although some argue that this is the fault mainly of our inflated expectations, rather than Twitter’s algorithms). But despite those kinds of setbacks, there is an emerging industry aimed at using the tweetstreams of millions of people to help predict the future in some way: disease outbreaks, financial markets, elections and even revolutions. According to new research released today by Topsy Labs — which runs one of the only real-time search engines that has access to Twitter historical data — watching those streams can provide a window into breaking news events. But can it predict what will happen? Predicting markets and the spread of disease Could Twitter have predicted revolution in Egypt> [A]s his tweets were retweeted and mentioned more than 30,000 times, his exposure grew to a whopping 82.68 million unique tweets within 21 hours.
How Google's +1 Button Affects SEO Why Browsing Is So Important to Content Discovery Laura Larsell is the information ontologist at Trapit, a content discovery, personalization and curation platform currently in beta. Laura holds an M.A. in library sciences from the University of Texas at Austin. I love libraries and bookstores. I love the tactile, olfactory and social experiences these physical spaces allow. Clearly the Internet has given us ample and exciting new opportunities to engage with information resources, but the digital realm is still a ways off from satisfying many of our real-world needs. Putting aside the physical niceties of brick and mortar information repositories, one thing the Internet has yet to reproduce is the ability to easily and pleasantly browse its vast reaches. Imagine head to the stacks at your local library to browse through the cookbooks. Experiences like these sit at the heart of browsing — aimless navigation by subject or genre that brings you to something unexpected, yet ultimately rewarding. How We Lost Browsing to Searching