Actually, November 9th is my birthday – but it’s also the first meeting of the DataSTORIES meetup – taking place this time at Havana Central on 113th Street and Broadway, NYC.    If anyone who reads my blog is in NYC at that time, please join us.

The original idea was partly mine – to host an event with live data where a company will open it self up to a peer review in real time – and a panel and/or the audience will suggest solutions and insights – purely from the data presented.   DataSTORIES first test, as a concept, was at Google’s own location in Manhattan last May – and it was suggested at the time – to make this a group of it’s own.

So we have.   Join us – or if you can’t be in NYC - join the meetup group, anyway - as we’ll post ideas and results from the meetings we hold.  Also, if you want to speak at one of the future meetings of DataSTORIES – and/or, voleenteer to have your data analyzed in real time (for the story it tells) – sign up for the group and contact us via the Meetup Page.

This week so many new developments in Search were announced that I waiting (and busy, anyway) for something to grab onto – some overall theme – and I’ll get to that, in a bit.

First, I’ve noticed some pretty good coverage on Google’s Social Search from TheGypsy – who seemed to cover Social Search before anyone else – and another on the Future of Search – Personalization.  Meanwhile, Brian Solis blogged about a Nielsen report claiming that Social Media makes up about 18% of the “Information Search” Market and if I had 45 minutes to listen to Eric Schmidt talk about Google’s Future in his Crystal Ball (I don’t) we’d learn Chinese is going to be the dominant language of the Internet within 5 years  and Video content will become even more important than it already is (I guess, by-passing the issue of which language is dominant in the future, ha, ha).  As if that weren’t enough, Google Android 2.0 is going after the GPS Market now using the new Motorola Droid and Cliq.

Or, I’d learn that Google likes Power Meters and developed an application used in the United States – just  developed another application to monitor the British Power Grid (if your working with the right providers and using a supported power monitoring gadget.  Not to be outdone, if you use Google Image Search – you’ll notice it improved this week by including “similar images” – but it only works on popular terms like “dollar bill” or “great pyramid“, for now – though this new feature might be more valuable for the related image terms it uncovers (such as “building blocks”, “egypt sphinx” and “pyramid of the sun” for the “great pyramid” – that let’s you optimize for semantic search because Google has coughed up the analogous terms.

In fact, if I were optimizing pages about hemophilia to rank well in Google, I might do better in my rankings if I included terms such as “white blood cells”,  “biotechnology” and “heroin” (wha?) – turns out the analogies break down the further you go from the first page of image search results.

Then again, maybe Google is onto something … and maybe….  there is some hidden connection between hemophilia and heroin ….. or not.

But, it was Andy Beal, who reminded me  Google, very conveniently, released Google Similar Search as GazoPa, a competing service, announced their Similar Image offering yesterday.

Yep, Google’s at it again!

No sooner had GazoPa dared to enter the search arena, Google comes along and says “oh no you di’n’t” and takes its Similar Images tool out of Labs. I mean, really, there’s just no subtly when it comes to Google. Dare to enter it’s space, and within hours it’s wrestling the spotlight off any challenger.

…. As usual, Google’s version is either designed for the masses, or barebones, depending on your point of view. Really, your only option is to enter a search query, then refine it to “Find similar images.”

And … that got me to think about the Google-X Factor – the secret to Google’s Success -  out-maneuvering anyone who legitimately competed with Google.   The secret of Google’s Success is so simple, I don’t know why it never occurred to me, till now.  Well … it did cross my mind about 6 years ago, when I worked at IBM.com research lab, but I never thought through the practical implications of it….

And … No, it’s not Michael J. Fox – though I liked the movie when it first came out (and I guess, I liked Google, too, when it first started).  Maybe, it’s more like the weapon Kirk has in the “Mirror Mirror” episode of the first Star Trek series (about 33 minutes in).

The Secret of Google’s Success …. the X Factor – is Search – but not the search we use …. it’s the Search Google uses to figure out what everyone else is doing and develop competing projects.

What scientists at IBM Research suspected, 6 or 7 years ago – that queries put into Google could be used by Google to fund it’s own research, quickly vanished, but it didn’t vanish – it’s actually the source of Google’s strength – even though any search engine could have done the same thing.

I suspect, that “search query log” that Google has under lock and key – is very extensively parsed for any new information that Google can develop a foothold in – before anyone else can get ahead of them.   That would explain why Google always seems to have a project running in the background – and when some new analytics capability is released by a competitor – Google’s already anticipated it and has it’s own offering.

It makes a lot of sense that, if you had about 75% of all the information in the world, and all questions and answers passed though Google, that Google would use this information to make itself invincible – it would out anticipate any competitor – because it had better information.    Of course, there’s a lot of noise in the information collected – but there are ways to isolate important information from the garbage surrounding it.

Anyway – that was my insight – Google is data-mining it’s own query logs to figure out what to develop next, what people want, and what others are working on – mostly because Google is so used as a search engine – it’s difficult not to use it.

And, for all I know, every query that goes into Google – might be owned by Google – not the person who searches, but the Search Engine.   In other words, if you search for anything in Google, say … some great idea, and Google see’s the pattern – I bet, that’s an idea they can use – because you used their search to find the information.

Not to spook people out (though Halloween is coming up in a few days) – though  I have written a few posts like Evolution of Search Results turns Social that give some a headache.

Turns our faster is better … When your talking about websites, according to an excellent post at Watchingwebsites.com

(see http://www.watchingwebsites.com/archives/proof-that-speeding-up-websites-improves-online-business)

I am wondering if it makes any sense to worry about bounce rate, if you can’t serve up you content within a fraction of a second? I don’t think so.

Look at this set of chilling charts below; the post at watchingwebsites.com has several more examples of slow sites affecting coversions.

At my last job, btw, a lot of money was spent adding features and capabilites to the site, but pages often took seconds to load, with frequent 404 messages.

Besides any other feature added to improve web effectiveness, is it any wonder why a slow site would equal declining profits?

I think, in Google Analytics, for example, average load time per page ought to be provided along with other metrics.