Welcome news – LinkedIn’s New Search Aims For More Engagement With Autocomplete, Unified Results And Improved Alerts in TechCrunch.
… one of the first big overhauls that the search function has had in years, with new features including improved autocomplete and suggested phrasing by way of a new algorithm; unified searches across different product categories; and an improved ability to save searches.
Google’s rejection of RSS (closing Google Reader and the RSS extension for Chrome) may drive some users to Twitter. Mathew Ingram calls The Death of Google Reader Is a Social News Win (Bloomberg Businessweek, Mar 15).
Ingram switched to Twitter some time ago, building Twitter lists into topics, and enjoying the social side, specifically the insights into who tweeted and retweeted.
So it’s not just that Twitter is good at delivering real-time news—when it is, in my experience, as good or better than an RSS reader. It is also particularly good at attaching meaning to that news, by the combination of people who tweet or retweet a link or a piece of information. That does as much to help me appreciate the significance of a story as a single post or scoop, and likely more.
He mentioned Prismatic (http://getprismatic.com/) as a tool for news streams and recommendations. This April 3 2012 New York Times blog posting – Prismatic Hopes to Create a New Category of Social News — describes it as “a new social news discovery site, [that] hopes to help by allowing people to delve into topics, through algorithms that read the content being shared on social media.”
Rash of news about Facebook’s changes to the news feeds to make content specific feeds possible. Good.
News Feed’s design finally catches up with Timeline, VentureBeat (Mar 7) – described the before situation.
As founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg just announced at his company’s headquarters this morning, he wants Facebook’s News Feed to be each user’s “best personalized newspaper you can have” with social and local updates on a variety of topics.
We’ll be able to define the kind of feed.
An “all friends” feed to give you a full firehose of updates. It also has a “following” feed to show only branded content from news organizations and companies you’re following — a much-requested feature from people. The “music” feed shows music-related sharing and activity, plus photos or updates from musicians’ Pages. And the “photos” feed shows off the visual side of your network.
Facebook Launches Feeds For Photos, Music, Friends-Only, And More by Josh Constine, Techcrunch (Mar 7) has a video to prepare us for when the rollout arrives.
Marc Sullivan at PCWorld prepared this guide to the new navigation – Hands on with Facebook’s new News Feed
Nathan Safran sees a very social future for search engines in his article, The Search Engine We REALLY Want To See Google (Or Microsoft) Build (Search Engine Land Mar 7).
He notes that search engines haven’t changed much in the last few years except that Google added Knowledge Graph. Generally, I would say Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo have more semantic smarts – and we know there is a movement toward social. For the future, he sees (or hopes for) increased capabilities in social sentiment, social discussions, email search integration, and user interface.
He also comments on Bing’s failure to increase marketshare – mainly that there’s no compelling reason at this time to shift from Google.
Startling article in FastCompany that reveals Google’s strategies for dominance through social strength and local connections.
The Future Of Google Plus, And Its Path To Social-Media Domination (by Dave Llorens, Feb 11)
“Scoff all you want, but these compelling, just-catching-on product rollouts and integrations will make Google win the battle for hearts, minds, and active users.”
Discussed: Google Plus, Zagat for restaurant reviews, local businesses and maps, Google Hangouts with voice and video and ties to GMail, Google Communities absorbing Google Groups, and then there are Google Glasses (aka Goggles). This is no longer science fiction.
Postscript: from the SPB.gov for US small businesses — 4 Ways to Use Google Hangouts in Your Business (Feb 13)
Another prediction about search and social coming together — How Search & Social Will Hit The Fast Forward Button In 2013 by Jim Yu, Search Engine Land (Feb 12)
This was written for SEO folks, but searchers can learn.
At Bing you can tag pages as being related to you or your friends – do this at Bing Tags – then those tagged pages show up in Facebook timelines. Barry Schwartz described it in Bing Linked Pages Now Called Bing Tags (Dec 21, 2012). Bing has said that these tags can be public – though this depends on your privacy settings. Danny Sullivan describes all the pieces involved in this tagging process –
Bing Tags Expands, Makes Pages Linked To Your Profile Public (Jan 22). You may conclude as I have that this is far too much bother and will probably flop.
Facebook Graph Search Is A Disruptive Minefield Of Unintended Consequences
by Anthony Wing Kosner, Forbes (Jan 20, 2013)
This is a thorough and skeptical examination of Facebook’s Graph Search – it may alarm people by what it exposes more than attract. Facebook’s search will not be a threat to Google – Facebook is socially personalized and Google is “contextually” personalized.
Kosner makes a perceptive distinction between Facebook and Twitter.
My Facebook friends are people I actually know. I don’t necessarily agree with (or care about) their taste in music or food or technology, but I have an affection for them that I want to maintain. On Twitter, on the other hand, I follow people who are into all of the kinds of things that I like to write about. Very few of the 374 people that I follow do I actually know in person, but that’s not the point. I consider them my “content friends.” We’re into the same stuff. They tip me off about new things way before they appear on Mashable. It’s like mainlining pure, early adopter tech intelligence. So when I use sites that filter or curate the content I see, I’m much more likely to use my Twitter account as the starting point.
Phil Bradley, writing as an information professional, finds much to value and exploit in Facebook’s new Graph Search. Facebook has started with places, people, and photographs – mainly friends – but eventually it will be a way to be found and to find others.
So – the library needs to have a Facebook presence; it’s becoming vital. However, that’s only stage number one. Stage two is that library and other professional staff also need to be on Facebook, so that they can be found. For example – I have an interest in American History (the Civil War to be precise) and if I’m going to the States to speak at a conference, I’m going to be keen to see if I can pop in some visits to places that will interest me about the Civil War. Yes, of course I can do a general search and get some stuff, but that’s still very clinical. However – if I can see who is going to the conference, and they’re friends of mine, I can use Graph Search to find out if any of their friends are into the same interests, or work at a useful library and maybe I can get an introduction to hook up to an expert quickly. Because of the friendship element, I suspect that I’ll have a much richer experience than if I just wander into the local museum or library.
Valuable read – Why the new Facebook Graph Search is important for librarians by Phil Bradley (Jan 17)
I’d like to know how many people are comfortable in linking Bing to their social networks. However, for those who are, they will now see more in that third panel on the far right (really need a 24 inch monitor).
Bing Adds 5x More Facebook Content to its Search Results by Pamela Vaughan, HubSpot’s Internet Marketing Blog (Jan 18)
“In addition to the Facebook results Bing was already showing, now you’ll also see status updates, shared links, and comments”.
You may also see results from Twitter, Quora, and FourSquare among these results.
My position: if I wanted social I would search those places on my own.