search engines – Page 4 – DECISION STATS

Microsoft Online Games

No, this is not about the X Box kind of games. It is about Microsoft ‘s tactical shift in the online space from going it alone, and building stuff itself, –to partnering, and sometimes investing and exiting business.

In Blogs- It recently announced a migration of MS Live Spaces to WordPress.com – It gives Automattic 30 million more users- no small change consider there were 26 million existing WP users.

Microsoft Messenger, which is the oldest online app in the suite, now provides instant messaging services to about 350 million users, and from now on Windows Live Writer works specifically with the WordPress.com blog service by default. Hopefully Skype, and Google Voice will show MS the way to monitize that business app yet.

Google buying blogger-blogspot seems to have done little, but given Biz Stone room to create another content disruption-Twitter.

With the round of lawsuits by proxy, in Android -Motorola, or for acquisitions – MS is just doing what Marc Anderseen (who’s apparently a better VC than Paul Allen was), Sun and co did to it in the nineties.

Google seems to be regretting putting a spade in the Yahoo acquisition- that would have tied up a big chunk of Idle MS cash- leaving it little room for niche investments (like the 250 mill that helped Facebook ramp up in time).

The real surprise here could be Apple- it has shown little interest in cloud computing- and it seems to be testing the waters with Ping. But Apple sure smells competition- and Android is doing to Iphone what Windows did to the Mac in the early 1990’s.

Google lacks presence in online gaming (despite it’s own Zynga investment)- and needs to start monetizing properties like Android OS (say 10$ for every phone license ??), Google Maps (as an app for GPS) and Google Voice. Indeed it may be time for the big G to start thinking of spinning off atleast some products- earning better returns, while retaining control (dual stock splits) and killing those anti trust lawyer fees forever.

As the Ancient Chinese said, May you live in interesting times. Fun to watch the online games people play.

Google Instant could kill Black-Hat SEO

Google Instant is a relatively newer feature in Google Search Engine- it suggests websites at each type of keyword rather than wait for you to type the whole keyword.

The impact on user experience is incredible- rather than search or scroll through the results- you are more likely to click on the almost one of the ten websites you would have seen by the time you finished typing- or just clicking on the relevant ad (which probably changes on the right margin as fast as the websites below)

This spells a death for all those who indulged in black hat SEO– or link building, link exchanging- as these techniques pushed up your rank in search page only incrementally and rarely to the top 2-3 for a keyword.

Remember the size of the screen is such that each Google instant snapshot basically shows you or rather makes you focus on the top ranked search (and then presumably type on to get a newer result- rather than scroll down as the case was before).

It would be interesting to see or research the effect of keywords in the auction pricing, as well as compare those keyword pricing with Bing.com- Maybe there should be a website api tool for advertisers -like Adwords Instant that would show them the price instantly of keywords,comparison with Bing AND the search engine results for the keyword in a visual way.

Anyways- it is a incredible innovation and it is good Google is back to the math after the flings with being “Mad Men” of advertising.

and yes- I heard there is a new movie coming- it is called “The Search Engine” 🙂

An interesting web hack is Google Images Instant athttp://hartlabs.net/instant/images/

Awesome new features in Doc Googles

I really liked some awesome new features in Google Docs, and I am mentioning just some of the features I like because they are not there in Windows Office mostly.

Sourcehttp://www.google.com/google-d-s/whatsnew.html

List View and Mobile View Improvements
Now you can see your spreadsheets with all their formatting in List View and on your mobile device, this includes background/foreground colors, borders and text formatting!

Themes for forms
Add a splash of color to your surveys and questionnaires. When you create and edit a form, simply apply one of the 70 themes

Forms improvements
We’ve added a new question type (grid), support for right-to-left languages in forms, and a new color scheme for the forms summary. Also, you can now pre-populate form fields with URL parameters, and if you use Google Apps, you can create forms which require sign-in to access. Learn more
Translate document
You can now translate an entire document into over 40 languages.

Translate and detect languages in Google spreadsheets
=GoogleTranslate(“Hola, ¿cómo estás?”,”es”,”en”) gives “Hi, how are you?” (or leave out “en” and we’ll automatically choose the default language of your spreadsheet) What if you don’t know the language? =DetectLanguage(“Hola, ¿cómo estás?”) gives “es”.

A new curve tool in drawings
Create smooth curves based on a series of points with this new tool.

Optical character recognition (OCR)
You can now upload and convert PDF or image files to text.

You can read the awesome new ones athttp://www.google.com/google-d-s/whatsnew.html but these are the ones I felt were missing in Windows Office.

Coming up- a Review of newly forked Libre Office

Using Facebook Analytics (Updated)

People sceptical of any analytical value of Facebook should see the nice embedded analytics, which is a close rival and even more to Google Analytics for websites. It has recently been updated as well.

It is right there on the button called Insights on left margin of your Facebook Page

Like for the Facebook Page

http://facebook.com/Decisionstats

You can also use Export Data function to run customized analytical and statistical testing on your Corporate Page.

Older View———————————————————————————-

see screenshot of Demographics of 213 Decisionstats fans on Facebook ( FB doesnot allow individual views but only aggregate views for Privacy Reasons)

SAS Sentiment Analysis wins Award

From Business Wire, the new Sentiment Analysis product by SAS Institute (created by acquisition Teragram ) wins an award. As per wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining refers to a broad (definitionally challenged) area of natural language processing, computational linguistics and text mining. Generally speaking, it aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic. The attitude may be their judgment or evaluation (see appraisal theory), their affective state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author when writing) or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect the author wishes to have on the reader).

It was developed by Teragram. Here is another Sentiment Analysis tool from Stanford Grad school at http://twittersentiment.appspot.com/search?query=sas

See-

Sentiment analysis for sas

–

Image Citation-

http://threeminds.organic.com/2009/09/five_reasons_sentiment_analysi.html

Read an article on sentiment analysis here at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emotion.html

And the complete press release at http://goo.gl/iVzf`

–SAS Sentiment Analysis delivers insights on customer, competitor and organizational opinions to a degree never before possible via manual review of electronic text. As a result, SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services, has earned the prestigious Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award fromTechnology Marketing Corporation (TMC).

“SAS has automated the time-consuming process of reading individual documents and manually extracting relevant information”

“SAS Sentiment Analysis has shown benefits for its customers and it provides ROI for the companies that use it,” said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. “Congratulations to the entire team at SAS, a company distinguished by its dedication to software quality and superiority to address marketplace needs.”

Derive positive and negative opinions, evaluations and emotions

SAS Sentiment Analysis’ high-performance crawler locates and extracts sentiment from digital content sources, including mainstream websites, social media outlets, internal servers and incoming news feeds. SAS’ unique hybrid approach combines powerful statistical techniques with linguistics rules to improve accuracy to the detailed feature level. It summarizes the sentiment expressed in all available text collections – identifying trends and creating graphical reports that describe the expressed feelings of consumers, partners, employees and competitors in real time. Output from SAS Sentiment Analysis can be stored in document repositories, surfaced in corporate portals and used as input to additional SAS Text Analytics software or search engines to help decision makers evaluate trends, predict future outcomes, minimize risks and capitalize on opportunities.

“SAS has automated the time-consuming process of reading individual documents and manually extracting relevant information,” said Fiona McNeill, Global Analytics Product Marketing Manager at SAS. “Our integrated analytics framework helps organizations maximize the value of information to improve their effectiveness.”

SAS Sentiment Analysis is included in the SAS Text Analytics suite, which helps organizations discover insights from electronic text materials, associate them for delivery to the right person or place, and provide intelligence to select the best course of action. Whether answering complex search-and-retrieval questions, ensuring appropriate content is presented to internal or external constituencies, or predicting which activity or channel will produce the best effect on existing sentiments, SAS Text Analytics provides exceptional real-time processing speeds for large volumes of text.

SAS Text Analytics solutions are part of the SAS Business Analytics Framework, backed by the industry’s most comprehensive range of consulting, training and support services, ensuring customers maximum return from their IT investments.

Recognizing vision

The Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award recognizes vision, leadership and thoroughness. The most innovative products and services brought to the market from March 2008 through March 2009 were chosen as winners of this Product of the Year Award and are published on the INTERNET TELEPHONY and Customer Interaction Solutions websites.

Google: Prediction API and other cool stuff

Google just announced it’s tools Big Query and Prediction API for use with it’s new cloud storage device called Google Storage. With this the computing cycle seems to have come a full circle – from mainframe to desktop/servers to cloud. The Prediction API seems interesting but it, and the other services, are quite clearly dependent on market as well as developer enthusiasm. Me thinks, Google knows a thing or two about Big Data, and this one looks like a revenue positive product from Google ( unless they get REST less and let it languish like other great ideas-like Docs,Wave etc)

Also could be interesting is applications from both R, as well as SAS and SPSS to start using this remote data cloud/server farm 😉

With Storage,Querying and Prediction Analysis- Google is definitely in the Infrastructure as a Service business, but success with these services would be crucial to establish it’s name in the formidably lucrative business analytics and business intelligence fields.

http://code.google.com/apis/predict/

http://code.google.com/apis/bigquery/

http://code.google.com/apis/storage/

Money for Nothing

Try and use Microsoft Live Search but only if searching for buying stuff AND US based. The cash back offer is cool stuff- MS is really using the 44 Billion they saved when the big G spiked the MS to Y deal.

http://search.live.com/cashback/