Tuesday, August 5, 2014
Danny Goodwin Leaves Search Engine Watch, Thank You & Goodbye
Monday, August 4, 2014
Twitter Buys Image Search Company Madbits
Twitter hasn't traditionally been known for their image capabilities. However, that may be about to change as image search company Madbits earlier this week announced via their website that they were joining Twitter.
Within the posting, Madbits co-founders Clement Farabet and Louis-Alexandre Etezad-Heydari shared the following insight:
"Over this past year, we've built visual intelligence technology that automatically understands, organizes and extracts relevant information from raw media. Understanding the content of an image, whether or not there are tags associated with that image, is a complex challenge. We developed our technology based on deep learning, an approach to statistical machine learning that involves stacking simple projections to form powerful hierarchical models of a signal.
We prototyped and tested about ten different applications, and as we've prepared to launch publicly, we've decided to bring the technology to Twitter, a company that shares our ambitions and vision and will help us scale this technology."
Madbits had taken to their LinkedIn page to share that they are "primarily interested in the task of image search, and the creation of intelligent, dynamic image sets, to automatically organize large databases of images," according to TechCrunch.
It appears that Twitter has been slowly adding image features to their arsenal. These capabilities include:
People-taggingMultiple photos per tweetAnimated GIFsGigaOm, which broke the news, had this to say about the potential future implications:
It’s not at all surprising that Twitter would want to acquire the company, given the tremendous amount of images published on Twitter every day. If Twitter wants to roll out functions such as image search, improve its search rankings based on image content, or perhaps even analyze images to get a better sense of what people are tweeting about, it will need people who understand how to do it.Would you like to see Twitter add image search? How do you think this might affect the way marketers utilize images on the platform to reach consumers? Tell us in the comments.
30% of Traffic to Insurance Sites Came from Search in June
How do auto insurance brands stack up in the search results? How much do they rely on search traffic to their websites? New data coming from Millward Brown Digital explains.
Across the carriers studied in June, approximately three in 10 website visits were generated from search engines. State Farm had the highest percentage of traffic to its site from search, at approximately 36 percent, according to Millward Brown.
Monday, July 14, 2014
Bing Reveals U.S. "Fireworks" Search Interest in Time for July 4th
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Back to School 2014 Trends: How Search Marketers Can Get Ready Now [Study]
School may have just got out for some, but that doesn't mean search marketers can take a break. The back-to-school marketing season is in full swing according to data coming from PM Digital's fourth annual "Back To School Trend Report".
Approximately 48 percent start shopping online in preparation for school three to four weeks prior to the first day of school, and about 31 percent do so two months prior. With much of the U.S. going back to school in late August or early September, that puts retailers into prime search opportunity starting in July.
Google: Top Search Ads Increase Brand Awareness by 6.6% [Study]
Traditionally, the value in search advertising has always been centered on increases in click-through rates and conversions. However, Google and Ipsos MediaCT partnered to study the impact of search ads on brand awareness. The results might surprise you.
How Was the Study Conducted?Google and Ipsos MediaCT ran over 60 search experiments in 2013 in hopes of understanding how search ads affect brand awareness. As part of the studies, 800 U.S. consumers participated in the simulated search scenarios. Think with Google recently shared further information on how the simulations were conducted:
The consumers were prompted to search for a specific category keyword (for example, "hiking boots" or "small cars") on their desktop or laptop. They were then shown either a control search engine results page (SERP) or Test SERP spotlighting one of the 12 categories: apparel and durables, auto, B2B, classified and local, consumer packaged goods (CPG), education, financial services, healthcare, media and entertainment, retail, tech and travel.Consumers that were given the Test SERP would see the test brand's search ad present at the top of their Google search results (as pictured below).
Bing Catapult: New Technology Delivers Faster, More Relevant Search Results
The Catapult project is a redesign of the data centers and machines that power Bing search. It began in 2012 and plans to effectively recreate how Bing handles searches in the backend.
The Catapult project technology can also be scaled across many different Microsoft platforms and services, meaning it can provide a faster user experience to their customers outside of Bing search as well.
Like Google and every other web giant, Microsoft runs its web services atop thousands of computer servers packed into warehouse-sized data centers, and most of these machines are equipped with ordinary processors from Intel, the world's largest chip maker. But when he sat down with Lu, Burger said he wanted millions of dollars to build rack after rack of computer servers that used what are called field-programmable arrays, or FPGAs, processors that Microsoft could modify specifically for use with its own software. He said that these chips–built by a company called Altera–could not only speed up Bing searches, but also change the way Microsoft run all sorts of other online services.What is also unique about the system is that Bing can update and enhance these types of chips, whereas the server system way of doing things has stalled out when it has come to getting the next bigger and faster version, according to a blog post on Microsoft TechNet.
"Going into production with this new technology will be a watershed moment for Bing search," heYandex's Sibir Reverse Image Search Technology is Pure Awesome
Yandex users will now have access to reverse image search, "Sibir," which is the Russian word for Siberia and also based on the acronym CBIR, which stands for "content-based image retrieval."
Reverse image search gives results not based on a word search but on a search of visual content. The developers over at Yandex accomplished this creation of computer vision technology, enabling users with a better image search product.
How Sibir Works
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
SES Atlanta is Just 3 Weeks Away: Learn Top SEO & Paid Search Tactics, Tips & Tools
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