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Who won Survivor last night? Powerset doesn’t know.

Okay - maybe that’s an unfair question for Powerset since the aptly-named Parvati Shallow only won Survivor Micronesia last night. It might be easier to ask “Who is Parvati? The answer: in Sanskrit, “parvati” means “Mountain’s daughter” one of the names for Shiva’s wife, the Universal Mother.

So what is Powerset? That’s a much more intelligent question to ask.

Powerset is the much-hyped beta natural language search engine metaphor-challenged mainstream media call the Google Killer. That means you can type questions in a search box the way you normally ask them. (Think Ask Jeeves 1.5)

That doesn’t mean natural language search or Powerset can kill Google, or even commit assault and battery on Google.

Powerset launched with a smart concept: better search results than Wikipedia’s own search box. So the play is a “non-Google Custom Search Engine” for Wikipedia. Let’s see about what Powerset can can do..

“What is Powerset?” we asked. Powerset separates results by combining the primary keyword (Powerset) with related verbs and nouns from Web pages and Wikipedia. Here’s the answer we weren’t looking for from Powerset itself.

Factz from Wikipedia: we found the following about Powerset
Powerset opened : community and Powerlabs.

Results for Powerset opened community

Powerset (company) In a form of beta testing, Powerset opened an online community called Powerlabs on September 17, 2007.

Results for Powerset opened Powerlabs

Powerset (company) In a form of beta testing, Powerset opened an online community called Powerlabs on September 17, 2007.

Results for Powerset displayed advertise

Powerset (company) (Powerset is not currently selling or displaying any advertising.)

Results for Powerset searched language

Powerlabs Let’s roll, is a prerelease of Powerset’s general natural language search.

Wikipedia Articles: results 1 - 10 of 78

1. Powerset (company)
Powerset is a company based in San Francisco, California that is developing a natural language search engine for the Internet.
2. Power set
In mathematics, given a set S, the power set (or powerset) of S, written , P(S), or 2S, is the set of all subsets of S. In axiomatic set theory (as developed e.g. in the ZFC axioms), the existence of the power set of any set is postulated by the axiom of power set.

6. Powerlabs
Powerset Applications Currently, Powerset has released two applications: Powermouse and a beta of its search engine.

Only when you click on the expand snippet (powermouse) miniviewer button, do you find the answer you’re looking for (sort of):

Powerset (company)

Powerset is a company based in San Francisco, California that is developing a natural language search engine for the Internet.

The company’s stated desire is to build a search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo which would act on a user’s questions, as opposed to keywords. For instance, a user who wanted to find out which U.S. state has the highest income tax would enter “Which state has the highest income tax?” at Powerset, as opposed to “state income tax” at Google. The advantage to the user, aside from using questions similar to what one person would ask another verbally, is that a natural language search engine would, depending on its underlying programming, return a result that is more relevant to what the user seeks

Powerset is limited by the poorly-written Wikipedia entry. The comparison to Google doesn’t work. If someone’s searching for the state with the highest state income tax, they’ll type in “highest state income tax.” No one would type in “state income tax” in Google if they’d type “Which state has the highest income tax?” in Powerset.

At this stage in beta, Powerset can be considered a search engine survivor.

But unless the technology yields better results — and fast — people will think of Parvati and Powerset as “shallow” contestants.

The team at Live Search as announced the addition of a deep links feature to its search results. Similar to Google’s Sitelinks, the feature lists prominent internal links for the #1 result on certain searches.

I did a comparison of this feature for both Live Search and Yahoo. My first search is for the “State Department.”

As you can see, Live Search lists the deep links in a single column, indented underneath the home page of the State Department’s website.

While Google lists more results in 2 columns, and offers a search within a search box underneath the Sitelinks.

Next, I did a search for Starbucks. Live Search listed a paid search link, followed by local listings and then served up the first organic results with deep links. It’s pretty far down on the page, especially since the closest Starbucks to me is not one of the three local listings provided by Live Search. Also, it provides Related Searches on the Sidebar, one of which is a search for a link provided in the deep links.

Google had a much more simple results page for Starbucks. The paid search ads are only on the sidebar and you get to the corporate Starbucks website right away.

For the most part, Google seems to turn up more Sitelinks than Live Search. Also, Google provides Sitelinks for sites that Live Search doesn’t. Searches for both “Search Engine Watch” and “Nike” both returned Sitelinks in Google but no deep links in Live Search.

Related Reading:
Google Sitelinks: New Name For Those Links Under The Top Listings
Google Revamps Sitelinks

Windows Live Search has added a News component, according to a report by CNet’s News.com blog. A meme tracker design has been employed for the front page of the news section. (If you don’t know what a meme tracker is, check out Techmeme.com or Megite.com).

Also on the front page is a search box and an aggregate of local news in a sidebar to the right. Scroll down just below the fold and you’ll find a row of news videos from mainstream media sites such as USA Today, AP Video, Reuters Video and Fox News.

When conducting a search, the results page loses its meme tracker feel. There’s a listing of headlines with the first paragraphs of the stories. Thumbnail photos with stories accompany the articles in the listings.

On the sidebar of search results are options to refine the search geographically or conduct recommended related searches.

Like Google news, there are no ads on either the home page or search results page.

There’s no official word yet from the Live Search blog. The feature comes a week after the release of updates to Live Search Maps and Virtual Earth 3D.

The standards debate may be in full swing in our industry - but the decisions may be soon taken out of our hands if the FTC continues to define allowable advertising practices.

MediPost has a good overview of the developments of behavioral targeting and how they can be used. “Ad industry players are urging the FTC not to impose any new regulations — and also argue that the proposed voluntary guidelines are too restrictive,” they reported.

Where this gets close to our industry comes from the people seeking greater regulations. “Privacy advocates, on the other hand, want to see rules that will require companies to honor Web users’ preferences about whether they wish to be tracked online and to receive targeted ads,” MediaPost notes.

If this occurs then search is on the horizon of these groups. And we better be aware of them if consumer advocacy groups are claiming they “want to see new rules, rather than rely on voluntary compliance with trade groups”.

MediaPost quotes both Google and Microsoft at the end of the article and they have opposing views.

“Google, meanwhile, is especially concerned that the standards could affect search ads. In comments to the FTC, Google said it’s testing personalized search results, and argued that search ads shouldn’t be considered “behavioral” even when the ads displayed to users are based on their search history.

“We are currently experimenting in our Search service with providing ads based on both the current query and the immediately previous search,” Google wrote. “For example, a user who types ‘Italy vacation’ into the Google search box might see ads about Tuscany or affordable flights to Rome. If the user were to subsequently search for ‘weather,’ we might assume that there is a link between ‘Italy vacation’ and ‘weather’ and deliver ads regarding local weather conditions in Italy.”

Google rival Microsoft, on the other hand, said it supports the FTC’s goals and that the proposed guidelines should be extended “to include the full array of online advertising activities.”

Funny about the Microsoft position given I have been in a pitch for increasing our budget where they used competitors advertising information to suggest other terms and ads….. anonymous of course but not hard to reverse engineer.

Yesterday, Google announced that it is rolling out its new Search within a Site feature. When searching for specific sites instead of keywords, users are able to conduct a secondary search of those sites within Google results.

For example, if a user searches for “NASA” at Google, the first result returns NASA.gov. Underneath that result is a search box with a submit button with the text “Search nasa.gov.”

The reason for the update? “Through experimentation, we found that presenting users with a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of finding the exact page they are looking for,” wrote Ben Lee, software developer, and Jack Menzel, product manager on the Official Google Blog.

Lee and Menzel also offered insight into how Google is implementing the feature. “This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.”

The fundamental premise of search marketing remains revolutionary and timeless. We research what people care about and market (organic and paid) directly to SERPs for their queries. Classic keyword research reveals search frequency and phrase permutations to gauge marketplace interest. Lateral stemming thesaurus tools help us brainstorm frequently used alternate keyword clusters. For instance if your ‘re marketing "catering services," some customers are also searching for "wedding food" and "party planning." This is not earth shaking news to most.

However, keyword research’s social-climbing step sister, "Buzz Pocket Mining" is not-so-quietly becoming the 800 pound gorilla next door. Buzz Pocket Mining refers to tools, usually free, that take the temperature of a social community’s chatter patterns. What hot topics are people chirping about enmasse? What do social site SERPs reveal about the marketplace for your product? Who owns the thought leading authority profiles in any given community for a topic? What are the blogs of note? These are crucial questions for social search marketers who are considering forays into paid and organic social media marketing.

Each community has different methods and tools available to measure it’s users’ Buzz Pockets. One of my favorites is StumbleUpon’s socially moderated SERPs. It’s free, so let’s have a look .

First, navigate to the StumbleUpon buzz page. This illustrates, at an overview level, what tags and sites are hot in SU. As an aside, getting your site to this level can mean 5K to 20K unique visitors in a day. Type gibberish into the search box (outlined in red) and submit.

The search results for this nonexistent keyword offer a treasure trove of information revealing what StumbleUpon users are interested in. Depending on the demographic of the product you’re marketing, this insight can truly be worth its weight in gold. The font size is proportional to community interest-level.

Ok, say you’re marketing candy bars. Yay! There’s a relatively small (but statistically significant) chocolate Buzz Pocket in StumbleUpon. Click on "chocolate" in the Tag Cloud. The results are exciting. First, you’ll note the SU users who are interested in chocolate. Yup that’s me. I’m active in SU and happen to love chocolate. Make note of these users for one- to-one conversation marketing later. These are potentially valuable evangelists for your candy product. They’ve expressed interest in chocolate by the sites they’ve bookmarked and tagged.

Further down the page is a list of featured chocolate sites. Note: getting your site on this page can result in 300-1000 unique visitors over the course of several days, depending on the size of the Buzz Pocket. There’s even more word-of-mouth value to be gained here. Click on the Chocolate Travel Tours link. Now you’ve identified a blog comments-thread to participate in order to grow your involvement in the chocolate blog community.

Each social community presents a different methodology to mine: it’s Buzz Pockets for social media marketing. The insights gleaned are invaluable while researching the likely success of SMO efforts. While traditional keyword research remains the cornerstone of search marketing, Buzz Pocket Mining is becoming more and more important as "marketing to the social graph" comes on line and evolves.

Soon 80 percent of the mobile phones in Japan will feature the Google search engine.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Google will have an 80 percent share of all Japanese local mobile searches. Google partnerships with the #1 and #2 mobile carriers in Japan forces Yahoo and MSN to compete for the bronze.
Here’s the math: Google [...]

Soon 80 percent of the mobile phones in Japan will feature the Google search engine.

That doesn’t necessarily mean Google will have an 80 percent share of all Japanese local mobile searches. Google partnerships with the #1 and #2 mobile carriers in Japan forces Yahoo and MSN to compete for the bronze.

Here’s the math: Google (NTT DocCoMo + KDDI) = 80 percent of the Japanese mobile phone market. Not a bad equation.

Google announced today a partnership with NTT DoCoMo to place the Google search box, apps and services on 48 million mobile users in Japan.

Nothing extraordinary here — bigger share of searches, ubiquity of Gmail — all in search of local mobile ad revenue, and of course, indexing all the world’s information.

The partners aren’t strangers: Google NTT Docomo are shooting for 10 billion yen (only 942 million USD) in shared ad revenue (split undisclosed) with a Linux-based mobile handset in Japan.

Expect more partnerships post-Davos and pre-Google earnings announcements.

In the spirit of its Ms. Dewey experiment, Microsoft has launched a new site, Left vs. Right, which pits opponents from two sides of the political spectrum. Left-leaning “Patrick O’Neil” and right-wing “Britt Hayes” trade barbs about each other’s hygiene, political views, and intelligence.
As with Ms. Dewey, when a user does not type anything [...]

Apple’s hot gadget, the toy world’s must-have plush pets, and arguably AOL’s hottest web property represented the top three fastest-rising search terms at Google.

Catapulting to the top of the hottest queries hitting Google’s index means grabbing the interest of thousands of visitors, all happily tapping away at their keyboards and looking for details on what [...]