Google launched a new product very useful for advertisers and marketers. It include a world heat map for the search volume and regional interest, the evolution for a specific search term and the top related and rising searches.

With Google Insights For Search, it is possible to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories, geographic regions, and specific time ranges.

Google AdWords blog details the specific characteristics of this new product and gives some examples to use it.

I have to admin that Google Insights For Search, together with Google Trends and some other older application of Google, become gold in the hands of the advertisers during their marketing campaigns.

I just started a search for a very known keyword for me and I discovered that almost all of the results are links to web sites of mine that I closed long time ago.

I understand that Cuil use as a starting base an older database, but how long does it need to update it?

Anna Patterson, the ex Google employer and one with a very important contribution in the development of the main search engine, decided to start a new search engine, which would provide better and more attractive results. She left Google and now she works with other prominent ex-Google employees, like Russell Power, who worked with Ms. Patterson on the large Google index, and Louis Monier, a former chief technology officer at AltaVista, a pioneering search engine.

Cuil went live on July 28, 2008. It displays relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for most results. Anna Patterson (born 1973 in Chicago) is president of Cuil

“I think it will be better,”, said her husband and partner, Tom Costello, in an interview.

For the moment, Cuil has about 30 employees and has its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., raising $33 million from venture investors.

Rather than ranking the pages based on inbound links as Google does with Pagerank, Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages for their relevance to a search query. Cuil claims its search algorithm scans through 120 billion web pages, three times more than Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

I see that most of the specialists consider Cuil with really relevant results. To me, at least for a specific keyword I used for search, it seems that it still has a lot to improve in the search algorithm. Although almost all the results was from my web sites (it was a regional search), none of the results was relevant for this specific region.

Writers has now a good occasion to make profit. Google launched this week Google Knol, the user-generated encyclopedia similar to Wikipedia. And every author can earn money from his work, depending on the hits of his articles

Google official blog says that “Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects.“, “The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content.”

The main principle of Knol is the “moderated collaboration”, meaning that the readers can suggest changes of a knol and the author will accept it or not. It’s the author’s option to include ads from the AdSense program, and to be paid this way.

It will become Google Knol a better authoritative source than Wikipedia? The fact that the articles will be owned by Google and paid through AdSense tells us that there will be a heaven for spammers (it seems that already Knol articles are better placed than Wikipedia in the Google search results). Also, comment links don’t have rel=nofollow, untill now, at least. It depends on how Google will manage it. On the other hands, the payment of the article will attract more and better authors than Wikipedia.

Anyway, unlike Wikipedia, where the articles are managed and valued by the community, in Google Knol the articles are managed by the authors and valued by the users.

My guess is the next acquisition of Google of Digg will have an important role in Google Knol.

Two very interesting notes from the Knol ToS: “you grant to Google a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide and royalty-free right and license to use, copy, distribute, transmit, modify, create derivative works based on… “, and “you may use Knol to create articles for your business or to promote your lawful products or services that are not otherwise prohibited by our Content Policy or Terms of Service”

The default settings for the articles is set to a Creative Commons license

So, it depends on Google management to become No. 1 in user’s encyclopedia. And, as far as we know Google, it never disappointed.

Twitter purchased Summize these days, in order to improve the search of the Twitter network, for relevant topics.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as tweets) which are text-based posts, ranging up to 140 characters long, via SMS, mobile, or Twitter’s web site

Twitter blog confirmed this aquisition: “We’re excited to announce that Twitter has acquired Summize—an extraordinary search tool and an amazing group of engineers. All five Summize engineers will move to San Francisco, CA and take jobs at Twitter, Inc. This is an important step forward in the evolution of Twitter as a service and as a company.”

Summize offers an API so other products and services can filter the constant queue of updates in a variety of ways. The Summize service and API will be merged with our own and integrated under the Twitter brand.

Twitter can connect groups of people in critical situations, and there are a lot of such examples. The American Red Cross uses Twitter to exchange minute-to-minute information about local disasters, including statistics and directions.

Like I said in a previous post, the strategy of a big company like Microsoft to buy a big company like Yahoo!, cannot be based on a simple offer only. It takes into consideration multiple denies of the targeted company, and it can be foresee for several years, even 10 years, if needed. And, of course, it acts on multiple plans, not only on direct or indirect negotiations with Yahoo.

Late Saturday, Yahoo declined Microsoft’s last attempt to buy its online search engine. Carl Icahn is still active in this stage of the Microsoft strategy, trying to attract as many shareholders as possible.

Now, it’s a fight inside Yahoo!, especially between the board and shareholders, that is predicted to end this month, but nobody knows who will be the winner. I hope that the winner will be the Internet users.

(Source)

Google PageRank is based primarely on the “votes” submitted by other web sites under the form of the links. It uses a complex algorithm to assign values, in order to measure the relative importance for every hyperlinked element.

An interesting article was posted on Google Blog by Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team at Google.

He reveal three most important principles in Google ranking: 1) Best locally relevant results served globally, 2) Keep it simple, and 3) No manual intervention.

It means that the results for local query will be used to improve the global search, the search system has to be kept simple, and that Google uses humans to improve and complete the algorithms only, no manual intervention in the final results.

Google itself says that “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.“

So, the final rank is the result of interaction (links) from all the other web sites, based on the importance assigned to each link.

The PageRank is like a mark weighting between 0 and 10, in a logarithmic scale.

R.J. Pittman, Director of Search Properties, showed some of the amazing advances Google made in image search, as well as how ads might work to enhance the user experience on image search. “There are over 300 million digital photos created each day,” said Pittman.

Carter Maslan, Director of Local Search Quality, talked about Google Geo products (Maps and Earth and their features) and the fact that they represent a considerable search problem. “Local search is a geographic lens to any place,” said Carter Maslan.

Johanna Wright, Director of Search Quality, emphasized on the search quality and the latest update on web search.

The Official Google Blog says that now Google Health is publicly available, offering to the users a safe and secure way to collect, store, and manage their medical records and health information online. Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google, noted the challenges of dealing with myriad security and privacy concerns and making different record formats accessible.

Also, Google launched Go for Good campaign with the Cleveland Clinic.

TechCrunch has a very interesting overview with live notes on the presentations made by Google to the press to its headquarters in Mountain View.

Google has no immediate plans to monetize the Google Health site. “We don’t sell the information and we won’t share it unless asked to,“, said Roni Zeiger, a medical doctor and product manager for Google Health.

(See the video of the presentation by Google for their search properties)

So, the next move in the Microsoft’s strategy is now to go on the partnership with Yahoo! (involving Yahoo carrying search advertisements from Microsoft, the Wall Street Journal said today), taking also into account to buy the full companies in the future.

A second battle-front was open by Microsoft through some investors of Yahoo!, especially Carl Icahn.

“Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments,” says Microsoft.

Microsoft says that there will be a “major new initiative“ in its search engine technology on May 21.

Dear Mr. Icahn:

We are in receipt of your letter with regard to your intention to seek control of Yahoo!’s board of directors.

Unfortunately, your letter reflects a significant misunderstanding of the facts about the Microsoft proposal and the diligence with which our board evaluated and responded to that proposal. A fair-minded review of the factual record leads to one conclusion: that Yahoo!’s ten-member board, comprised of nine independent directors along with Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang, remains the best and most qualified group to maximize value for all Yahoo! stockholders.

(See the full Press Release)

John Dvorak makes an overview of the Yahoo’s board:

• Jerry Yang, founder
• Roy Bostock, chairman of the board here and at Northwest Airlines, and director at Morgan Stanley
• Ron Burkle, finance guy and Bill Clinton pal ,expert in supermarkets and board member of Occidental Petroleum Corp
• Eric Hippeau
• Vyomesh Joshi, a VP at Hewlett-Packard Co. from the printing division
• Arthur Kern, the new-media guy
• Robert Kotick, chairman and chief executive of Activision Inc. OK
• Ed Kozel, background in technology as well as finance
• Maggie Wilderotter, connection to Microsoft as a former VP
• Gary Wilson, from Northwest Airlines,

and the Carl Icahn’s new group:

• Carl Icahn
• Lucian Bebchuk, corporate lawyer, expert in corporate governance
• Frank Biondi Jr., former Viacom Inc. executive sits on a lot of boards, including Seagate Technology’s
• John Chapple, little or no hook into Yahoo’s business
• Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner
• Adam Dell, VC and finance guy
• Keith Meister, Icahn’s personal economic hit man
• Edward Meyer, advertising
• Brian Posner
• Robert Shaye, a Hollywood mogul,

concluding that Carl Icahn will try to sell Yahoo! to Microsoft; If he will not succeed, he will bring Yahoo in disaster.