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We need ambient findability. We need smart ways of guiding people towards the content they’d like to see — with categorization and search playing complementary goals.Getting people to the content they want to see, using the search functionality your average newspaper website has on offer, is not exactly what I’d describe as fast or effortless. Full-text search can be a daunting experience. We need some sort of a sitemap that acts as a gateway to our content and is broader than our primary navigation.We need deep links to the topics that are currently on people’s mind and that are being talked about.How neat would it be if we could also browse by mood or by genre?We need quick links to topic pages about related persons, organizations, events and locations.We need links to terms on Wikipedia (e.g. using Apture) or the ability to look things up in a dictionary (like the one they have over at the New York Times)Related content should be referred to either using tags or if you’re really hip, using relationships. Search behavior doesn’t always revolve around a big input box and a submit button.Faceted search needs facets: ways of splitting up search results into meaningful categories. Rich metadata and a well thought-out categorization scheme is a prequisite.Online search should work similarly to asking a question to a flesh-and-blood reporter

Today, Google announced a change to its search algorithm that the company says will impact 35% of Web searches. The change builds on top of its previous “Caffeine” update in order to deliver more up-to-date and relevant search results, specifically those in areas where freshness matters. This includes things like recent events, hot topics, current reviews and breaking news items. Google says that the new algorithm knows that different types of searches have different freshness needs, and weighs them accordingly. For example, a search for a favorite recipe posted a few years ago may still be popular enough to rank highly, but searches for an unfolding news story or the latest review of the iPhone 4S should bring the newer, fresher content first, followed by older results.

In the past 20 years, a lot of research has been done towards visual information retrieval on pictures and video files. Not all of it has been successful. But on the last years, the quality of these visual search engines has reached levels that are beginning to be acceptable for eDiscovery, compliance, law enforcement and intelligence applications.

More and more electronically stored information (ESI) is non-text based or does not contain any searchable text components: sound recordings, video and pictures are growing exponentially in size and more and more collaborative and social network applications support (only) these information formats.

In addition, a whole generation is growing up that no longer uses written communication forms such as letters or emails: they only use social networks and other new media forms for communication and collaboration.

What Ellerdale is now doing with Twitter’s 50 million tweets per day is definitely interesting - the service uses an intelligent data-parsing engine to analyze the context of tweets and the links they contain and combines that with other data sources like RSS feeds and Wikipedia to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker that provides more than just a list of tweets - it provides an understanding of the world’s conversations.The best part about all these new partnerships is that we’re about to see an entirely new way to search the web emerge. For quick real-time results, there will always be the major search engines and their more basic lists of tweets, but for true data analysis, we now have incredible new options like Ellendale and all the others.Within each category are conversation topics and sub-topics.any topical page on Ellendale returns an incredible amount of data. There are summaries provided from sources like Wikipedia, Freebase (an online semantic database),

In New York, at the Mobile Marketing Association forum, Google presented sponsored research on global smartphone user and marketer behavior. The data come from two related studies. The first is an “an online survey of thousands of mobile consumers in 30 countries.” The second is based on “a telephone survey of 1,000 marketing decision makers,” with a focus on US, UK, Germany, France and Japan.

More than Half of Smartphone Users Online Daily In the US smartphone penetration stands at about 36 percent according to the most recent Nielsen data. In Western Europe, on a percentage basis, the numbers are higher in several countries. The Google research showed that increasingly smartphone users go online daily and that many are on the mobile internet multiple times a day: US — 58 percent (online) 53 percent (multiple times) UK — 55 percent (online) 49 percent (multiple times) France — 59 percent (online) 47 percent (multiple times) Germany — 45 percent (online) 42 percent (multiple times) Japan — 78 percent (online) 68 percent (multiple times)

Almost All Local Info Seekers Take Action Here’s what the data showed about local-mobile information seekers and then the percentage who have “taken action” after a local search/lookup: US — 90 percent (search/lookup) 87 percent (took action) UK — 81 percent (search/lookup) 80 percent (took action) France — 83 percent (search/lookup) 83 percent (took action) Germany — 85 percent (search/lookup) 79 percent (took action) Japan — 90 percent (search/lookup) 80 percent (took action)

YaCy has no web portal like that of traditional search engines, instead it relies on users to download a peer-to-peer software client, which crawls the web from users’ computers, and indexes sites they visit.

Instead, each user gets to make these decisions locally. The portal at search.yacy.net is just a limited demonstration. To get the full experience, you have to install YaCy locally (this usually takes no more than a minute). Then your computer will be part of the YaCy network, and you will be able to draw on the whole network for search results.

At FSFE, we find YaCy highly interesting because it’s part of a trend to replace centralised systems with distributed ones. We have Diaspora and other distributed social networks as an alternative to Facebook. We have identi.ca and its status.net platform as an alternative to Twitter, which users can install and run on their own servers. YaCy is one of less than a handful (to my knowledge) of distributed search engines.

IT has been said that Google knows more about what you like than your own partnerNow the search giant has given a glimpse on just how much information it has collected - and who thinks you are.But it seems the famed Google algorithms are far from infallible.

And people taking advantage of the facility that allows the public to view what kind of consumer Google thinks they are have been amused to find themselves listed with the wrong age and even sex.Nevertheless, the knowledge that Google works so hard to profile its 350m account holders is bound to intensify the debate about privacy which flared up again this week with the announcement that the company was going to start tracking users across all of its sites, including YouTube.

The detailed personal 'profile' sums up many of a user's interests, along with age and gender.Google builds a detailed profile by harvesting the history of its account holders' visits to sites in its advertising network.But your age and gender are decided by those of other Google users who have visited the sites you visit, leading to the mistakes

Google’s official Android Market is not available in China, leading to a plethora of independent markets – over 70 at last count. The system works – sort of – but users may find it annoying because you actually don’t know how to find the good stuff. China is still lacking any sort of innovative search mechanism to help people identify the apps they really need in daily life.

Discovering the apps should not be boring, and the core value of Qiuqiu is to bring the pleasure of discovering apps during different activities. Qiuqiu’s app search engine is unique because it offers results based on your location, the time of day, and the things you like and do. Each scenario is expressed by a series of apps – education apps for the school day and travel apps for your vacation. It’s a compelling and interesting change from the traditional “editor’s choice” and selected apps lists found in many markets.

Qiuqiu, the new app discovery engine is developed by AppChina, one of the leading third party Android markets. The founders are a group of very experienced senior engineers and product managers from STC Bing search technology centre and graduates from Tsinghua, Beijing and Fudan Universities. Being successful in the Android market, as Luo Chuan, the co-founder of AppChina, formerly CEO of MySpace China, said, means suppling the right apps at the right time. AppChina is moving forward to the field of search engine and data mining and try to develop a new way of discovering Android apps most suitable for you.

It’s a good question: archiving all of Twitter - can any sense be made of it when the context has passed?

Hence the decision by the Library of Congress last week to store the complete archives of Twitter. Starting six months from now, every last tweet—currently produced at a rate of 50 million a day—will be saved on an LoC hard drive and will presumably be accessible to historians for … well, forever.

But the decision to archive Twitter takes digital preservation to a new level of detail. In the past, all archives, even digital ones, had to be selective.

Sparks are a very simple taxonomy right now, but do have persistent URIs, which you can find by hovering over a Spark and looking in the left of the status bar at the bottom of your screen.

This warrants more dissecting and attention. Will they eventually use all or some of the hierarchy of Google Directory? Will they become hierarchical? Will the algorithm improve as we click on links that interest us? Can we add our own information? Are we creating new entities for Google as we search for and add Sparks to our items of interest – it seems that way. It’s not an ontology yet, but it’s a start. Lots of people creating persistent URIs for entities they’ve dreamed up – I hear that evil cackle again!

Google, by nature of its founding, is in a prime position to address the challenges that many enterprise technologists have when thinking about semantic data – how do we handle unstructured data? We have metadata: in schema, in taxonomies, in ontologies even. We have loads of content. With no metadata. How do we get them together? We can’t afford to hire a small army of indexers to apply the metadata to the content. The system metadata is insufficient and poor. We have a pretty good search tool, and have put some effort into data dictionaries, entity extraction and rules-based classification. We have tools that do latent semantic indexing and latent semantic analysis.  Make sense of unstructured information? Sure, Google can do that. Hopefully they will not reduce efforts in these areas too much to focus on other projects. Many of us can execute a search and return nothing useful; crowdsourcing tagging in G+ may re-vitalize  components of the search algorithm.

Google CEO Larry Page trotted out an impressive statistic during last week's quarterly earnings call: Google+ now has 90 million users, double what it had three months ago. Even better, 60 percent of those users are engaged daily, and 80 percent weekly.

But those users aren't necessarily engaging with Google+. Any action taken during a logged-in Google session—whether it be searching the Internet, checking Gmail or using Google Docs—counts as engagement under the statistic Page used. Google has refused requests from journalists and interested bystanders to reveal exactly what percentage of those 90 million signed-up Google+ users actually view Plus content each day, week or month. Instead, Google is arguing that it doesn't matter: Google+ is so integrated into the overall experience that what matters is the number of users interacting with any Google site. Combined with other steps Google has taken to integrate Plus into search results and other Google properties, the message is clear: Eventually, Google Plus will just be there whether you want it to or not.

On Friday, the Google Operating System blog (not affiliated with Google) wrote a post titled "New Google Accounts Require Gmail and Google+." While this isn't strictly true, the blog demonstrates how Google is making it difficult for new users not to sign up for Google+.

In the fast-moving world of Internet innovation, the search for the winning combination of strategies often means companies are continually rolling out features to match their competitors.Take local deals, territory that Chicago-based Groupon claimed with its launch more than two years ago. Google, Facebook, Yelp, OpenTable and a host of other Web-based companies have introduced their versions of discount offers since then. And many of these players have started allowing users to "check in" to local businesses on their mobile phones, a concept popularized by Foursquare and other location-based services.This ongoing flurry of activity is underpinned by a common desire to conquer three important categories of growth for consumer-oriented Internet companies: mobile, social and local commerce. The race to find the right mix is crucial for capturing revenues and the loyalty of consumers whose sources for information and entertainment are becoming increasingly fragmented.

"A mobile and social Web, both on the advertising side and e-commerce side, is going to be more highly monetizable," said Mendez, whose private-equity firm focuses on privately held companies such as Facebook. "It's more likely to turn eyeballs and visitors into transactions and dollars spent."Companies are building on the three pillars of mobile, social and local commerce in different ways, focusing on core strengths before adding other capabilities.

Groupon, for example, built its business model on the idea of social plus local commerce, creating a group-buying platform as a new form of local online advertising. Last week, it launched a mobile application called Groupon Now that delivers deals to consumers based on their location.

Looks like Cingular will work with Chase, Visa, Nokia, Philips and a host of other bigshots to test next-gen NFC (near-field communication services, ala FeliCa) for cellphones at Philips Arena in Atlanta. The main benefit of near-field technology is the ability to use a cellphone to pay for products; just wave your phone in the general direction of a point-of-sale terminal at the Arena, and you can buy your hot dogs and brew without missing half of the game. The test will be open to Atlanta Hawks season-ticket owners, who will also have to have Chase Visa accounts (Mastercarders might find this old hat) and be willing to use Nokia 3220 phones modded with an NFC chip. We hope that Cingular and Nokia are at least giving the passholders the phones. It's bad enough being a Hawks fan — these dudes should get something more for their loyalty than an offer that requires them to ante up another $150.

The unthinkable has happened: Twitter has decided to make money. Longtime users of the microblogging service, which for years has operated without a viable business model, are anguished at the prospect of paid ads appearing among their tweets. But advertising is just the tip of the iceberg. Twitter’s vast and ever-growing data store will be the true profit center, say company execs — both for Twitter and for independent developers.Exactly to what extent Twitter plans to make its data available to outside parties remains unclear, but the company’s APIs are already accessible for developers to access its services, and last October it signed deals with Google and Microsoft to allow tweets to appear alongside search results. Now Twitter is reportedly developing “analytical products” aimed at marketers who want to mine the Twittersphere for insight into public opinion about companies, products, and brands — and it’s encouraging others to do the same.Read more at infoworld.com