Search engines have evolved, make no mistake about it. Where once a search engine did nothing but look for stuff, they now incorporate apps that are moving closer to the realm occupied by social media. Likewise, social media sites are fighting to capture their share of the search market by introducing real-time results. In the not-so-distant future, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if Facebook (the biggest kid on the social media block) squared off against Google, undoubtedly the search engine king for the past decade. Unfortunately for us little people, this collision of search and social will lead to serious online privacy concerns.

Which is not to say that users aren’t already concerned about online security. We’ve come to an intersection, and it’s a Catch-22 because we have to give up privacy to gain access. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Lately, many of the privacy issues have focused upon social media sites, their associated apps, and the numerous security fumbles that nearly every social media site’s committed. However, the real “information” is being stored by your favorite search engine.

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 »