Google’s at it again, this time announcing their launch of the fastest internet connection in the U.S. The experiment features a plan to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the country.
They’ll deliver internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today (about 15 megabytes) with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. The service will be offered at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.
Google executives said the move was designed to accelerate the deployment of faster networks and show off the sorts of services that high-speed connections can enable, such as rapid video downloads. This, in turn, puts more pressure on cable and phone companies, as well as the FCC, in efforts to provide higher-speed connections.
Google has acquired social search service Aardvark, which was founded by ex-Googlers, for around $50 million.
Aardvark lets users ask questions and get immediate responses from their friends, and friends of friends. The Q&A format is designed to seek out topic experts and find a strong answer quickly.
Aardvark queries were 18.6 words long on average, compared to just 2.8 in standard search engines. With the knowledge that humans are reading the queries, people are more apt to add context in hopes of receiving a better answer to their question.
Stats on Aardvark:
-90,361 users (Oct. 2009), 55.9% of whom had created content (asked or answered a question)
-98.1% of questions asked were unique, compared with between 57 and 63% on traditional search engines
-87.7% of questions submitted were answered, and nearly 60% of them were answered within 10 minutes
Google is continuing to improve the way they match ads to the content network, making them even more relevant.
(A “referral URL” is a way to deliver contextually relevant ads to a website. It contains information about the link a user followed to arrive at the website, whether from a search engine or another site on the Internet.)
In order to deliver the most relevant ad, Google treats the query words [golf shop atlanta] in the referral URL as if they’re part of the content of the webpage. They can then better tailor the ad to be delivered on the site. They’ve also started to expand the use of the query words in referral URLs to a few hours in order to enhance the relevancy of ads.
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Sources:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-gig-our-experimental.html
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/11/google-acquires-aardvark-for-50-million/
http://blog.vark.com/?p=361
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/02/better-contextual-matching.html
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