The state of search in social media times: the contextual prehistory

Last Sunday I posted an article about the state of both search engines and search engine marketing, from a personal perspective on my personal blog. It’s a bit provocative but, again, it’s my opinion and so I invite you to add yours. I think search is still in a very premature stage despite recent innovations such as Google Instant. All these tools are very nifty and some might find them cool, that’s OK.

Regarding the impact of them on search engine marketing, the jury is still out. But what matters most to me is that search is not relevant enough in these social media times from a user viewpoint. On top of that, I strongly feel the importance of content and context in search engine optimization and in the way search engines work should be much more prominent.

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Google, Facebook and Microsoft: the social network battle for the internet user, online ad revenues and WWW dominance

Bing facebook google Facebook's announcements on F8 (read here) clearly are yet another sign that there is a lot going on in the battle between the top online properties. It's about the internet user (yes, about eyeballs too) and about ad revenue. In fact, it's about domination on the WWW.

What do you think Zuckerberg really said when stating yesterday that the purpose was to “make Facebook the centre of the increasingly social and more personalised experience that people encounter when they use the Internet” and that it wants to enable other websites and online applications to share information across the user base of Facebook (that counts 400 million people…).

What he really said was “the battle is really open now, Google”. And it's all about us: the "users".

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