relevancy

Google is offering a look into its process for measuring and analyzing data from television ads. It's interesting to see the metrics they use and how they are trying to make television ads more relevant to viewers.

Murray Dick and Mark Ward have an article up at BBC News looking at Rushmore Drive and minority-based web searching. They look specifically at a search engine called RushmoreDrive, which we pointed to back in April upon its launch.

Yahoo has released the beta version of a new service called Yahoo Glue. What Yahoo Glue does is piece together results from different popular sites and bring them to you on one page. For example, a search for an NFL team will bring up results from Wikipedia, Yahoo Sports (including stats, rosters, schedules, etc), YouTube, Yahoo Maps, Yelp, Flickr, Yahoo Groups, and Yahoo Answers.

Yahoo is still awaiting approval from the U.S. Department of Justice on their proposed search advertising deal with Google, but that has not stopped them from making adjustments to their own advertising platform. In fact, some think they might even be doing it to emphasize to critics of the deal, that they are still serious about their own advertising endeavors, and are not just bowing down to the forces of Google.

Google is  testing the concept of showing a date alongside certain results on its SERPs. The tests were spotted by Michael Gray (like two months ago) and by a WebmasterWorld member. Search Engine Roundtable quotes the latter:

Last night Twitter launched an Election site that features Tweets involving the presidential and vice presidential candidates rolling in almost faster than you can read them. In Twitter's words, "We’re filtering hundreds of Twitter updates per minute to create a new source for gathering public opinion about the presidential election and a new way for you to share your thoughts."

Back in May, I noticed what appeared to be a test by Google to add more relevancy to search engine result (SERPs) by publishing a search box for geographical modifiers to a requested search query (Google Pushing Local Results). See image below:

Google, already has a near infinite number of data points to compute relevancy for the active parts of the web, and is looking to gather even more user data information. The WSJ has background on the story: