Microsoft uses Facebook 'likes' to battle Google

Microsoft will launch a new feature in Bing Search, baking in recommendations from Facebook friends, to make results more relevant.
The new feature, to debut tomorrow, will elevate results that have received a thumbs up "like" from a friend on Facebook. So if a user is searching for a Thai restaurant in San Francisco, for example, a particular spot that received kudos from that person's Facebook posse will climb in the results.
Microsoft, which likes to call Bing a "decision engine" to distinguish from Google, wants Bing to mimic the real world, where people often seek advice from friends before making decisions. And while recommendation sites such as Yelp offer utility, they don't include insights from trusted friends.

Bing search results that include recommendations from Facebook friends

(Credit: Microsoft)

"We're trying to infuse this idea of emotion into the decision engine," Bing director Stefan Weitz said. What's more, Microsoft is deepening its relationship with Facebook, creating a bulwark against Google, which dominates Web search. The Facebook partnership offers Bing searchers something they can't get on Google.
"They don't have access to the Facebook firehose," Weitz said.
Google continues to dominate search with 65.4 percent share in April according to ComScore, compared to just 14.1 percent for Bing and 15.9 percent for Yahoo, which uses Bing's search technology. The closest social recommendation offering from Google is its "+1" feature that gives users the ability to effectively "like" search results.
Microsoft estimates that roughly 3.5 million sites have "like" buttons. What's more, the company says more than 30 billion pieces of content - everything from news stories and blog posts to music links and photo albums - are shared each month. The companies didn't share data about how often users "like" products and services, the cornerstone of the new Bing feature.
The social recommendations will be most obvious in searches for products and services. Hotels, stores, and goods, such as electronics and clothes, will all rise in search results if user's friends have clicked the "like" icon in Facebook. When those results pop up, they'll include a line that a specific friend liked the product or service along with a tiny thumbnail photo from their Facebook profile.
Bing will also elevate news articles in results if a Facebook friend posted a link to the piece on their wall. And when users look broadly in a product category, such as "thin laptops," review sites that focus on the category and have been liked by friends will surface in results.
The feature only works when a user is logged into both Facebook and Bing at the same time. Microsoft said that more than 60 percent of Facebook users have a Facebook tab open in their browser while online.

Google adds video editor to Honeycomb

Google CEO Eric Schmidt speaks at Mobile World Congress 2011.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

BARCELONA, Spain--Google today unveiled Movie Studio, a new application for the upcoming Honeycomb era of Android tablets that lets people edit videos.
The software, which Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt announced during a speech here at Mobile World Congress, is designed to expand on a phone's abilities to capture imagery.
With it, people can combine still images and videos to create broader video that can be shared online. People will be able to add musical soundtracks, fade to black at the end of the video, and add effects like the Ken Burns-style panning so common on Apple video software.
The software requires Android 3.0, the tablet-optimized version of Android set to debut soon with Motorola's Xoom tablet.
"When you play with Honeycomb, you'll get the sense of beauty and power we have with the new interface," Schmidt said. "I just really love it.
Android releases proceed alphabetically, with Gingerbread being the present version for phones and Honeycomb soon to come for tablets. The "I" version of Android will marry elements of both, Schmidt said.
He also said Google likes a six-month development cycle for Android. With Gingerbread released in late 2010, that suggests the sequel should arrive in the second quarter of this year.
Google's biggest Android rival is Apple, which makes not only the iOS mobile operating system but also the iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches on which it runs. Google has outflanked the iPhone with Android on cheaper phones that, though not always up to the full potential of Android, still are a big improvement over earlier-era smartphones.
Perhaps not coincidentally, however, rumors surfaced this week of a smaller, cheaper iPhone.
"Beyond helping address a potential saturation challenge, we believe that the possible introduction of a lower-priced iPhone is strategically important for Apple, and we are surprised the company hasn't introduced a lower-priced offering previously," Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi said in a research note today. "We believe that Apple's ultimate intention is to be the dominant smartphone vendor globally, and that the company has market share aspirations that are akin to its iPod business (rather that its Mac business, where it faces a sticky Wintel platform.)"
Competing with Microsoft
Google faces another rival in the newly paired Microsoft and Nokia, trying to create a third ecosystem to rival iOS and Android. With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is trying to steer a middle course between the locked-down control of Apple with iOS and the free-for-all near-chaos that is the Android realm.
Indeed, in the big picture, Schmidt listed Microsoft as the company's top competitor.
"No question, our strongest competitor is Microsoft," Schmidt said. "They have a strong advertising model. They have the cash, the scale, the brand, and the reach to do good and amazing things."
Facebook, on the other hand, is not a problem at present, Schmidt said.
"Facebook appears to be additive," Schmdit said. "Facebook users use Google more. There's no evidence they're hurting our ad business. At this point we think Facebook is zero to net positive."
He left unsaid other aspects of the competitive reality, though: Google has been trying furiously for years now with little success to come up with services that match Facebook as a place where people congregate and share information online.
Regarding Nokia, Schmidt said the door is still open for the Finnish phone maker to join the Android realm. "We would have loved it if they'd chosen Android," he said.
Google has another operating system effort under way besides Android: Chrome OS. This is a browser-based project that runs Web apps rather than the native apps found on personal computers and Android.
It's possible someday it will merge with Android, Schmidt said.
"Don't force technology to merge when it's not ready," he said. "Wait for them to be ready."
Answering audience questions, Schmidt acknowledged fragmentation is something of an issue for Android programmers who want their apps to run well on multiple phones. But, he said, an antifragmentation clause and the Android Market dynamics will keep companies from straying too far.
The antifragmentation clause requires members of the Open Handset Alliance to include mandatory Android interfaces that software needs. And straying too far also will mean that apps aren't available in the Android Market--and no carriers want to miss out on the Android ecosystem, he said.
Moreover, he added, Android 2.3 will smooth over differences.
"We've released Gingerbread, which in a month or two everybody will upgrade to. At that point everybody will be on a common platform, which should address a lot of your concerns," he said, perhaps optimistically presuming that older phones will get the upgrade.

Preview into Android 3.0 SDK

Google which gave a sneak peek into the tablet-friendly Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” earlier this month in CES 2011, has now laid out some of the main highlights of the forthcoming Android 3.0 SDK along with a short preview for developers to start testing their existing applications on bigger screens.

Some of the highlights are:

• UI framework for creating great apps for larger screen devices: Android 3.0 comes with a new holographic UI Theme. Therefore developers can use the new UI components, themes, richer widgets and notifications etc. It also features drag and drop, and other new features which app developers can make use of, to create rich and engaging apps for users on the tablet form factor.
• High-performance 2D and 3D graphics: A new property-based animation framework allows app developers to add amazing visual effects to their applications. A built-in GL renderer lets developers request hardware-acceleration of common 2D rendering operations in their apps, across the entire app or only in specific activities or views. Developers take advantage of a new 3D graphics engine called Renderscript for adding rich 3D scenes.
• Support for multicore processor architectures: Android 3.0 has been optimized to run on either single or dual-core processors, so that applications run with the best possible performance.
• Rich multimedia: Android 3.0 comes with new multimedia features such as HTTP Live streaming support, a pluggable DRM framework, and easy media file transfer through MTP/PTP, giving developers a new way to bring rich content to users.
• New types of connectivity: Android 3.0 offers new APIs for Bluetooth A2DP and HSP allowing applications to offer audio streaming and headset control. Applications can also connect to UI less devices thanks to the added support for Bluetooth insecure socket connections.
• Enhancements for enterprise: The new administrative policies, such as for encrypted storage and password expiration integrated in Android 3.0, helps enterprise administrators manage devices more effectively.

For a complete list of the new and improved features of Android 3.0, do check out Android 3.0 feature highlights. To get started with developing/testing applications in this SDK, developers can head over to Preview SDK Introduction and additional details about the changes in the latest versions of the tools can be found using SDK Tools, ADT Plugin, and NDK pages on Google Android Developer website.

The final SDK will be released in couple of weeks after which developers can build and publish Android 3.0 applications to Android Market.

For Google's AdWords, relevance takes time

Google's AdWords system often isn't fast enough in ranking relevant ads during a sudden
surge in search query volume.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Dodge's Challenger is a modern muscle car. The Challenger explosion 25 years ago was a tragic moment. Other than the name they don't have much in common, but for several hours Friday morning, Google's AdWords system considered them linked.
That's just one example of a weak spot in Google's famous AdWords system, which turned an interesting Stanford science project into the world's most powerful Internet company. Simply put, it takes some time for the AdWords system to determine whether an ad triggered by a search query is truly relevant to that query, meaning that in times of breaking news or a sudden spike for certain queries Google often serves completely irrelevant ads, such as the one promoting the Challenger's Hemi engine above news stories about the 25th anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle disaster.
A week of study of Google's "hot searches" as measured by Google Trends--a compilation of search terms whose query volume is disproportionately rising at a given hour compared to their usual frequency--provided numerous examples of how AdWords can require at least several hours to obtain enough feedback to properly rank ads.
Breaking news stories about the death of fitness guru Jack LaLanne triggered an ad for The Cord Bug, an accessory for car owners in cold climates that need to keep their engines warm overnight, in the most prominent slot. After a five-foot long monitor lizard was discovered wandering around a Southern California condo complex and showcased on morning news shows Wednesday, Google News served computer-monitor ads for several hours alongside search results.
This is probably not an issue on incoming CEO Larry Page's immediate to-do list, as Google continues to make quite a bit of money from relevant ads on the majority of searches. But it does speak to the thorny problem of determining relevancy in real time: it's not just a search problem, it's an ad problem too.
Your Quality Score is important to us
Ad rankings on Google for search keywords are determined by two main factors: the maximum cost an advertiser is willing to pay per click, and an ad's "quality score," which is a measure of how relevant the ad's copy is to the desired keyword, among other things. Even if an advertiser is willing to spend a lot of money per click, if their ad scores poorly on quality, it will likely appear below ads from advertisers that weren't willing to pay as much but scored higher on quality.
However, it takes time for Google to determine the quality score for a new ad. It needs to measure how often users are clicking on the ad as compared to other ads, as well as whether users are staying on the landing page behind the ad as opposed to returning immediately to Google.
How long does this take? Google won't say, but it's at least several hours in many cases.

Morning news reports on the discovery of a monitor lizard in Southern California sent
people to Google looking for more information, and the ads they were served during the
early spike in those queries weren't particularly relevant. Why serve an ad at all?

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Google would only offer a statement on the issue. "Google's advertising system determines the quality of an ad based on how users are responding to that ad. This process can take a brief amount of time, especially if it's a fast-rising query that is newly popular," it said. Your definition of "brief," of course, may vary.
The gap is important for a few reasons. First of all, Google's top priority is to serve relevant content to its users, and it has long considered ads to be useful content so long as they are relevant to one's query.
Also, the gap allows advertisers to piggyback on search queries in Google Trends much the same way news organizations latch onto those reports in hopes of directing some of that search spike their way. An advertiser could get a decent amount of traffic relatively cheaply if they are quick to jump on a trending keyword that not many other people have purchased, taking what they can get before the quality score calculations take place and kick them off the page.
One prominent advertiser on trending topics in Google throughout the whole week was Ask.com, which confirmed that as part of its ongoing traffic-acquisition strategy it frequently purchases Google ads linked to trending search terms that direct clicks back to Ask.com's pages on that topic. (Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing employ similar strategies.) Those ads actually fare well in the quality score calculation since it's clear what type of content Ask.com is advertising, but it's not hard for others with less-relevant content to employ the same fast-mover strategy and settle for the second, third, or fourth spot on the search-results page until the calculations take effect.
AdWords showing its age?
But perhaps more troubling for Google is the notion that the system that generates an amazing amount of cash is a bit too creaky for a Web that publishes content at a speed which Google never could have anticipated 10 years ago when the system was first designed.
Expectations of how content should be delivered on the Internet are changing as news publishers and consumers focus on speed: just look at the demand for information following reports that Michael Jackson had died in the summer of 2009. There is an opportunity to serve relevant ads alongside that content in Google News or Realtime search that the company is simply missing because of the delay in determining relevancy.
That doesn't bode well for its chances of using the current incarnation of AdWords to monetize real-time content on Google. Irrelevant ads aren't good for anyone in Google's system: users don't want to see ads perceived as spam, advertisers want to target likely buyers, and Google won't make money from ads that receive few or no clicks. That's not to mention any institutional embarrassment from missing the mark when it comes to relevancy.
As Web usage shifts more and more toward the real-time consumption of content, Google will need to develop a strong system for ranking both the relevancy of the content as well as the ads. Somewhere, someone is working on this extremely difficult computer science problem. If they're not inside of Google already, the company might want to find them.

Google.org's human aims could be good business

A map of Mexico's forestry cover made with Google Earth Engine was created for
environmental reasons, but mapping the whole world with that and other environmental
measurements could prove to be an interesting business for Google.

(Credit: Google Earth screenshot - Tom Krazit/CNET)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Some of Google's next big opportunities may not come out of its
traditional product development organization; look out for the do-gooders.
It's been almost two years since Google announced a philosophy shift at Google.org to focus more on attacking "problems in ways that make the most of Google's strengths in technology and information," Larry Brilliant, the former head of Google.org, said at the time. One of the first successes from that shift--Google Earth Engine--may not only help developing countries get accurate data about their environments for the first time, but such a massive collection of information and sophisticated analysis could pay financial dividends as well.
Google does a lot of charitable giving, but tucked away in a corner of its sprawling campus is a group drawn from all parts of the company that is dedicated to something a little more Googly that simply giving money away: "Can we use our engineering skills to design our way out (of the world's problems)?" Megan Smith, general manager of Google.org, said in an interview with CNET.
Take Google Earth Engine, conceived and run by Rebecca Moore, a former member of Google's Geo team who now works for Google.org full time. Moore developed quite a reputation in the environmental community after using Google Earth to map out a proposed logging project in the Santa Cruz Mountains that was defeated after the graphical presentation showed the project's scope was larger than advertised. That led to Google Earth Outreach, a project which taught environmental groups and governments how to use Google Earth as a presentation tool.
Environmental scientists were impressed by the tool, but what they really wanted was a tool that could let them analyze and manipulate the data stored in those images in order to make decisions about environmental policy, such as how much to compensate local groups for protecting forests against logging. Moore recognized that what they needed was something "intrinsically parallelizable;" in other words, something perfectly suited to be broken up into thousands of small tasks and run across a distributed network of servers.
What other computing problems are like that? Web search, for one.
"I think we're (becoming) clear about what is our best lever: technology-driven philanthropy," Smith said. Google Earth Engine was demonstrated at the most recent round of world climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, allowing the Mexican government to produce the most detailed map--by far--ever assembled of its forestry footprint, Moore said. It plans to use that map to set wildlife habitat boundaries as well as antideforestation programs.
Google.org wants to find hard problems that are often too much for poorer countries with limited or nonexistent IT budgets to solve on their own and apply Google's vast resources of computing power and human talent.
Around 100 Google employees are affiliated with Google.org, and while their salaries are paid out of Google.org's estimated 2011 budget of $45 million, they generally maintain a strong connection to the Google.com working group from which they came.
Earth Engine is an example of a "pilot" project started by one or two engineers from the Geo team that grew into a full-blown Google.org project, Smith said. There are five major products at the moment: Google Earth Engine, Google Flu Trends, Google PowerMeter, RE<C (research into making renewable energy cost less than coal), and Google Crisis Response.

Another Google Earth Engine project allowed the Surui tribe in the Amazon to receive
compensation from the Brazilian government for maintaining the forests in their territory,
the green area in the middle of the picture with the clear borders. The yellow and pink areas
represent deforested land.

(Credit: Google)

While the projects are designed to tackle specific philanthropic needs, there are clearly commercial applications that can arise from this work. Truth be told, should the projects prove wildly successful, Google won't have much of a choice but to find some way to monetize them in order to make up for the drain on its computing resources: for just the Mexico project, Google donated 15,000 CPU hours of computing time to produce the map and plans to donate 10 million CPU hours to developing countries as they attempt to figure out how to measure the size of their forests while negotiating the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) agreement reached in Cancun.
Google has discussed commercial applications of Google Earth Engine, but it's too early to have laid down any specific plans, Moore said. There will always be a free version of projects like Google Earth Engine available to developing countries, but don't be surprised to see a break-even pricing tier at some point that allows Google to recover its costs or even a for-profit version that could turn into its own business, she said.
Projects such as Google Earth Engine are extremely valuable to the world, for both humanitarian and commercial reasons. One of Google's clear aims for Google.org is to unlock generations of material--such as historical satellite imagery--stored on tape drives in musty warehouses by getting that information online, Smith said.
Moore cited the example of local researchers who were able to draw strong conclusions between changes in weather patterns and disease. A system that would allow countries to identify such weather patterns backed by years of historical data could lead to early-warning systems against crippling diseases, although Moore cautioned such an application is still in the conceptual stages.
This would also have obvious benefits for agricultural companies, for example. "We'll have to charge something," Smith said, in order to make these ideas work at a truly global scale, but for now the limited application of these practices allows them to remain completely philanthropic.
With strong support from Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, don't expect anything to change drastically at Google.org following Page's elevation to the CEO spot in April. Likewise, even as Google adds employees left and right in 2011, don't expect cultural support for the promises of Google.org to become diluted by new recruits.
If anything, younger people emerging from universities and graduate programs have even a stronger connection to this kind of work than the generation that helped build Google, Smith said.
"In a lot of ways, the Internet is like a shift like the Silk Road in its day: people were able to connect to each other in a way that's never been there before," Smith said. Younger workers "will demand" that their employers engage in this manner of using business strengths for humanitarian purposes, she said, and Google feels it has quite the head start.

Android Market tops 100,000 applications

Google reached a significant milestone for its Android mobile operating system today: 100,000 applications are available in the Android Market.

The company announced the news in a post to its Android Developer Twitter account, nearly two years to the day since the Android Market formally opened for business. An unofficial estimate of Android applications by AndroLib had pegged the number at 50,000 in April, but it's not clear how accurate that was, as AndroLib currently predicts that 150,000 applications are available in the market.

Google is still well behind Apple when it comes to mobile applications, of course, with iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad owners having access to over 280,000 iOS-based applications at last count. (UPDATED 1:37 p.m PDT - Apple e-mailed in to clarify that on its earnings call last week, CEO Steve Jobs said there are now over 300,000 applications in the App Store.) Still, the milestone is worth noting as Android continues to cement its role as the Apple alternative for developers and consumers.

Before Google made the formal announcement The New York Times posted a story noting the milestone and pointing out some of the challenges that remain for Android developers, such as the subtle-yet-important differences between the hundreds of different Android devices on the market as well as payment issues with Google Checkout.