Is It Finally the End for Real-time Search Engines?

Phil Leggetter — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 08:00:40 +0000

During the past four months we’ve seen not one but two well known real-time search engines disappear. First there was OneRiot, which in October 2010 decided to focus on advertising. More recently, Collecta closed it’s real-time search engine and API to focus on alternative real-time products. Digging further into real-time search offerings you will also discover that crowdeye has also decided to pull its real-time search engine. This now appears to leave Topsy, a OneRiot partner, and of course Google as the main players focusing on building a real-time search destination. Does this trend signal the end for all real-time search engines or just that their focus has been wrong?

There are a couple of quotes that seem to indicate what the problem has been for some of these real-time search engines. On the front page of crowdeye there is now the paragraph:

While we have been successful pushing the state of the art forward with features like location-based search, relevance sorting of results and sentiment, we have not yet built a profitable business around CrowdEye.

The OneRiot blog post that announced the move to focus on advertising states:

Now, of course, since OneRiot has been around we’ve been known as leaders in the realtime search space. In reality, we’ve been in the market with two products that leverage the same underlying technology platform: consumer-facing realtime search and an innovative advertising product that monetizes both realtime search the wider realtime social web. Our advertising platform has taken off like a rocket – both in terms of network growth and the number of advertisers who are seeking to engage with the social influencers across that network.

The problem is monetization. Isn’t it always!

As the real-time web exploded we saw a bunch of real-time search engines appear. That list has significantly decreased in size and of those that still exist at all quite a few have shifted focus.

So the question is what could they have done to monetize their real-time search engine product? The obvious solution is advertising and Google have already proven that this works and continues to do so. OneRiot have followed suit but have decided to drop the search destination offering and instead have chosen to partner with companies and offer value through the OneRiot API.

Using an API as a source of monetization isn’t a new idea with both Google and Amazon proving that this can be a fantastic revenue generator. Google provide access to a host of functionality through their APIs with a reasonable proportion of them focused on advertising, monetization and revenue generation and Amazon offer the ability to generate revenue via their Product Advertising API (UK version). However, what is interesting is that there appears to be a movement away from the absolute requirement that in order to generate revenue your product or service must be a destination – a website. By providing access to quality data, generated through ground breaking technology and exposed via an accessible API a service can be very successful.

Are real-time search engines dead? No. However the trends discussed above do indicate that consumers don’t seem to need, or want, as many real-time search destinations (websites). But that in no way means that we don’t need real-time search engines – we do still need technology products and services that can consume the vast amounts of real-time data being generated, extract value and expose this value to others. Therefore the engines will continue to be developed it’s just that the focus and the value exposed by these products may well shift away from being consumer focused and instead the target user will be the programmable web.

Photo via Blake Patterson

This post was originally written by me for ProgrammableWeb

Microsoft Bing.com round table thoughts

Phil Leggetter — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:07:02 +0000

A couple of days ago I blogged that I was going to attend a Microsoft bing round table. I’ve now attended and here are the key points and interesting facts that I took from the event. You can also search for #meetbing on twitter for relevant tweets.

Bing.com is a re-brand of Live Search

And Microsoft openly admitted this. Basically Live Search wasn’t getting any traction so Microsoft had to do something (see my next point).

“Microsoft believe they will provide as relevant search results as Google in the UK in a number of months #meetbing” @leggetter

What they’ve done is go with a “web 2.0 name” of “Bing” to try and jazz things up a little. They’ve also gone back to basics and want to concentrate on the quality and relevance of search results and believe they will provide as relevant results as Google in a few months and are judging the quality of their results on something called NDCG. I certainly didn’t use Live Search because I found the results pretty useless. Bing definitely returns better results than Live did. An example on this focus on quality is that Bing has only presently indexed around 10 Billion pages which in the scheme of things isn’t very much.

“Only 1 in 4 searches deliver a successful result. Data from MSN search, tool bar in IE. Could be searching Google, yahoo etc.” @karenblakeman

Microsoft also believe they’ve improved the UX a bit to allow users to refine their search results with the introduction of the quick tabs/suggested links in a menu on the left hand side of the user interface. They’ve done this because they believe that only 1 in 4 searches deliver a successful result so this allows users to more easily find things faster.

Microsoft seem to think the re-branding and basic search tweaks have worked as they showed us data that they believe proves Bing has overtaken Yahoo! as No.2 in the search market. Their source of data to determine where users were going to perform their web search was quite interesting. Their source was the MSN toolbar which is only available to those with Internet Explorer. I guess since IE still has a large share of the market (W3Schools Stats | Wikipedia Stats) that the figures are more or less correct but some people at the event did question this as a suitable source.

The other thing that Microsoft are doing is to integrate Bing as a “search brand” into all their products in the same way that Google integrate Google search into Gmail, Google Docs etc. So, you will now see “Bing” used to power Hotmail search and most probably all other Microsoft sites or web applications over time.

Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo! to become No.2 in search

“Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo to become No.2 in search. Fact admitted here” @leggetter

This may not be a big surprise to some people but I didn’t know that this was Microsoft’s main motivation to buy Yahoo! and I did read a few articles about the attempted purchase. Microsoft admitted that Yahoo! had the No.2 slot and if they bought them they would gain this position in addition to a well-known brand. They also admitted that they may have kept the Yahoo! brand for their search and ditched Live altogether.

Bing UK is in Beta. Bing US is not

Bing UK is lacking a lot of the functionality of Bing US since it’s still in beta. Microsoft wanted to launch Bing and felt it was better to do it world wide so stuck with the beta. Bing UK will move out of Beta when more of the functionality you can see in the US is available in the UK.

Only the standard verticals are being targeted

Local, travel, maps, videos, shopping and news will be the verticals that Microsoft initially target. This is a little disappointing as it would be great to see Microsoft break the mould and do something innovative. The only unique vertical that was mentioned is that a music search function is being worked on by the Bing China team.

All in all I thought it was a worthwhile exercise by Microsoft to tell people what they are doing and gather a number of opinions. The consensus of the people at the event is that Bing is going to have to something different to take a significant portion of people away from Google and their current offering doesn’t offer too much to do this.

I’m simply happy that Microsoft have upped their game and will at least have Google looking over their shoulders albiet way back into the distance. Hopefully this competition will provoke innovation in search that has been generally stagnent for the past few years up until the introduction of the real-time web. Maybe this could be something that Microsoft could excel at?