facebook search

Ever since Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt last month and mentioned that Facebook was working on search, there's been plenty of speculation about just how that will play out. The examples Zuckerberg gave to illustrate how search might work suggested a potentially powerful version of question-and-answer sites such as Quora with a mixture of Yelp, the reviews site. (Here's CNET's take.)

Facebook, Zuckerberg argued, is "uniquely positioned" to answer such questions as, "What sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York in the last six months and Liked?" … Read more

No other company in the world holds as much personal data as Facebook, which puts it in an ideal position to cull data from your friends and friends-of-friends, and even those you don't know, to bring you answers to your deepest questions. Such as, "What sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York in the last six months and Liked?"

Ok, maybe that's not your deepest questions, but it's the example that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg used during an interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF conference earlier this month when he was talking … Read more

Microsoft should consider selling Bing, says a Reuters opinion piece that's gained attention in the last day or so, after being published last Friday.

Though the search engine has grown in market share and popularity since its debut in 2009, it's still a money-losing proposition and a distraction for its parent, claims Reuters columnist Robert Cyran. Despite the flush of cash that Microsoft has poured into Bing, the search's engine's online services division lost $2.6 billion in the company's latest fiscal year, he says.

Microsoft believes Bing provides a boost to some of its … Read more

One billion people worldwide visited Google in May, the first time ever that a site has drawn that many visitors in one month, according to data from ComScore.

The number of unique visitors to Google's sites rose by 8.4 percent from 931 million a year ago to just over a billion--1,009,699,000 to be more exact.

Across the world, market researcher ComScore said yesterday, Google saw its greatest numbers in India and South Africa, which accounted for 14.3 percent and 13.5 percent of its visitors, respectively. The lowest numbers were in South Korea and … Read more

If your mobile device has Wi-Fi enabled, the device's previous location may be listed on the Web, CNET reported this week.

Google publishes the estimated location of millions of iPhones, laptops, and other devices with Wi-Fi connections, the latest twist in a series of revelations this year about wireless devices and privacy. Android phones with location services enabled regularly beam the unique hardware IDs of nearby Wi-Fi devices back to Google, a similar practice followed by Microsoft, Apple, and Skyhook Wireless as part of each company's effort to map the street addresses of access points and routers around … Read more

To make results more relevant, Microsoft is launching a new feature in Bing search that bakes in recommendations from Facebook friends.

The new feature, making its debut tomorrow, will elevate results that have received a thumbs-up "like" from a friend on Facebook. So if a user is searching for a Thai restaurant in San Francisco, for example, a particular spot that received kudos from that person's Facebook posse will climb in the results.

Microsoft, which likes to call Bing a "decision engine" to distinguish it from Google, wants Bing to mimic the real world, where … Read more

Facebook is taking a page out of Google's playbook.

The social network updated its search this week to include articles that a user's friend has "liked." So, when a person inputs a query into the Facebook search field, any article related to that query that someone in the person's network has liked will be included. All Facebook first reported on the update.

In most cases, the search results in Facebook's improved tool are ranked by the number of likes an item gets. But in a few queries that I input, including "new Apple … Read more

On Monday evening, my dinner cooking was disturbed by someone who claimed to represent the California League of Conservation Voters.

She boasted that this league pressured politicians into supporting pro-environment policies. She was self-righteous. She assumed I was on her side. And, within 30 seconds, she asked for money. ("You see," she said, "your neighbors have already contributed.")

I asked her whether she could give me something to read, so that I could better understand her slightly fascist overtones. "Well, we prefer to just take a check donation," she replied. Preferring that she leave … Read more

Diddit, a site that allows users to share life experiences with others, announced Friday that its "diddits" and "wanna dos" can now be shared with other social networks. Users will be able to deploy new Diddit widgets, showing their lists of what they've done ("diddits") and would like to do ("wanna dos") on their blogs or personal Web sites. With the help of Twitter integration, Diddit users will be able to automatically tweet any of their "diddits" to their followers. Users will also be able to sign in through … Read more