Will Facebook’s newly unveiled social graph feature soon bring the company profit and additional relevance? 

Mixed reactions are meeting Graph Search, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg called "one of the coolest things we've done in a while" in announcing the feature on Tuesday.

Graph Search enables search using natural language and replaces links to answers with direct results. Sample searches include “Movies my friends in San Francisco like,” “Photos my friends took in the 1990s,” and “Languages my friends from college speak.”

"This is a beta product," Zuckerberg said at the company's rollout event in Menlo Park, Calif. "We focused on a few use cases that we think are good. Even as an early product, Graph Search is a completely new way for people to get information on Facebook."Continue reading...

This holiday shopping season is all about mobile, and Google wants to help Black Friday shoppers not get lost. Last November, the Google Maps app headed indoors, mapping the interiors of locations such as IKEA, airports and shopping meccas such as Mall of America. This month, it expanded its indoor retail mapping in time for Black Friday sales beyond Android devices, and now offers "over 10,000 detailed floor plans of locations in nine countries," including Macy's New York City flagship. Google is also promoting its voice-activated search app this holiday season.

Google is touting its voice-activated search app in a new TV campaign. Above, a mom scrambles to pull together a costume based on the eighth president of the United States — Martin Van Buren, with an assist from her Nexus tablet — and below, a replacement baseball umpire gets a little help from the app on his Android phone to refresh his memory on the rules:Continue reading...

Microsoft and Yahoo have announced Yahoo Bing Network as the official name for Microsoft and Yahoo’s Search Alliance partnership, with the related move that Microsoft adCenter is being renamed Bing Ads. 

“Bing Ads is not only a new name, but an improved experience with new features to help you better manage your campaigns and complete tasks faster,” says Microsoft’s Tina Kelleher in a blog post. “Recent improvements include: a new web interface, improved ad rotation controls, and agency enablement tools that make it easier for agencies to manage multiple accounts.”

Microsoft and Yahoo claim a 30% share of the U.S. search market with a reach of 151 million users likely to spend 124% more than the average searcher and 5% more than Google searchers, thereby offering advertisers 46 million unique searchers in the U.S. who aren’t using Google, according to comScore June stats cited by WebProNews.com.

Still, it's hard taking down Google.Continue reading...

Almost a year ago, former Google executive Marissa Mayer struck a deal to purchase the user review-based Zagat brand.

Today, Google confirmed it's expanding its travel content library by acquiring the Frommer's brand of travel guidebooks and related assets from US publisher John Wiley & Sons, while Mayer, of course, has struck a different big deal for herself.

The Frommer's deal will beef up the Google+ Local platform, which now incorporates Zagat restaurant reviews, with Frommers-curated lists such as "Best National Parks of the Pacific Northwest" and other travel resources.

Why buy rather than partner? Zagat, for starters, can't do it all alone — while Google has big plans in the travel space.Continue reading...

In a bid to show how Google Maps' Street View function can map interiors (such as the White House and any business that meets the criteria for a virtual tour), the search giant today released this promo for its NASA guided tour of the Kennedy Space Center. The description:

Google Maps in collaboration with NASA is enabling people around the world to take a trip to the doorway to outer space. This location is our largest special collection of Street View imagery to date, totaling 6,000 panoramic views of the facilities, and expanding our mission to document the world's most amazing places. Among the images you can now explore online with the click of your mouse are the space shuttle launch pad, Vehicle Assembly Building and Launch Firing Room #4. Gaze down from the top of the enormous launch pad, peer up at the towering ceiling of the Vehicle Assembly Building (taller than the Statue of Liberty) and get up close to one of the space shuttle's main engines, which is powerful enough to generate 400,000 lbs of thrust. From these vantage points, anyone can live out his or her childhood dream of becoming an astronaut.

Microsoft's So.cl is described as “an experimental research project, developed by Microsoft’s FUSE Labs, focused on exploring the possibilities of social search for the purpose of learning.” Quietly debuting this week, it was previously to students studying information and design at the University of Washington, Syracuse and New York University, and originally called Tulalip. Facebook remains a log-in choice on So.cl but Twitter does not, replaced by Windows Live.

So.cl is now open to everyone, and as stated on their site, “We hope to encourage students to reimagine how our everyday communication and learning tools can be improved, by researching, learning and sharing in their everyday lives. So.cl is not meant to replace existing full-featured search and social networking tools. It is an experimental research project using a minimal set of features which help combine search with the social network for the purpose of learning.”Continue reading...

Yahoo!'s latest product is in step with the Pinteresting, visual world that we live in these days. Axis is a mobile browser and desktop plug-in that shows visual search results as a user types, “providing a more direct path to whatever they’re looking for online. Think of it as a personal companion for your daily explorations of the Web,” states Yahoo's blog post announcing the launch.

“Our search strategy is predicated on two core beliefs—one, that people want answers, not links and two, that consumer-facing search is ripe for innovative disruption. With Axis, we have re-defined and re-architected the search and browse experience from the ground up” said Shashi Seth, SVP of Connections, Yahoo!

As a standalone mobile browser for Apple iOS devices and for HTML5 enabled desktop browsers, Axis offers one-step visual search results without leaving the page, “It’s the end of the back button!” and an instant answer feature shows information of common searches like movie times, sports scores or stock prices as they're typed.Continue reading...