I posted previously about how I saw the web unfolding in 2010. One of my pointers was about on-site search and how bad it is in general. I recommended that the big players team up with the search engines to get it right.

Well, Google beat me to the deadline and launched its Google Commerce search offering toward the end of 2009, not 2010. I’ll be really interested to see who takes this on and how the technology (and partnership) affects their sites.

At $50,000+, it costs more than most SMEs would have in their site development budgets and I’m not sure the M&Ss or Nexts of the world would ever really incorporate it, but what a great plug in.

Google are the hottest company on the planet and they have well and truly won the war on search. That aint news to you. Fighting them directly is a bit like voting Labour in the next general election – a waste of energy.

You can’t be more of a lion than the lion himself, so throw in the towel. Move on. Fight another battle. Use new rules or change the game (even slightly). Semantic search is the future battleground where the engine understands more of your searching needs and the data it’s mined.

To the untrained eye this looks like the same ball game but it’s a much cleaner slate. Rather like Formula 1 this year where the cars appear the same as previous models but they’re inherently different. The new rules in both fields promise some new victors.

What’s so new about this semantic search?

Data has moved on exponentially since Google’s inception in 1997 (or so). Blogs, microblogs (e.g. Twitter) other social networking sites and book marking services stream and highlight more information than anyone could’ve honestly anticipated in the 90s.

Harnessing this data torrent allows for real time search results. If you’d searched for “Iran election” in June you probably wanted the latest news and insight on the troubles, not a standard bit of Foreign Office research.

Context is also increasingly important. Typing “Jaguar in London” could produce zoo or a car dealership results. Intelligence is needed to distinguish which you needed (known as disambiguation).

Making sense of search based on context and fresh data is the Holy Grail (closely followed by monetising it). Semantic search is craving to do just that.

Who’s playing in the hit-Google-from-another-angle game?

Bing (from Microsoft)
Mahalo (50% original content, 25% search and 25% knowledge exchange)
Aadvark (Vark.com asks your network for answers)
OneRiot (a real time socially-relevant engine)
Kosmix (a web guide with a dashboard)
Hakia (tabs results: web results, credible sites, images and new)
WolframAlpha (type a question, get an answer)
Twine (a bookmarking site on steriods)

Some are more semantic than others but that’s just eight players who are all in their relative infancy. With Yahoo’s open API code, Boss, anyone has access to a huge engine and can adapt from the basic Yahoo chassis. Google may have called game over on search 1.0 but there’s a whole new future out there…

UPDATE: since drafting this in early August, Google have announced a “fundamentally big change” via their Caffeine update.

Clearly, this threatens to put Bing et al back into their corner while Google blazes ahead with market share aplenty and more advertising than MadMen could dream of. We all know that’s not guaranteed though.

Well, that’s my prediction. They’ll stop burning dollars acquiring paper mills and fork out $750+ million for Twitter.

Twitter is the most popular and certainly the most talked about social media tool of the moment, yet there’s no clear indication on how they’ll monetise the whole shebang. They raised another $35 million in venture capital last month but to what end?

If you concede that Google want to know far more about you and your digital habits along with the world at large, this source would make an obvious acquisition. The speed at which trends and news appear on Twitter is unmatched elsewhere on the web. Google could leverage this into their algorithm and gain much more real-time searching (certainly opposed to Google News).

Of course, we’re not privy to the magic that’s being created right now in Mountain View where Google’s rocket scientists wave their wands over the web with reckless talent. Have they got a Twitter-killer waiting in the wings? Personally I doubt it. And if they have, will it be another Google Video which was always the poor cousin to YouTube – remember Google later bought YouTube purely to get that online video foothold?

They’re into harvesting strategies and don’t need to monetise everything immediately. Again, YouTube teaches us that. So the lack of income at Twitter won’t be such a problem; the data is the treasure worth the capital outlay. Although, Twitter wont keep its monopoly forever – when you show the market what’s it’s capable of, it rarely stands and applauds for long. Immitation is immenant.

Then again, others might get to the buy-out first. Facebook is reported to have offered $500 million and Carol Bartz could do with creating some buzz about Yahoo other than dismal reports of staff exoduses. Either of these firms would be salivating at the thought of gaining those 6 million Twitterers and all that live data.

What do you reckon? Do you think Google will crush Twitter, buy Twitter or just look at it like a play-thing in the corner?

Free is synonymous with Internet. It’s likely to become more so with Microsoft’s Office Live and cloud-based solutions from Google, Zoho and the like.

Enter Aaron Wall (SEObook.com), one of the Internet’s geek superstars. He is to SEO what J.K. Rowling is to wizards. Mr Wall started out with a desire to learn and has become a true guru of search. His latest [free] tool is an upgraded version of the SEO toolbar that’s been pumping iron.

Okay, Page Rank’s relevance is a moot subject but this toolbar also gives you: domain links, page links, directory links, site age, monthly usage and loads more – check out the video.

This is a simple but penetrating tool – he warns that too much use may have engines thinking you’re scraping data! The power of these freebies never ceases to amaze me and SMEs should be lapping them up. Get hooked up here.