Our attention spans are getting shorter. While being constantly interrupted or distracted by new toys, new sites, new things, new messages, new people, and new ideas, we’re delivering a stream of consciousness into a void which quickly gobbles it up and waits for more. Scads of sites are helping us find out what is trending in real time, and deliver us the “now”. What’s hot now. What’s peaking now. What’s being said now. But the focus on the cutting edge of time, combined with reduced capability to search our history is making finding what happened “when” a lot harder.

Louis gives some specific examples of what he’s looking for.

• What was the first blog to cover the service backtype.com?
• When was the first time Denton Gentry left a comment on my blog?
• When was the first time Robert Scoble mentioned the word Twitter in his blog?
• Who mentioned FriendFeed on Twitter first? MG Siegler

A much broader example would be it you wanted to go back and figure out which blog was the very first blog to scoop the iPhone back in 2006. Even using advanced search on Google’s Blog search you would be hard pressed to find the definitive right answer.

For example this is one of the results I found when I searched for “iPhone” on posts written between Jan. 1, 2006 and Dec. 31, 2006:

In the search results it’s marked as 2006, but when you look at the title or go to the page you can clearly see the post is about the 3G S vs. the Pre and was published in 2009.

I have to admit Louis’ post really has me thinking. Maybe I’m being a little naive or overly optimistic, but I commented on his post making the point that I believe that eventually the technology for discovering the “when” will catch up to the stream.

What do you think? Is the “when” being lost to the “now” web?

Via Google: The personal blocklist extension will transmit to Google the patterns that you choose to block. When you choose to block or unblock a pattern, the extension will also transmit to Google the URL of the web page on which the blocked or unblocked search results are displayed.

Matt Cutts, Google’s Spam Guru, blogged about the extension earlier today.

We’ve been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. One of the signals we’re exploring is explicit feedback from users. To that end, today we’re launching an early, experimental Chrome extension so people can block sites from their web search results. If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.

You can download the extension and start blocking sites now.

It’s always interesting to see the annual, year-end Google Zeitgeist and take moment to reflect on the past year and all the topics, events and people that held some sort of mythical influence at some point during the year prompting hoards of people to hop on Google and find out more about the flavor of the moment.

Some of the more interesting searches:

I’m a little shocked that there’s at least a couple of terms from each of those lists that I’ve never even heard of. Not that I consider myself some sort of Google Zeitgeist Rain Man, but I do try and keep abreast of what’s going on around the world. Fortunately, thanks to the zeitgeist, I can now look them up and make progress on my lifelong endeavor of being the smartest man alive!

Click for full-sized image

Instant Previews can be helpful for many kinds of tasks. For example, say you looked at a page before and need to find it again—with a preview, you can tell if any of the results look familiar. Or perhaps you’re looking for an official website—look for a logo and formal style and you’ll probably be able to identify it. Or maybe you’re looking for a how-to guide—it’s easy to spot a page with clear illustrations and step-by-step instructions.

There have been many times when I found something on a site and I was looking at later. I knew I would recognize the site if I saw it but, up until now, that meant clicking on every link until I finally found the site. That’s one instance that I can think of that Instant Previews will really come in handy.

Go ahead, give it a shot now.

A few days ago when Bing was released in preview, I wrote a post about giving Bing a shot at being my default search engine for a while.

I tried hard to give Bing a go. I tried to pry myself away from the warm, fuzzy satisfied feeling of a Google search.

I tried, but Bing failed. Sure Bing can take my search terms and return results but Google can answer my questions and that’s what I need a search engine to do.

For example, let’s say I want to ask “what is the average life span of a blue whale”.

Google blows Bing out of the water (no pun intended), it’s not even close.

Bing search results for “what is the average life span of a blue whale“:

• The first result returned by Bing is some desultory post from Wheelock.edu message board from 2005 that does in fact mention the lifespan of whales, unfortunately it’s in reference to bowhead whales not blue whales which is what we searched for.
• The second result returned by Bing is a Wikipedia article, which is usually a pretty good sign, sadly the Wikipedia page that Bing turns up is an entry on “Maximum life-span” and while the word whale does appear once on the page, not only does it have nothing to do with blue whales, it has nothing to with whales at all.
• The third result returned by Bing is yet another haphazard post from Wheelock.edu message board, this one dated February 21, 2000! Ironically this result is the only one so far that is actually about blue whales but it still somehow manages to be the worst result of all. The post contains someone asking for facts about the blue whale and someone responding, “I don’t happen to have those measurements at hand, but the best source would be a book called The Blue Whale”.

I’ll stop there because the next result returned by Bing is actually about the life cycle of an adult elephant (seriously), so if you’re not banging your head against a wall by now, you may be on your way to your local bookstore to buy a copy of a book called The Blue Whale so you can actually figure out the answer to your question since Bing is apparently totally clueless.

Now, let’s compare and contrast that with Google, the search engine we all know and love.

Google search results for “what is the average life span of a blue whale“:

There’s no need to even make a list here. The very first result returned by Google is a to a site called Blue-Whale.info and the name of the post is “Life Span of Blue Whales“. Not only does it give you lots of other information on blue whales it clearly states:

Blue whales have a life expectancy of 35-40 years, but the normal, un-hunted lifespan of a blue whale is estimated to be 80 years.

Not only does it answer our question it gives us a better, more specific answer than what we asked for.

Anyone that may have been hoping that Bing had the chance to be a Google killer is advised to keep on looking. Google runs rings around Bing and it’s hard to imagine that Bing will even have the opportunity to get off the ground anytime soon. Not that it has to of course, Microsoft has the resources and is already used to keeping things around that lose, rather than make, money.

It’s not really shocking that that Google is better at search than Bing, that is to be expected. Google is the standard. To me, the truly shocking aspect of this is the magnitude of the disparity between Bing and Google.

I tried to give Bing a chance to usurp Google as my default search engine of choice, but with results so incredibly bad, it’s hard to justify not sticking with Google.

I’ve had the same gmail account since 2004. I use it as my personal account as well as filtering all of my business accounts through there. It’s my one login for all of my email accounts.  I also use Picasa Web for all my photos, Google Docs for my documents that I store online, Google Reader knows all the feeds I’m subscribed to and my Enterprise calendar is synced up with my Gmail calendar and, when it’s an option, I tend to use Google Checkout for purchases. Now I even have a Google profile.

The point of the post I read was, with all that information, do I really want Google to know what I’m searching for? Search is the one part of your experience that really reveals the most about you and your habits. Are we giving Google too much information to build profiles on us to target us with eerily specific marketing data?  Sure, it may be a sound a bit tinfoil hat-ish but it also has its merits. Simply by switching search engines you can seperate much of your “anonymous” info from your “personal info”.

The one problem with that theory is that for some reason I really loathe Yahoo’s search. Now with Bing’s release last night I think I’ll give it a shot for a week and see what I think. For the next week I’ll use Bing as my default search engine thereby seperating my search for “hot japanese girls eating ice cream” from my Google overloards and the rest of my online personal info.

Setting up Bing as your default search engine in Chrome:

1. Click on the customize and control wrench on the top write of your browser.
2. Choose options
3. Make sure you’re on the Basics tab
4. Choose Live Search as your default search engine
5. Click cloes and you’re all set.

Setting up Bing as your default search engine in Firefox:

1. Go here and install the Bing plugin.
2. Once you install the plugin Live Search will show up in your dropdown options in your Firefox searchbox.
3. Click that and you’re all set.

I’m going to give Bing a try for a week and see what comes of it. Even if it’s only that Google can’t put my search for “rash cream” in the same vault as the rest of my personal information that I trust it with.

Microsoft quietly rolled out its new search engine Bing.com last night. The unavoidable question for any new service like this is, “is this going to be a Google killer?” Obviously it’s too soon to make that sort of call, but you have to think that Microsoft is due to get something big right sooner or later. After the failures of Vista, Zune and Hotmail, Microsoft is definitely playing catch up.

Could Windows 7 and Bing be the 2009 tech hits of the year? Only time will tell.

Bing has a “preview” tag below it, whether it was intentional or not, this seems to be a bit of a jab at Google which often keeps the “beta” tag on many of its products for years.

My first impressions of Bing are pretty good. While I think the splash page, with the photos on the page, are a bit hokey, I might be able to get used to them. What I really like though is the search results. They’re not only accurate, the results are even cleaner and easier to read the Google’s.

When you mouse over a result you can see a snippet of the latest content posted on the site you’re looking for.

“There is a lot of clutter on the Web and with this, publishers will be able to clean up a lot of junk,” said Matt Cutts, an engineer who heads Google’s spam fighting efforts. “I think it is going to gain traction pretty quickly.”

“We are happy that everyone is going to support the same implementation,” said Nathan Buggia, a lead program manager at Microsoft. “This is a clear benefit for publishers as it gives them an opportunity to get more exposure through search engines.”

Google Webmaster Central:

Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: we now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

That’s great news for anyone out there looking for that extra bit of juice to drive some more traffic to your site and fortunately, if you’re using WordPress to publish your site, it’s pretty simple to add this functionality.

Specifying your canonical in WordPress

Add this snippet of code to your functions.php file in your theme.

function set_canonical() {
  if ( is_single() ) {
    global $wp_query;
    echo '
';
  }
}
add_action('wp_head', 'set_canonical');

Once this is up, the canonical link will be on every version of your post page telling bots that the preferred version of the page is the permalink version.

If you want to check and make sure it’s there you can view your page source and look for the link rel right before your closing head tags. But remember, this is only going to show up on your inside pages. i.e. your single post pages.

link rel="canonical" href="http://jamespoling.com/2009/02/how-to-specify-your-canonical-to-avoid-duplicate-content-in-wordpress/"/

Enjoy!

1. obama
2. facebook
3. att
4. iphone
5. youtube
6. fox news
7. palin
8. beijing 2008
9. david cook
10. surf the channel

Check out the entire breakdown here.

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together.

During the 2007-2008 flu season, an early version of Google Flu Trends was used to share results each week with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC. Across each of the nine surveillance regions of the United States, we were able to accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports.

The data goes back to 2003 and has been cross-referenced with survey data from the Centers for Disease Control.  While all of this may seem a bit “big brothery”, Google assures us that they don’t use personally identifiable information to create their flu estimates, “only aggregated search queries are used to provide Google Flu Trends”.

Taking into account the World Health Organization’s overview on influenza GFT starts to seem like a pretty damn good idea:

Influenza rapidly spreads around the world in seasonal epidemics and imposes a considerable economic burden in the form of hospital and other health care costs and lost productivity. In the United States of America, for example, recent estimates put the cost of influenza epidemics to the economy at $71-167 billion per year.

In case you haven’t noticed lately our economy is pretty effed up.  If anonymous Google searches can help the CDC identify outbreaks up to two weeks faster and potentially prevent further spreading it seems as though the end may justify the means.

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