Thursday, June 25, 2009

Data Rich Customer Service

Image representing Amazon EC2 as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBase

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...Image via CrunchBase


Businesses collect so much data on individual customers and individual transactions. Social media is becoming so very pervasive. Your social media profile is portable. Soon enough you could take it to Amazon.com and all sorts of vendors big and small.

Just like your Facebook experience is different from mine, your shopping experience at a site ought to be unique to you, unique and rich.

Chris Brogan sounds rather futuristic in his latest blog post.
First One to This Standard Wins Make your website all about me.
From The Netizen BlogRoll
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Dynamic PageRank And Real Time Search


Google beat the old search engines back in the late 1990s with its concept of PageRank. The more sites that linked to you, the more valuable was your site.

If something like real time search were to become possible, the concept of a dynamic pagerank would emerge. It would not be about how many sites linked to your site alone. It would be about do people actually click on those links to get to your site? Google's search algorithms have gone through so much evolution, and since they have been secret about it all for understantable reasons, it is hard to figure out what they have already done.

Google has been smart about constantly finetuning its search algorithms. They try to beat the so-called Search Engine Optimization people. It is a constant tussle.

Another thing would be content itself. After billions of search queries from people, Google should be able to figure out what sites and pages best delivered for what queries, and the number of search terms are for the most part finite. So if you can measure satisfaction, would that affect the way you do PageRank?

What about the content of the page itself? It might be a brand new page, but what if it is the most relevant page to my particular query? I guess search engines are not that good at reading yet.

Content creation and searching content will stick around for a long, long time.

And Bing's recent launch showed presentation is a whole new ballgame altogether. Microsoft decided they can't beat Google at its secret sauce of search, so they decided to take a bite at the other side of the coin: presentation of search results. Calling itself "a decision engine, not a search engine" was also a good marketing move.

They did not beat Google, but they did beat Yahoo, looks like. Now Bing is number two. Shoots for the stars, and you will get the moon.

Microblogging Search: What Took Google So Long?
Square Search
Blogger Search Gadget: What Took You So Long?
Wolfram Alpha: An Answer Engine, Not A Search Engine
Real Time Search: Twitter Is Not Doing It
Distributed Search
Google Is Working On Search
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream

From The Netizen BlogRoll

So, you want to be a Gmail ninja?
The Link Builder’s Guide To Analyzing SERP Dominators For Link Opportunities
First One to This Standard Wins
Learning from Singer
All for Good: Bringing search, scale and openness to community service
A new landmark in computer vision
Search by Author on Google News
Blogger is Turning 10
Designing a lounge for the Day in the Cloud



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