Freshness signals and Instant Previews

If improvement in a freshness signal has brought about a minor improvement to one of the freshness signals that helps to identify fresh documents more effectively, it has modified a classifier used for promoting fresh content so as to exclude fresh content identified as low-quality. A smart tweak to trigger behavior for the Instant Previews will narrow the trigger area so that users won’t get to see a preview till they hover over the icon just to the right of each result. The feature would trigger in the past only if one happened to ‘mouse into’ a rather larger button area. The engine has internationalized the sunrise & sunset search feature to more than 30 new languages. So now users can plan an evening jog just before dusk more easily or set alarm to view the sunrise.

Better query interpretation

More importantly, better query interpretation will helps Google better interpret the likely intention of a user’s search query as denoted by the last few searches. On the other hand, news universal results serving improvements will streamline the news results’ serving by shifting to greater unified system architecture, whereas the user interface for dynamic news results while users searching for a certain breaking news topic has also been improved. People now will see a large image thumbnail just alongside two fresh news results.

Broadened range of user features in more languages

More thorough predictions are there in the offing for local queries to make the autocomplete predictions more comprehensive by expanding existing coverage for certain long-tail U.S. local search queries like addresses or small businesses. Another set of changes to triggering will improve the public data search feature triggering in order to broaden the range of user queries, which will return helpful population as well as unemployment data. There are also improvements done to SafeSearch for both videos and images as well as improved SafeSearch models apart from more spell corrections for long queries.

Other enhancements and additions

In some cases if users misspelled a search query, say (pneumatic), the results they found would actually be those for pneumatic, or the corrected query. Google after having the explicit ‘Showing results for’ interface more often in English, is now expanding the same to several new international languages. Another algorithm feature that first checks any spell prediction to know if it is useful before actually presenting it to the engine user has been expanded to different languages.

Apart from introducing an additional indexing tier to back up  continued comprehensiveness in results, there is also a visible backend improvements in serving as well as better ranking of expanded sitelinks and ‘Sub-sitelinks’” in expanded sitelinks. Better HTML5 resource caching for mobile, more efficient generation of alternative titles. More concise and/or informative titles, less snippet duplication in expanded sitelinks, and Sitelinks data refresh features have also been added or enhanced.

• Categorize paginated documents: Search results sometimes can be dominated by a paginated series documents. This change will help surface in such cases more diverse results.
• Navigational results that are more language-relevant: When the user for navigational searches keys in a web address, the engine usually tries to rank that address right at the top, but this isn’t necessarily the best answer. For instance, though is bol.com, a Dutch page, many users are searching actually in Portuguese. They are looking for bol.uol.com.br/, the Brazilian email service. The change will take into account language.
• Country identification for pages: Location is a key signal used for surfacing content relevant to a country. For a while, Google had systems to detect when a site, subdomain, or directory was relevant to a specific set of countries. The change will extend those systems’ granularity to the page level for websites, which host user generated content.
• More domain diversity and anchors bug fix: The latter fixes a bug related to handling of anchors. Search at times returns too many results from similar domain. More domain diversity will help surface content from a large number of domains.
• More local websites from organizations and local navigational search Improvements: The former makes it much more likely users to find an organization site from their home country (for example, mexico.cnn.com rather than cnn.com for Mexico). For searches including location terms, Google more likely ranks the local navigational homepages in higher position, even where the navigational page doesn’t make mention of the location.
• Improvements to search term scoring in ranking: A fundamental signal employed in search is whether or how search terms surface on the webpages users are searching. This change will improve the way those key terms are scored.
• Disable salience in snippets and more text from the start of the page in them: This particular change updates Google system to generate snippets and keep it consistent with other major infrastructure improvements. It increases consistency in the overall snippet generation process. The later makes it far more likely Google will display text from the start of a page in snippets especially when that text happens to be particularly relevant.
• Smoother ranking changes for fresh search results. As Google explains, it wants to help people get the best and latest results, for searches with key new web content particular like news topics. The engine tries to promote content, which is apparently fresh. This change will apply a more granular classifier, resulting in more nuanced alterations in ranking on basis of freshness.

As part of spelling model refresh plus quality improvements, changes have been made in 27 languages.

Video content gets more professional

A case in point is Gotham Chopra, the son of renowned spirituality author Deepak Chopra. He is currently busy in a cramped studio In a ubiquitous industrial arena, just south of downtown Los Angeles, recording a series of short videos funded by YouTube – to guide viewers through certain more unlikely elements of the spiritual sciences like ability to recall things from past lives and exploring the trend of many people informing census takers Jedi as their religion. He acknowledges the fact that the show, slated to go live on the social site in July, would have struggled in finding a home offline and its concept would have been rejected straightaway.

More options for advertisers

Google has just made its first appearance during upfronts, the annual television industry ad sales ritual, highlighting progress made by YouTube. Its confident executives revealed that they had signed up filmmakers like Black Swan producer Jon Avnet, rapper Jay-Z, and actors like Rainn Wilson and Amy Poehler to create channels. There would be roughly 25 hours of new original content on the site each day, by the end of this July.

YouTube vice president & global head (content partnerships), Robert Kyncl, has been quoted as saying: People are definitely spending more and more time here. And if you’re an advertiser eager to reach people, this is just the right place to be.”

Web-exclusive content

Meanwhile, YouTube’s competitors are concentrating on Web-exclusive content in order to lure both the viewers and advertisers. They are eyeing the major studios. Netflix is already streaming ‘Lilyhammer’, its mob drama, apart from having new shows in the offing. It also got the rights to original episodes of ‘Arrested Development’, the cult TV hit.” On the other hand, Hulu is coming up with a faux-documentary sitcom, set in the realm of Wisconsin politics. Amazon Studios, Amazon.com-promoted creative development arm, recently stated it would back the best proposals for children’s and comedy programming.

More user friendly features

Aware of the stiff competition that it faces, YouTube is constatly fine tuning the technology to help users find relevant channels and videos through an enhanced Topics on Search to narrow search results, using most commonly-used phrases. It has further auto-generated entire channels of topics contained in the ‘Top YouTube Collections’ tab, offering uniquely-focused and constantly updated channels. Now, users will start seeing them more broadly available, like in ‘Recommended for You’ section of its channels page as well as on a video watch page.

As top video hosting and sharing sites jostle to attract advertisers, it’s a perfect situation for users and video makers to leverage for their own gains…

Thanks to them, users can get updated, precise, and in-depth inputs on a wide array of topics arranged across verticals like Places, Finance, Restaurants, Entertainment, Music, Movies, Television, Education, Games, Websites, Language, Politics, Health, Sports, and so on. You ask for it, and you’ll get it thanks to these new specialized search facilities! Wolfram Alpha, a mathematician’s brainchild, incorporates both data sets and computations used by Apple’s Siri, among many others.

The fast-booming online realm of Big Data, wherein literally unquantifiable amount of information gets scoured and segregated for individual and corporate consumption – something once thought to be unimaginable – has now become a reality. As we’ve followed in a previous post, corporate houses now feel the need for advanced technologies to manage online data conundrum – almost 2.7 zettabytes of it by the 2012 end, equating almost 700 billion DVDs. There is a definite demand for the vast databases to co-relate and interact.

Making data faster and simpler to follow

And this is where lies a great opportunity for data management and analysis resources to cash on. Their statisticians and researchers are incessantly collating, cleaning, and correcting every minor and major bit of data relevant to laypeople and specialists. No surprise, many experienced data specialists, especially those from search engine giant Google have given up their lucrative job postings to wrangle user-friendly information in newer, simpler ways.

A case in point is a former product manager at the company, David Friedberg, who has launched the Climate Corporation. The venture makes use of latest government data on soil porosity, weather, root structures of soybeans, wheat and other farm produce, to write crop insurance. Another start-up called ClearStory looks to bring big data technology is looking to tie together all these entities, often termed data marts, in a way laypeople can use.

Tapping consumer minds for business opportunities

The young company gathers and explores diverse, dispersed data sets from corporate data sources, Hadoop and the Web to help business users to gain insights and discover new business opportunities. There are also several open-source data repositories, with public and private information that developers plug into their algorithms. The company analyzes this vast amount of data, to uncover new trends and patterns. This can unearth exciting, new business opportunities and result in enhanced consumer intelligence.

Several niche players are exploring the arena of ‘self-driven big data exploration’ for data scientists, statisticians and masses in order to draw intuitive insights from sets of data gathered from multiple sources. There is absolutely no doubt about the fact that big data is now a major draw for investors and the enterprise alike.

A restaurant chain, for instance, might employ the intelligent search tool for figuring out whether a new site is ideal for business, whether it’s in vicinity of the competition, and how the local customers have responded to the place on a social ratings site like Yelp. Going a step further a quick check on gas stations near the location can help to work out how many potential customers come off the highway.

Change the search and data analysis spectrum

There are many niche services like Factual that are fast emerging on the scene, establishing themselves as powerful knowledge-driven data resources to change the whole dynamics of search. These specialized engines can seamlessly arrange ‘many billions of individual nuggets of data arranged across n a wide array of verticals such as Entertainment, Education, Health. Such search tools are essentially meant for a consumer-centric business of modern age.

Infochimps, for example, provides geographic as well a social data, among various other types. The platform acts as an end-to-end Big Data solution, backed by infrastructure and expertise. It claims to ingest data from the corporate user’s legacy databases, data feeds, data sourced from the web, or its own Data Marketplace – in an affordable and scalable way.

Leverage your BI

The tool makes it more useful with algorithm hosting plus in-stream data augmentation. Its powerful data system can host and manage database; ingest and deliver vast amounts of data even while undertaking complex, resource-intensive analytics. The aim is to unlock the potential of the Big Data that businesses already possess and of the even bigger, better data available on the vast Web as well as the Social world.

Underlining its features, a recent news report in the Wired.com, mentions: It’s targeting startups and smaller units within enterprises – those Big Data users sans a lot of reliable resources. It has on offer a more hands-on service for enterprises as platform-as-a-service or as on-premises system. The tool offers visual tools for connecting and controlling the pieces of the system.The company’s CTO, Flip Kromer, has been quoted as saying, “It’s your system diagram as if coming to life.

According to Mr. Gilad Elbaz, he and his research team, feel that it makes perfect sense to fine tune data, however, trivial it may seem. Revealing the true and precise facts of the world to each user is the mission of a lifetime. He has been quoted as saying: ”Lately, I have been thinking that there is need to get a bit more personal data (not necessarily names and addresses of people, rather their genetic information, and things like what they ate, where and when they exercised etc – ideally, for each person on the earth, now and forever). I want to figure out a way, to get people to leave their data to science”

Measuring the impact of social campaigns

Still, the research agency states not all types of ads are that easy to measure right to the purchase. According to it, the tough part is to get that level of precise detail from car ads, high-end clothing and luxury goods since such purchases are not regularly made and different emotional aspects often play into those purchase calls. Some top advertisers have done research that indicates campaigns on social network have pushed their sales up.

Ford, Kia and Facebook ads’ effectiveness

Ford Motor noted shopping activity almost doubled for the Explorer by using Facebook ads versus the average shopping lift of mere 14% after Super Bowl ads while marketing the 2011 Explorer. According to a Ford spokesperson, over 20% of their digital media spend is exclusively on Facebook, citing friends and family recommendations as the most trusted source for consumers.

Facebook does serve as a reliable and cost-effective platform for leveraging that insight at scale. However, it is not always easy for brand managers to measure intrinsic value of the social networking site against other traditional forms of advertising whose results are tangible and measurable.

Some brands claim to have figured out certain ways for overcome Facebook’s value measurement limitations. There are ad companies such as Buddy Media that can provide advertisers with a deeper and more insightful understanding of how the site’s promotions work, or install applications that offer them the ability of tracking users by letting people opt in to cookies.

Social presence can work wonders

Meanwhile, brands like Kia are working with the social site to put in place parameters for better measurement of its ads’ effectiveness, though the company has not specified about ad spending figures. As of now, just being there on Facebook sends a loud and clear message to consumers, is what really matters to businesses, keen to leverage its reach and power.

As a whole, even for world’s best businesses, social media platforms like Facebook is something critical in terms of brand building, though measurement hurdles are still there. However, brands are not accounting for their dollars spent on Facebook ads in a rigid manner, leaving scope for intangible benefits like user goodwill and engagement that leads to a positive buzz, albeit perhaps not higher conversion rates that they would have wished for…

Essentially, they provide webmasters with the ability to help the engine highlight key aspects of their pages. Whether the page consists of product/services details, events or apps, some basic additions to the markup can lead to better engagement with site content, thus more traffic to it and potentially increased conversions. For them to surface on a site, rich snippet markup needs to be implemented on the pages and then to be thoroughly tested with the rich snippets testing tool just to make sure it’s correct. However, it may take a few weeks for Google engine to crawl your site.

Picking up a markup format

If you’ve marked up the content for rich snippets, but they fail to show up in search results, you may check if your markup follows Google usage guidelines. There are specific usage guidelines, and your markup must follow them guidelines, while using rich snippets for events, products, reviews,  recipes etc. For example, while making use of review markup, the core topic of that page should be about one particular product/ service. Using review markup on a page that is comprised of multiple products is usually not supported.

Also check for correctness of your markup and whether the marked-up content is representative of content on that page. Your markup should also include proper nesting. Your markup should match the broad requirements for each of the content types. Crosscheck for any missing tags or attributes, and verify that the information is in the proper format. microformats, microdata, or RDFa can be used to mark up the content, albeit pick one markup standard format across the page.

Google recommends usage of microdata, though any of the above three mentioned formats are acceptable. The HTML5 microdata specification is a basic way of labeling content to denote a specific data type like reviews or events. Each type of information describes a peculiar item. For instance, an event will have the properties venue, category, starting time etc. Microdata employs simple attributes in HTML tags (often <div> or <span>) for assigning brief/ descriptive names to items/ properties.

On the other hand, microformats are entities (simple conventions) used on pages for describing a particular type of information. Each entity will have its own properties. Generally, they make use of the class attribute in HTML tags (often <span> or <div>), whereas RDFa use simple attributes in XHTML tags.

Also, utilize the right property names. For instance, the appropriate RDFa property name to mark the number of reviews is count. In case the number of reviews is marked up using a property labeled reviewCount, no preview would get generated. The rich snippets testing tool as part of Google Webmaster Tools helps in verifying the markup.

Rich snippets- a form of structured content including business listings, reviews, product details, management profile (key staff personnel, their role and job title), upcoming events etc– are aimed at providing more pertinent information about the particular page in response to a user query.  In other words, they help people recognize sites/ pages relevant to their interest and needs regarding data, resulting in more clicks to informative pages.

They are beneficial in terms of enhancing click-through rates significantly and reduce the amount of bounces. Google has unveiled many in the past for shopping, reviews, video, events, recipes, and music. It is also possible to view application snippets from a number of marketplaces as well as review sites like Android Market, CNET, Apple iTunes etc. It’s equally easy and convenient to add app markup on a site.

Actually incorporated at site level itself, rich snippets let webmasters label key parts of the business, product or service related information. Each labeled part of text represents a specific thing. For example, About Us page of a site can be marked up for each key part such as address, contact details, feedback form etc using rich snippets, whereas snippets for product categories can be based on brands, models and brief descriptions and offer details. Here are a few things to keep in mind while using rich snippets, as elaborated by Google:

• Generally speaking, Google won’t show any content in rich snippets, which is not visible to a normal user. It would be quite tempting to add all of the content pertinent to a rich snippet in one single place on the page, then mark it up, and hide the whole block of text with techniques such as display:none, value-title and css. However, it is advisable not to do so! Google will invariably ignore content invisible to human users, so a wise idea would be to mark up the text visitors will see on your pages.
• Ensure your marked-up content is representative of the main content of the page and not anything else. Google needs certain data to generate a rich snippet preview for each product type. For example, a Review without a reviewer or a Review-aggregate without a count will not generate a preview. Some items can incorporate other sub-items. In a case like this, you can convey the relationship between these types of data by nesting Person information (reviewer details) and Organization information (address details) inside that review.

Microdata properties can also be used to mark up the name and address (and other elements like street name zip code) details, which can be important for brand managers planning to host a business event or for specifying the location of a branch/ store in Local Search. Correctly used event properties can boost clickthrough rates and ensure success of an event.

• Market research firm eMarketer mentions of a new study showing that more than 84 percent of executives recently polled attribute the effectiveness of sales & marketing efforts to social media campaigns. On the other hand, 81 percent feel that an active social media presence had helped them achieve an increased market share, underlining that companies should employ the avenues to create spaces for both existing and prospective consumers for meaningful conversations with key stakeholders.
• Yet it also notes of the fact that no one can conclusively define the impact into a quantifiable ROI for brands. But a focused social engagement activity is always preferable to little or no presence on the networking sites, if one goes by what the executives believe, emphasizing on a comprehensive social media strategy despite tangible measurement hurdles.
• Almost 70 percent of the respondents talk of a spike in their sales because of customers having a greater say on social media sites, even if some of it might be negative. Such kind of interactive approach builds credibility and trust with consumers, transforming them into potential brand advocates with immense value.
• In spite of these positive possibilities, assessment of the social media campaigns in terms of effectiveness remains largely subjective in nature. According to nearly half of the executives surveyed, one of the major impediments to an extensive social media campaign was apparent lack of standardized metric to measure tangible returns on advertising spend allocated for it.
• While taking into the number of followers and total Facebook ‘likes’ does provide marketers with a concrete number, not many can yet fathom how those numbers are to be translated into a quantifiable ROI for brands. Thankfully, an increasing number of executives are improvements in marketing and sales efforts, and market share gains as a result of well-planned campaigns.
• Even as executives align a well-planned social campaign with marked improvements in marketing & sales efforts, and to an extent, market share gains, the prospects also consider it to be an important yardstick of a company’s responsiveness. Almost 77 percent respondents of BRANDfog survey indicated that they were much more likely to buy from those brands whose CEOs actively uses social sites to define their company values as well as to amplify leadership principles.
• The CEO of BRANDfog, Ann Charles, was quoted as saying: “We’re now well at a tipping point, wherein business leaders must start communicating their vision through social media. As more and more consumers look to seek out brands, which serve a broader social purpose, the best way of articulating company values is through the executive leadership team’s voice. This will  bolster confidence in business leadership and provide a halo effect for the brand.”
• Interestingly, according to a separate study done by Accenture regarding social media usage among B2B marketers, close to 30 percent of respondents pointed out that they would seek increased CEO conviction for making social media initiatives more effective. The CMO Council survey respondents revealed that speed of adoption when it comes to new web technologies by top-level executives was still a challenge.

According to the Gartner Research Director, Nikos Drakos, social business is not any longer for early adopters alone; it’s fast emerging as a mainstream phenomenon. The market is rapidly evolving, which calls for powerful solutions for real business problems. It offers an effortless and effective collaboration experience by seamlessly merging into day-to-day workflows.

Yammer, one of the popular enterprise social networks boasts of around 4 million users. It raised $85 million of funds in a round including Charles River Ventures, DFJ Growth, and Founders Fund among others. It has secured $142 million from VCs so far. An official note on the site mentions:

“Yammer brings the power of social networking to the enterprise in a private and secure environment. It’s as easy to use as great consumer software like Facebook and Twitter, but designed for business collaboration. Connect people, content, and conversations across all of your business applications with productivity software that employees love to use.”

UserVoice integration with Yammer

• Meanwhile UserVoice, a customer service solution online, has gone in for new technology integration with Yammer.
• It pushes feedback gathered from customers or employees in UserVoice into the Yammer Ticker directly as part of a real-time activity stream.
• Yammer has also opted for several enhancements to its ESN software, comprising updates in aspects like search, groups and mobile, apart from expanded integration with certain third-party products (for example, the Microsoft Dynamics enterprise applications).
• An updated Universal Search feature lets users sift through Yammer content from within pre-integrated 3rd party software like SAP, Salesforce.com, and Microsoft SharePoint.

But Yammer is not the lone dominant player in the domain! Another popular enterprise social network, Jive Software, which was listed in December, claims a user base of 17 million. Jive also claims to be among the first to fuse the innovation of the new-edge consumer web with the enterprise domain by breaking down the barriers that separate employees, partners, and customers.

Jive claims to extend social business capabilities

It has recently unveiled its ‘next-generation’ interface, incorporating many new business-friendly features and introducing a new, cutting-edge social business technology. The new Jive Software platform is available immediately in the cloud. A user can access multiple Twitter accounts as well as Facebook, including specific company-owned fan pages with Jive Software that spans the whole Social Business Software implementations life-cycle.

Jive Anywhere extends social business capabilities to the web at large, letting business owners easily access social functions from any site or web application. Another feature enables users to invoke business-friendly applications and seamlessly merge them into the social business workflow.