The number of searches for Michael Jackson via search engines was extremely high on the 25th and 26th of June. To give you an idea, there were more searches for Michael Jackson than for the usually highly searched terms ‘sex’, ‘mp3’, ‘Yahoo’ and ‘Google’ cumulated.

Michael Jackson - Google Trends

Obviously the passing away of the ‘King of Pop’ was an international event and people were looking for information online worldwide. The number of searches was so high that Google thought during the first hours that it was cyber attack from some hackers. Some people were even sent to a ‘Sorry’ page when they were looking for Michael Jackson related keywords on Google.

 
Yahoo! had the good idea of publishing on its home page an article about Michael Jackson presumed death and the article brought five times more traffic than usual. Yahoo! communicates that they had 800,000 clicks in one minutes. It is the most viewed Yahoo! article ever.

 
Twitter was also very slow because the number of users trying to post message regarding Michael Jackson. Unsurprisingly, Michael Jackson has been the number one topic since the 25th of June.

 
Michael Jackson’s untimely death was pretty much the first global event fully amplified by social media and search engines.

During my regular perusal of new happenings on the world wide web I came across Hunch. Hunch.com is a decision-making website which uses a bunch of personal questions to determine the most appropriate answer for you individually. The beta version launched in March 2009 of Hunch was only accessible via invitation. The full opening was 4 days ago.

Hunch - Should I use Hunch?

For example if you are looking to buy some new training shoes you will answer a few questions about yourself and how you will use your shoes. Hunch will then suggest three different trainers with a nice link to an e-commerce site…good idea.

Hunch - Suggestion

If your question requires a simple yes or no answer, for example: Do I need a Smartphone? Hunch will give you a percentage of yes and no e.g. 25% yes and 75% no.

The more questions you answer, the more Hunch knows about you and hence the more relevant the suggestion. Also you can judge the result, if you think that the answer is not relevant you can let Hunch know and they will add this change to its data base.

Hunch is pretty funny to use for stupid questions such as ‘Should I clean my house?’ or ‘Does my breath stink?’ where you don’t really need the advise of a computer. Also it is a good way to know different options that you did not consider (What’s the best dog breed for me?).

I even think that Hunch will provide more practical answers for the day to day life than Wolfram Alpha (please see my previous post)…

The new ‘Jewish’ search engine Koogle was launched few days ago. This search engine is ‘kosher’ understood filter the result and only shows what it is acceptable for the strictly Jewish (no sexual content and pictures of women are very controlled…). Koogle is trying to be the Israelite search engine and has two language versions (Hebraic and American English)

Koogle Search Engine

To be honest, Koogle is not really a search engine (like Google, Yahoo! or Bing) although its name is uncannily similar to Google. Koogle is composed of two components, the first one looks like the yellow pages where you can look for a shop/service in your area. The search engine results page is just a list of addresses and phone numbers. The second part of Koogle is the shopping function; you can compare the prices for a multitude of services or objects (camera, mp3 player, car…).

From a technical point of view Koogle is not the best search engine/yellow pages/price comparison website but it is difficult to know if this new search engine will be massively used in Israel, because of its religious implications it probably responds to some needs.
One thing is sure; it is the beginning of a new tendency. After the ‘intimate social network’, the trend is more for an ‘intimate search engine’ where everyone ( based on their religion, sex, country or activity) will have their own personalised search engine and social media.

HP is testing a new social network application for cell phones. The idea is simple, it is a little bit like msn messenger, you can see your friends pictures, name, offline/online, city and some information about the local time and weather of where they from. So far nothing very exciting…

The main idea it is to only promote the friends that you‘re actually contacting regularly. The application will show (promote) only people that you really know and interact via phone, text or other social media sites. We call that ‘Intimate Social Network’.

Intimate Social Network from HP

The new trends in social media will be increasingly about intimate social networking. Who cares about the pictures on Facebook of somebody that you meet twice at work and some random people you maybe never see? How many of your Facebook (or MySpace) friends are you really in contact with? Realistically, probably not a lot…

Also more and more people are worry about the access of personal information to random people or co-workers. This is why the next generation of social media websites or applications will look more like your MSN Messenger (or at least mine) with only the people that you actually personally interact with.

Intimate Social Network goes a little back to basics of social media networking, where the only contacts were people you actually knew. This will be a major change for Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter where the number of friends/followers is commonly understood as popularity.

Personally I think that is a good thing that people focus more on ‘true’ friends than cyberspace ‘acquaintances’.

The new function of Google which was implemented a few days ago (please see my previous post: Google Suggest) raises new questions and issues for companies.

How does Google suggest the relevant keywords and how can we update Google’s suggestions are the two questions most asked.

Google suggests relevant keywords based on the number of searches across an expansive period of time. As, Google Suggest is not updated frequently enough to keep up with the latest trends (e.g. Bing is not part of Google Suggest).

Sometimes the opposite happens, Google will suggest some old trends to the user when actually nobody (based on Google trends) is still looking for these keywords (e.g.: ‘Sarkozy Drunk’ or ‘Obama Special Olympics’).

Google Suggest - Sarkozy

Google Suggest - Obama

This is where a search engine reputation management (SERM) problem arises. Even when the incident is gone from the average searchers memory, Google does not forget, even if it is few months ago.

The only solution to update Google Suggest is to create new trends relevant to the topic and wait few months. Not very efficient, but it is unfortunately the only option.

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing,released on Monday, is trying to respect the Indian law regarding online pornography. In India it is illegal to transmit or publish any pornographic material.

 
When you are using the keyword ‘sex’ in India, Bing will refuse to display any search result. Maybe it is a little bit too drastic; why not use a parental filter in order to display other websites without any pornographic content but still relevant to sex (e.g.: medical websites).

Bing - Sex in India

Google did not bother with this measure and displays very easily pornographic material on its results page.

 
Also any promotion of abortion is illegal but both search engines provide information on the topic. As far as I know none of these companies as been legally penalised for these practices…

 
Anyway, all these different local laws are a big issue for the global search engines. This probably why in some countries the local search engines have still a big part of the market.

Since the start of the Roland Garros Tennis tournament (French Open) you can follow the score very easily via Google or Yahoo!. Both search engines offer the possibility to see the scores on the search engine result page.

It is not the first time that Google and Yahoo have had their own shortcut on the results page; you can look, for example, at any conversion rate (money, distance…).

For the French Open, Google set up an RSS feed from the official website to its result page (for the keywords relevant to Roland Garros). This graphic version is pretty simple and the result links to the official website.

Google - Roland Garros

Yahoo! once again has worked a little bit harder with its own RSS feed. The result links to the Yahoo sport section. There are also some other links to some other pages of Yahoo! Sport (Scores, schedule, photos and video). The graphic view of the score is also a little clearer.

Yahoo - Roland Garros

It is a very good way for Yahoo! to promote is own content. Yahoo! also did a lot better job by proposing some other links relevant to Roland Garros. Google’s provides minimum services, but did it…