Is Facebook planning on sharing information about the words that people use on the site in messages, and demographics about the people behind those messages? A couple of patent applications published today at the US Patent and Trademark Office describe how the social network might analyze the messages of members, to identify popular topics and the words that co-occur in messages that contain references to those topics. They also describe how demographic information supplied by members might be used to graph those topics.
The following images are a couple of examples of one way that kind of information might be displayed (click on the images to see larger versions). The first displays mentions of President Obama from messages dating back 14 days from July 21, 2008, along with many of the most popular words or phrases that accompanied those messages, as well as information about what percentage of those mentions came from males graphed against the average age of those members. Topics displayed by this system can cover a wide range of topics included in Facebook messages, as the second image shows mentioning “Hip hop,” along with popular terms included in those messages.
With more than 3 billion search queries a month, a search engine like Yahoo might be tempted to take a close look at, and analyze the data it receives in its search logs. That data might tell it what people tend to search for at different times of the day, and different days of the year. The search engine may also be able to tell sometimes whether those searches were performed by men or women, by people in different locations, and may look at other information they might have about those searchers.
That analysis, that collection of data, might be helpful in deciding what to show searchers in advertisements, and in other content displayed to people looking for information.
In my last post, I wrote about a patent application describing how Yahoo might come out with a widget that could be used with blogs, to recommend old posts on those blogs based upon your lifestreaming activities.
It appears that Yahoo may have even grander and more financially motivated intentions behind collecting information about how you blog, tweet, tag images, and leave other footprints on the Web about your life and interests.
Imagine Yahoo crawling the Web and grabbing information from APIs and feeds published by other sites that provide information about the movies you rent, the reviews that you publish, the pictures that you tag, and the sites that you bookmark. Along with your tweets, your status updates, and your other activities on the Web, this information could be used to build a profile of your actions online.
That profile might then be used to determine which banner ads, job postings, and other advertisements that you may be shown.
Search for “cheap cars” at Yahoo in the future, and you might see web search results and paid search results for terms like “job searches” or “bicycles” in the future, according to a recently published Yahoo patent application.
If you’ve been keeping a close eye on Google search results lately, you’ve possibly noticed that sometimes when you perform a search at Google that the search engine might broaden the search results that you see to include synonyms for one or more of the terms that you used for your search.
I wrote a post about that, Google Synonyms Update, in which I pointed to a couple of patent filings that Google made which described a couple of different ways that Google might come up with synonyms for search terms. In the comments section of the post, a couple of people asked what kind of implications this query expansion might have for sponsored search results.
I remember reading a Stephen King novel a few years back, and getting to a point where one of the characters in the book grabbed a coke to quench his thirst. There was no reason to mention a brand name in the story – it didn’t add to the plot, it didn’t make the story seem more realistic, and it felt like the novelist only included the brand name of the soft drink because he may have been paid to do so. I have no idea whether or not that’s actually the case, but it really lessened my appreciation of the novel.
In the world or universe of a game, someone driving down a freeway might see billboards on the side of the road that contain actual advertisements. Storefronts may carry signs, and recognizable buildings and logos products may appear within games during play. I wrote about some of the possible implementations of games that Google discussed in a patent filing they released on in-game advertising in a post titled Google Games Patent Filing on Targeted Advertisements.
A new patent filing from Google discusses how they might track and measure “impressions” of ads actually placed within a game.
A newly granted patent from Google provides details on how advertising from Google may be evaluated by human evaluators…
Last September, Scott Huffman, leader of Google’s Search Evaluation Team, told us about some of the efforts behind the scenes to measure and improve the quality of Google’s search results in a post at the Official Google Blog titled Search evaluation at Google. As one part of the review process that they perform, the search engine may use human reviewers:
Human evaluators. Google makes use of evaluators in many countries and languages. These evaluators are carefully trained and are asked to evaluate the quality of search results in several different ways. We sometimes show evaluators whole result sets by themselves or “side by side” with alternatives; in other cases, we show evaluators a single result at a time for a query and ask them to rate its quality along various dimensions.
Google also uses human evaluators to look at the quality of paid advertising shown through Google’s advertising programs. Here’s a snippet from a classified that Google is presently running for a temporary Ads Quality Rater:
Google’s advertising model goes beyond the Web to places like televison. Yesterday, the Official Google Blog ran a post on TV advertising through Google, Tuning in to TV data, which told us that they are gauging interest in ads shown on TV by whether or not viewers change channels during commercials. A video featuring Google’s Dan Zigmond discusses how television ads might retain audiences:
I wonder about the approach, personally. When you’re watching TV and a commercial comes on, do you change the channel to see what else is on? Do you get up and grab a snack, or run a brief errand? Or, do you pay as much attention to the commercials as you do the show that surrounds them? If you do stay in front of the screen and pay attention to the advertising, do you change the channel if you don’t like an ad, or do you suffer through it knowing that it will be gone very soon?
When you perform a search on Google, you’ll often see “sponsored links” at the top and to the right of your search results. Advertisers can bid to have their advertisements appear with search results through Google’s Adwords program.
When an advertiser creates an ad for the Adwords program, they attempt to choose the keywords that their ads may appear beside in search results. The premise behind this approach is that allowing advertisers to target keywords in searches that are relevant to what those advertisers offer means that the ads searchers see will be relevant for what searchers are looking for.
Usually, those ads will show up in response to a current query that a searcher has typed into the search engine, but if you’ve been performing a number of searches, Google has sometimes looked at your earlier queries in addition to your current one to determine which advertisments to show you.
For example, you search for the word [golf] and received a set of search results, along with some sponsored links. If you then search for the word [shoes], you may have seen ads (in the past) on the search results page for “golfing shoes.”
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