The Google Experience During The Super Bowl

Google just ran a Super Bowl ad, something Eric Schmidt said in a tweet yesterday means that Hell has frozen over. Regardless of the current atmospheric conditions in the underworld, one of the more subtle things about the Google ad that caught my attention was a mention in the Google blog that, “our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact.”
Google and its proponents have always made a point of emphasizing the user experience of search – that’s why the Google start page isn’t covered in widgets [...]

Undecided about Bing: The Decision Engine

Okay, I admit it. Bing is starting to show some glimmering signs of promise. But I still have concerns. Big concerns.
I had the chance to chat with Stefan Weitz recently about where Microsoft wanted to take Bing and it’s hard not to get swept up in Stefan’s evangelism. Microsoft is trying to do some very impressive things with search: parse the ambiguity out of our language, stitch together disparate fragments of content into a whole that’s useful to the user and present all this in a results format that informs and assists without requiring extensive tweaking on the part of [...]

Google and Social Search

Yesterday, I blogged about a great webinar in my post B2B Social Best Practices in the Marketing Cloud, where the discussion centered saround B2B companies and social media strategies.  Everyone keeps saying that 2010 is the year for social.  The fact is that some organizations have been developing social strategies for years.  Social is not new, but it is a hot topic for many B2B companies as they are shuffling budget over to develop social strategies.�
Yesterday, Google also rolled out something that they first mentioned back in Octrober and that is Google Social Search.  The reasoning behind this?  Well Google understands that [...]

The World’s Intentions at our Fingertips

We’ve made Google a verb. What does that mean? Well, for one thing, it means we have a better indication of prospect intent than ever before. Google (or any search engine) becomes the connector between our intent and relevant online destinations. John Battelle called Google the Database of Intentions and predicted that it would become hugely important. Battelle’s call was right on the money, but we still haven’t felt the full import of it. Our tapping into our zeitgeist (defined as the general intellectual, moral and cultural climate of an era) is usually restricted to a facetious review of the [...]

How Google Became a Verb

It’s probably because I’m just finishing a book (The Stuff of Thought) by famed linguist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, but grammar has been on my mind more than usual lately. And in particular, I was fascinated by how we use Google in our language. Google, of course, has been “genericided” – the fate that falls on brands that lose their status as a protected brand name and become a generic term in our vocabulary. This causes much chagrin with Google’s legal and marketing team. What is more interesting however is the way we’ve taken Google into our lexicon.
Of [...]

Google Busy Changing the World Again… or at least their Results Pages

To say Google has been busy would be an understatement – there’s been over 30 new search innovations since October. Keeping itself on pace, today Google announced the launch of real-time search, an innovation we know has been coming for a while now as Google tries to compete with the freshness of Twitter content. The new real-time search function, called “latest results”, incorporates feeds from news, blogs, FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace. It shows up in the Google search results page similarly to how news, blog, images or video results are currently displayed. Here’s a screenshot:

The latest results scroll along [...]

Google’s Second Coming of Personalization of Search

On Friday, Google announced that they are rolling out personalization to all.  Personalization, aka personalized search results, means that the results that you receive will be based on your searching habits as Google will be customizing the search results based on six months of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser.  Personalization of search is meant to provide a richer, more relevant search experience.  This “customization” includes searches you’ve done and results you’ve clicked.
Previously when Google launched personalization back in 2007, it only impacted users who were signed into their Google (iGoogle) account.  In addition, they needed [...]

What to Expect at Next Week’s B2B Expert Series: Face-to-Face

The Enquiro team is getting geared up for next Thursday’s marketer event in Northern California. Attendees to these events include fellow marketers from companies like Cisco, 3M, SAP, YouSendIt, MarketingProfs, and Symantec. The atmosphere is informal and the discussions in-depth.
We have a total of 7 speakers joining us for the half-day event. Graham Mudd, comScore’s VP of Search and Media will be arriving from SES Chicago to deliver the opening keynote. Gord Hotchkiss, Enquiro’s CEO, is currently moderating the Search Insider Summit in Park City, Utah. He will join us to present B2B buying research and show us highlights [...]

Duplicate Content: Myths, Mayhem and Making Sense of it All

When you are a company that is trying to organize the world’s information (Read: Google), relevancy and duplication are big concerns.  With all due respect to Google’s advertising platform, Google is in the business of Search and all about providing the world’s informaiton to those in search of it.  Google’s mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.  If you have been in the Search industry for some time, you will of no doubt heard the proverbial “content is king” statement.  A bit of a more accurate statement might read “unique content is king”.
Some of you [...]

Google Caffeine and Blended Search

Internet speed is fast and online users such as the millions of digital natives out there are requiring Internet speed to find he information they are looking for, to communicate with their online peers and to simply examine everything that is important to them in cyber space. Google realizes this and as a result knows that they cannot simply return their traditional SERP.