Working in Bing Local Search brings together a number of interesting challenges. Firstly, we are in a moderately sized organization, which means that our org chart has some rough similarities to our high level system architecture. This means that we...
The web search community, in recent months and years, has heard quite a bit about the 'knowledge graph'. The basic concept is reasonably straightforward - instead of a graph of pages, we propose a graph of knowledge where the nodes...
The web search community, in recent months and years, has heard quite a bit about the 'knowledge graph'. The basic concept is reasonably straightforward - instead of a graph of pages, we propose a graph of knowledge where the nodes...
The early days of web search were essentially about observation. The web search engine observed the web (documents, links and user behaviours) and then delivered results based on those observations. In recent years we have started to see more of...
Having recently returned from a trip to Kauai where I used my beach search engine with middling success, I've now got a few updates out on the site. Firstly, there is a full map showing either all the beaches in...
At the beginning of the year, Google's results page for {restaurants in seattle} looked like this: Note: the size of the map, the presence and colouration of the main column ad block and the use of the restaurant's web page...
When I pushed out the first version of Beach G33k / Beach Ball (I'm not actually sure what the thing is called) - a search engine for beaches - I did as close to nothing in terms of features as...
I've written recently about building a perfect beach search engine. Here is a brief example of using the site. Let's imagine you want to find a beach that offers snorkeling, but you want to find one that is shallow because...
There are plenty of techno pundits out there who are on a mission and rarely dip in to data to determine if reality is or is not cooperating with them. From the outside, one has to be somewhat creative to...
Currently, as I've mentioned in previous posts, beaches are a strangely under-served segment of the local search space. Searches on Google and Bing for beaches are fielded by entities such as resorts and restaurants that happen to be matches for...
