New Search

On January 2nd we wrote a post on "The Increasing Uselessness of Google Search" based on our experience on searching for commercial items over the holiday period. Matt Cutts of Google told us (and others who had noticed the same) that we'd never had its so good with Spam and later that month on TWIG a number of A Lister US Tech luminaries told us we didn't know what we were talking about. Roll forward to the 24 February, and Google announces the most brutal change to its search algorithm ever - Search Engine Land:

New Change Impacts 12% Of US Results

The new algorithm — Google’s “recipe” for how to rank web pages — starting going live yesterday, the company told me in an interview today.

Google changes its algorithm on a regular basis, but most changes are so subtle that few notice. This is different. Google says the change impacts 12% (11.8% is the unrounded figure) of its search results in the US , a far higher impact on results than most of its algorithm changes. The change only impacts results in the US. It may be rolled out worldwide in the future.

..........

Officially, Google isn’t saying the algorithm change is targeting content farms. The company specifically declined to confirm that, when I asked. However, Matt Cutts — who heads Google’s spam fighting team — told me, “I think people will get the idea of the types of sites we’re talking about.”

What can we say except Told Ya So

Actually, I do give Google a lot of credit for moving so far, so fast, and Matt Cutts did what he had to as a Corporate Droid - but it really is so frigging transparent, why no just 'fess up guys?. Anyway, Kudos! As for those A Listers, we know who you are....... and we're saying nowt more 'cos we know we'll mess up one day as well

There are some who suggest this is PR as much as real action - which may well be true, but I think Google now really understands it let things rot a bit too far......

Ryan Spoon wrote something I've been increasinglty thinking for a week or so about the New Techmeme, and it's pointing to Twitter and Quora:

Techmeme has been making an increased effort to move beyond blog posts by integrating Twitter and Quora conversations. Conceptually it is attractive, but figuring out how to cohesively merge the different conversation types is quite difficult.

Techmeme will test their way into the right solution… and I give them credit for integrating Twitter beyond a side-bar widget (most attempts)… but I am not sure examples like this add value to the experience (other than getting to headlines very quickly):
He goes on to show a conversation on the board that was a bit circular and unhelpful (the inevitable impact of pointing to a microblog and an aggregator if one is not carefu)l. Curiously enough, he then looks at yesterday's gerfuffle with various Uber-reaching Twitterclients, and felt they they had kinda got it right...

And as it broke on Friday, there was a mixture of real-time commentary, news and updates from the companies themselves (namely Twitter / @Support and Bill Gross).

Whether in real-time or as a digest, Techmeme was the best way to follow. Why? Because Techmeme had figured out how to appropriately (and immediately) combine the different news sources and formats… most of which was blurred between news and tweets.

...which was interesting because just before I read his article I was putting pen to paper to observe similar frustrations to him, but I was writing about the frustration of navigating around the news item he felt was "getting it right". Having compared the two experiences I think I know why - when he was writing it was a breaking item on a sidebar (see below)



Great, pithy early warnings. However, by the time I woke up in the UK, it had mutated to this:




That's Techmeme the same as it's ever been, I hear you say.....amd on the surface, you are right - but now click on "expand discussion" on that big story from TechCrunch....this is about 1/4 of the expansion ( I have highlighted the twitter input in yellow, its nigh on half the input - btw I missed one, fourth from bottom):





The issues I had were the following, from a user experience point of view - firstly, Twitter:

(i) There is a hell of a lot more stuff there now to wade through, and that real estate is precious - I want to read the blogs I like and trust, and scanning through the longer twts (some of which look like txt speak) is more jarring than blog post headings in my opinion

(ii) Personally, I don't find the twts high value, as they all tend to say roughly the same thing, which typically I've already seen on Twitter or wherever - there are only so many ways you can say "ZOMFG Twitter kicked off UberTwitter go here [link]." in 140 characters, and there is precious little analysis in a twt after you've read 2 or 3

Secondly, Quora - I am not sure of the wisdom of an Aggregator linking to another Aggregator, because - in my experience anyway:

(i) You sort of just get the same news review you have just read on Techmeme again (especially as many of the Quora participants have typically made a Twitter post that has already been picked up on Techmeme), and then you have to go scanning the Quora page to see something new and its just sloppy seconds of the same stuff (in this case anyway, maybe other discussions are better).

(ii) I prefer different aggregators for news - Hacker News, Slashdot for example - to me Quora is just FriendFeed 2.0 - same people (who are everywhere anyway), same conversations, and with the interconnected twts and often blog posts from the same people all linking to their other posts in different media it all became a bit like a "mini link farm" around this story in my opinion (I should draw the lines between the items that are interlinked on the above page)

But to take Ryan's point, clearly there is a need to bring the real time into Techmeme - my take on it is this:

(i) Twitter feed is useful when Ryan saw it - on the sidebar as an early warning. less so when I saw it later, spamming the picture. IMO Twitter's value is speed, not content. I wonder if there is some way of killing tweets after they have been on a while, or showing them as a separate grouping / having a "show no tweets" filter option?

(ii) Quora is both easier - I can ignore it - and harder: I really question the use of another aggregator as a major news source, because the screen real estate and my attention are the limited resources. I would probably prefer to see it as a another link to the main story in the commentary section (like Slashdot sometimes is) rather than a destination in its own right.

But it is an interesting UI/UX question, and like Ryan, I think if anyone can get it right its the Techmeme team, but the fundamental value Techmeme has had to me is that it reduces, not increases the stuff I have to wade through...until now. . I shall watch with interest.

Normally when we predict things will happen its over months or years, not weeks - so when we predicted the inevitabiity of search spam filters early this year and also noted the things Google should to to get themselves back on track we noted that they should, as a matter of Class A Fundamentals:

Fundamentals - secure the next 3 years

1. Get the core search back to the quality it was a few years ago - this is the golden goose, the bread and butter, etc etc - if this drops away then everything else is moot. Sorry, Matt Cutts, if you believe your algorithms tell you it is better than ever before, then your algorithms are wrong. If I were looking to make Google search social, a good start would be letting people sharing spam-site killing data for filters. Crap search = fewer users, fewer users = fewer Ads seen, fewer Ads = less revenues, less revenues = misery.

2. Stop f*cking around with people's privacy. In the Silicon Valley bubble, privacy may be over - but to a lot of other people out there (and their governments) it isn't. To reduce the risk of being seen as creepy, evil guys that governments want to take a very close look at, rein in the this tendency. People can walk away very fast now decent competition is emerging (see above Ads - to - Misery tale), and grumpy Governments can tie up a lot of time, cost and ultimately market access.

Those are the big things, the "A" class "Must Do's".

3 weeks later and Lo, they announce the exact idea I highlighted above:

We’ve been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. One of the signals we're exploring is explicit feedback from users. To that end, today we’re launching an early, experimental Chrome extension so people can block sites from their web search results. If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.

Kudos, though it is also more evidence that the will to act on spam has only really been there since a fairly strong user driven backlash since the New Year's superspamming of search results.

First thing to cull - Demand Media, and as we noted, HuffPo had to sell, we think they saw this coming. I hope we can also share our culls with friends, sort of like an Akismet Almanac

Personally I'm going to wait for Mozilla to do theirs because I don't like toolbars/apps that phone home to public corporations who are already playing fast and loose with user data. But net-net, this is a first move in a trend is going to create a major balance of power shift in the SEO spameconomy, because now:

(i) Users will be able to cull sites they know are cr*p, rather than waitfor Google et al to (not) act..

(ii) Those sites won't know if they are being culled or not for quite a while, so they are going to spend a lot of money being useless, poor things.

Cue arms race in frequency-hopping URLS.....

Now, lets see some movement on Item 2......

It's interesting - ever since we wrote about the "Increasing Uselessness of Google Search" after the 2010 Christmas holidays, it looks like a whole lot of Googleflaws are coming out. Today there is a report in the NYT of how JC Penney gamed them over several months in the holiday period. Essentially JC got some black-hat SEO guys to build a link-farm to boost their rankings across a whole lot of consumer product terms, and Google didn't spot it.

There are links to JC Penney.com’s dresses page on sites about diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, aluminum sheets, travel, snoring, diamond drills, bathroom tiles, hotel furniture, online games, commodities, fishing, Adobe Flash, glass shower doors, jokes and dentists — and the list goes on. Some of these sites seem all but abandoned, except for the links. The greeting at myflhomebuyer.com sounds like the saddest fortune cookie ever: “Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.” When you read the enormous list of sites with Penney links, the landscape of the Internet acquires a whole new topography. It starts to seem like a city with a few familiar, well-kept buildings, surrounded by millions of hovels kept upright for no purpose other than the ads that are painted on their walls.

The thing is, these things are not new - anybody in the whole 'Net space knew about all this 5 years ago at least, those in Search knew about it for even longer. So the question you have to ask yourself is "how come it takes such a bright company like Google so long to not solve this problem?" . The Google Hypothesis is that this is all very hard, and there is a continual war with SEO guys, and the War On Spam is a long term slog, and besides their metrics tell them there is less spam and better results than ever.

I think they are being somewhat disingenuous, or (more scarily) their metrics are plain wrong as they don't understand what "spam" really is. It's not that all of Google is corrupted, but our experience is that typically anything of mass market consumer value is gamed to the nines - and it's not as if one has to put any deep study in, its visible to the naked eye, as it were. It is blatantly obvious what is being gamed, and how it is being gamed, and has been for several years, and I for one cannot believe that it is not possible to develop approached to solve this for the 5% of the Googleverse that is taking 95% of this spam if one had the will (I believe they have the know-how). Non trivial, sure - but do-able, even if it requires human intelligence - especially over 5 years.

So we have to look for the "why" there was not been the will - one option is that they have been so busy with all the other projects that the eye has been taken off the ball. Possible, and I suspect that's what they will tell us in about 3 months or so when more comes out the Googlewoodwork (There will be more, I am sure....). Another hypothesis is that Google, by a combination of intellectual comfort (no Search challengers till recently) and reliance on Big Algorithms, wasn't able to see/ build effective defences. But heck, competitors and decent New Search techniques have been around for the last 2 years now.

But here’s another hypothesis, that also explains all the facts and complexities, the almost unchallenged arrival of mass Content Farm businesses, and win's the Patrick's Razor award - we will let the NYT run with it:

Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of its largest advertisers, including AT&T, eBay and yes, J. C. Penney. The company, this document said, spent $2.46 million a month on paid Google search ads — the kind you see next to organic results.

Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It’s the sort of question that European Union officials are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.

The hypothesis that Google is colluding in all this as eventually a lot of the Ad money flows to them is clearly a heinous suggestion - but it does explain things rather well......


*Patrick's Razor - when it comes to money, the most cynical explanation is usually right

Just after Christmas we wrote a post on the "Increasing Uselessness of Google search" which (if we may say so ourselves) helped kick off a furore which still continues, the latest episode this week being a debate between Google, Bing and newcomer Blekko - over to Vivek Wahwa, who emceed' it:

I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion this week between Google, Microsoft, and Blekko. The event, which I emceed, was called Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box, and was organized by BigThink and Microsoft. As I joked, it seemed odd that Google was playing the role of “evil” monopolist; Microsoft, the “good” contender, whilst Blekko was a fly on the wall.

........

At the conference, I gave my spiel on my vision of search: how I want my computer to serve me and tell me what I want to know, rather than my having to cater to its whims by entering specific keywords in a text box and reading through text links—which are often baited by spammers. I challenged Matt to tell everyone what Google was doing about the spam. Matt, instead, went on the warpath and accused Bing of stealing Google’s information. He disclosed a sting operation that his team had run. He expressed outrage at Microsoft’s ethics. Harry Shum fired back, defended Bing, and accused Google of playing games.

Cue media frenzy - but when Vivek says that Google has "changed the argument" away from spammy search and how Google's money is made, I think he is wrong - at least outside the Valley where maybe more bloggers are in the Googleshadow - here in the Uk it seems to be seen quite clearly. Here is the Torygraph:

Google’s Search Fellow Amit Singhal complained via Twitter that Bing was copying Google’s results. That should tell you everything you need to know about the scale of this dispute: serious accusations of theft of intellectual property, even in Silicon Valley, are made in court.

Here is e-Consultancy:

First, Bing isn't copying Google's results. It's not looking at Google's results for particular searches and then changing the order of its own results to reflect these. This really would be "stealing" Google's results. Instead, Bing is using, as one of the signals to decide the order of its own results, which URLs people click on when they search for things on Google. If anything, Bing is in our search result pages stealing our click through data.

Puremango:

When Google set up their experiment, they created special pages on their site which contained words which didn’t exist anywhere else on the web, then they installed Bing toolbar and clicked on links from those ‘synthetic’ pages. Bing toolbar sent MS that data, just like it would for any page, and their system incorporated that clickstream data into the other signals just as normal.

But what that meant was that when Google then went to Bing and searched for those unique words, all the other signals didn’t have any input at all; the only data Bing had was from their clickstream signal, and so that was what the system used. It’s not surprising that Bing returned the same pages as Google did, because that was all the data that existed in the whole world about that query! Bing didn’t collect that data because it was from Google, Bing collected it because it was from Bing toolbar users.

Slashdot wasn't fooled either, as this exchange early on in the comments shows:

"Apparently Google's accusations are viewed by some as a backhanded compliment."

........

I don't thing they're wrong. I remember years and years ago how excited the Slashdot crowd got when Microsoft started directly addressing their superiority over Linux in their marketing propaganda. It meant Linux was enough of a threat that Microsoft was taking it seriously.

When was the last time you heard Google talk about other search engines? When it comes to searching, Google's been the undisputed market leader for a long time. For them to seriously acknowledge Bing, even if it's solely in the form of criticism, is still a big step.

.......

I still don't understand how this is in any way dodgey or underhanded.

1. Step 1: User opts in to report anonymous clickthrough data to Bing
2. Step 2: User searches for a term, chooses a search result
3. Step 3: Microsoft gets the data and compares it against relevent information for that search term.

Since google chose a random, unique for their search term, there is nothing to compare the user behavior with so it receives a disproportionately high amount of weight. With actual search terms, what a user searches for on google will have significantly less weight in the rankings, and depending on their algorithm could be next to inconsequential.

But the fact remains that looking at how customers use the competition (especially the frontrunner) is prevalent in all industries, and is a really smart idea from a business standpoint, and only serves to benefit your customers. By the looks of Google's optional photo homepage, they are guilty of it too (and if they weren't doing more I would be shocked). It seems the only people who are upset about this are Google, and people loyal to Google (most /. users).

Conclusion - This is a Googleblink!

(Update - Kara Swisher reckons it's got Larry Page written all over it - a blink indeed)

Lots of stuff on the webz about what Google (i.e. Larry Page) should do to get Google's mojo back - much of it mutually contradictory of course, or requiring too many things at once. From a strategic perspective however, the oldies are still goodies - Fundamentals, Focus and Future, via the simple action of following the money:

Fundamentals - secure the next 3 years

1. Get the core search back to the quality it was a few years ago - this is the golden goose, the bread and butter, etc etc - if this drops away then everything else is moot. Sorry, Matt Cutts, if you believe your algorithms tell you it is better than ever before, then your algorithms are wrong. If I were looking to make Google search social, a good start would be letting people sharing spam-site killing data for filters. Crap search = fewer users, fewer users = fewer Ads seen, fewer Ads = less revenues, less revenues = misery.

2. Stop f*cking around with people's privacy. In the Silicon Valley bubble, privacy may be over - but to a lot of other people out there (and their governments) it isn't. To reduce the risk of being seen as creepy, evil guys that governments want to take a very close look at, rein in the this tendency. People can walk away very fast now decent competition is emerging (see above Ads - to - Misery tale), and grumpy Governments can tie up a lot of time, cost and ultimately market access.

Those are the big things, the "A" class "Must Do's". Then there are the "B" Class things - are we going to throw more resource at them or cut our losses. The main ones are:

Focus - stop doing all the things you do, especially look at rationalising, and - er - firing:

3. Mobile - in or out? The Android value chain is as fragmented now as Olde Planet Mobile's ever was, so the value will be sucked up in the holes - and Apple will take the high ground, high rollers and high margins. Yes, the potential value is huge, but not as it is currently structured. Either take the whole market by the horns - ie get very serious, probably a major unit in its own right or even a spinout, or exit as anything more than a software house.

4. The GoogleCloud - can Google guarantee 5 '9's reliability? If not, its a pipe dream and it will fail to make money, and its probably consuming lot of resources - real time core value services do. In 5 '9's, deliver a hybrid strategy that works with partners' on-deck tools (like Mozilla for example, or even Microsoft), and exit anything bigger than cool tools for people with time on their hands (ie no need to be on the hook for real time delivery )

5. GooTube - Is it making money yet? Will it be at average unit profitability in the next 18 months? If not, kill it (or sell it to a Bigger Fool) - it's had enough time.

6. Chrome OS - Why?

7. Chrome Browser - Why? If its not at 20% market share by end 2011, kill.

8. As for the rest - the "C" class stuff - its a good time for the good old Star/Question mark/Dogs etc analysis, and anything not getting a "star" or "question mark with traction" rating gets shot straight away.

Future - where are the next things?

9. "New Search" - Yup, competition is emerging, the likely outcome in 5 years is a big No 1, smaller Nos 2 and 3, and then a small tail of niche operations. For the way to stay No. 1 for the next 5 years, see points 1 and 2 above. Prepare for the reality. "Social Search" is hyped to the nines, but if it can't make money in the medium term it will die, as did all the DotCom darlings. Traffic is not the same as money, and certainly not the same as profit. If anybody understands the economics of transaction messaging it's Google - get some smart people in a room, get them to work out what you have to believe for Facebook to make real money, and if you don't believe it, ignore them and tell all the remaining staff why it will die so they don't leave (and they will tell the press, never fear ). If you do believe it, then you have found where the leverage is, so hopefully the next Google product in the space is not the sort of things that only True Geeks can love.

10. The Next Big Thing - probably not going to be one big thing, stories like Google's original one are extremely rare. Search is Google's "big thing", the key therefore is to continuously innovate in Search.

Simples

Given Google's recent announcement that they are cleaning up the spam sites (see our article below) probably means that the "cr*p content" sites like Demand Media's ones will probably also not get top billing either, which willl significantly impact their IPO - and future profitability. Search Engine Land:

This announcement comes just as Demand Media gets set for an IPO. Demand owns eHow, LiveStrong.com, and several other properties that often get labeled as “content farms,” and is reportedly going to go public next week. AOL, with Seed.com and Yahoo, with its Associated Content purchase last year, are also in the content farm business. Those two, in fact, will be speaking on a panel called "Content Farms" Or The Smartest SEOs In the World? at our SMX West conference in March.

By cr*p I mean unhelpful given its prominence - eHow's advice is muchly of the level of the Feynman Problem Solving system

1. Write down the problem.
2. Think very hard.
3. Write Down the Solution

Still, live by the SEO, die by the SEO. It would have happened eventually. But timing, as they say, is everything.....

Update - fascinating post by eHow's original owner Josh Hannah on why Google may rate it so highly:

Google seems to weight domain-level credibility very heavily, and to not be very good at understanding if individual pieces of content are any good. And historical credibility, once earned, seems to decay very slowly.

When I co-owned eHow, it had a bunch of really high quality content, in a time where the web had much less high quality content. (There has been a content explosion -- both high quality and content farm style -- since 2004-05, when it started to be economically feasible.) For the 20,000 articles on eHow at the time, we ranked in the top 2 results for exact searches on 99% of them, and I think justly so.

When Demand Media bought eHow, they built a content machine. It is my opinion that 80%+ of eHow's "credibility" with search engines was earned prior to 2007, yet 95% of their content was created after 2007. My view is that Google's algorithm is not well architected to deal with this kind of situation, where the domain is the same, but in essence the product is entirely new.


Possible reasons why Google doesn't manually degrade eHow:

- Google is in love with the idea of a pure, algorithmic, scalable solution to problems and will invest great energy in this before manually tweaking
- eHow addresses a lot of long-tail content topics, for many of which they are probably the best answer (even if they are not a great answer). The eHow algorithm for choosing which articles to write clearly takes this into account.
- eHow generates tens of millions in AdSense revenue for Google annually. Wikipedia generates none.
- Google has more pressing quality problems in product-focused areas, where it seems like the first ten search results are dominated by garbage product spam. Whatever you think of eHow, it's generally better than that.

Tut - wash yore mouth out on that last one, you're wrong sez Google and its Fanbois

You may recall we wrote a story just after the Christmas holidays about the "Increasing Uselessness of Google Search" - well, it got so far as being mentioned on TWIG (where Jeff Jarvis roundly dissed us for not knowing what we were talking about*, despite a lot of agreement by ordinary users that they too had experienced a similar thing). Well, today, Google admitted - in their own roundabout "there was no problem, and here are some changes to fix the non-problem" way, that there was a problem:

First, the "there is no problem" bit - Matt Cutts:

Reading through some of these recent articles, you might ask whether our search quality has gotten worse. The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness. Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English.

Tut - silly users - the algorithm says there is No Problem, so....anyway, then comes the "so now we are fixing the problem that doesn't exist" bit:

As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well. To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments. We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites.

.......

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content.

While I hear all this, and am heartened by it, I do believe there is a little bit of trying to tell us that we didn't see what we saw. To reiterate what we observed empirically, in late 2010 and early 2011, if you clicked on something monetisable (like buying a consumer product) you found that most of Page One would lead to sites that basically served more links and Ads, and others that basically copied Wikipedia text and links and Ads, and I wrote the article because my family (and some friends) also remarked on it, and judging by the response a lot of other people noticed it as well. (searching for say "Byzantine Iconoclasts" does not contain spam, but then there is b*gger all money in that, these days anyway). So, I am delighted that these steps are being taken, but I suspect that Google's attention has been refocussed in early 2011 by what was, essentially, a massive user outcry. I have just searched again for the things I was looking for in November/December, and there is a marked improvement today - seeing the camera brand name's website up first again is soooo 2006 :-0
.

So while I am heartened, I am pretty certain these algorithms have mainly come in very late 2010/early 2011, and may I hypothesize that it was mainly due to the user outcry - and I would also hypothesize that this is why I am reading Matt Cutt's post on 21 January 2011, not say 07 January 2011

Also, perish the thought that we may wonder if they may have been making money in this (potentially) symbiotic relationship:

To be crystal clear:

- Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google;
- Displaying Google ads does not help a site’s rankings in Google; and
- Buying Google ads does not increase a site’s rankings in Google’s search results.

These principles have always applied, but it’s important to affirm they still hold true.

Well, whatever the reason, I am delighted at the changes made so far, and I look forward to proof positive that they are not making money from the spamsites. A rapid deterioration again in a few months would be a "thing that made me go "Ummm".

*In fairness, he then went on a rant about Buzz, which I enjoyed

Techmeme is now trawling Twitter as well as blogs and the online news world to get an indication of what is being talked about - Wired:

On Thursday, Techmeme chief Gabe Rivera announced that the site would now be aggregating tweets — the 140-character micro-posts found on Twitter.

The move represents another milestone in Twitter’s seemingly inexorable march toward becoming a central news water cooler of the internet era.

“I think this is yet another step in Twitter becoming a mainstream news service, since more people will recognize it as such now,” Rivera said in an email to Wired.com. “Content-wise, tweets will never play the leading role, but they’ll play a supporting role, and will act as glue and early warning.”

Why do it, and why now - after all, Twitter has been around awhile? I think the answer is here:

Rivera said he’s not sure if the move will boost traffic, but he said the goal of the shift is to improve the site, “which should expand our readership.”

Au contraire, I suspect the issue Techmeme has been having is that people are linking direct from their Twitter aggregators to stories, rather than going to Techmeme first, a trend which could eventually make one's Twitter aggregator the "Go To" news site (and which is what Tweetmeme et al are trying to do.) If you have the real time search and aggregation already, adding Twitter is not hard to do*

So are blogs therefore dead, as Business Insider argues - on Twitter?

“Now it’s official. Blogs are dead.”

No, we would argue, and that twt shows why - its a statement, without any reasoning or backup. I for one am not going to use a service that just points me to one liners like that. There has to be some beef somewhere, and blogs are the best way of delivering that.

*A bit of an aside - we actually built a blog/news search system a few years ago (see here), and looked at turning it into a Twitter search (it's not that hard) but were darned if we could see a sustainable business model for just reading twts.

The meme of Google's sputtering search product has certainly taken off, and that of course brings the apologistas out of the woodwork - one of the most amusing is this one on MediaBeat, which somewhat circularly argues that:

I saw it coming first:

I can only ask: What took so long? I first blogged about Google’s increasingly terrible search results in October 2007. If you search for any topic that is monetizable, such as “iPod Connectivity” or “Futon Filling”, you will see pages and pages of search results selling products and very few that actually answer your query. In contrast, if you search for something that isn’t monetizable, say “bridge construction,” it is like going 10 years back into a search time machine.

You are all wrong, Google is working on it - but they can't win

But here’s what these late-blooming critics miss: Yes, Google’s search results do indeed suck. But Google’s fixing it.

......

The folks at Google have not been asleep at the wheel. They are well aware that their search results were being increasingly gamed by search marketers and that this was not a battle they were going to win. The answer has been to dump the famous blue links on which Google built its business.

Umm..actually, most observers have been noticing this for some time, certainly since 2006 when we first wrote on New Search - the reason the meme has taken off like wildfire now is that it has got noticeably worse since 2009! Anyway, the argument is that Gooogle is now putting in Niche Search un-noticed by all us dumbos, so even though its "not a battle they could win", they have in fact won:

But they have won anyway

Over the past couple of years, Google has progressively added vertical search results above its regular results. When you search for the weather, businesses, stock quotes, popular videos, music, addresses, airplane flight status, and more, the search results of what you are looking for are presented immediately. The vast majority of users are no longer clicking through pages of Google results. They are instantly getting an answer to their question.

Google is in the unique position of being able to learn from billions and billions of queries what is relevant and what can be verticalized into immediate results. Google’s search value proposition has now transitioned to immediately answering your question, with the option of sifting through additional results. And that’s through a combination of computing power and accumulated data that competitors just can’t match.

For those of us who have watched this transition closely and attentively over the past few years, it has been an amazing feat that should be commended. So while I am the first to make fun of Google’s various product failures, Google search is no longer one of them.:

So, all the current people who are seeing a problem are clearly wrong, its gone now - move on, nothing to see here. Unfortunately for this argument, SEO Watch did a survey at the same time and found that (surprise) there was a problem, Bing getting better results by 63 to 52 points.

There is the start of a good debate for New Search aficionados on Stowe Boyd's post here:

We will find everything through social relationships: what washing machine to buy, or the best Thai restaurant in Beacon NY, or the company that makes the horizontal corduroys. people that care about these issues, and to who we matter, will share meaning with us: they have beliefs that they can justify, also called knowledge.

Google is only the echo of our linking behavior, a second-order derivative of our combined gestures. But generally, we would be happier with fewer results from trusted sources, and the rise of social tools makes that almost as fast as Google search.