Kati McGee

Revamping Google’s Search Engine

When Google launched Google+, one of the internal benefits of the social network was Google’s ability to ruthlessly promote the service through their search engine and other public offerings. Try visiting gmail.com - you’ll see your Google+ profile link in the upper left-hand corner. 

This incredible product promotion has been beneficial for Google thus far, but on January 10th the company decided to take things a step too far, and integrated Google+ search results within their search engine. This is the ideal situation for the company - utilizing their most popular tool to promote their products, and surface search results that eventually lead users back to their Google+ space. But for other social networks that were at the top of the search engine before this change, this means that Google search has become the bully on the school playground, and has stopped showing results that may be more relevant for the user. 

Over the weekend, a team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace hacked together a bookmarklet that helps make Google search more beneficial for the end user. Instead of only showing the Google+ profiles attached to the search query (as seen in the left hand side of the photo shown above), the bookmarklet automatically “googles Google” to see if the search engine can find a more relevant result than the initial Google+ offerings. 

Let’s say you try searching “movies” through Google and Hugh Jackman appears based on his ties to the entertainment industry. Currently, Google will only show Google+ pages and individuals on the right hand side of the screen. What the bookmarklet does to change this is to show all social media offerings - the most relevant offering is given the premiere space (such as highlighting Hugh Jackman’s twitter account), while links for other social sites are included below. This is a much more comprehensive search result, and in my opinion, much better for the overall user experience. 

It’s important to note that all information in the bookmarklet comes from Google itself, and all of the ranking decisions are made by Google’s own algorithms. With that in mind, why isn’t the search engine displaying these results immediately? I think that’s something Google needs to start thinking about, as well.

I read a fantastic piece on Obama’s new forays into campaign technology this morning, featured on Bloomberg Businessweek. 

The piece featured a close examination upon many of Obama 2012’s recent hires, including software engineer Will St. Clair, and former Threadless CTO Harper Reed. What the engineers are working on is simply dubbed “microlistening,” a method of leveraging technology to finely target potential voters and connect more consistently and creatively with the overall voting pool.

One of the things that most stood out for me was the spring recruiting posting for “quantitative analysts.” The article quotes the post by describing the job opportunity, and corresponding department as “The Obama for America analytics department analyzes the campaign’s data to guide election strategy and develop quantitative, actionable insights that drive our decision-making.” 

In my opinion, the Obama teams knows this race is going to be an extremely tight one, dependent upon reaching a large number of voters in the most effective and streamlined manner. What they are doing now, developing technology in house to better analyze and penetrate the voter pool more directly, is going to place the Obama for America team far, far ahead of any Republican campaign at this point.

If Republicans want to catch up, they need to begin developing their own technological strategy - and so far, most of their efforts have been spent playing chicken amongst each other rather then look ahead to developing tools and practices that will be necessary to compete against Obama for America. 

According to TechCrunch, Turntable.fm is about to rock the smartphone world.

Quite possibly my favorite music-sharing service at the moment, Turntable.fm is also one of the fastest growing betas that exists, hitting 140,000 active users in one month (June). The popular website essentially combines three big players: music-streaming, chat, and voting to create the internet DJ trifecta — giving users the opportunity to jump on stage and rock the crowd, or get booted if others don’t like the music they are sharing.

With that in mind, it comes as no surprise that Turntable would want to jump on the iPhone bandwagon, and scoop up some new users in the smartphone world. According to MG Siegler, TechCrunch has been “told that the company is hoping to release the app next week.” Take a look at the photo above… the whole release looks very polished and clean, a great replication of the original service. The one image I wish I could see? How you manage your current track list. It looks like that is the one screenshot missing from the collection.

However the Turntable.fm app scoop wasn’t as polished. According to Turntable’s Billy Chasen, TechCrunch scooped themselves with the publication of this article, as the company was planning to save the iPhone app and subsequent images as a surprise for TC Disrupt next week. 

You win some, you lose some TC! 

brit:

Checking out the newly launched (3 hours ago) Daily Dot, a “hometown newspaper of the World Wide Web”. Here’s what they say on their site:

The Daily Dot gives a voice to the Web’s communities. We report on the most important and relevant topics from within, applying tried-and-true principles drawn from community journalism to the growing cultures of the Internet, and allow our audience to read the Dot across multiple platforms, where they live, online.

Sounds interesting. From a design perspective, it looks pretty Huffington Post-sy. Time will only tell if their content is actually interesting and relevant to users. The jury is also still out on whether it could SAVE or ADD a lot of hours looking at random Internet sites throughout the day.

My overall conclusion is that, at least for me, this site isn’t all the way there yet, but is a good concept with definite “cool” potential. What do you think?

(Source: brit)