Interested in what people were saying the day after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008? Or how people reacted on the Web to the Chicago Whitesox winning the World Series in 2005? Or the early news on the Gulf oil spill on April 20, 2010?

When you search at Google, you can click [...]

Earlier this month I wrote about a granted Google patent, and a continuation of that patent filed earlier this year, that describe How Google Might Suggest Topics for You to Write About, by providing information to web publishers on queries and topics that are either under-represented in search results or where there’s more demand [...]

Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is a technology that can enable a computer to look at pictures that include text, and translate those visual representations of text into actual text. If you have words within images on your web pages, there’s a good chance that search engines are ignoring those words, when it comes [...]

How does a search engine choose whether to show news items in web search results and when not to?

If you live in Bealton, Virginia, chances are that you may not be too interested in news of a car crash in Brooklyn, New York, when searching for information about Brooklyn. If you’re from [...]

Ever go to a search engine to find out more about a specific place, such as a street or park or business? Want to see what the area around a historic monument is like? These types of searches are often referred to as location searches because the intent behind them is to find information [...]

Is Facebook planning on sharing information about the words that people use on the site in messages, and demographics about the people behind those messages? A couple of patent applications published today at the US Patent and Trademark Office describe how the social network might analyze the messages of members, to identify popular topics [...]

People still read books. I started on Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness not long ago. I’m about a fifth of the way through, and I’ve already added “Choice architecture” to my list of concepts to study more, and I’m looking more carefully at the choices I make.

Seeing a lot of [...]

When you search on Bing, sometimes instead of seeing an ordered list of search results, you might see search results broken up into categories. For example, if you search for “Virginia,” your search results start off with an image and link to the state web site, as well as a map. You then see [...]

Information about where searchers hover their mouse pointers over different parts of search results, as well as advertisements and Google Onebox results, may be collected by the search engine to be used as ranking signals to determine in part how relevant those items may be seen by Google users in response to a search [...]

You may know him by a number of names or titles – Governor of California, Terminator, Governator, Conan the Barbarian, Kindergarten Cop, Mr. Universe, Mr. Olympia, Arnold Strong, Arnie, The Austrian Oak.

To Metaweb, Arnold Schwarzenegger is referred to as 9202a8c04000641f8000000000006567.

Who is Metaweb?

Metaweb is a company recently acquired by Google, and [...]