Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

Google has announced it is enhancing it’s search engine – moving from an “information engine to a knowledge engine”.  It looks pretty cool.  While not yet available everywhere (those of us in Australia will have to wait a while) it is being rolled out in the US.  As The Conversation explains very well:

The aim is to provide a more intelligent search engine – one that isn’t based on simply matching strings (a sequence of characters, such as a word) to single web pages. Instead, the Knowledge Graph will “understand” what you’re searching for and provide more relevant and precise information.

…About a year ago, Google acquired Freebase, an “open shared database of the world’s knowledge”. It’s a repository of structured knowledge describing over 20 million entities, each with a unique identifier, a type (people, place, book, film, building) and a set of properties (e.g. date of birth for a person, latitude and longitude for a place).

Each entity is represented by a topic node in the massive graph that underpins the database. Properties can be used to specify relationships between entities and topics.

Freebase’s approach builds on “semantic web” technologies and the more recent Linked Open Data movement. The Semantic web has been driven to a large degree by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. While the concept of the Semantic Web has been around for more than ten years, the vision described in a 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee has largely been unrealised.

Google has tried many different initiatives to varying degrees of success – such as Google Wave, Google Health, Google+, but where Google’s forte is search and this initiative will, I hope, mean that we not only get more information from our searches, but also learn more.

If you want an overview of some of the things that Google offers, Hubspot have an excellent ebook.  If you don’t know about Hubspot – they are offer a ton of  free Hubspot resources and clear explanations on business use of social media as well as software.  Below is one such example.

Download (PDF, 1.89MB)

Scholarometer is a social tool to facilitate citation analysis and help evaluate the impact of an author’s publications. So I’m giving it a whirl.

According to James, a man in the know, there are three main ways author citations can be found:

• web of science
• google scholar
• scopus

Each gives a different number of citations as they use different ways of identifying articles. Scholarometer uses Google Scholar.

Google are on a roll and introducing the Priority Inbox (in beta) – an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail, identifying important email and separating it out from everything else:

“Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this “bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.”

Here it is in action

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nt3gE9dGHQ&feature=player_embedded#!

According to their blog The Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread”, “Starred”, and “Everything else”. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you.

Google wave is to be no more, the Google team in Sydney, having put a lot of effort into an innovative new product will see the technology developed in a different way.  What happened?  Wave had some internal competition from Google Buzz, and users were having to get used to two very different ways of communicating.  And in both cases you need someone to communicate with. A very active Sydney Wave user group dived into the technology, visited Google HQ and began to experiment.  Here are some of their discussions on hearing the news but first, from the Google blog:

… Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow

I didn’t know you could be a Google Fellow! But that aside, here are comments from the wave user group in Sydney on their experience with using wave and interacting with the Google Wave team. The discussion took place on facebook, but some of the points raised are so pertinent I wanted to post them here. I agree with Tony’s comment:

Tony Cosentino

It’s funny, I was at a gathering the night before the announcement and when wave came up in conversation someone said ‘does anyone even use it?’ Most agreed not.

I made a statement that I believed they had rolled out BUZZ and WAVE the wrong way around. I think WAVE should have been offered to all gmail users from the beginning to allow a critical mass to use and understand it. It was so hard to try putting groups together in the beginning with limited invites it all became like a secret cult with little documentation.

I feel for Gina Trapani who wrote the ‘Complete Google Wave Guide’ as an ongoing project. And also the programmers we have met at google wave meeting putting a lot of time and money to develop wave tools. No One in google lost their jobs over it.

I am also glad I hadn’t put anything really critical on wave that I was relying on as a long term repository.

Frances Jones

What I appreciated about Wave was that Lars, Jens & co created it in Sydney and I will always admire them as entrepreneurs. Heck, Lars even came to see us speak at the User Group. Many of the nscm crowd got together at Google HQ because of it. It created positives for us.

Google spent I don’t know how many $millions on Wave which Sydney benefitted from. Positives all round for us I’d say.

Tony Hollingsworth

Spot on Frances – the community building and support that occurred remains.

For example, some memories include:
http://gwsug.eventbrite.com/ – the informal user groups where you can see the range of people interested.

http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%23gwsug – we coined the hastag #gwsug for Google Wave Sydney User Group and can enjoy the history via FriendFeed, including the photos of the community.

Finally your teriffic blog posts Frances capturing the initial excitement and promise of Wave:

First impressions of Google Wave, An Australian Perspective
Innovation according to Goovle Wave co-creator Lars Rasmussen

These guys (and many others) really were experienced on wave and their comments, to me at least, say a lot.

What’s page ranking?  It’s one of a number of measures on how easily you can be found on the web, to be taken with a pinch of salt because it depends on what the measurement criteria are (a closely guarded Google secret). But, if you do have a site, a blog, a something on the web, it is nice to know how you’re doing.  Here is one of the Google team, Matt Cutts, on what form part of the 200 signals of measurement.

Google will change their algorithms in order to improve the quality of search we as users experience and to prevent spammers ranking high in search results. This can, however, have an impact on your site because all of a sudden the algorithm changes and your site or post is no longer found so easily.  Again, here is Google’s Matt Cutts on a change in their algorithm in May that resulted in a change to long-tailed searches for sites.

(a long tailed search being a search with a lot of words eg ‘Exceptionally good coffee in Sydney’ versus a short tail: ‘Sydney coffee’)

For more on this one read Timberline Interactive’s post.