reDesign

July 29, 2010

Why small businesses are snapping up the daily deal

Filed under: advertising, google, local search, marketing, yelp — Rocky Agrawal @ 1:05 pm

A sample daily deal from Living Social.

In recent months, we’ve seen daily deal sites like Groupon and Living Social grow like crazy. Groupon is valued at $1.35 billion. That’s more than 4x the valuation of the McClatchy Company, one of the country’s largest newspaper publishers. It also ekes out The New York Times Company. Others are scrambling to get into the business, including DealPop in Seattle and CrowdCut in Minneapolis. Yelp is also testing its own entry in Sacramento.

A while back, I wrote about why small businesses were reluctant to get online. So what changed?

Well, the daily deal providers addressed most of the challenges I laid out.

  • No one was asking them to get online; now they are. Groupon, Living Social and others are rapidly building up local sales forces to approach small businesses.
  • It’s a lot simpler. Bidding on keywords is beyond the experience level and time commitment most small businesses can afford. Putting together a special offer is much simpler and the daily deal sites are doing a lot of hand holding. Even Google has realized this, with simplified pricing for its Google Tags product aimed at small businesses.
  • There’s no upfront commitment required. Unlike most advertising products, businesses don’t have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on an ad and pray that it works. Instead, they get paid for the deals sold before they’re actually redeemed.
  • Results are evident and compelling. Businesses can clearly see how many people are buying their deals in real time. They can also see customers as they walk through the door with the coupons. It’s a lot more trackable than other forms of advertising.

On the consumer side, the daily deal sites have turned coupons from something that were looked down on to a fun, social thing. Friends who wouldn’t use coupons in the past are touting the great deals they’ve found online.

A big challenge for providers will be providing enough new businesses to keep the deals interesting. Many of the deals I see these days are too far to drive to; a metro area is too large a geography. As the novelty of the daily deal wears off, deals will have to be more targeted based on location to avoid becoming perceived as spam.

June 9, 2010

EVO vs. iPhone

Filed under: android, apple, facebook, flickr, google, iphone, mobile — Tags: — Rocky Agrawal @ 10:21 am

I’ve been using an HTC EVO since last Friday. As an iPhone user for the last two years, this is the first Android phone that has appealed to me.  CrunchGear has a good comparison of the technical specs of the iPhone and the EVO.

The two biggest complaints others have voiced about the EVO are bulk and poor battery life. Yes, it is bulky. It’s the heaviest phone I’ve had in at least 5 years — at 6 ounces, it’s 25% heavier than the iPhone 4G. It’s width makes it more awkward to hold than an iPhone, but not uncomfortably so. But it also has a big, beautiful screen. Life is a tradeoff.

I haven’t had issues with battery life, but then I don’t talk a lot on my phone. Unlike with the iPhone, you can carry around a spare battery.

The other issue that has been mentioned regularly is the on-screen keyboard. The iPhone’s keyboard is less complicated, but the EVO let’s you accomplish more tasks (like entering numbers) without leaving the main keyboard. The one issue I’ve definitely noticed is that some keys on the left side haven’t been registering consistently. (e.g. “A” and “S”)

While others have railed against one or the other, the phones are different enough that they’re likely to appeal to different people. I’ve tried to identify those below.

For typical consumers, my recommendation would be the iPhone, provided that you’re in an area where AT&T’s network isn’t saturated. For me? I’ve got three more weeks to decide.

If you…

… have a lot of music or photos and like iTunes.

Go with the iPhone. I haven’t been able to find a decent media synchronization experience for EVO. I used my iPhone frequently for podcasts and those are easy to set up and synch with iTunes. I also synch photos from my computer to my iPhone. Again, not something I can do with the stock EVO.

… want to customize your phone experience.

Go with EVO. You can customize a lot of elements of how the phone operates. You can create themes for different uses, e.g. a work theme, play theme and travel theme. Each theme can have different applications, shortcuts and widgets. It’d be even nicer if you could change themes automatically based on time of day or location. (e.g. work theme while at the office)

… don’t want to know what a task manager is.

Go with iPhone. Ordinary users should never have to see things like com.google.android.apps.googlevoice. It’s difficult to figure out what apps are running on the EVO. That’s problematic because you could easily have an unknown app running down your battery.

… want something that looks pretty.

Go with iPhone. It’s hard to top Apple design. The EVO is bulkier and certainly looks more utilitarian than iPhone. The EVO screen also shows fingerprints a lot more than my iPhone 3G.

… give out your Google Voice number to friends, family and colleagues.

Go with EVO. The Google Voice integration is incredible. Calls you make can be routed through GV automatically. Calls are logged correctly in the phone and on the GV site. Voicemail is also seamlessly integrated. Text messages aren’t integrated into the phone’s messages app.

… want a broad selection of apps.

Go with iPhone. Yes, it’s not open and yes, Apple can arbitrarily reject apps. But iOS has many more apps written for it. While many of the major apps are on both platforms, I couldn’t find equivalents for flickr or Zipcar on Android. Google Voice is the key exception of an app that’s on Android but not iPhone.

For gamers, the iPhone advantage is even stronger. With the gyroscope on iPhone 4, gaming will only get better.

…  like flickr, Facebook and Twitter.

Go with iPhone. The Facebook and Twitter apps for iPhone are much more polished than their Android counterparts. For example, on the Facebook app, clicking on a link someone has shared sends you on an infinite loop between the shared item and the person’s wall.  (Google VP Vic Gotundra recently gave a Facebook intern an HTC Evo in hopes of getting a better experience on Android.) I couldn’t find an official flickr app for Android.

HTC includes some tools for all three networks that integrate them into the phone’s UI. For example, contact lists from all three can be integrated with the phone’s main contact list. This sounds great — and is the right direction for phones — but the software isn’t ready for prime time. I often see the same people listed 3 or 4 times. (You can manually consolidate these for each person, but that’s a lot of work.) If you set up favorite people, you’ll see when they’ve updated their social networks. Background downloading of status updates also takes a toll on battery life.

… have terrible AT&T coverage.

Go with EVO. AT&T’s networks in SF and NY are overloaded and getting data connections or making a call can be a real challenge.

I’ve had few issues with Sprint’s network. Sprint also includes roaming on Verizon’s network.

… want something that “just works” out of the box.

Go with iPhone. The stock EVO is much more customizable than a stock iPhone. With customization always comes complexity. When iPod came out, a lot of techies criticized it for being a dumbed down MP3 player. Other MP3 players of the time had FM radios! They didn’t tie you into one company! But by stripping away all those extra features, Apple created something that just worked for the most common tasks for most people.

Same is true with iPhone. Owning the entire stack gives Apple a huge advantage in creating a user experience that just works across its enormous userbase. Video calling will work the same across all iPhone 4s. Not true with Android.

With HTC’s Sense UI, Android, Sprint customizations and apps all playing a part, the EVO experience doesn’t hold together.

Although features like social networking integration will be important, what HTC has done with EVO is too confusing for most people.

… want to be able to connect your laptop, iPad or other devices.

Go with EVO. Although AT&T is now offering tethering, they’re charging an extra $20 a month and the usage still counts against your 2GB data limit. For$30 a month, Sprint offers unlimited data and a wireless hotspot that supports up to 8 devices simultaneously. If you don’t need that, you might be able to use an app like PDANet to tether your laptop without paying the $30 a month.

… talk a lot, text a lot, use a lot of data or use navigation and want to economize.

Go with EVO. Sprint’s pricing plans are generally cheaper than AT&T for heavy users. For $80, Sprint includes unlimited nights (beginning at 7pm vs. 9pm for AT&T) and weekends, unlimited calls to any mobile phone (vs. just AT&T customers), unlimited texting (an additional $20 on AT&T) and navigation (extra $10 on AT&T). Sprint also has generous corporate discounts that can knock up to 25% off the bill. Low volume users who can get by with less than 250MB of data a month are better off with AT&T.

… are a world traveler.

Go with the iPhone. With GSM, you’ll at least have the option of international coverage in most countries, even if you have to pay exorbitant roaming rates. Of course, it’s best to unlock your phone and use local carriers if you’re spending any amount of time outside the country.

… are uncertain.

Try EVO. Sprint offers the most generous return policy in the business. You have 30 days to decide whether you like it. If you don’t, you can take it back and you won’t pay anything. They won’t even charge you for the service you used. AT&T will charge you for the service, plus the activation fee, unless you return within 3 days. Sprint’s early termination fee is also lower, $200 vs. $325.

NOTE: Comparisons here are based on a stock iPhone vs. a stock EVO.

May 24, 2010

Can Google cross the retail chasm with Google TV?

Filed under: apple, apple tv, google, television — Rocky Agrawal @ 6:40 pm

Sony Dash at Best Buy

Last week, Google announced Google TV, a product that marries the Web with TV. It’s a product category that I’ve been excited about for several years.

But creating new product categories is hard. Retail is hard. Doing both together is really hard.

I was reminded of that today at Best Buy, where I saw a display for Sony’s Dash. As best as I can describe it, it’s a cross between an alarm clock, picture frame and MP3 player. Despite Best Buy having a real Dash, I still couldn’t try it out. The unit seemed to be glued to its stand. The screen said it was looking for a network, which it never found.

I then went over to check out Insignia GPS devices. The connected GPS unit sells for $199. Given that Insignia is Best Buy’s house brand, you’d figure it would get some decent promotion and training. I asked the blue shirt if there was a display unit. Nope. How much is the service? “I think it’s like $10 a month.” (The correct answer is $14.99 a month.) What’s the difference between it and the not connected unit that sells for $69? “I think it lets you connect to Google.”

Like Google TV, these are products that need to be experienced. They are either new products or significant (and premium-priced) variations on existing product categories. If people can’t try them or, at the very least, talk to someone who has in-depth knowledge about them, people won’t buy them. (As an early adopter, I probably will… but that’s not a huge market.)

Contrast this experience with the Apple Store in the same mall. There were two tables, each with about a dozen functioning iPads. You could pick up an iPad and play with it for as long as you wanted. There were employees available who knew the device and could answer questions. The biggest challenge? They were sold out of all but the 16GB WiFi iPad.

As I wrote before the first iPhone was released, Apple’s retail stores give it a huge leg up when it comes to introducing new product categories. The excitement that they create for product launches (read: free media), combined with the opportunity to experience new products is unmatched in retail. If Apple decides to make Apple TV more than a hobby, its store employees will play a big part in shaping user perception.

A big unknown is the price of Google TV. People might pay an extra $50 on a $800 TV for the Google brand, even if they’re not quite sure what it does. It’s unlikely that the price premium will be that small, given the cost of just the Intel Atom processors. I’d expect Google TV to add at least $100 to the price. The other big challenge is that a lot of people have recently replaced their TVs as a result of the digital TV transition. 65% of homes already have at least one HDTV, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.

A standalone box is going to to be an even harder sell to all but the geeks. The market is littered with unsuccessful standalone boxes from hard drive and networking gear manufacturers. They’ve all suffered from poor retail support and complexity of set up.

For Google to succeed, it will have to spend a lot more money on buyer education than it traditionally has.

See also:

More on: Google, television

August 5, 2009

Past, present and future of online maps

Filed under: bing, google, local search, maps, microsoft — Rocky Agrawal @ 11:55 am

Business names and landmarks on Google MapsGoogle announced yesterday that it has added more detail on its maps, highlighting businesses and landmarks. They even solved the Albert Einstein Memorial problem that I wrote about last year.

Businesses and landmarks are important because they make maps more in line with the way people think, instead of the way that computers operate. This change also means that businesses won’t have to resort to painting their rooftops to be easily identifiable.

There are two big challenges with what Google is doing:

We’ve come a long way from the early days of the Web when maps consisted largely of roads and a clunky user interface. We’ve seen the addition of aerial imagery, building outlines, photos, public transit, Street View, neighborhoods, user-generated content and live traffic. Google has driven much of this innovation, although to be fair MapQuest had aerial imagery first and A9 had a version of street view early on.

There is still a lot of work to do to improve maps:

  • College and corporate campuses. Campuses such as Google’s and Microsoft’s buildings have numbers, but these aren’t shown on the map. If you were meeting someone, they’d probably tell you to go to “Building 43″. My friend Adam at Google keeps a custom Google map to show where his building is. (Oddly, Microsoft’s Bing maps show building numbers for the Microsoft campus, but don’t let you search for them.) The same thing applies for airport terminals.
  • Controlled-access facilities. Businesses in controlled-access facilities should be hidden by default — few people are going to park and go through security to eat at an airport restaurant. On the other hand, if I’m in the airport, I want to know what businesses are in my terminal.
  • Handling nonstandard locations. Databases are organized around cities and states in the United States. This works for most places, but is problematic in areas that don’t follow the convention like Hawaii or Las Vegas. Hawaiians talks about islands, but the local databases don’t know the concept of an island. This is made worse by the fact that the same town name is used on multiple islands — there’s a Waimea on Kauai and Hawaii and a Kailua on Oahu and Hawaii. Local constructs such as “North Shore” and “South Shore” aren’t understood either. Navigating using local search on my recent trips to Hawaii was error filled.
    In Vegas, hotels are a primary navigation construct and many of those hotels have more shops and restaurants than do a lot of American towns.
    Given how popular these destinations are, I’m surprised this problem hasn’t been solved.
  • Parking availability. In a big city it’s rare that you can drive up to your destination and park right in front; finding parking can easily add 15-20 minutes to your trip. Companies like Urban Mapping are already collecting this information. I had a book called Park It Here! that showed street parking restrictions for every block in Manhattan. I’d love to see that data online.

More on: google, maps, local search

June 30, 2009

Bing, Yahoo! try to capitalize on Google’s Michael Jackson traffic surge

Filed under: advertising, aol, bing, google, search, yahoo — Rocky Agrawal @ 2:23 pm
Bing, Yahoo! ads on Michael Jackson results on Google

Bing, Yahoo! ads on Michael Jackson results on Google. Click to see full version.

Seen over the weekend: ads for bing and Yahoo! on Google search results for “Michael Jackson”.

The bing ad led to bing’s xRank page for Michael Jackson. The Yahoo! ad bizarrely led to a Yahoo! shopping results page for Michael posters, most of which had nothing to do with Jackson.

The bing ad appeared every time I reloaded the page. The other ads were much less frequent.

Update: AOL has joined the fray with ads for AOL Music, including a pitch to download a “Michael Jackson tribute toolbar” on the landing page.

June 7, 2009

What the AP must do now

Filed under: google, journalism, newspapers, publishing — Rocky Agrawal @ 10:13 am

I’ve written before about how the Associated Press blew it in the early days of the Web by choosing to not play in the online news space. More than a decade later, AP still has tremendous assets that it can use to become a great news source. Rather than fight expensive legal battles that it will almost surely lose, it can try to build a great product:

  • Unlock the content vault — AP content has typically been available online for no more than 30 days, which means that links to AP content goes bad quickly. AP could provide exclusive access to all of the content that it has. Not only does this provide a great service to users, it’s also great for search engine rankings.
  • Exploit the photos –- One of my favorite things when I was working in a newsroom was to look through the AP LeafDesk. AP employs some of the world’s most talented photographers and the LeafDesk was my window to the world. From there, I would choose which photos would appear in our products. In the online world with infinite space, there is no reason to have editors limit the availability of pictures to what they can fit in print. Online access to AP’s photos would be a pageview goldmine; slideshows are incredibly popular. At the New York Times, 11 million of the 49 million pageviews on the day after the inauguration went to slideshows. (Bonus tip: talk to the folks at Cooliris.)
  • Geotag the content — AP journalists are in the best position to include relevant geographic information in articles and photos. Geotagging would provide users new ways to explore AP’s content. Imagine browsing through a map with the latest photos and news. Or using geotags combined with archived content to explore a region in time. Google News tries to do this using algorithms, but often misses or adds irrelevant geotagging.
  • Organize the AP’s information and make it universally accessible – Instead of letting Google organize the AP’s information, the AP should do it. This may be hard to do given the AP’s DNA, but it needs to move from generating disposable news stories to creating longterm news resources. There is a lot of information and judgment that goes into the newsmaking process that doesn’t make it into the final story. If embedded in a database, that information could be used to automatically generate timelines of the major stories of significant news events. AP’s obit file could become a reference source about newsmakers.
  • Talk to NPR – NPR faces channel conflict similar to AP’s, yet they’ve managed to build one of the best news sites and they’ve done it under the NPR brand. NPR.org is frequently a leader when it comes to adopting new technologies, including open APIs, social media and search. Learn from their experts.

AP needs to do this under the AP brand instead of obscure local brands. It needs to focus on page performance, usability and searchability.

If AP does all of the above, it will have built an unparalleled news product. Maybe one that consumers would pay for.

More on: newspapers, geotagging

See also:

April 15, 2009

How the AP blew it

Filed under: google, iphone, journalism, media, newspapers, yahoo — Rocky Agrawal @ 9:17 pm

In the most recent round of AP getting in a huff about search engines and aggregators stealing traffic that they feel rightly belongs to them, there’s a fundamental problem they’re ignoring: AP chose not be in the online news business. More than a decade ago, AP made two crucial decisions: to not create a destination site and to license its content to news portals. Either of these decisions on their own would have been damaging, but the combination of the two has been nearly deadly.

Screenshot of AP's iPhone app

Screenshot of AP's iPhone app

As a member-owned cooperative, the AP has catered to its members, which includes newspapers, radio stations and other media outlets. Even now, if you go to AP.org, news is a footnote. Contrast that with the front page of Reuters. Instead of displaying AP content on the AP-branded site, you get AP content in obscure brands like the Lake County Record-Bee, High Desert Daily Press, Citizen-Times.com and GazetteXtra.com. AP is still hosting the content, but the strong national AP brand is subsumed by a large number of brands that have no meaning outside their region.

This might have worked if newspapers had assumed the role of the default home page and people sought out their local brands. Some papers, including the Washington Post and New York Times tried to create all purpose portals; those efforts have been abandoned.

AP also decided to license content to online media outlets. Yahoo! was an early licensee; Google struck a deal with AP more recently. Yahoo! was able to take the AP content and create a leading news destination site without employing hundreds of journalists.

Not only do Yahoo! and Google license AP content, they are doing a better job presenting it than AP. Compare this story on the AP’s site (branded oanow.com) with the same story on Yahoo! News. The Yahoo! story loads a lot faster and the layout is cleaner. On AP-hosted pages, I sometimes get pop up ads. It’s a much worse experience than Google or Yahoo! News.

The fact that AP doesn’t have a destination site presents another big problem in today’s PageRank driven environment: because the same story can be presented at hundreds of different URLs, they don’t rank highly in search results.

It’s not impossible for AP to get back in the game. But they have to play the game as it exists today, instead of trying to reset the calendar to 1995. They’ll need to focus on the things that any Web business needs to focus on today: simplicity, performance, community, analytics and search engine optimization. And they must do it under the AP brand.

One hopeful sign is AP’s Mobile News iPhone application. The app provides a solid user experience, incorporates photos and videos effectively, has acceptable levels of advertising and looks like it was designed this decade. You can even send in news tips. My only real complaint is that the AP brand is buried in favor of a generic “Mobile News Network” brand. (Probably to placate member companies.)

AP has a lot of assets that even now aren’t fully exploited by Google or Yahoo! With some creative thinking and Web-focused talent, they could use those assets to build a killer destination site. It won’t be anyone’s home page, but it can be successful nonetheless.

More on: newspapers.

March 19, 2009

Facebook drives 6MM people to Friendster!

Filed under: facebook, google, search, social networking, statistics — Rocky Agrawal @ 1:25 am

That headline is kinda, sorta true. If you buy shoddy analysis from misinterpreted data.

Like a recent piece from Henry Blodget, mass inflator of the Web 1.0 bubble. He is at it again with a piece on Facebook being a Google Killer. He points to RBC Capital Markets analyst Ross Sandler’s “analysis” of Facebook’s incredible growth and comScore data on entries and exits.

This is the kind of incessant hyping that inflated the housing bubble we’re all suffering through now — assuming that extreme rates of growth will continue.

The 1427% growth cited for Facebook starts from an insignificant base. With Google’s 468MM uniques in 2006, the only way for Google to have grown 1427% would be to reach every man, woman and child on earth. And it certainly couldn’t sustain that growth into the future, even if a lot of couples got really busy really fast.

Blodget also points to comScore’s entry/exit data to bolster his case. Here, he falsely equates correlation with causation. comScore’s entry/exit report doesn’t necessarily mean that site A drove traffic to site B. It just means that after someone went to site A, they went to site B.

If you go from Facebook to Google, it counts as an exit from Facebook and an entry to Google. It doesn’t matter whether you clicked on a link in Facebook to go to Google or not. You just happend to do those two things. Given that a lot of people use both Google and Facebook, any big site will show up on both entry/exit reports for any site.

Blodget says:

Fully 19% of Google sessions now come from Facebook, up from 9% a year ago.  At the very least, this will likely give Facebook the leverage to negotiate a sweet referral deal at some point.

Nope. Those people are going to Google anyway, without any prodding from Facebook. Google would be stupid to pay for that traffic.

comScore’s entry/exit report is one of the most useless reports they generate and really difficult to interpret. The only real curiosity in the Facebook data is this: 6MM people go to Friendster after they go to Facebook?

Yet another issue with RBC’s graph is that it doesn’t take into account duplicated reach. The combination of Google and Facebook is not 99% of worldwide uniques, because there is a high degree of overlap between the two sites. RBC analysts evidently don’t know how to use the unduplicated reach feature of comScore’s reporting tools.

That’s three huge flaws in one report. Sadly, that’s not uncommon. Analysts and journalists frequently ignore methodology while chasing killer headlines.

Thanks to @carolalene for the pointer on the comic.

March 13, 2009

Realtime Twitter search is not a Google killer, part 2

Filed under: facebook, google, search, seo, twitter — Rocky Agrawal @ 12:00 pm

In the first part, I wrote about the fallacy of using people with thousands of followers to illustrate how you can get great results if you ask questions on Twitter.

In this part, I’ll focus on why the conversational nature of Twitter makes searching it effectively a hard problem.

Consider this exchange:

@CherylHaas: Celebrating my newly purchased iPhone. w00t!!! No longer a Luddite. App suggestions, please?
@rakeshlobster: yelp and shazam and Facebook

This is how people interact on Twitter. Partly because we’re lazy, partly because a lot of the interaction is done from mobile devices where typing is hard and partly because of the 140 character limit on tweets.

Between these two tweets, we have an answer to the query “iPhone app”. But Twitter Search treats these tweets independently. As a result, if you search for “iPhone app”, you’d get Cheryl’s question. Not very helpful.

If you search for “shazam,” you’ll get back my response. But there’s no context for it. The meaning of my response is lost without the context of Cheryl’s question. The question could have been “what apps are causing your iPhone to crash?” This happens in ordinary conversation on Twitter; when people are slow at responding and I get a “@rakeshlobster yes,” I’ll sometimes have forgotten the context.

This problem could be alleviated if Twitter presented threaded conversations. But then Google could just as easily index the conversation, as it does with Yahoo! Answers.

Another issue is that people don’t write for Twitter the way they write for search engines. Compare my tweet above with this post I wrote on my favorite iPhone applications. That was written with searchability in mind. There’s also a lot of shorthand on Twitter. @maryvale shortened “Nikon D80″ to “D80″ in her tweet discussing my last blog post.

That may change if searching Twitter takes off, but it would also change the nature of Twitter. I’ve been experimenting with adding more keywords in my tweets. For example, when I dropped my laptop, I originally wrote:

“laptop hinge broken. argh. it’s pretty, sleek and light. and extremely delicate.”

But then I added in the “toshiba portege r500 is”. It’s more searchable, but it makes the conversation sound stilted and robotic.

Another challenge with searching Twitter for information is that a lot of the value in Twitter is not in the tweets, but in what the tweets point too. With the extensive of URL shorteners like TinyURL and bit.ly, even the minimal keywords are lost.

Beyond the content difficulties in search, there are the related issues of search order and authority.

The results that you get back are sorted chronologically and are highly dependent on when you search. Although the “best” answer for a search can fluctuate over time (one of my criticisms of Google is that its algorithms don’t do enough to counter the effects of Web rot), for most searches it doesn’t vary dramatically over the course of a day or a week. A notable exception would be queries like “what’s a good party at SXSW right now?”

As with asking questions of the Twitterverse, searching Twitter doesn’t provide any guidance as to whose answers are better than others. Searching Twitter is in someways like stepping back 15 years in search technology, before search engines widely used off-page clues and link authority to rank results.

Some suggestions have revolved around developing authority rankings based on number of followers, number of tweets, etc. The problem with that is that no one person is an authority on everything. A search result from Om Malik (@Om) on telecom should be ranked much higher than a result from Om on migration patterns of birds in Africa. Review sites like Amazon and Yelp have devoted a lot of energy to helping people determine which results are valuable. Twitter will have to develop something similar.

Despite today’s issues, the immense amount of data that Twitter and Facebook are collecting could be used to build a better, more spam-resistant search engine. The marriage of search and social networks has the potential to get us better and more credible answers, while also increasing our connections to our friends.

More on: Twitter, Google

Disclosure: I worked with several members of Twitter’s search team at AOL Search. While I don’t believe in the current hype in the blogosphere about Twitter as a Google killer with the current technology, the guys I know are very smart and I look forward to seeing what they do next.

March 8, 2009

Realtime Twitter search is not a Google killer

Filed under: google, search, seo, social networking, twitter — Rocky Agrawal @ 6:08 pm

There’s been a lot of hype lately about “realtime search” using Twitter being a Google Killer. John Battelle talked about it in searchblog. Mike Arrington talked about it in TechCrunch.

There are two scenarios that have been talked about with Twitter and search: using Twitter to ask questions of the Twitterverse and using Twitter search to search Tweets.

In the first scenario, you send out a Tweet looking for information. An example is a Tweet by Om Malik on Feb. 2 at 7:02 p.m. “suggestion for great Indian restaurant in or around Palo alto. needs to be authentic”. Within a few minutes, he got a bunch of responses. (I recommended Amber India in Mountain View, which was a frequent recommendation.) By 8:19 p.m. Om was “eating at amber India in mountain view.”

Wow! Send out a query and you can get answers from real people right away. Who wouldn’t want that?

Not so fast.

This reminds me of latenight TV commercials for miracle diet drugs. You see pictures of people who have: lost 75 pounds in 8 weeks! lost 10 pounds overnight! gone from a size 24 to a size 6 while eating cake and sitting on the couch! You usually see a line of fine print that says “results not typical.”

That’s exactly the case here. You get atypical results when you have tens of thousands of followers as Om (23,000+) and Battelle (11,000+) do.

I posted a Tweet yesterday “Looking for good wineries in napa. Focus on ambiance and red wines.” To give the Tweet extra chance of success, I posted it using Twinkle, an app that adds a location layer to Twitter. Given the nature of my query, my friend network and location in the Bay Area, I expected success. At 200+ followers, my follower count is well above the median for Twitter.

Three hours later, I got one response from a friend. By that time I’d already decided which wineries I was going to visit. Hardly a Google killer.

Suppose for a moment that I just picked a tough query. What if I’d gotten a dozen responses?

Then the problem becomes how I decide which of those responses are better than the others. Many queries have qualitative components: “What’s a good winery in Napa?” “Is the Nikon D80 a good camera?” The value of the answer depends on my needs as well as the expertise of the answerer.

With a typical search result, you have a number of clues as to quality of the answerer. If something appears on the first page of Google, presumably a lot of people have found that resource valuable. If I get a page from dpreview, I can see that they’ve reviewed hundreds of other cameras, so they probably know what they’re talking about.

With Twitter answers, I get limited information about the source and limited content.

In some cases, this is OK. I did a Tweet a while ago wondering if it was sunny at the Beach Chalet in San Francisco. You’d have to be a jerk to lie about the answers, there’s not much expertise required to answer the question and the answer fits within 140 characters.

But a query like “Is the Nikon D80 a good camera?” is tougher. If @maryvale says “yes, absolutely” then that’s all I need. I know her, I love her photography and I know she knows a lot about cameras. That doesn’t hold true for most of my other followers. And it certainly doesn’t hold true for people I don’t know at all. Someone may say “D80 is a piece of crap” because they would never consider anything less than the $2,000+ D700 or because they aren’t very technically savvy. A Tweeted answer doesn’t provide that context.

Part 2: Challenges of searching Twitter

More on: Twitter, Google

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