Google and Microsoft are jostling to capture the online search market in the US. The later lags behind considerably the market leader and is taking steps to bridge the gap. For example, the company announced a fresh tie-up with Facebook earlier this month for integrating tips from the top social network into results of Bing. Users get to see a sidebar that identifies ‘friends’ so as to help answer topical queries of their choice and those they had ‘liked’ or those they had posted photos about. Read the rest of this entry »

Amid the anger and dismay of disappointed Facebook investors, along with the underwriters embarrassment, LinkedIn has come into spotlight. Like Facebook, this social-media platform for professionals has steadily built up a profitable and growing business. Both have managed to achieve what not many social sites have – by building a community of users who interact with each other. The two sites leverage their users’ personal data of to generate revenues. Both incidentally are considered proxies for probably the hottest new trends in technology. Read the rest of this entry »

A popular network for professionals, LinkedIn has managed to monetize its connections through its tremendous reach and power as a complete corporate recruitment platform. It has emerged as the ‘virtual rolodex’ for dynamic business people world over with close to 160 million members (a majority of them in their 30s and above). When you meet someone during a business meeting and if you forget to ask for business card, the most likely way of locating the person is the LinkedIn profile. Read the rest of this entry »

Actions initiated against ‘overoptimized’ sites by Google have been intensified. It seems a series of recent updates are easily able to detect most links-related overoptimization digressions, which can lead to both short and long-term positional damage, with or without any warnings. Even though the search engine major announced the Penguin update a couple of months ago, changes on its link evaluation system have been quite noticeable well before the announcement. Read the rest of this entry »

The Knowledge Graph from Google isn’t rooted merely in public sources like Freebase, the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia. It is augmented at a much vaster scale. It focuses on breadth and depth, which is really comprehensive. It contains over 500 million objects currently, as well as over 3.5 billion facts about and relationships that exist among these different objects – based on what searchers look search for, and what is found out on the web. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft has just thrown open its social networking service ‘So.cl’ to the general public. This site, designed to allow users to share and post comments on offbeat search results, also lets them engage with ‘like-minded’ users. The service, primarily targeted at the learning community, had been restricted formerly to invitees at schools and universities in the US. Being pitched more as an ‘experiment’ than a hardcore rival to other popular networks, it integrates with Facebook. Read the rest of this entry »

Can Google search be treated as an intermediary just like the phone company that simply connects people with bits of information they seek? Or is it a publisher akin to a newspaper, providing only the information it deems fit and is fully protected by the First Amendment? Apparently, there are enough reasons for the search major to want to be viewed as a mere connector; like any other Internet company, it can do away with responsibility for the material being transmitted by its worldwide users – a useful idea for rebutting copyright infringement or libel claims. Read the rest of this entry »

The foundation of a structured data resource is invariably Resource Definition Framework – a standard model for purpose of data interchange on the web, which allows it to be seamlessly shared across various applications, apart from supporting easy evolution of different schemas. In fact, the Googlebot in the near future will be looking beyond keywords and Web links – to identify structured data or semantic markup. Read the rest of this entry »

In your search engine optimization strategy, semantic search denotes identifying the right set of keywords on basis of target user intent, as in the real world, and then create site content around those terms. The realm of semantic keyword involves a database of core terms that are full of obvious context and not just literal meaning instead of merely chasing words and phrases boasting of higher search volumes. Read the rest of this entry »

The search engine major is keen to produce sharper and smarter, quicker and more relevant results. The company has just introduced a dynamic new feature known as ‘Knowledge Graph’. a ‘graph’ that will understand real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings. The idea is to hone the user searches and offer them more focus, breadth, depth and detail. These are several different ways in which the Graph will enhance Google Search: Read the rest of this entry »