Posts Tagged 'search marketing'

There is still discussion in bars, offices and around the web on the topic of whether G+ will ever be as big or bigger than Facebook?

Lots of opinions abound often reflecting the author’s view on the relative merits of the two platforms. Well in my view it doesn’t matter whether G+ gets there or not. User volumes are little more than bragging rights and more important to Social Media Strategists selling their wares than to the platforms.

What’s really important here is the “logged in internet”, the more a platform can get you “logged in” the better for them. Historically when you wandered around the internet, you weren’t logged in to anything (only your ISP and they didn’t pass that on). So you were in effect fairly anonymous, you had an IP address (that could change) and some cookies (which you could delete).

There are pros and cons to this depending on which side of the fence you sit. As a visitor you were anonymous and every page request is treated as a new request with no history, as a web site lack of identity makes life harder and means you have to address identity on a site by site basis which can’t be readily shared.

With the advent of Facebook and it’s always logged on model you are no longer anonymous, and therefore when you interact with “associated” sites, you are known, in more detail than you may care to contemplate. That’s why Facebook are so keen on getting 3rd party sites to support the Facebook Login.

Google on the other hand has been taking a data centric, data mining approach, trying to build up an identity for you from its records, which are sadly incomplete. The game now is to find as many ways as they can to have you logged in, so Youtube needs a Gmail account, Gmail needs a Gmail account, Google docs needs a Gmail account, and Android phone needs a Gmail account, you get the picture. And by being logged in (and with the new black bar always signposting the things you can do) Google starts to know much as much more about you and can smooth many transactions, building a more complete profile along the way, all the better to push targeted ads at you…

So Google’s game is not to make G+ bigger than Facebook, it is to make Gmail logins ubiquitous and to know more about you.

Does anyone still think that this is about building a better search experience?

A friend who knows how much I love celebrity gossip (and discovering new search platforms), recommended a new website the other day. Intrigued, I paid it a visit….

Kosmix is essentially a vertical search engine that aggregates content from a number of sources across the web; it then builds you a profile of your search query right before your eyes. There are several vertical search engines and apps aggregating content from multiple sources, Globrix and Headup being just a couple of examples, but this is definitely the best I’ve seen so far.

There are still a few things they need to iron out, country specific results would be nice, suggestions for search strings with spelling errors – essential, and improvements are needed for non-people based searches. However, if you’re trying to find out more about a particular individual the results are mighty impressive. A quick search on Jeffery Archer (no particular reason) for example presents me with his Wiki, a selection of blogs related to him, his official website, pictures, videos, book reviews, twitter feeds and even amazon purchase recommendations.

Perfect for all your celebrity stalking needs…. and some background research on authors!

To try it for yourself visit www.ksomix.com