Google has launched a new feature in its search results, which displays results that are deemed "similar" to the query. If you search for eBay, for example, you may get results for Craigslist, uBid, Buy.com, and ebayanuncios.es.

Basically, if someone searches for a brand, there is a good chance Google will inject links to the competition on that results page by default (though at the bottom).

It's actually not a new feature entirely. "We've offered a 'Similar' feature on results for a while now as a way to discover new, useful sites, but it hasn't been too visible," says Google software engineer Doantam Phan. "Since we've been continuously improving this feature and we think it's really useful, we're now going to start showing these alternative sites more prominently."

I thought it would be interesting to see what pages Google thinks are similar to Google itself and some of its competitors. When I searched "google" I didn't get any similar pages. When I searched "bing", I got the following:

For "facebook" I got the following:

For Yahoo, I got the following:


I find it interesting that Google deems Bing to be more like Dogpile than Google or even Yahoo. It's also worth noting /> [...]

Thu Apr 29, 2010 12:31 pm

The singers in the chorus of disapproval that greeted Alistair Darling's pre-budget report may live to regret their hastily written obituaries. Far from being an irrelevant, pre-election budget which fails to grasp the nettle, last week's PBR could well turn out to have been a well-judged approach to this stage of this prolonged financial and economic crisis.

I am not referring to the individual measures, about which people can argue till the sacred cows come home. No, I am talking about what used to be known as “the budget judgment”.

Now, strictly speaking, this was not a budget at all, but a progress report in the series which began years ago with chancellorial autumn statements and evolved into the now familiar PBR. But given the proximity of the election, and the relatively new practice of announcing specific new measures in advance such as the further rise in national insurance contributions from 2011/12 and given the heated atmosphere of the times, the PBR seems to have taken on the status of a budget in its own right.

The essence of the budget judgment was “steady as she goes”. There has been no premature fiscal tightening. Furthermore, despite all the speculation to the contrary, the government's fiscal projections are more or less on track. The aim to halve the deficit by 2013/14 seems eminently reasonable in these unusual circumstances. The Treasury intends to consolidate as growth picks up, not to risk choking an incipient and fragile recovery whose shoots are still a very pale green.

As I have reiterated in this column, the only way out of a budgetary hole is to grow out of it. A frighteningly large proportion of the analysts who overpraised the Brown chancellorship in the glory days are now indulging in a collective fit of masochism which must have the French thumbing their dictionaries to bone up on the latest /> [...]

Mon Dec 21, 2009 19:10 pm

New programs are believed to be a first for health insurance industry

As those of us who’ve worked with health care companies know, the health care field has been slow to get off the dime and embrace the gamut of changes that social media offers, from interactions with customers to providing a real-time feedback loop to develop new products or services. But that’s starting to change.

Today I had a long conversation with Jason Yang, brand manager in the Corporate Brand Marketing department of Blue Shield of California, who filled me in on a host of social media initiatives that the not-for-profit health plan has recently launched, chief among them:

• A customer [...]

Tue May 11, 2010 14:25 pm

There was this place. Lenny's Nosh Bar. Depending on your age when you found it, it was where you hung out in college, high school, or after college. One of its habitués, talking it over on a Facebook page devoted to the place, decided to create the Lenny's Jukebox on YouTube. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive. What a great use of new technology to resurrect a moment of past time! Seems like he wasn't the only one to have that idea.

RecreateMyNight.com is devoted to just such a purpose. But it pulls together a full suite of social media tools in the service of transcendent memory. In addition to video, it allows text, status updates, photos and more.

Sponsor

RecreateMyNight is "an application built on top of an enhanced time stamping API," according to the young so-and-sos at MediaMerx, who built it as "a project to keep track of some epic nights out."

Now Virgin Records is hoping fans of its bands will use it to help those bands keep track of their nights. The first band to employ it are The Constellations.

It's always iffy whether a service built to assist users in their desire to celebrate themselves will be used to sing the praises of others. In other words, my gang might use this to memorialize our time together, but will we use it to glori/> [...]

Wed Jul 14, 2010 04:21 am