The primary emphasis was on originality of the content. Original content would be (and should be) rated high, pushing down in ranking the sites that scraped or copied the original site’s content. Matt Cutts in his blog mentions help and feedback from Stackoverflow team. Ironically Stackoverflow is the reason I am writing this post, a debate that has gotten subdued post the Panda update. Couple of days back, a friend asked me ‘how does a mutex differ from a semaphore’. I answered to the extent I knew about them. Anyhow, to catch up with the subtle aspects of how the two differ, I entered this search query ‘difference between a mutex and a semaphore’. I opened the first two results in separate tab. First was from a geekswithblogs.net and the second from Stackoverflow.

I happened to look at both of them. And our geek boys had blindly pasted the answer from stackoverflow in reply to the question. This wasnt the first time I was witnessing this. Quite often in programming queries, these copycats top the search results.

There are ways, I, as a user, can bring them down, with the +1 buttons now and filtering through the Chrome extension. That however is besides the point. I wonder why Stackoverflows results are still lower in programming queries, when Google or Matt would both agree that their content is very authentic and original. There was news of that the chrome extension would be used as a signal to Google’s search algorithm. +1s are going to be a definite strong signal in times to come. But Web Spam Team at Google could still take note of these individual cases -- for or against (authentic content sites ranking lower or content pages ranked higher).

Any other experiences from users wrt Google search results are welcome . I can be reached at vikashbitmesra@gmail.com. My twitter feed @_Vikash.

MS [and for that matter Google too] have made their respective failed attempts to buy out both Twitter and Facebook. While both Twitter and Facebook decided to thrive on their own then, they didn’t mind the cash inflow this time around by making available the vast real time updates they have at their disposal. Even as Twitter CEO Evans Williams humorously downplayed questions regarding this deal (a day earlier at the Web 2.0 summit), Microsoft’s online services group President Qi Lu went on to explain the deal, a deal that MS likes to call “Bing Wave 2″.  Lu said the deal with their other prospective partner, Facebook, will come in at a later point. Excerpts from his interview here and a conversation with ‘O Reilly here.

The official Bing-Twitter Integration is up and live at http://www.bing.com/twitter, for the US only (so change your country preference to US  to check it out). It has a tag cloud showing the hottest topics on twitter (similar to Twitter’s trending topics) and also sample tweets on each of them.When we actually make a particular query, we get the tweets in two categories ‘Most recent’ and ‘Best match’. The Tweets corresponding to the search tag are supposedly updated in real time (but when we checked it out, didn’t quite find it to be so!!). This is just a basic setup live and should get more compact/trendy and feature laden with time. A snapshot :

The deal in itself is huge (and we are not talking in just financial terms here, infact Qi Lu passed the question when asked about the Financial terms of the deal), taking ‘Search’ on to the real time corridors.The deal gives MS, the access to full (public) Twitter data feed. This, for sure, is a formidable blow to its arch-rival Google. Twitter too has been looking at options recently for some revenue generation. This deal (and the upcoming one with Google) should suffice for some time now. The other options (read ads) is a scary one in itself.!! If the deal with Twitter is big, that with Facebook is going to be bigger, what with the 45 million status updates per day from 30 million unique visitors.

While all this does sound great, the question to be asked is : “Isnt this at some point the invasion of  user privacy?“. The question holds less of a significance with respect to Twitter (considering that its user’s tweets are more in the public domain), but gets pretty significant in the context of Facebook (whose users want to share those updates only amongst their friends). News has it that Facebook is going to provide its users with options in this regard. Wonder how this entire deal looks  in the light of Twitter’s user friendly TOS (Terms of Service) that says -- users very much own their Tweets. So what if MS starts Archiving these tweet streams. Facebook have anyways a non-friendly TOS (as per which, Facebook can use/modify/publish  your status updates and that too even after you terminate your account!!). Probably the Bing-Facebook integration will further fuel the issue. So are the users ready to let these giants invade their privacy (read status updates) for the sake of a perfect real time search? Readers’ opinion solicited.