Google Announces Google Buzz

PC World reports that Google announced a new social media tool on Tuesday called Google Buzz that is designed to link people’s Gmail accounts with features found in popular social media tools including Facebook and Twitter. Expected to be fully deployed within one week, Google Buzz allows people to share status updates, photos and videos with their network of friends.

“We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences),” wrote Gmail and Google Buzz Plus Project Manager Todd Jackson on the Google blog. “Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.”

However, rivals immediately jumped on Google Buzz as a misguided approach to social networking.

“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”

Google continues growth while Yahoo! And Bing drop

Google accounted for 71.08 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 3, 2009, according to Hitwise data. The search giant saw a one percent gain from last month, while both Yahoo! and Bing dropped in September from last month, down three percent from 19.96 percent to 16.8 percent and down five percent from 9.48 percent to 8.96 percent respectively. Surprisingly, Ask.com showed a big increase of eight percent, from 2.37 percent to 2.56 percent of the market early in October.

In addition, Hitwise revealed that one-word queries accounted for the majority of all searches, amounting to 24.32 percent of all queries. In addition, longer search queries, averaging searches of five or more than eight words in length, increased two percent between August and September 2009. Searches of eight or more words increased 6 percent.

The findings also showed that search engines continue to be the main way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. In their share of traffic coming directly from search engines, Automotive, Business and Finance, Entertainment, News and Media, Online Video and Sports categories showed double-digit increases last month compared with September of last year.

Bing adds Real-Time Twitter to Search Results

As part of an effort to integrate real-time data into search results, Microsoft has announced that its one-month-old search engine Bing now includes the latest tweets of Twitter users. While Bing will not feature all of Twitter at this time, it will index a few thousand of the more prominent Twitterers based on their follower count and volume of Tweets. The list of Twitter users includes everyone from search technology journalist Danny Sullivan to people like Al Gore and Ashton Kutcher.

In a blog post about the announcement, general manager of Microsoft’s search technology center Sean Suchter wrote, “There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. We’ve been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space.”

When Bing users search for people in association with Twitter, the search results will bring up their latest Tweets along with a quick link to more tweets. Users can type in queries such as “Ashton Kutcher Twitter” or “Ashton Kutcher tweets.”

This is a major step for Bing in terms of competing with search giant Google. The New York Times reported that while all major search engines index Twitter profiles and some older tweets, “Bing is the first major search engine that is integrating with Twitter in this way.”

-Melanie Saxe