With the recent loss of Michael Jackson, we were able to witness not only the loss of a music icon (whether you loved or hated him is irrelevant), but also the impact and benefit of real time search capabilities.  Real time search is one of the strongest features of Twitter.

Ploked previously covered the aspect of Twitter being a search engine.  Not only is Twitter a search engine, it provides something that even Google or other search engines can not provide…real time results.  This was witnessed first hand when reports/rumors of Michael Jackson’s death began to surface.

Antiquated Search Results

Should you have tried to search Google, Yahoo or even Bing, you had little luck finding out what was going on.  Even if there were news outlets that confirmed his actual death, these old school search engines did not have the story indexed within their search results immediately.  Therefore the casual internet user may have had trouble finding confirmation of his death right after the report of his passing was confirmed at a media outlet. Read the rest of this entry »

Hunch launched publicly on June 15th and showed Microsoft’s Bing what a real decision engine looks like.

Hunch is the brainchild of Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, and is arguably the most intuitive of a new pack of startup companies that have zeroed in on the insight that many times when people use Google they are actually not searching for results …they are looking for answers.

Search Engine VS. Decision Engine

Where search engines like Bing fall short is when you have a question and need help making a decision and not just listed information ranked by keyword relevance. Read the rest of this entry »

I have seen a large number of people overly obsessed with Google Pagerank.  Sure, having a decent pagerank is nice, but obsessing over it is lame.  When you ask these people why they are so infatuated with the pagerank of their site, many can not give a good reason.  In fact, many of these people appear to not have a clue about pagerank and what it really is.  So let’s back up the truck and take a brief look at Google Pagerank.

What is Pagerank

Google pagerank is essentially a measuring stick by Google in relation to the amount of links your site or page has from other web properties.  Incoming links to your site are weighted differently by Google on several factors.  Google may consider some incoming links more valuable and therefore assign more of a weight to these links.  More valuable link weighting can be results of an incoming link originating from a high pagerank page, or maybe an incoming link originating from an authority site.  The pagerank scale ranges from 0-10, with 10 being the highest. Read the rest of this entry »