Google Lets Users Find Results Based on Location
Google has added the ability to search by location to its list of search options. The option is called “nearby”.
“Location has become an important part of the way we search. If you’re a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer’s market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information,” says Google Product Manager Jackie Bavaro.
“One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don’t have to worry about adding ‘Minneapolis’ to your query and missing webpages that only say ‘St. Paul” or “Twin Cities,’” Bavaro adds.
Google has been using users’ locations to deliver search results for quite some time, but this marks the first time the search engine is actually letting users dictate when they want it to be used to retrieve results for specific queries. In local search, Google is generally pretty good at delivering nearby results anyway, but giving users this added little bit of control can’t hurt, and simply gives users another way to refine their results to match their preferences.
Users can view results by their default location, or set a custom location. The feature is currently only available on Google.com in English.
Experts Agree The Internet Will Make Us Smarter
The Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Internet Center at Elon University teamed up to survey 895 experts about the future of the Internet and its affect on human intelligence.
“Three out of four experts said our use of the Internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the Internet has improved reading, writing and rendering of knowledge,” said Janna Anderson, study co-author and director of the Imagining the Internet Center.
“There are still many people, however, who are critics of the impact of Google, Wikipedia and other online tools.”
Two-thirds of those surveyed said reading and writing skills and the rendering of knowledge will be improved by 2020 due to the influence of the Internet.
Eighty percent of the experts agreed that “hot gadgets and applications that will capture the imagination of users in 2020 will often come ‘out of the blue.”‘
The experts were fairly divided on whether anonymous online activity will exist in 2020, with nearly 40 percent predicting that anonymous Internet users will have their access sharply decreased.
“The privacy and civil liberties battles over the next decade will increasingly focus on the growing demands for identity credentials,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
“New systems for authentication will bring new problems, as more identity information will create new opportunities for criminals.”
On the issue of an open Internet in the future, nearly two-thirds said the Internet will remain as its founder envisioned.
More than a third chose to agree with the statement “the Internet will mostly become a technology where intermediary institutions that control the architecture and content will be successful in gaining the right to manage information and the method by which people access it.”
Yahoo And NBC Benefit From Winter Olympics
Yahoo Sports said today traffic to its site during the Winter Olympics has soared, beating out both NBCOlympics.com and ESPN.com.
According to comScore, Yahoo’s Winter Games coverage attracted 9.3 million unique visitors, more than NBC’s Olympics site (7.6 million unique visitors) and ESPN (8.4 million unique visitors). Yahoo Sports attracted over 17.5 million unique visitors over the week, more than double the visitors to its nearest competitors.
Meanwhile, NCBOlympics.com on MSN has generated more than 177.4 million page views, 414 percent more than the nearest competitor, according to comScore. NBC says visitors to its Olympic site spent more time and viewed more pages than visitors to Yahoo’s Olympic site.
On average, visitors to NBCOlympics.com spent 8.2 minutes per visit, 64 percent more than the five minute average for Yahoo users; and visitors to NBCOlympics.com on MSN averaged 27.5 pages per visit, more than seven times the 3.8 average pages per visitor for Yahoo.
While NBCOlympics.com leads in pages views and time spent, and Yahoo Sports leads in unique visitors, there is little doubt that the Winter Olympics have been good for both properties.
Ask Says it Has a Head Start as Google Acquires Q&A Site
Update: Ask.com-U.S. President Doug Leeds offered the following additional statement:
“Google’s purchase of Aardvark is simply an acknowledgement that Q&A is the future of search. As the #1 brand in Q&A, we’ve been passionate about investing in this next phase of search for a long time. Our current technology is unmatched at answering questions using content we’ve crawled and indexed from across the web. In Q2, we’ll also beta launch a Q+A community that will route the questions we receive to real people with relevant knowledge. This community will reach search engine scale – able to handle more than a million questions a day, faster than Google or any of our competitors. We’re singularly focused on Q+A because, in the end, we believe that consumers rather Ask a question, than Google one.”
Original Article: Google has reportedly acquired Aardvark, which operates at Vark.com, for around $50 million. Aardvark is a Q&A site. This is a space Ask.com says it is the number one brand for. Ask sees this move by Google as a direct challenge. “Bottom line, this move validates the space we have been #1 in for years,” the company says. “It’s Google coming after us and our mission.”
We spoke to Ask Networks President Scott Garrell, who says, “We welcome the challenge”.
A head start in Q&A that is, and Ask views this as even more important to people than web search. The reasoning for this is that web search relies on published information, while Q&A includes unpublished knowledge from people. According to Garrell, Ask gets three to four times more questions as a percentage of total queries than Google.
Ask, while not among the top three in terms of search market share, has managed to gain U.S. market share recently. In fact, from December to January, while Google dropped a percentage point and Yahoo dropped 2, Ask gained 4, according to the latest data from Experian Hitwise.
But Ask is focused more on the Q&A side of things, because it feels like that’s what it is truly good at, and the company appears to feel comfortable in that role. Garrell says Ask has the best answers from technology and from people.
“We have a head start,” says Garrell. Ask plans to launch a beta of a new, updated version of Ask.com in Q2.
Aardvark is a little bit different of a beast than Ask. Aardvark is more like a Q&A site/social network hybrid, and it’s difficult to say just what Google intends to do with it at this time. Will it continue to operate as a standalone entity only, or will Google look to integrate this kind of answer into its own search results at some point? We’ll have to wait and see on that one.
One thing Aardvark has going for it is that it can be integrated right into Gmail chat. The social aspect of Aardvark combined with the recently launched Google Buzz, could turn Gmail into a much more social presence altogether.
On a sidenote, on Aardvark, I asked if Google was coming after Ask.com with the Aardvark acquisition, and I got responses like ”Ask is so yesterday…” and “Aardvark isn’t really in competition with Ask.com.” Ask clearly doesn’t see it that way. This very example illustrates that Q&A search (at least Aardvark’s brand) is prone to just delivering different opinions from people. Granted, the question wasn’t one that would lend to a factual answer.
What do you think? What site do you use to get questions answered?
Mark Cuban’s Mahalo Wants Your Blood (And Gets it TOO!)
Mark Cuban recently talked about how search engines and content aggregators are vampires.
There is no reason to be indexed in Google. … You haven’t gotten anything back
But he failed to disclose how his Mahalo investment loots content.
If Google is a vampire (while sending away billions of Dollars of traffic for free) then what does that make Mahalo (which borrows your titles and abstracts as content to pull search traffic into their ad cluttered pages pages, while placing your content below the fold (while using nofollow on attribution links))?
Is the following accurate?
If you think otherwise, then please explain. 
Danny Sullivan TORE UP Mark Cuban in a must read article which only Danny could have wrote. It is well worth a read for anyone who wants to understand the hypocrisy behind the Mahalo position on content scraping / vampiring.