It
wasn’t too long ago that most pundits had written off the battle for search
supremacy and handed the title to Google. Google still has two-thirds of all
search but, strangely, there seems to be plenty of innovation happening, in
search these days, both from Google as well as Bing and other entrants. Five or
six years ago the smart money was betting that algorithms could solve for all
user queries—Google and its rivals poured money into acquisitions, startups and
inhouse R&D to get computers to recognize the content of images and video,
to learn from user choices, etc. Today? Not so much.
The
pendulum has swung the other way—search firms are now focusing their creativity
on content. Google’s recent purchase of Zagat and Frommer’s is a prime example
of how the Silicon Valley giant is trying to shift from being a middleman (we
find the content you want) to providing more information itself (pairing
human-written reviews with maps and data).
The
latest exmaple of this happened last week when Bing decided to begin showcasing
journalists and other published authors as experts on specific topics that
users are search for. To be fair, Bing was already listing experts in its
People Who Know sidebar—but those results were computer-generated, based on
data such as who answers questions frequently on Q+A site Quora. The author list
is curated by Bing staff, another nod to the staying power of editorial and
curatorial knowledge that computers just can’t seem to learn on their own. Is
this the beginning of a long-awaited (and, for some, long-feared) tipping point
as Silicon Valley finally embraces what used to be called “publishing?”
Bing
article: http://searchengineland.com/bing-now-handpicks-news-writers-for-its-social-sidebar-135510
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