Google Takes On Twitter With Hot Trends Integration

the ballmaster — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:06:38 +0000

Google continues to launch skirmishes against anyone who would carve-out a piece of the Interwebs for itself. Consider:

It took on the shopping comparison engines in 2007 by including Google Product Search results at the top of its search results page.
It fired a shot across the bow at Wikipedia with Knol.
It is challenging local content sites like Yelp with its new Place pages.

And now it is going after Twitter with realtime search. Meet the new-and-integrated Hot Trends OneBox:

“The idea behind the [Hot Trends] OneBox is to not only provide you with search results as you’d want but also extra meta data on how popular the search is and whether it has peaked in interest, plus the number of sites that are creating chatter and buzz about this particular topic or person, to give a relative hotness rating as well” said RJ Pittman, director of product management for consumer search properties at Google.

The concept is simple: Google amasses a wealth of information about what people are searching for in its search logs. Google has long offered this info to those savvy enough to use Google Trends. Now, it is integrating these results on its search results pages, albeit at the bottom.

Will this take the steam out of Twitter’s much-vaunted realtime search? Time will tell. But you can be sure this is being discussed within Twitter, especially as there is considerable evidence that its explosive growth may be peaked.

via Take That, Twitter: Google Hot Trends Integrated Into Google Search.

Google Knol Dying on the Vine? Ask Wikipedia.

the ballmaster — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 23:06:45 +0000

Knol, Google’s attempt at displacing Wikipedia as the web’s dominant repository of knowledge, has suffered a 43% decline in monthly visits since January. Beal speculates that Mountain View may pull the plug on the ailing site before long:

It’s not the first time that we’ve seen questions asked about the futile contuation of Google Knol. In fact, it was just this past January that SAI asked why Google (GOOG) didn’t kill off Knol along with all the other dead weight.

It seems that even Knol users have become disenchanted with the service–resorting to using Knol as Craigslist classifieds alternative.

Memories, however, are short. It was only two years ago that Google decided to shake the mothballs out of its long-suffering shopping portal, Froogle. Fast-forward a 24 months, and you have a formidable shopping engine that has stolen significant market share from traditional e-commerce sites like Shopzilla.

Google is a giant, and like all giants, it tends to move slowly. What may be different is that Knol’s traffic decline is taking place at the tail-end of a crushing recession which has hit Google’s revenues like anyone else’s. Since the start of the crisis, Mountain View has signaled its willingness to pull the plug on negative ROI projects that, in former days, would have been allowed to simply coast along until the necessary developer bandwidth could be allocated to their further development.

Will Knol become a casualty of such abbreviated return horizons? I don’t know, but I’m guessing we’ll read about it on Wikipedia first.

via Looks Like It’s Goodbye for Google Knol — Seeking Alpha.

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Google Takes On Twitter With Hot Trends Integration

Google Knol Dying on the Vine? Ask Wikipedia.