Whoa! This just amazed me.  It’s “old” news now, but a week ago Shane ONeill reported in CIO that Bing search results were fixed.  Yes:  natural search results were manipulated to return pro-Microsoft and/or anti-Apple or anti-Google results.  You need to read this article–I’m not going to repeat the details — and it seems the problem has been ‘fixed’ — though searching Bing for ‘why is windows so expensive’ just now (evening 11 Aug) returned a #1 result whose point is ‘why are Macs expensive?’.

The important thing is, search results have to be trustworthy. Once you blow it on the trust issue, you cannot get it back.  I cannot help seeing Microsoft’s testosterone-driven culture overwhelming its thinking head here.  So stupid, so self-defeating, and most of all, so confirming of what a lot of people already think about Microsoft.

Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed is all the buzz the past couple days, but I’m really more interested in FB’s roll out of a new search capability. This is something that will grow over time — as people learn about it, more content will be added to the network that can be used in search.  But it is clearly another alternative to traditional search, and it is based on peoples’ own preferences and experiences.  That’s the social media advantage!

Now that search bar in the upper right corner of your FB page takes you to a new search page where a great array of results wait for your browsing pleasure.  This is keyword-driven (like all search) so it’s not too useful if you have a really complex query (use Aardvark for those!), but if you’re looking for something more common, like ‘restaurant’ or ‘music’, you’ll get lots of ideas.

The image below is from my own search for ‘music’, filtered by ‘events’.  I found a lot of concerts advertised on Facebook!

Facebook's New Search Interface

On the downside, when I tried to find ‘music san luis obispo’ there were no results. Come on SLO musicians!  Get with it and get on Facebook.

This is another example of Facebook’s huge advantage of having all that profile information from hundreds of millions of users and businesses.  You couldn’t usefully add a search capability to a small network (not enough results possible), but when you have this kind of scale, it becomes valuable.  The network effect means that FB will continue to grow because it has these capabilities.  The big get bigger.

I wonder if there will come a point where the personal connection people feel with their networks gets so diluted that the information in the network overall begins to degrade, in quality and/or in quantity.  In a way, that’s what happened to MySpace.  Thinking of the goose that laid the golden eggs here.

At least according to Statcounter, Bing search engine edged past Yahoo into the number 2 spot in search. This was as of June 4th, and was true both worldwide and in the US. Whether Bing will hold this position over time remains to be seen.  Of course, you need to put this in perspective:  Google is still a huge leader in search, with about 87% of search worldwide (according to Statcounter).  Here’s what the trends look like:

Statcounter suggests the Bing gains are at the expense of Google — the lines in the graph suggest that. Could be true. We’ll see how it holds.

Hope – and huge financial incentives – spring eternal. Microsoft is going to be launching its newest attempt at search on Wednesday next week when Bing goes live.

MSFT has a sad history with search, slowly losing ground to Google (mostly). They’ve had some really bad decisions (what the heck was ‘live search’ supposed to do running parallel with the generic MSN search engine?) coupled with the fact that Google is good.  And Yahoo is fine.  It isn’t like people couldn’t find information on the web.

But the stakes are enormous, so here we go again.  Some early reviews talk about interesting new features that may appeal to users. For instance, the NYTimes reports that Bing will have a multi-layered search result page that will have a ‘table of contents’ that will be somewhat different for each search. It will suggest drill-down options for follow up searches to help the visitor get to what they want more quickly.

I am looking forward to trying it!

On May 12, Google introduced a new feature called ‘Rich Snippets‘ that will become a standard part of their indexing algorithm. This feature could be important for any business, but I think local businesses should be especially alert to it — it is one more tactic to use in the local search SEO campaign.  Pay attention to this one, folks – it could have a big impact on search over time.

The Rich Snippets feature is an evolving effort to use structured data in search results. Ordinarily, Google picks up a piece of text, usually the meta description, to insert a brief descriptive ‘snippet’ about a website along with the URL in search results. Beginning now, it will sometimes include structured data in the search result snippet in place of the text description.  Google is currently supporting structured data about ratings and people, but plans to begin using other kinds of data soon.

Here’s one example from Google how a rich snippet might look.  In this one, a local business with a rating on Yelp is shown in search results with rating information.

Google has tested this concept and offers an important clue to the importance they give it: It’s a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable — if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through. That’s the important thing for your business — attracting the click.

It’s not yet clear, to me at least, how individual local businesses will use this feature, but I am sure the issue will be all over the blogosphere for the next few weeks, and we’ll know a lot more soon.  The structured data does have to be tagged by someone who knows what they are doing (your webmaster, unless you build websites yourself), but as always Google is providing examples like the ones you see in the link above.

One last thing:  You might be asking, what is structured data?  Roughly, it is information that is defined by a variable that can take a range of values.  “First name” = “Glenn” in my case.  Ratings information is classic, since there is a structure that includes the name of the business, a ratings system (e.g., 1 to 4 stars), a price range, and might include a testimonial in text.  If you run a business that can be rated, in Yelp or TripAdvisor for example, it is described by structured data.

One more part of your SEO package.  Do use it.

Twitter seems to be my favorite subject these days, a little weird since I spend so little time on it.  Anyhow, here’s another two cents worth of thought about what it’s good for, from Dr. Pete at SEOmoz.

Dr Pete thinks Twitter is a way to connect online ‘friends’ with each other in the other ‘real’ world.  He says “The real power of Twitter is in transforming online connections into real-world relationships.”  He goes on to give a few examples of how Twitter helped him meet up with friends and colleagues.

Sure, I’ll buy it.  But I’m sticking to my guns on this:  Twitter is search.  It’s social search, to be sure, but it’s search.  You might want to find a person, thing, website, resource, directions, advice, or business, but you are using the people on Twitter to do it.  Social, real-time search.

Bloomberg posts today that Time Warner is close to spinning off its loss making AOL unit, maybe as early as tomorrow.  Wow, talk about a long fall.

I ran across a post about Microsoft’s mobile Live search and thought I’d give it a test drive (I’m usually a late adopter).   Kind of funny, kind of sad.

I decided to make it easy by dialing in and asking for services in San Luis Obispo since that’s a pretty well-known town (unlike Morro Bay which no one outside of CA has ever heard of).  After going through a minute or so of introduction, instructions, and options, the voice-activated system took me through a quick menu to find the kind of business I wanted to find — ‘restaurants’.  It asked me what kind of restaurant I wanted, and I said ‘california’ — no answer to that one.  So I tried ‘wine country’ and got the same response, and decided to let the system tell me what my options really are:  pizza, chinese, fast food, mexican, italian.  That’s a hip pocket survey of American culture right there isn’t it?

I chose Italian and we started down a numbered list — you choose by saying the number at any point.  I listened and tried #3 and got the response it didn’t have that option, and would you like to hear the list again?  So this time I picked ‘one’ and it clicked, giving me my options for ‘unna avola’  which I think means Buona Tavola, including one option to get directions.

The system did recognize ‘Morro Bay’ and it basically clicked on my home address as well!  I registered the home address and then asked for the directions:  after a few seconds, Live search announced it couldn’t find the directions at this time, and re-opened the main menu.  Square one.

By this time, I would have been half way into SLO and in the usual cell phone dead spot just north of the Cuesta campus.  I gave up.  A good idea but not well executed. I’m sure this is hard to do technically speaking, but when it doesn’t work well, people will leave for other systems.

Rumors have been flying around that Google is hot to buy Twitter.  Makes sense to me, since I see Twitter as a real-time search tool with a billion points of light (users) who can get the most up-to-the-minute answers to almost any question.  This has cooled off in the last week or so — but it still makes more sense to me than some of Google’s other acquisitions.  Why not own your most threatening competitor (much as I would not like to see that happen)?

In the past couple days, though, other stories have emerged that suggest that Twitter and Google might be dancing to a different kind of tune.

First up, in a Google to Acquire Twitter post from a couple weeks ago, Techcrunch‘s influential Michael Arrington said that Twitter and Google were in “late stage” negotiations on a purchase in the neighborhood of $250 million.  Arrington also believes Twitter is a search engine, like I do, and thinks it makes good strategic sense for Google.  But:  Twitter insiders apparently think the company’s value is closer to $1 billion — plus it’s beginning to dawn on people that Google acquiring Twitter might raise anti-competitive warnings among regulators.  On April 3, Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone posted a brief reply that of course they were talking with other companies, but that they had every intention of building their own firm.

Then, on April 9th, Kara Swisher published a long article called Who Will Be Twitter’s Best Search Friend? with the remark that the hot property of the moment in Silicon Valley has been pursued before (notably by Google and Microsoft – who obviously have some of the deepest pockets) – she mentions Microsoft’s purchase of a tiny part of Facebook for $240 million after a lengthy battle with Google (who won that battle is an open question).  Finding a way to get ad distribution on Twitter would be a coup for either of the biggies — if there is a model that works.  The attraction of Twitter is that huge and growing audience, and the fact that it has a model whose applications are continuing to grow.  Lots of big companies are buzzing around it, attracted to all that mindshare.

Updating all this, Claire Cain Miller published an interview with Fred Wilson, one of the investors in Twitter, in the April 16th  NYTimes, with the summary that:   Yes, Twitter is talking to big Internet companies about forming partnerships with them. No, it is not looking to sell itself. Wilson says that Twitter has reached the scale (#3 social site in the US now, after Facebook and MySpace) that other people take seriously, but it is working to find out how to leverage its scale and model in distribution deals with other large properties like Google and Microsoft.

Then, finally, today sees an NZ site called The National Business Review reporting on Google’s recent healthy profits and Eric Schmidt’s (Google CEO) praise for Twitter. They note that this could be part of the competition with Microsoft, trying to butter up Twitter to favor a Google deal for ad distribution.  On the other hand, they also report that rumors persist that Google and Twitter are still in purchase talks, stalled over price.

I hope Twitter stays independent, much as I like Google.  I don’t see how Twitter could replace Google’s archive search, or vice versa, but melding the two would still reduce competition in this market.

The Twitter phenom is still gaining traction, and here’s why (imho):  user generated search.

When I first signed up for a Twitter account, my very first impressions were a lot like the ones comedians make fun of Twitter for:  someone told me every personal thing they did in tweet after tweet — and I stopped paying attention.  I have been a poor follower and worse tweeter (twitterer?) since.

But reports keep rolling in about how effective Twitter is as a real time communication tool, and most of these are about one thing:  search.  Our friend Martin  in Portland talked about how his team, working with the tourism industry in Oregon, started something called the ‘Twisitor’ Center (in this blog, you will also find posts about how Visitor Bureaus across the country are using Twitter).  You simply Tweet a question including the #inpdx hash to have your query posted to everyone following that conversation — and almost immediately you have an answer.

Most of the other success stories I hear about are similar.  Someone at a conference needs a laptop charger.  Someone else there has one.  They connect and problem solved.

I know the other famous stories about Twitter are things like the fact that the first reports of the Mumbai terrorist attacks were sent in tweets.  These real time alerts are important, but for the day to day, I think the search function is the killer app. It’s a perfect extension of the interactive logic of the Internet.

So, Web 3.0?  If we can have user generated content = Web 2.0, why not user generated search = Web 3.0?  OK.  I agree,  neither one is really a game changer in the biggest picture.  But the growth of the Internet tools we have — enlarging and enriching the network — is pretty amazing.