Twitter’s Advanced Search Function: Simplified

Real quick before bed, Mashable released this great video tutorial just going over Twitter’s Advanced Search function. As an alternative to Google, Twitter’s advanced search allows the user to search for “personality” rather than “popularity”.

Google: 2010.

Google recently released its Zeitgeist report for 2010, which highlights the most popular search queries on Google for this past year. Mashable shares some great insite into what we found most intriging in the world in 2010 and what we looked up on Google throughout the year:

“The search giant analyzed billions of searches performed in 2010 and compared them with searches from 2009 to surface emerging trends. Chatroulette, the iPad and Justin Bieber were the three fastest-rising search terms in 2010; Twitterand Facebook also made the list, at numbers eight and 10, respectively.

Among the items of interest that lost the world’s attention in 2010 were swine flu, Stephanie Meyer’s novel (and the accompanying movie) Twilight: New Moon, Susan Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire, “MySpace layouts” and Michael Jackson.

The iPad was the emergent search winner in the consumer electronics category, followed by the iPhone 4,Nokia 5530, HTC EVO 4G and Nokia N900.

In terms of news searches, Haiti proved the most popular, followed by Turkish sports club Besiktas, Chile, “earthquake,” Lady Gaga and the iPhone 4. The Gulf of Mexico oil spill ranked 10th.”

 

 

Here’s the video that Google released, recapping our favorite search topics for 2010:

 

 

So Much For Grooglpon. Groupon say’s No Thanks to Google!

The big story this week in social media was Google’s attempt to buy group discount company Groupon for 6 BILLION dollars. To which Groupon said “No Thanks” yesterday. Many might think this was a crazy decision on Groupon’s part (6 billion dollars is A LOTTTTT of money) but it might make a little sense. Groupon is the fastest growing company of its kind, leaping light years ahead of it’s nearest competitor, LivingSocial. They’ve absolutely exploded onto the scene and pretty much took the discount market by storm in a very, very quick fashion. To be honest I don’t think Groupon is going to slow their growth much at all in the near future.

I think the main reason that Google wanted to buy Groupon was because Groupon offered something very specific that Google was never able to accomplish. We all know Google to be this huge mega company that does everything on a huge scale. what Google lacks is local advertising distribution. Groupon (and any other group discount company) will have a much superior grasp on local advertising. The 6 billion dollar acquisition of Groupon would have made Google billions on top of what they already make. But Groupon knows that they can make it themselves, at least for the time being.

Regardless this is a pretty new area of social media that definitely isn’t fully saturated yet. But with only a few companies in the ring and with Groupon dominating the competition, it makes me wonder just how big this business can be.

If you don’t know what Groupon is, or how it works, here’s a couple videos: