New Florence. New Renaissance.

Search beyond the box

But app indexing is not just Google introducing another corpus into its search engine. The mobile app-sphere is where people live these days — not so much the web. Google must be there. Huffman knows this. “Google should be the premiere place in user’s minds for finding apps, discovering great apps and finding the content and the capabilities inside of those apps,” he says.

The company faces challenges in doing this. For one thing, it had to figure out how to rank apps in search results. Google has endless experience ranking websites, but it has had to come up with new signals to identify the apps most likely to have the best information. (Apps with lots of downloads and high user rankings are more likely to have better information, and Google ranks the deep links within those apps more highly.)

Another potential hurdle is getting total buy-in from developers, who must not only allow Google to scrape their content, but actually do some work to make their apps integrate fully into Google’s scheme. This seems like a no brainer. After all, if the data in your app surfaces in a Google search result,users are more likely to use that app. What’s more, Google has started to give results from apps that are not installed on a user’s device. For instance, if you are searching for a recipe, Google might give you a deep link to a cooking app you don’t have. In those cases, there’s an opportunity to download the app. “So we actually are kind of promoting your app in line,” says Huffman.

Medium.com

Three steps to an answer: (1) holding and tapping the phone while “Blurryface” plays on Spotify and (2) asking Google who’s singing lead, will (3) surface the frontman of Twenty One Pilots. Note that at no point is the Google app or a browser involved

Move over, Google Maps

FastCompany profiles three startups including Mapbox which utilizes drones to redefine digital cartography.

Digital Valentine

Impressive how much technology is going into match making and dating

PC Magazine has a complete issue on the technology of romance'

Time profiles the mobile dating app, Tinder

Wired explores the big data as in most common terms in dating profiles at OkCupid

Big Data and Recruiting

Brian Sommer writes at ZDNet about a new generation of content-rich recruiting tools

“At this time, Identified has some 1 billion profiles that employers can peruse. But, what I really like is the intelligence Identified has built into their search capability.  For example, they know that some firms may call an entry level IT person a “consultant” while other firms call this position a “business consultant”, “Associate” or other name. When you do a search it uses its proprietary position nomenclature dictionary to find the widest set of potential candidates your firm should be cultivating relationships with and possibly hiring.”

see video below for more

and more from Brian

“Connect6 counts over 500 million profiles within its searchable database.   Connect6 offers a mix of applications to its corporate customers. It will:

• Search – Employers can search by prior employer, school attended, location, desired skills and more
• Post – Connect6 uses its knowledge of social networks, job boards, discussion groups, etc. to send an employer’s job postings to these sites. This makes Connect6 work more like a two-way process rather than a straight-up search and contact tool.
• Connect – Connect6 will connect the employer to prospective candidates.  Connect6 will also provide social maps that clarify the connection between the candidate and the firm. “

 

The Google Of Genomes And Drugs

The search engine, called the Drug Gene Interaction Database, includes 2,600 genes and 6,300 drugs that target them to make up 14,000 drug-gene interactions. An additional 6,700 genes are also included in the database because of the potential for finding a matching drug that interacts with them.

Before this innovation, researchers and clinicians sorted through clinical trial results, scientific studies and other sources of information one at a time to find the right information that could help them treat a patient. Now, these interactions are easy to investigate all in one place.

The database isn’t complete with either all possible drugs or genes. “There are genes that we haven’t yet found out their uses for, and the drug side needs more to target,” says Malachi. But this is the first time that known interactions have been put together in one database.

Txchnologist

Google Now

The point of Google Now is to give you answers without making you search at all. One way it does this is by integrating with your Google account, pulling calendar entries, restaurant directions, sports scores, and more into a tidy at-a-glance package. If you’ve got a flight later in the day, Now will keep your boarding information handy--and send you a reminder of when you need to leave, factoring in real-time traffic data between your location and the airport. On Android, it’s continually running in the background, ready to be summoned up at any moment. And on that platform, it’s tightly integrated with Google Search, not only allowing you to ask for answers by text or voice but also learning from those queries and serving up more relevant information to you based on what you’re looking for.

Fast Company

How Search Works

Really nice infographic from Google – small section in image below

The Reinvention of Search

Multiple companies are developing search businesses with a vertical (i.e., market) orientation. These businesses are becoming significant, and most of them do not belong to Google. This phenomenon is somewhat stealthy because these vertical search businesses usually don’t advertise themselves as “search”.

Forbes

The article discusses Kayak, Amazon, LinkedIn and others

Photo Credit: Kayak.com

The Facebook Graph

Search Engine Land

With a typical Google search, the objects we search for are web pages, with the connections (or graph) that help determine the pages that rise to the top primarily being links from across the web. Links, simple form, are like votes, helping Google decide which are the most popular pages to show for a particular topic.

With Facebook Graph Search, the objects we search for aren’t web pages but instead virtual representations of real world objects: people, places and things. The connections are primarily Facebook Likes. Did such-and-such a person like a particular photo? A particular doctor? A particular restaurant? Those likes are the ties that bind the information in Facebook together.

Another difference is the layers of searching or refinement that Facebook Search offers compared to Google. For example, a Google search can show you restaurants in San Francisco, a pretty much single dimensional view.

A Facebook search can show you restaurants in San Francisco liked by your friends. Or further, those liked by your friends who actually live in San Francisco, as opposed to those who live elsewhere. Or those liked by your single friends, your straight friends, your gay friends, your friends who work for a particular company….

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook explains the new offering

Adobe Marketing Cloud

The strategy has its roots in the 2009 acquisition of Omniture, a Utah-based web analytics company, for $1.8 billion. At the time analysts scratched their heads over the deal, but Narayen believed his customers would come to demand data-driven marketing. Such marketing now embraces diverse tasks: real-time bidding on Google search ads, targeting display ads using Facebook (FB) profiles, analyzing which Tweets or blog posts drive traffic, testing different site designs to see which generate sales.

To make those features possible, Narayen has spent $800 million on acquisitions since Omniture: Day Software for website-content management, Demdex for ad targeting, Efficient Frontier for search and social media ad exchanges, and Auditude for inserting ads inside streaming videos. Online marketing will probably be a larger priority for many companies in coming years. According to Gartner, marketing budgets will grow 9% this year, compared with 4.7% for IT. Adobe wants to benefit from that growth by selling marketing services and software simultaneously.

Adobe's marketing products are being used by Expedia (EXPE), which created and optimized a social media campaign that boosted its Facebook followers by 750%. Movie-rental outfit Redbox used it to design mobile apps directing customers to its video kiosks. Sotheby's (BID) tracks which auction items clients are interested in the most when they peruse the company's iPad catalogues. Amy Todd Middleton, Sotheby's senior vice president of global strategic marketing, says that Adobe tools once relied on just for creating a website, for example, have become much more useful.

Fortune