Just When You Have Finally Mastered Google Search, Along Comes New Search Tools to Wow You or Not: Part 2 of 2

If you are a Googler like I am, and that probably means almost all of you, then you have to try Microsoft's latest attempt to grab market share away from the preeminent search tool on the web. Microsoft Bing was launched just a few weeks ago and I have been playing with of late as have so many others.

I am a huge fan of so many of the applications that Google has created. So in approaching Bing I almost wanted to experience something negative, another chance to put Microsoft down. But I can't. From the moment you start using Bing you notice how clean the interface is (those mountains sure look appealing) and how many interesting features it provides.



Like Google, Bing lets you enter a word or phrase, group words together in quotes and use '+' signs and other mathematical symbols to construct your search query.


The search results pages are clean, uncluttered and look familiar to Google users but at the same time include some pretty neat features. One is the highlight feature. Drag a mouse over a search result and a box appears to the right with the first few sentences and information from the referenced page.



In addition, your accumulated search history appears on the left-hand side of the page. You can click on any item in the list to see the results of these previous searches.

If you click to see all of your searches to date Bing opens a search history screen that gives you a time and date stamp view of the search queries you have made and the sites you visited during each search. This is pretty cool stuff.

The image search appears similar to Google with two notable exceptions. The anecdotal clutter that accompanies each image is not on display. Instead use your mouse to scroll over an image and the image enlarges along with more information about the image and a link to similar images.

The image search results are all contained on one scrollable page as opposed to Google image results which require you to go from page to page.


Check your video search results without having to preview the entire video. Playback video image segments in Bing just by placing your mouse pointer on the image. No extra clicks required. Another neat video feature allows you to display video results in standard or wide screen formats, sort search results by video length to eliminate undesired results, and even search by source and image resolution.


The map search results are clean and easy to understand because they emulate what Google has already perfected in its search engine.

Bing includes settings for safe search but lacks the sophistication of Google's advanced search capabilities. All in all, Bing is a very satisfying search engine. Only time will tell whether it has the legs to take on Google and make a dent in its search engine dominance.

Check out my postings on Kiwi Commons

If reading my thoughts on this site aren't enough, you can also check out other articles I write. The latest can be found on Kiwi Commons.

In this article I write about the importance that President Obama places in the Internet as a communication medium and his appointment of a cyber czar to oversee policy related to securing and enhancing the web.

Look for more postings on Kiwi Commons in coming weeks.

Social Media Marketing Playbook is Worth a Read if You Want to Facebook and Twitter with the Best

In testing the theory that participating in public social networks can assist you in business I am amazed to find pearls that get dropped on my plate. I am a member of Xing, a social network that on a scale of 1-10, where Facebook is a 10, Xing is a 0.5. But Xing attracts a business audience from all over the world whereas Facebook attracts everybody. One of the groups I belong to on Xing focuses on entrepreneurship. This contribution was sent to me by Dean Hua, a member of that group.

The Social Marketing Playbook is 56 pages long and packed with interesting ideas on how to use social media to help you differentiate your brand and sell to customers. I couldn't agree more with the author's opening comments, "Social marketing eliminates the middlemen, providing brands with the unique opportunity to have a direct relationship with their customers."

Enough said. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Just When You Have Finally Mastered Google Search, Along Comes New Search Tools to Wow You or Not: Part 1 of 2

Google Search has changed the way most of us do research. We put in a word or phrase and instantaneously receive a response that can contain 100s to millions of references with those words. What a challenge this has proven to be for the traditional search technologies of the past, the library, encyclopedias, and newspaper and newswire services. Even the online search subscription services from West Publishing and Lexis-Nexis have felt the impact of Google's ubiquitous research application. Other search engines like Yahoo and Ask Jeeves have found themselves playing second fiddle to Google.

As powerful a tool as Google Search is, it is also a source of great confusion and an eater of time. Unless you use the Advanced Search capability, simple search results may require you to wade through hundreds of documents of little value to your query. There is also no way to know whether the quality of the information you find represents facts or fancy. Hence the evolution of new search utilities is inevitable.

This article is part one of a two part discussion on the most recent newcomers to the Internet search scene. In this article we take a quick look at Wolfram|Alpha. In part two we will explore Microsoft Bing.

Stephen Wolfram is the mind behind Wolfram|Alpha. A scientist and mathematician, Wolfram has made the long-term goal of this venture to make knowledge accessible to anyone using state-of-the-art and science, computing models, methods and algorithms. With Wolfram|Alpha you enter a question in natural language and receive an answer.

You can try it out to see the results. I give you some examples of queries I have made:

I asked Wolfram|Alpha to "compare Canada and Australia population." It came back with results in report format that compared total population, history, value comparisons and demographics.



























You can ask Wolfram|Alpha to give you information about a historical event. I asked "fall of Constantinople," (If you want to know why I picked that subject, I studied Medieval History, Islamic and Byzantine Studies in university). Here was the result:

It was nice to see that it knew what I knew and even gave me other phrases or words to look up to obtain even more background information.

This is pretty powerful stuff. But what Wolfram|Alpha appears to be very good at is solving mathematical equations and problems. Its algorithms and computing methods lend themselves to that type of query.



Here is another example. I asked Wolfram|Alpha to give answer the following problem "1283 times 56." It came back with the following:
















Wolfram|Alpha describes itself as a work in progress. On its site it claims to contain 10+ trillion pieces of data, 50,000+ algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for over 1,000 domains.

As Wolfram|Alpha develops it is attempting to systematically cover the content available from the world's reference libraries. Future plans involve expanding coverage in science, technology, economics and popular culture.

Wolfram|Alpha has attempted to create a way to enter questions in a more natural language than Google Search or other search engines. I found, however, that it was easy to confuse Wolfram|Alpha when stating a query in natural language and often had it come back with an answer that required me to rethink the way I posed the question. This left me a bit frustrated. But the more I play with this tool the more impressed I am by its potential to provide a new means of doing meaningful online research.

There's lots of online help at the Wolfram|Alpha site and I encourage you to see how you can utilize this new research tool in your businness and lives. If anything it should help your children with their math homework.

"In These Tough Economic Times" - Words that are starting to grind on my nerves

I don't know about you but it seems almost every advertisement has picked up on the tag line in the title of this article. Yes the economy has been hit by the collapse of a financial bubble built on worthless paper. Yes our governments in Canada and the United States have selectively decided to bail out some car manufacturers to save jobs while allowing jobs at dealers to disappear with little thought of a bail out for them. We have seen a contraction in trade, a drop in the value of homes, foreclosure crises for thousands of families, and many other business failures. All of this is a reflection of our capitalist system where risk is rewarded and failure is not.

So having described the "tough economic times" for the last time in this article, I would like to talk about new business models that can push us in a different direction. North America is going through a revolution. Manufacturing used to account for a large number of jobs on this continent. Not so much anymore. I remember a very wise boss of mine, Dave Ungerer, back in the late 1970s who told me that the information economy is North America's future. He was right, just a little prescient. At the time the Internet didn't exist. Computer networks were mainframe and midrange computer systems costing millions of dollars. The home computer was an Apple II, a Sinclair, or a TRS-80. If you had 64 kilobytes of RAM you were state of the art.

Today we look back at these technologies from a Mount Everest of technical advances, atop a worldwide, ubiquitous network we call the web, tying together billions of computers together with collective computing power that would have boggled the minds of those of us in the 1970s. Our way of doing business has been altered dramatically. We rely on email, probably the killer computing application of all time. We Google rather than go to the library. We more and more watch TV online. Wireline phone calls have been replaced by wireless cell technology. We chat. We twitter.

Has our collective business mindset altered with the onset of a worldwide communication network? Have we changed our business behaviours to match the collaborative power of all of this technology? The tools are in place for collective solutions, mining individuality, sharing expertise, and building the new economy. This is the silver lining of these times.

Collective Solutions

By collective don't think communism, collective farms and that ilk. Collective solutions are best represented today by natural collaboration in the form of wikis and other web tools. Collective solutions refers to collective wisdom. Google Search is a collective solution. Wolfram Alpha is the latest new knowledge answering tool to arrive on the web.

Collective wisdom can be captured in a social network designed with that purpose. Public social network sites like LinkedIn, Xing, BizNik and Partnerpedia are designed to foster networking and collaboration. Behind the firewall private social networks such as those created by Enable Consultants, a client of mine, are ideal collective knowledge gathering and sharing tools. For example, Recess, an academic social network encourages students to interact on homework assignments, teachers to meet in virtual lounges to blog, comment and discuss best practices, and mentors to share their knowledge and provide coaching to students.

Mining Individuality

What CEOs and Presidents of corporations don't know about the people they have hired to make their businesses successful is legion. People are more than their job titles. They bring hidden skills to work each day, skills that can be used to improve the business, foster camaraderie among employees, and extend the business into new areas that can lead to revenue growth. But if CEOs cannot mine the skills of their workers then their will be no gold to share.

Some companies are using public social networks to foster better understanding of their staff. Others are building private social networks with employee pages that let them share their interests outside of work including hobbies, photos, music they like and so on. I remember when I got out of school, the first company I worked for had annual meetings in Florida. In the first few years, there was always a talent show night where employees did skits, standup comedy, played instruments, jammed together and shared a bit of who they were beyond their workselves. After a few years the company stopped sponsoring these evenings. What a loss that was.

Deploying private social networks can do much more than those singular talent show nights that I experienced back then. Individual skills and interests can become valuable corporate assets.

Sharing Expertise

In the past few weeks I have been approached by an entrepreneur who has been a consultant for many years, just like me. His skills are complimentary. His skills combined with my skills creates a higher value proposition when I go calling on a prospective client. I am sure these types of meetings are happening everywhere these days. In marketing we always talk about the importance of networking. We network with former business associates over lunch. We go to association talks and meetings a few times a year. We join organizations and clubs.

The web, however, is the ultimate virtual network and sharing expertise is as simple as creating collaborative social networks where consultants can share their knowledge, both free and fee for service, and individuals and businesses seeking answers can find the experts they seek. Such collaborative social networks represent a new paradigm, a guerilla marketing challenge for traditional management consulting firms, and the coming wave.

I state this with absolute certainty because a lot of very bright people in the last few months have watched their gold-watch careers vanish as businesses have layed off them by the thousands. Many of these individuals are turning to self employment because they are finding job prospects to be slim. These individuals have thousands of years of collective expertise to share. The web medium is there for them to seize the opportunity and create a new expertise sharing model that generates revenue individually and collectively.

Twittering and Change: Harnessing New Online Technologies

I was having an interesting discussion around the Passover Seder table a few weeks ago. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law are both retired teachers. They were espousing their views on the future of newspapers, Twitter, FaceBook, short messaging, and chat and trying to get their heads around today's youth. My daughter who is 24 was at the table. She is an inveterate user of the Internet, FaceBook, short messaging and chat through Windows Messenger. But to her Twitter was something she didn't get.

It is interesting how the fast pace of Internet evolution with its many communication widgets and gadgets is altering how people seek, share and express information. The future of the traditional print newspaper is being challenged. I still read two every day but I also read newspapers online and subscribe to The Huffington Post. I'm on Twitter now to see what it is all about. I have embraced social networks in the last two years after being a skeptic about their worth.

We are in a whirlwind of constant change today and keeping up with that change is not easy but understanding how young people embrace change and make it part of their lives is an important thing to realize. Youth has embraced social networking, chat, instant messaging, wikis, blogs, online information, search engines. This is how they learn and communicate. Harnessing the tools they use is a key element in any strategy to engage them. That's why I believe in the use of social networking and other Internet widgets and gadgets to reach the virtual online audience.

If you do not embrace these new applications and understand them then all you can do is express mystification when suddenly they become disruptive. I'm a great advocate of turning over rocks to see what's under them. So use your curiosity when online because the Internet world is evolving rapidly.

Today if you are not "facebooking" or "googling" or "twittering" then you are missing potential marketing opportunities.

Knowledge Sharing: How Social Networking is Changing the Face of Business

Here's an interesting quote. Author Paul Gillin states in an article that appeared in the April 6, 2009 edition of eWeek,

"Formerly, people were forced to give up their knowledge, but with social networks, people willingly give up their knowledge. the great business opportunity is behind the firewall because simple tools can be used to replace more complicated collaboration tools."

Wow! The implications in these two sentences are enormous. It represents a paradigm shift for business people. Instead of an individual employee keeping information and knowledge close to the vest, for purposes of leaping over fellow employees in the race to the top, that employee is now rewarded for spreading the knowledge wealth.

What's causing the shift? Social networking has moved from being a public forum to a private business forum, a behind the firewall phenomenon that encourages new business behaviours among employees, between employees and customers, and between employees and suppliers. Behind the firewall social networking is seen as an effective way of improving overall performance. Gartner sees the growth of this market reaching over $1 billion by 2012. Forrester predicts $1.5 billion in the same time period compared to $384 million in 2008. I think they are underestimating the market growth because Microsoft and IBM, with their SharePoint and QuickR platforms are not only building internal social networks to link their employees, they are also selling these solutions to customers around the world. And when these two giants of the industry are involved it is a pretty good indicator of where the market is going.

They are not the only ones playing in this new space. Google has created Open Social, a set of programming standards that lets any developer create applications to run on a wide range of social networking platforms.

Sabre (the travel reservation system that came out of American Airlines) has developed Cubeless, a private business network that connects its telecommuting employees around the world. Pose a question on this site and a relevance engine makes a decision on who should see it within the social network. The right answer usually comes back within an hour. That's knowledge sharing at its best.

Enable Consultants, a small Ontario company, has created 3 flavors of private social networks, a school centred application, called Recess, a not-for-profit application called Communitirooms, and a private business network called Workingrooms. Recess has been deployed in primary and middle schools as a safe social networking site for young people to use as an extension of their "bricks & mortar" classrooms.

Some vendors like Worklight are creating applications that overlay public social networks such as Facebook. WorkBook is the application and it allows an employee to pull other Facebook members behind the firewall for collaboration. Authentication is handled by the existing business security setup.

Think about the impact on sales teams as knowledge sharing and problem solving become paradigms for measuring performance success. Will companies start providing bonuses and compensation to reflect this new behaviour? I remember when I was working for a large software developer some years ago that as part of a widely distributed sales team focused on a telecommunications client, I decided to publish a newsletter. That monthly newsletter shared knowledge internally within my company and also went out to thousands of employees of my client. The knowledge sharing led to sales group collaboration, joint strategies in penetrating the account, and finally to the biggest one time sale in the history of the company. That was before behind the firewall social networking.

Imagine what we can do today. Imagine what we will be able to do tomorrow. In 2009, the year of "Yes we can," expect social networks to be instruments of change in the way business operates.