2013年4月13日 星期六

As Web Search Goes Mobile, Competitors Chip at Google’s Lead 搜索知識化

As Web Search Goes Mobile, Competitors Chip at Google’s Lead

Say you need a latté. You might pull out your phone, open the Yelp app and search for a nearby cafe. If instead you want to buy an espresso machine, you will most likely tap Amazon.com.
Either way, Google lost a customer.
Google remains the undisputed king of search, with about two-thirds of the market. But the nature of search is changing, especially as more people search for what they want to buy, eat or learn on their mobile devices. This has put the $22 billion search industry, perhaps the most lucrative and influential of online businesses, at its most significant crossroad since its invention.
No longer do consumers want to search the Web like the index of a book — finding links at which a particular keyword appears. They expect new kinds of customized search, like that on topical sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor or Amazon, which are chipping away at Google’s hold. Google and its competitors are trying to develop the knowledge and comprehension to answer specific queries, not just point users in the right direction.
“What people want is, ‘You ask a very simple question and you get a very simple answer,’ ” said Oren Etzioni, a professor at the University of Washington who has co-founded companies for shopping and flight search. “We don’t want the 10 blue links on that small screen. We want to know the closest sushi place, make a reservation and be on our way.”
People are overwhelmed at how crowded the Internet has become — Google says there are 30 trillion Web addresses, up from 1 trillion five years ago — and users expect their computers and phones to be smarter and do more for them. Many of the new efforts are services that people do not even think of as search engines.
Amazon, for example, has a larger share than Google of shopping searches, the most lucrative kind because people are in the mood to buy something. On smartphones, people skip Google and go directly to apps, like Kayak or Weather Underground. People use YouTube to search for things like how to tie a bow tie, Siri to search on their iPhones, online maps to find local places and Facebook to find things their friends have liked.
And services like LinkedIn Influencers and Quora are trying to be different kinds of search engines — places to find high-quality, expert content and avoid weeding through everything else on the Web. On Quora, questions like “What was it like to work for Steve Jobs?” get answered by people with firsthand knowledge, something Google cannot provide.
“There is a lot of pressure on search engines to deliver more customized, more relevant results,” said Shar VanBoskirk, an analyst at Forrester. “Users don’t need links to Web pages. We need answers, solutions, whatever intel we were searching for.”
But Google remains the one to beat, even as alternative search sites become popular. “They’re the specialty store you’re going into here and there,” said Danny Sullivan, an editor of Search Engine Land, a blog, “but they’re not your grocery store.”
Yet the promise of search is big enough that even though Microsoft loses billions of dollars a year on Bing and has failed to make a dent in Google’s market share, it keeps at it. Microsoft — which in February had 17 percent of the market, and 26 percent including the searches it powered for Yahoo — has said it views search as essential to its other products, and there is still a lot of money to be made as No. 2.
“You have millions of people a day saying exactly what they want, and if you’re an advertiser, it’s a beautiful vehicle,” Mr. Sullivan said.
EMarketer estimates that Google earns about three-quarters of search ad spending. There are signs that people’s search behaviors are changing, however.
Searches on traditional services, dominated by Google, declined 3 percent in the second half of last year after rising for years, according to comScore, and the number of searches per searcher declined 7 percent. In contrast, searches on topical sites, known as vertical search engines, climbed 8 percent.
In the first quarter, spending on search ads fell 1 percent, a significant slowdown for Google, according to IgnitionOne, a digital marketing company. Last year, Google lost market share in search ads for the first time, according to eMarketer, falling to 72.8 percent from 74 percent.
Google is not watching from the sidelines. It is making more changes to search offerings, at a faster pace than it has in years.
Larry Page, its co-founder and chief executive, renamed the search division “knowledge.” Google now shows answers instead of just links if you search something like “March Madness,” “weather” or even “my flight,” in which case it can pull flight information from users’ Gmail accounts.
The company’s biggest step happened last year, when it introduced the knowledge graph. While search generally matches keywords to Web sites, the knowledge graph uses semantic search, which understands the meanings of and connections among people, places and things.
A typical search engine, for instance, responds to a search for “Diana” by showing Web pages on which that word appears, from Wikipedia entries on the goddess of the hunt and the Princess of Wales to an engagement ring company.
But a more knowledgeable, humanlike search engine could know that you were looking for your roommate Diana’s online profile.
“What Google is beginning to do is share some of the knowledge in the world that humans have in their minds,” said Ben Gomes, a Google fellow, “so users can begin to communicate with Google in a way that’s much more natural to their thinking.”
In the future, Google could answer more complicated questions, Mr. Gomes said, like “How far is it from here to the Eiffel Tower?” and “Where could I go to a concert in warm weather next year?”

下文Google的翻譯有二--這是繁簡體的錯亂

個性化移動搜索挖谷歌牆角

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
谷歌榮譽員工本·戈姆斯在加利福尼亞的谷歌總部。他背後的牆上印的是搜索關鍵字。
如果你想喝杯拿鐵,你可能會掏出手機、打開Yelp的應用、搜索附近的咖啡館。如果你想買一台意式濃縮咖啡(espresso)機,你很可能會打開亞馬遜(Amazon.com)的網站。
不管怎樣,谷歌(Google)都會丟掉一個用戶。
谷歌在搜索領域,仍然是當之無愧的王者,佔據着三分之二的市場份額。然而搜索的性質正在轉變,尤其是更多的人會在移動設備上搜索他們想買、想吃或想 學的東西。這讓價值220億美元的搜索產業處在了誕生以來最重要的十字路口,而搜索或許是網絡業務中利潤最為豐厚也最有影響力的一種。
消費者已經不想再像書籍的索引那樣搜索網絡了,如找到出現過一個特定關鍵字的鏈接。他們開始期待新形式的定製化的搜索,如Yelp、 TripAdvisor或亞馬遜等主題化的網站所提供的服務,而這些網站正在蠶食谷歌的市場份額。谷歌及其競爭對手正在努力積累知識和理解力,來解答具體 問題,而不只是為用戶指出正確方向。
華盛頓大學(University of Washington)教授奧倫·埃齊奧尼(Oren Etzioni)表示,“人們想要的是,問一個很簡單的問題,就能得到一個很簡單的解答。”埃齊奧尼曾與人合作創立過幾家提供購物和航班搜索的企業。他 說,“我們不想在小屏幕上看到10條藍色的鏈接,我們只想知道最近的壽司餐館在哪裡,預訂一個位置,然後直奔那裡。”
谷歌稱,現在有30萬億個網址,而五年前則只有1萬億個。互聯網上已經變得如此擁擠,人們不堪重負。用戶們期望電腦和手機能夠變得更加智能,為他們做更多事情。對於許多新的服務,人們甚至不認為是搜索引擎。
例如,亞馬遜在購物搜索領域的市場份額比谷歌要大,這種搜索最為有利可圖,因為人們正好有購物的心情。在智能手機上,人們會繞過谷歌,直接打開應 用,如Kayak或Weather Underground。人們會使用YouTube搜索如何打領結等問題、在iPhone上用Siri進行搜索、用在線地圖尋找附近的地點、用 Facebook查看朋友們喜歡的東西。
LinkedIn Influencers和Quora這樣的網站,則在試圖提供另一種不同的搜索引擎服務,在那裡,你能找到高質量的專業性內容,同時還能避免過濾掉網上其 他不相干內容的麻煩。在Quora上,諸如“為史蒂夫·喬布斯(Steve Jobs)工作的經歷是怎樣的?”這樣的問題,會得到有第一手知識的人的回答,這是谷歌無法提供的。
弗雷斯特(Forrester)分析師夏爾·范博斯科克(Shar VanBoskirk)說,“搜索引擎面臨著極大的壓力,要提供更定製化的、相關性更強的搜索結果。用戶們不需要指向網頁的鏈接。我們需要答案、解決方案,或者其他什麼正在搜索到信息。”
儘管替代的搜索網站已經流行起來,但谷歌仍然是行業內的巨頭。行業博客“搜索引擎天地”(Search Engine Land)主編丹尼·沙利文(Danny Sullivan)說,“它們相當於你會去逛的分散在各處的專賣店,但卻不是雜貨店。”
搜索業務的前景很廣闊,所以即便微軟(Microsoft)每年會在必應(Bing)業務上損失數十億美元,而且未能衝擊谷歌的市場份額,但是微軟 還是在堅持運營搜索業務。微軟2月在搜索市場的份額是17%,把為雅虎(Yahoo)提供的搜索服務計算在內的話,市場份額是26%。微軟已經表示,它認 為搜索對旗下其他產品至關重要,而且作為份額第二的公司,市場上依然有很多的錢可以賺。
沙利文說,“有數百萬人每天都在明確說出自己想要什麼,如果你是廣告商,這就是一個美妙的工具。”
EMarketer估計,谷歌賺取了約四分之三的搜索廣告費。然而有跡象表明,人們的搜索行為在改變。
根據comScore的數據,谷歌主導的傳統搜索服務上的搜索總量,在經歷多年的增加之後,於去年下半年減少了3%,每個搜索用戶的搜索量減少了7%。與此相對比,主題化網站,也就是被稱為垂直搜索引擎的網站上,搜索量卻提高了8%。
根據數字營銷企業IgnitionOne的數據,第一季度花在搜索廣告上的開支下降了1%,這對谷歌來說是一次大減速。eMarketer數據顯示,去年穀歌在搜索廣告市場的份額首次下降,從原來的74%下降到了72.8%。
谷歌對此不會熟視無睹。它正在以多年來最快的步調對搜索結果做出更多變動。
谷歌聯合創始人和首席執行官拉里·佩奇(Larry Page)將搜索部門更名為“知識”部。現在如果你搜索像“瘋狂三月”(March Madness),“天氣”或者甚至是“我的航班”這樣的信息時,谷歌會提供給你答案,而不再是諸多鏈接。搜索“我的航班”時它還會從用戶的Gmail郵 箱賬戶中抽取航班信息。
去年該公司邁出了最大一步,引入了知識圖譜(knowledge graph)功能。一般搜索會顯示和關鍵詞相匹配的網頁,而知識圖譜則使用語義搜索,它理解了人們、地點和事物的意義和它們之間的關聯。
比如,典型的搜索引擎對“戴安娜”(Diana)的反應是展示出顯示該詞的網頁,頁面包括從維基百科關於狩獵女神和威爾士王妃的詞條,到一家訂婚戒指公司。
但是一個知識更加淵博,更像人類的搜索引擎會知道,你搜索的是你的室友戴安娜在網上的資料。
谷歌榮譽員工本·戈姆斯(Ben Gomes)稱,“谷歌正在着手做的是分享人腦中的一些關於這個世界的知識,所以用戶可以開始以一種更貼近自己想法的方式來和谷歌交流。”
戈姆斯說,未來谷歌將能夠回答像“從這裡到埃菲爾鐵塔(Eiffel Tower)有多遠?”以及“明年天氣暖和的時候我可以去哪裡看演唱會?”這樣更為複雜的問題。
翻譯:王童鶴、張薇、張亮亮

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