LinkNotes: Google Insights for Search

2008-12-05

Yahoo Search Improvements

Yahoo Technology Will Offer Abstracts of Search Results (PC World)

Yahoo's lab in India is developing technology that will summarize information about web search results rather than simply offer links as search engines currently do.

clipped from bangalore.yahoo.com

clipped from tech.yahoo.com

The Bangalore lab is working in the area of automated information extraction, which involves going into the URLs, going through billions of pages, and extracting the relevant information, he said.

If it is a product page, users will typically get abstracts that include an image of the product, the name of the manufacturer, and the price, Rastogi said. Likewise a link to a hotel would have its address, telephone number, maybe a map guiding users to the hotel, and the rating of the hotel, he added.

Yahoo made available to developers earlier this year SearchMonkey, a platform that it said would allow developers and site owners to customize the presentation of URLs in search results.

clipped from developer.yahoo.com

SearchMonkey

SearchMonkey is Yahoo! Search's new open platform.

Using SearchMonkey, developers and site owners can use structured data to make Yahoo! Search results more useful and visually appealing, and drive more relevant traffic to their sites.

clipped from tech.yahoo.com

"Clearly we don't expect that everybody will adopt SearchMonkey, so this 'rich results' piece is our in-house effort to automate the information extraction for large classes of web sites," Rastogi said.

Search query refinement

The Bangalore lab is also working with other Yahoo labs in the area of search query refinement.

If a user types in "cars", he could be at various stages in the purchase cycle for a car, or is maybe looking for a car mechanic, or wants to rent a car, Rastogi said.

2008-08-06

Google has launched an application called Insights for Search. You can provide a couple of terms and let Google show you the search volume for these mapped over time with search frequencies displayed on a world map.

clipped from blogoscoped.com

Google Insights for Search, Another Google Trends

clipped from www.google.com

See what the world is searching for.

clipped from www.google.com

Examining seasonality

Insights can be used to determine seasonality. For example, a ski resort may want to find out when people search for ski-related terms most often.

Creating brand associations

Insights can be a helpful tool in creating brand associations. Take, for example, an advertising agency that needs to build a compelling advertising campaign for its client, a computer hardware company. The agency needs to know what competing brands are doing: how should they position their client's product against them?

Entering new markets

Insights can be useful in determining a new market. A wine distributor may be looking to expand into new markets. By entering in wine + vino, and comparing the data across multiple countries, such as Argentina, Mexico, Spain, and Venezuela, the distributor can get a sense of where interest is more prevalent.

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