Google Gives Suicide Hotline Number For Certain Searches: Diets For Fast Food Next?

Nevermind complicated algorithms and personalized content streams according to past search patterns and the like - Google has, for only the second time in its history, decided to offer specific results, a sort of guidance, in response to select search terms. When users search for phrases such as "ways to commit suicide" or "suicidal thoughts", they now see the toll-free number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at the top of their results. We have to wonder - when will Google advise users buying cigarettes to seek help too? Sponsor The New York Times quotes Dr. Roni Zeiger, the chief health stategist for Google, as saying that the idea came from a Google user. "A mother wrote in a suggestion to us -- her daughter had swallowed something that she thought was dangerous, and she had a hard time finding poison control," Dr. Zeiger said. "Now when you search for poison control or similar queries, we make it straightforward to find the number for poison control." So can we be as callous here as to wonder where else the company might take this? Can anyone really take issue with a company offering the phone number of a suicide prevention hotline to those looking up phrases like "I want to die"? Perhaps this could be a new direction - rather than simply offering results directly related to a user's query, or looking to personalize content by looking at what friends and peers are looking at, or even looking at a users history, Google could offer up a Devil's Advocate set of results on every query. Looking for a brand new SUV? While you're at it, why not consider this beautiful, used bicycle that will help save the environment? Cheap cigarettes? Didn't you mean Nicorette gum? McDonalds? Why yes, we do have a few diet programs and some instructions on healthy eating. In reality, we think that this could be a great compliment to all those apps and engines out there that simply look to show you exactly what you're looking for before you ever even get to searching . Let's use the web to challenge ideas, not simply echo them. As long as results are clearly identified, is there a problem? While this is a loaded area to look at (questioning Google's action can be made to seem as if it were a promotion of suicide) we still think there are interesting implications to its actions that should be considered. Do we want Google to simply act as a firehose of data or can we expect it to tailor its results to do better for the world? And who's version of better will it go by if we do? What do you think? Discuss

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Google Gives Suicide Hotline Number For Certain Searches: Diets For Fast Food Next?

Tags:beautiful, challenge-ideas, daughter, Dr. Zeiger, environment, Google, long-as-results, national suicide prevention lifeline, number, only-the-second, phone, Read, roni zeiger, similar-queries, suicide, suicide prevention hotline

Bing Keeps Getting Smarter: Adds More Info About Cars, Sports Teams

Bing now knows a lot more about cars and will also give a select group of users the option to compare the performance of different sports teams. Microsoft just announced these updates at the Search Engine Strategies event in New York. The new comparison answers for sports will be rolled out to only about 5% of Bing's users at first. In addition, Microsoft will also begin to roll out some minor design changes to a small group of users today that will better highlight Bing's assets like weather and travel search. Sponsor Starting today, mobile users will also see improvements to Bing's autosuggest feature, which will now include answers for things like stock quotes right in the autosuggest box. Domain Task Pages for Cars Whenever a user searches for cars and car-related topics (" 2010 Toyota Camry specs ," for example), Bing will now bring up a page will all of the car's specs instead of directing you to another site with this info. This page will also include links to additional images and videos about the car, as well as the ability to restrict the search query by different trims and links to the specs of cars in the same class. In Microsoft parlance, these pages are called "domain task pages" and chances are that - if successful - the company plans to roll out more of these for additional topics in the near future. The task pages are part of Bing's efforts to provide users with specialized answers for popular queries in verticals like weather . According to a recent job posting , other topics for these pages that Microsoft plans to launch in the future could include "movies, music, games and other high-volume domains." Given that Bing bills itself as a "decision engine," it only makes sense for Microsoft to try to capture as many popular searches as possible and present its users with relevant answers right on Bing.com instead of sending them on to other sites. Sports Comparison and UI Changes A small number of Bing users will now also be able to compare the performance of sports teams by simply typing the name of two teams in the search form. As Stefan Weitz, Microsoft's Director of Bing, also told us during a briefing earlier this month, about 0.7% of all queries on Bing are comparison searches and the company hopes to capture more of these in the future and present the right answer in Bing instead of sending users to multiple sites. The same number of users (about 5%) will now also see a new user interface for the boxes at the top of the page that Bing will often display for popular topics. For searches related to cities and towns, for example, these "Bing boxes" will now include info about local weather, a relevant link to Bing Maps, as well as airfare info from your current location (based on your IP address). For popular artists, these boxes will now also include information about upcoming concerts and other relevant information. Sadly, this concert info is based on chronology and doesn't take a user's current location into account. Overall, these are interesting updates - not necessarily because Bing now knows a lot more about cars and sports, but because they show the direction the Bing team is going in. As a "decision engine," the Bing team's intend is to give users more information directly on the site instead of just presenting them with a couple of links. While these links can be relevant (and Bing still shows them most of the time, too), the Bing team wants to reduce the number of queries that result in links and increase the number of times the software can present users with direct answers Microsoft has sourced from its own databases or from sources across the Internet. Discuss

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Bing Keeps Getting Smarter: Adds More Info About Cars, Sports Teams

Tags:Bing, Bing Keeps, Bing Maps, comparison, concert, director, future, info, Microsoft, minor design changes, New York, number, performance, search, search engine strategies, search-engine, Stefan Weitz, toyota camry

Twitter is Winning Its Fight Against Spammers

Not too long ago, spam on Twitter was quickly becoming a serious issue that made searching for any popular topic on the service's own search engine almost pointless. Spammers would regularly hijack popular terms by polluting the search results with nonsensical tweets that included the popular keyword and a link to a spam site. Since Twitter started implementing better spam controls last year, however, the number of spam messages on the service has gone down dramatically. According to the latest data , the percentage of spam tweets per day is now down to under 1%. Sponsor According Twitter's chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury , the company's Trust and Safety team is "constantly battling against spam to improve the Twitter experience and we're happy to report that it's working." Between May and October 2009, the percentage of daily of spam messages on Twitter regularly exceeded 9% and spiked to over 10 on a few days. As Twitter's primary monetization strategy currently involves selling access to its firehose stream to search providers like Google and Microsoft, it is definitely in the company's best interest to keep the number of spam messages as low as possible. Report a Spammer If you want to help Twitter in its fight against spam, remember that you report a spammer directly to Twitter 's anti-spam team from every user's profile page. Just look for the "report for spam" link in the right sidebar or in the drop-down actions menu. Discuss

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Twitter is Winning Its Fight Against Spammers

Tags:abdur chowdhury, Google, messages-as-low, Microsoft, number, search, service, since-twitter, spam, spam team, spam-on-twitter, the-percentage, Twitter

Mobile App Marketplace: $17.5 Billion by 2012

According to a study commissioned by mobile application store operator GetJar , the mobile application market will reach $17.5 billion by 2012. By then, the number of mobile application downloads will have also grown to nearly 50 billion from just over 7 billion in 2009. Although those numbers may seem high, they line up with other estimates, such as those previously reported by analysts at both Gartner and research2guidance . Sponsor The GetJar study, run by independent consulting firm by Chetan Sharma Consulting, noted that over the past year, the number of app stores grew from 8 to 38 and that there are even more in the works. Apple's iTunes store leads the way with a reported 150,000 mobile apps and 3 billion downloads to date. Google's Android marketplace is growing fast as well, and now has more than 30,000 mobile applications that run on devices like the Droid, the myTouch 3G and the Nexus One, among others. However, as Getjar founder and chief executive officer Ilja Laurs told the BBC , feature phones should not ignored either. "It is almost as if these phones don't exist. We know smartphones are an extremely important phenomenon, but in terms of consumer mindshare and revenue share, feature phones represent 90% of the global market compared to 10% for smartphones and data cards." He also made the bold prediction that "mobile apps will eclipse the traditional desktop Internet," even going so far as to say that "mobile devices will kill the desktop." Just the Stats: Here are a few other highlights from the report (via Paid Content and TechCrunch ): The annual growth rate for mobile app downloads is 92% By 2012, off-deck, paid apps will be the biggest source of revenue In 2009, mobile operators accounted for more than 60% of apps' revenue By 2012, mobile operators will account for less than 23% of apps' revenue The app store growth (8 to 38 by 2012) is an increase of 375% Average app selling price is $1.09 in North America, $0.20 in South America and $0.10 in Asia Revenue opportunities in Europe will grow from $1.5 billion in 2009 to $8.5 billion in 2012 Revenue opportunities in North America will grow from $2.1 billion to around $6.7 billion in 2012 Apps are most popular in Asia where they account for 37% of global downloads this past year Users spent the most for apps in North America where they account for over 50% of revenue Analysts Agree: Apps are Big Business A report earlier this year from research firm Gartner predicted that application stores are expected to generate revenues of nearly $7 billion over the course of 2010. That figure is a combination of the $6.2 billion spent purchasing the mobile applications themselves combined with an additional $.6 billion generated through advertising revenues from in-app ads. The Gartner analysts also predicted that mobile application stores' revenue will grow to $29.5 billion by the end of 2013. Another forecast from research2guidance estimated the smartphone application market will grow from $1.94 billion in 2009 to $15.65 billion by 2013. Although these aren't exactly apples to apples comparisons, the overall trend is apparent: app stores are growing rapidly and generating massive revenue streams.

Tags:analysts-agree, Business, from-the-report, mobile, north, North America, number

How Did MySpace Become Number One on Android?

When MySpace announced earlier this week that they had now established themselves as the number one social networking application on the Android platform and the number three download overall, needless to say, we were a bit shocked. After all, (with no offense to MySpace intended), there are more Facebook users than MySpace users in the world. It's just a simple fact. So how did this happen? Is the MySpace Android app that much better than Facebook's? Are Android users more interested in MySpace for some reason? Are they younger than other mobile users and therefore choosing MySpace over Facebook? As it turns out, the truth is that measuring the mobile downloads of official applications may not be mean anything when it comes to measuring the success of social networking sites. Sponsor After scratching our heads for a good ten minutes, we decided to reach out to a mobile expert for help. Peter Farago of mobile analytics firm Flurry had a few ideas, all of which seem more than plausible. Theory #1: Third-Party Apps On the Android platform, there are over ten third-party applications which allow social networking users access to Facebook outside of the Facebook official app or mobile website. This means that thousands upon thousands of Facebook users are downloading other Facebook applications which are not being counted towards the official app's total. Meanwhile, there is only one third-party MySpace application, so most of the downloads from MySpace users are going to the official app. Theory #2: Facebook Pre-Installs The Facebook application is pre-installed on the Droid, the most popular Android handset. It's highly likely that those pre-installed copies of the Facebook app are not being counted as downloads on the Android marketplace. In addition, the Facebook application is included on the Android 2.0 mobile platform , alongside other popular apps like Amazon and Pandora. So again, that's another potential area where Facebook application downloads are not being counted. Theory #3: Mobile Web Use Another theory, (this one ours not Farago's), is that some Facebook and MySpace users don't access the sites via apps - they do so via the customized mobile websites. Facebook, for example, has two mobile alternatives to the official app - m.facebook.com and touch.facebook.com. For personal reasons, some Android owners may actually prefer accessing Facebook via these sites instead of by way of the app itself - an app which, unlike its iPhone counterpart, points to the mobile website when you interact with some of its functions, a regular complaint among Android users. In fact, many users actually consider the MySpace app to be the more polished of the two. Theory #4: All of the Above MySpace claims that its popularity on the Android is due to "deep integration with the Android platform" and, in their press release , the company mentions the multiple MySpace homescreen widgets for things like voice-enabled updates and photo uploads. The release also notes that the MySpace user base is highly engaged, with 70% of the mobile app users checking in three or more times per day. However, these are probably not the major reasons contributing to the app's popularity on the charts, where it now ranks #3 overall . It's more likely that the combination of factors described above have more to do with where MySpace stands today on Android. Mystery solved. Discuss

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How Did MySpace Become Number One on Android?

Tags:amazon, combination, downloads, facebook, mobile, MySpace, number, official, press, social-networking, space-android