I have mixed feelings about Google. They have made billions of people’s lives easier with their search engine and they truly are an innovative company which is just so impressive for such a big organisation. On the downside, their business model works as a network effect (many searchers=more ad potential = more advertisers) so now they have critical mass, and an amazing brand to go with it, it’s going to be extremely difficult for others, both big and small to get a foot into the online information business, which in the long run is a bad thing.

On the whole though for me the name Google is bathed in an overall sense of awe. When they launch a new product, they just do such a damn good job. And this is a company that is just over 10 years old. It’s not as if we are talking about decades of corporate learning here, unlike other super performing organisation like say Toyota or Apple.

So to Chrome - their new browser. Another amazing entrance from Google. Lovely and clean. It barely takes up any screen real estate, and there are some other nice design touches like the animations on file downloading and the incognito guy. BUT the best part about it for me and in particular for Brandwatch is it’s so goddamn fast. We did some side by side tests with IE7 and Firefox3 and Chrome is 50% faster at loading our app than either of the others. And 50 is a lot of %s.

The reason, it appears, is how Chrome deals with Javascript. We use a lot of Javascript in our UI to make it as nice to use as possible and firefox in particular is not that fast at rendering it. Chrome is. It’s my new browser of choice. Google has done it again - horray! boo! horray!!

Filed under: Browsers, Search, Software development by Giles Palmer

Just read a very interesting article on the future of search. The bottom line for me was pretty clear: Google Search is broken. Several of the core principles behind it are now obviously wrong.

Search is not about getting a list of web pages. The structure of online information is much more complex. If you’re looking for some help on a particular Java library, you wouldn’t expect Google to return you a link to every single page of a 50-page online manual: the whole manual is the information unit you’re looking for. If you’re looking for opinions on a new Wii game, you should expect a list of forums, with for each forum, some insight into how many posts refer to the game, what the overall sentiment is, etc. The posts may be on one same web page, or they may not, and this does not matter.

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Filed under: Search, Social Media by Fabrice Retkowsky

I’m doing some analysis using the public search engines and I’m being presented with a lot of pages that are not what I’m looking for. The date of publication is sometimes wrong when I search over a specific time period, or the information is weak - it takes a couple of minutes of my time to read the 2 lines of a blog in the search results, make the decision to open the page, wait for Firefox to load it properly then read enough of it to realise it’s rubbish and close the tab.

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Filed under: Research, Search, Spam by Giles Palmer

Over the last 30 years, many tasks that humans once performed have been automated, encoded and passed over to computers. It’s the drive for efficiency that Bill Gates still talks about today. The internet however, never started off as a human-powered system so there was nothing to automate. But recently we have been witnessing the emergence of human-powered applications such as Social Search that are in some way competing with fully automated systems.

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Filed under: Quality, Search, Social Media, Spam, Technology by Giles Palmer

When compared to certain parts of the internet, spam is a beautiful, poetic and inventive thing. It really really is.

In some (lots of) parts of the net there is a tipping point where spam has more going for it than human utterances. Spam is more open to new ideas, more thoughtful, less repetitive, less myopic than lots and lots of forums and blog sites, online culture magazines, etc. And it’s getting more complex and more inventive, while some blogs and forums are beginning to feed off themselves and on themselves.

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Filed under: Consumer Generated Media, Customer Engagement, Quality, Search, Spam by Phil Newman

As I mentioned in the last post, the accuracy of the entire result set is critical to us at Brandwatch, but so too is making sure that we have as big a sample as possible.

We are increasing our crawl all the time (circa 100k new sites per month right now), but a comparison with Google’s index is something that we do on a regular basis to cross check our total result count with theirs.

Whilst doing this I stumbled upon a rather surprising little secret (more…)

Filed under: Search by Giles Palmer