With more than 1 billion tweets sent out by the company's millions of users in each of the last two months, Twitter is seeing record usage after a year of meteoric growth. But finding those tweets can be hard, as the company's search engine at times has strained under the challenge of tracking the world in real time. To aid in building out the company's search capabilities, Twitter has just added Krishna Gade to the team.
Hailing from Microsoft, Krishna worked on the Redmond giant's Web search engine development team, he was a software development engineer, spending more than 5 years at Microsoft, where he helped build and ship many features of Bing, including index quality measurement, static rank computation infrastrucutre & algorithms, Web spam detection, query suggestions, entity extraction, autosuggest, contextual display ads and realtime/social search, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Krishna did not return cell phone calls prior to publishing to elaborate on his role at Twitter, but his hiring spells good news for the company's search engine getting even more hands on deck to become a more relevant and useful archive.
BusinessWeek has an interesting article that is being passed around the Web tonight talking about potential discussions between Apple and Microsoft to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone, replacing Google. The reason for this, the article speculates, is the increased competition between Cupertino and Mountain View, with the advent of the Android platform and Chrome OS. The article goes on to quote an unnamed source as saying that "Apple and Google know the other is their primary enemy", leading to the conclusion that working with Microsoft would be more advantageous for Apple than sticking with Google.
So what is this about? The enemy of my enemy is my friend?
I have talked at length previously about the capability of Google to take on Apple on many fronts, highlighted most directly in my "Could A Real Apple Fan Completely "Go Google"?" post last October, looking at the two companies offering competing products at the OS layer, the browser layer, the mobile platform, and many other applications. That the two firms are increasingly overlapping is clear.
But primary enemies? Really? I am not yet sure.
The 1980s saw Apple's primary enemy as Big Blue. IBM and its IBM PC was seen as this monolithic figure that needed to be combatted, made famous with Apple's 1984 ad which introduced the Macintosh. By the 1990s, having been relegated to a minority market share, smacked down repeatedly from Redmond, Apple was going up against Microsoft, which was mocked as "The Evil Empire" and attacked around the world as a monopoly. At times, Apple and Dell were seen as rivals. In the 2000s, Microsoft itself focused on different mortal enemies, from Netscape and AOL to Google, with Apple being a mere thorn in its side.
Jobs' Deal With Microsoft in 1997
Google's rise in the 2000s saw not Apple as a major enemy, but more accurately, Yahoo! and Microsoft. Google eventually grew to the point that it was half-heartedly rooting for Yahoo! to play a larger role on the Web, to reduce anti-competitive discussions, and Microsoft's enterprise dominance has been the clear target for the company's push of Google Apps, and growing Office suite.
In the decade, for the most part, Google and Apple remained friends - with Eric Schmidt's role on Apple's board for the majority of the decade being the most obvious example. Apple made the right decisions through the decade to include Google when it made the most sense, integrating Google search into Safari, and Google Maps on the iPhone.
Even with the increased competition, Google never flipped the switch that Microsoft once did, turning "evil". Whether it's assumed Apple and Google are best friends at this point is not as important as the two companies making the right choices for consumers.
Going back to the BusinessWeek article, the main focus is that Apple is looking to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone, which would reduce, only mildly, some exposure to Google Search, and would help Microsoft more as their improving search engine is in the hands of iPhone fans everywhere. But this could be a humungous case of sour grapes, poised to no doubt leave a bad taste in our mouths. And we've seen it play out before.
In 1997, Steve Jobs, returning to the CEO position at Apple after his jettison the decade before, struck a deal with Microsoft and his arch-rival Bill Gates, to have Microsoft invest $150 million in the floundering Apple and, ridiculously, make Internet Explorer the default browser for the Mac. He even went so far as to say it was the best out there, dissing Netscape Navigator. It was a huge volley in Microsoft's battle to crush Navigator, and it reeked of backroom shenanigans that defied reality.
In 2010, moving to Bing would be perceived in the same light. While Bing has its fans, and I know some great people who work on the engine, the assumption from users is that Google is the gold standard in search. If Apple sells its customers short in what is perceived as a second class product, it erodes the customers' trust, and perception of quality from what's supposed to be a premium mobile experience. Even if Bing is twice as good as Google, no handful of on-stage demos from Steve Jobs and his team is going to make people think there's more to the story than Apple playing favorites.
From my view, Google is as concerned with Facebook and Microsoft as it is with Apple. If Apple is going after Google with Bing as a revenge play, then we customers are pawns being forced to accept embedding of products we didn't request. That very thing is what was at the heart of the DOJ's case against Microsoft in the late 1990s, and has me feeling less inclined to trust Apple, not more so.
Apple has gained a loyal customer base through focusing on best of breed, even if it costs a little bit more. From Apple, I should be able to assume a higher quality product, and something that reflects real worth. Bing is good, the very best Microsoft has ever offered in search, but backroom shenanigans dealt out due to hurt feelings or assumed alliances is wrong, no matter what. I don't think Apple and Google are going after each other's throats right now, and if so, Google is thinking about Apple less than Apple is thinking of them, so making a move because of enemies' rank is just ridiculous. It's not 1997 any more, and I have alternatives.
With all the recent news around Bing and Google making deals with Twitter to gain a foothold in the world of real-time search, not much has been said about the often frustrating world of blog search, and not a peep has been made about Icerocket, a company I'd myself largely neglected until a few months ago, having mentally relegated it to the Technorati-like category of Web 2.0 dustbins. But very quietly, Icerocket has built out what I believe to be the best blog search out there, and its Twitter search is quite potent as well. I have been using it exclusively to find links to my blog, and its relevancy blows Google Blog Search out of the water, barring any upgrades from Mountain View.
Aside from an October post from Doc Searls, Icerocket's improvements have practically been invisible. But it's a disservice to the site, which has easy to find RSS feeds for any search, total number of positive hits in the database by URL, and improvements on the standard Twitter search that include the "smack your forehead and say 'duh'" additions of retweeting and replying to any successful search result, which Twitter's search engine lacks today.
In years past, most bloggers have turned to Technorati or Google Blog Search to find relevant posts. Google Blog Search does a great job finding keywords, and until the most recent revamp, Technorati did the best job in finding which sites were linking your way. (In March, I even said Technorati was trumping Google for blog reactions) The October update to Technorati (covered here) added some interesting twists, but the "reactions" function that I liked has pretty much become impossible to use, or disappeared.
Icerocket, which CrunchBase reports gained its first funding round way back in 2004, from Mark Cuban, has not gotten some of the buzz that other real-time search companies, including Collecta, Topsy and OneRiot, have, but its results are top-notch. Like any good blogger, I've bookmarked a search on the site to find links my way, and more often than not, Google's Blog Search doesn't find them for me in the database.
Icerocket does more than just find the most answers. It highlights the ranking of the domain being searched in its database (mine has hovered just below 2,000), and shows the rank of linking blogs - a simple way to assume "Authority", including the total number of references these downstream blogs have. Also, helpfully, the results are sorted by date! Not bad. Google Blog Search won't do that. Icerocket also lets you display total results for a specific post, by URL.
Some Notable Blogs' Rankings in Icerocket
More than 20 Blogs Linked to My Recent FTC Badges Post
Similarly, Icerocket thumps Twitter Search for the same results.
Icerocket's Twitter search results are the same as those presented by the microblogging giant, but in addition to the standard responses, you see the number of people following those mentioning a keyword, you see more results on one page, and have the smart additions of "Reply" and "RT" at the end of each result, having you one step away from making an action on the search. In contrast, to do so on Twitter Search, you would need to click the timestamp of the specific update, and then, from that window, hit reply or retweet.
Just about the only thing Icerocket is not doing when it comes to Twitter search results is having the newest flow in from the top to present the illusion of real time. Instead, to get the newest answers, you still have to refresh. It's a small price to pay for a single site that offers great blog search and Twitter search results in one. I've switched. I just wonder if Icerocket, considered an older property, can have new users recognize its new life.
As previewed in a scoop by All Things Digital's Kara Swisher, Twitter has enabled Microsoft's Bing search engine to have access to the full firehose of all public tweets, adding these real-time elements to the company's data pool. In a post confirming the partnership, Twitter called the onslaught of updates an "overwhelming deluge", hoping that Bing could help you find those that make sense for your search query "right now".
Solving search and discovery for Twitter Search has been extremely challenging for the San Francisco-based startup, and the company's incomplete database has led to a swarm of competition, notably that of Searchtastic most recently, who gave top billing to the fact their index dived deeper than Twitter.
This obviously is no free transaction, so it is safe to say Twitter clearly has revenue today. And more will come as the company promises the development of meaningful relationships with companies that share their vision of creating value for users - be they big companies or small ones. More on the announcement can be seen on the Bing blog.
Update: (I just received this via e-mail from a Bing PR rep)
Hi Louis,
This morning at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Qi Lu, President of Microsoft’s Online Services Division is announcing a new beta feature that enables people to easily search Twitter’s real-time information feed directly in Bing. This new feature helps people make better decisions and more fully understand Twitter conversations by collecting, analyzing and uniquely presenting real-time Twitter content.
More specifically, the new Twitter developments in Bing include:
A real-time index of the Tweets that match your search queries in results. This feature makes it easier to follow what’s going on by reducing the amount of duplicates, spam, and adult content.
Giving you the option to rank tweets either by most recent or by “best match,” where we consider a Tweeter’s popularity, interestingness of the tweet, and other indicators of quality and trustworthiness.
Providing the top links shared on Twitter around your specific search query by showcasing a few of the most relevant tweets. Additionally, Bing automatically expands those small URLs (like bit.ly) to enable you to understand what people are tweeting about. Instead of showing standard search result captions, we select 2 top tweets to give users a glimpse of the sentiment around the shared link.
You can try out the new Bing Twitter search beta here momentarily or learn more about it at the Bing blog. Please note that this is a U.S. only feature at this time.
Facebook Partnership
As part of his on-stage discussion at the summit, Dr. Lu is also announcing a global partnership with Facebook that will bring public Facebook status updates to Bing search results. The experience will be available at a later date.
As the discussions around Bing continue, I found myself often thinking of how the product would need to not just be marginally better than Google search for me to switch, but dramatically better - not due to an inherent bias on my part, but because of how the landscape has changed. Under our nose in the last decade, Google has grown to represent much more than just a search engine – essentially recreating the major pieces of the operating system experience around their crown jewel, with a large number of hooks that have me choosing their search over others, even if competitors are “good enough”. And the more I think about it, Google has pulled a “reverse Microsoft”, not so much in an anti-competitive sense, but in terms of how they have created customer lock-in.
Microsoft is in an unenviable position many times when it comes to the Web. Nearly two decades of underperformance on search, portals and Internet access have the Redmond giant constantly changing its approach as it tries to fend off more nimble competitors. But as we all know, it ripped its way into the Web discussion in the mid to late 1990s through leveraging its operating system monopoly to push Internet Explorer to the #1 position against Netscape, adding onto its leading position in office productivity suites, and yes, the OS.
Microsoft customers could be seen climbing the ladder of Microsoft lock-in from the bottom up – starting with the operating system, adding the office suite, the e-mail application, the Web browser, and sometimes, the MSN portal or search engine.
In contrast, Google started with its search engine and has worked the other direction – adding a formidable e-mail option in Gmail, an office suite with Google Docs, a Web browser with Chrome, a portal with iGoogle, and many utilities designed to make us come to Google as our information engine – from Google Maps and Earth to Google Reader.
Meanwhile, as Microsoft came under fire for bundling its browser as part of the operating system and forcing OEMs to preload it and not its competition, Google went out and signed deals making its engine the predetermined default in practically all non Internet Explorer browsers – including Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari browser, making it a formidable barrier for other engines, Microsoft's included, to gain share. And as we discussed previously, late last year, in the debate on mobile phones and Web browsers, where I argued that the new tactics will be “all about the hooks”, there’s no question that Apple’s iPhone, combined with Google’s Android platform, will extend the share of Google’s engine even further on the mobile Web.
So far, Google has escaped serious drama in the world of anti-trust, a benefit its competitor from Redmond does not enjoy. As Microsoft is forced to contend with pulling its browser from the operating system in Europe, or seeing flack for Bing taking over as the default search engine in Internet Explorer 6, Google continues to make deals that make its kingpin position even more secure, and add new applications that make me even less likely to leave the site. After all, if I switched to Bing, I would still have no intent to ditch Google Reader. Microsoft has never really competed with Google Maps, making that a no brainer, and though Google’s office suite online isn’t the best or biggest, arguably, at least when I am using Microsoft’s office suite, I am doing it offline, away from the real battlefield of tomorrow.
When Google first debuted and we were measuring its success in the speed of response, or simply by the number of pages in its index, I don’t think we foresaw how it would turn one of the most aggressive tech monolith’s advantages on its head. While I recognize Google Search might not be dramatically better than Bing or even Yahoo! Search at this point, once you take the brand names away, it’s the hooks that have got me.
In April, we had the opportunity to first take part in the epic whirlwind of social media fun that is the FFundercats, FFundercats, a project undertaken by Josh Haley and Johnny Worthington, who have teamed up to create a fun weekly show centered around all things FriendFeed. At that time, they claimed I tried to "drop science" and explain how we operate in this real-time world. Missing the duo, I begged, pleaded and bribed the pair to be back on this last Friday, and, luckily they let me return.
Friday's podcast focused on some of the major topics you have seen us discuss in the last few weeks, including the "Blame Drew's Cancer" phenomenon, my new (used) car, the introductions of Google Wave and Microsoft Bing, as well as other items that keep FriendFeed's community going. And, as per usual, there was a highly active chat throughout the show, which you can find here.
Amidst the buzz from Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference that took over the tech news world today, in the shadows, something very weird has happened. Companies that were once market leaders, and then, later, laughed at as the ugly stepchildren in tech, are being championed once again. And this time, they are being lauded not because they are the best necessarily, but because they are doing a good enough job to avoid ridicule - a good enough job for us to praise them for not completely being full of fail. Of course, I'm talking about Palm's new Pre and Microsoft's latest search entry, Bing.
I have never seen, touched or tasted a Palm Pre. I've heard they are hard to come by, and they were only available initially to a select list of reviewers. So far, the reviews are good, and the Pre is being seen as a real challenger to the iPhone. While we all ignore the traditional market leaders, like Nokia, Sony Ericsson or Motorola, it is Palm, Apple and Google who have us talking about phones. And Palm, despite being brand new and having an application store with a few dozen applications, compared with the tens of thousands on the iTunes Store, is giving people pause because it is even coming up at all. We had left them for dead, and they are rising like Lazarus, becoming part of the conversation, when most of us expected them to just go away.
Similarly, Microsoft's Bing continues to get positive writeups as people realize you can search with it and not suffer a fatal disk error. Over the weekend, a site was built that showed Bing going head to head with Google and Yahoo!, in a blind test, and doing very well, more so than likely any of us would have anticipated. While it still was losing, the results, showing it competitive at all, were enough to change our perceptions a bit - after years of seeing Microsoft unable to impress us while under assault from Mountain View.
It's quite odd, really. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that much of the tech blogosphere likes so much to rally around failures that when something miraculous like Bing being ahead of Yahoo! search in market share for a 24-hour period happens, it becomes front page news - or that the Pre actually had people waiting in line for its debut. We were all prepared to write about the disaster, so when something resembling a middling success struck, it caught us all by surprise.
But a few days of positive headlines and friendly nods cannot a market share leader make.
Palm wades into a hostile cell phone environment where Apple leads in mindshare and has the ears of thousands of developers looking to make serious coin. Google has extended their reach to many different applications beyond vanilla search - from YouTube to Google Reader, GMail, Maps, Earth, Docs and so much more, making replacing a search engine or swapping out mobile phones, once a choice has been made, that much more difficult. As I wrote on FriendFeed, and said in Jesse Stay's first podcast tonight, even if the Pre and the iPhone were feature equal, it's the integration with iTunes and all its applications that makes the difference for me now. I'm invested in this platform, and I'd venture a guess that a ton of other people are too, AT&T or not.
As for Bing? Google is the default search engine in my Safari. I trust Google to get the right results, and even catch myself searching it for results from my own blog posts' history often. Bing is a cute alternative - something to use if Google ever ticks me off, or magically, goes down for any extended period. But it hasn't delivered the "wow" experience that tells me a good reason to switch. Microsoft may have built a better mousetrap than their previous models, but they don't have enough bait.
Microsoft and Palm. One, the current and longtime leader in operating systems and office software. The other, the onetime leader in handheld operating systems. Now, today, both have tarnished brands looking for a little spitshine. They may have gotten a little buffing, but not enough to have me seeing them in a new light.
With more than 1 billion tweets sent out by the company's millions of users in each of the last two months, Twitter is seeing record usage after a year of meteoric growth. But finding those tweets can be hard, as the company's search engine at times has strained under the challenge of tracking the world in real time. To aid in building out the company's search capabilities, Twitter has just added Krishna Gade to the team.
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