Jordan Novet of GigaOM reports, “Facebook doesn’t devote thousands of people to its fledgling Graph Search tool, so it needs to make improvements with minimal amounts of engineer effort. In an article slated to go live on the Facebook Engineering blog on Thursday, Eric Sun, a software engineer from the entities team working on Graph Search, describes a few ways in which Facebook boosts the product step by step with the help of external data sets, user input and machine learning.” Read more

Frederic Lardinois of TechCrunch reports, “Bing‘s social sidebar, which shows relevant entries from your Facebook friends, Twitter, Klout, Quora and other services, just got a lot more interactive. You can now like Facebook posts in the social sidebar and add their own comments. In addition you can now also see all of the existing comments on a post right in the sidebar, too. This, Microsoft believes, will make the social search experience on Bing even more interactive, engaging and helpful than before. It also means users don’t have to leave Bing to engage with these posts. Chances are, after all, that they will get distracted by all of the other goodies Facebook has to offer once they leave Bing and won’t return anytime soon.” Read more

David Amerland of Imassera recently shared his opinion on why he thinks Google will win the semantic search race. He writes, “Google was a latecomer to search. When you’re the new kid on the block the paths that’ll lead you to the top of the hill are strictly limited: innovate or be the best. Innovation is the obvious one, of course, because it creates buzz, sets you out from the rest at first sight and draws the attention of the Press and those who can give you publicity. Being the best is harder. Read more

Matthew Syrett of PBS Media Shift recently shared his thoughts on the flaws of Facebook’s graph search. He writes, “With Graph Search, Facebook intends to mine our social networks to unlock knowledge stored among our online friends to create a recommendation search engine. Instead of crawling the Internet to build search indices, Graph Search will use our social media connections, likes, and Check-ins to make search indices to respond to our queries. Using Graph Search, we should be able to find restaurants that have been checked into or liked by our Facebook friends. We can discover movies based upon the likes of our connections, or relevant music. The project strives to be an alternative to everyday search queries we all do to discover things to do or get in our lives — all validated by people we know and trust, and not by unknown reviewers or a faceless algorithm.” Read more

Barbara Starr of Search Engine Land reports, “In a June 2010 Semantic Web Meetup in San Diego, Peter Mika of Yahoo!’s research division gave a presentation entitled, ‘The future face of Search is Semantic for Facebook, Google and Yahoo!’ As the title suggests, the presentation focused on the ever-growing use of semantic markup as a means for helping computers parse and understand content. The talk focused on what was then the current state of the Semantic Web, as well as upcoming formats/technologies in development and the research being done in the field of semantic search.” Read more

Facebook is integrating into its platform Rovi Video’s descriptive information on millions of TV shows, movies, celebrities, sports events and more. The partnership should help users flesh out more details in their entertainment likes and status updates that tag their movie, TV, and other media experiences in their profiles, and aid app developers in leveraging a standardized set of entertainment data for new apps and user-engagement.

Rovi Corp.’s media metadata Video Data set boasts standardized, structured data on more than 4 million programs, including theatrical, DVD and Blu-ray releases.

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Lenna Garibian of MarketingProfs.com recently discussed a new eye-tracking study that monitored how users interact with Facebook graph search compared to other search engines. She writes, “Similar to search engine results pages, being in the top two or three listings of a Facebook Graph Search results page is key to ensuring a listing is seen quickly and for a relatively long duration, according to research by Mediative, which used eye-tracking technology to explore which elements of the Facebook Graph search results page hold the most interest. For the study, 21 people were asked to view the results of the query “restaurants nearby” on a given Facebook page. Among the participants, 95% focused on the top two results of a Facebook search results page—and the proportion of viewers who viewed a given result decreased fairly uniformly as viewers scanned down the page.” Read more

Google Analytics gives web site owners good information about what’s clicking with visitors to their site, how those users got there, and more. But, attaining that insight can be somewhat laborious for those not well-versed in the tool and its interface, says Nick Cassimatis, associate professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He’s the founder of natural language processing technology startup SkyPhrase. His take: Apply SkyPhrase to the task, and things get a lot easier.

The startup in February began private beta testing of its NLP interface to Google Analytics. “Google Analytics lets you ask things like how many people from California visited the site last month, or which of your pages were most visited on mobile devices,” says Cassimatis. “Our system lets you ask these questions in natural language and get answers to them” more seamlessly than using Google Analytics alone.

Previous to bringing its NLP help to Google Analytics, SkyPhrase had a public site that let users run natural language searches of their Gmail or Twitter accounts, as well as flights and music.

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Tom Simonite of the MIT Technology Review reports, “More than one billion people visit Facebook each month, mostly to see photos and messages posted by friends. Facebook hopes to encourage some of them to do a little work for it while they’re there. By asking people to contribute data—from business locations to book titles—and to check one another’s work, Facebook is building a rich stock of knowledge that could make its software smarter and boost the usefulness of its search engine. ‘We’re trying to map what the real world looks like onto Facebook so you can run really expressive and powerful queries,’ says Mitu Singh, product manager for Facebook’s entities team, a group charged with building a resource called the entity graph.” Read more

According to Tineka Smith of CBR Online, “New research links public sentiment on social media channels with the valuation of individual stocks. The study by Colt Technology services interviewed over 350 UK financial professionals. Over 60% said that public opinion on social media sites played a role in stock prices. While only 7% said that social media was a leading factor, 45% said it definitely had a role to play. Hedge funds and proprietary trading houses are now able to scan social media data and analyse messages into a range of public mood states. An algorithmic or trading strategy is then used to placed trade orders, giving them an edge over competitors who use traditional forms of data.” Read more