Posts on State of Search about ‘Google’

Bing calls Google Names but does Gain Some Market Share

bing-google-fight

Bing and Google will probably never be best friends. The two biggest ‘official’ search engines got into a fight several months ago when Bing allegedly copied Google’s search results. Ever since the tension between the two has been there. Google will probably remain the biggest for a while, but Bing is closing in on Google according to the latest numbers.

It is not those numbers however but a Bing “Easter Egg” which got the most attention this weekend. A Googler noted that Bing had been hiding some interesting results which seemed to be a ‘pinch’ towards Google on specific searches.

Software engineer Andy Arnt found two results which seemed to have a negative message to Google inside the search results. A search for “more evil than satan himself” returned the results “10^100“, while “Hiybbprqag” gave back “hiybbprqag (orcish) = whiner (common)“. (more…)

What If Google Was a Person?

Google knows more and more about us. It knows our moves, it knows where we’ve been and what we like best. That can be very handy. But it can also be very scary. What if Google would be a person? And that person would know everything about us. Do you think we would like that?

Freddy Mercury Doodle: Possibly the Best Google Doodle Ever?

It must be hell working at Google and being responsible for thinking of new Google Doodles. Not because it is no fun, but because the challenges are becoming almost impossible. How can you beat the idea of the latest Doodle every single time? Gone are the days in which relatively easy doodles were just being drawn. Today Google maybe have raised the bar so high they possibly might never make a better one anymore.

Today it would have been the 65th birthday of the lead singer of Queen, Freddy Mercury. And somebody must like Queen at Google because they went all out. If you click on the Doodle, this happens:


(more…)

Google Plus One Button Shows Who Plus One-d a Page

plus-1-annotations

The Google +1 Button has been around for a while and is slowly but surely starting to get more characteristics of the like/share button from Facebook. After Google released the feature in which you could share posts using the +1 button, they now also release an annotation option and the possibility to customize the snippet which goes with it.

Members of the Google+ Platform Preview group can already get the code and implement it on their site. We added the annotation option to our share button on the left side. That means that if you hover over the +1 button, you will see a list of contacts who already +1’d the page. (more…)

Panda Update: The Movie?

google-panda-the-movie

The Panda Update has kept a lot of site owners awake: were they amongst the ones who would get ‘hit’ by Google’s latest update? In retrospect it looks a lot like Google just ‘cleaned up’ their SERPS. Those that got hit, maybe even deserved to get hit.

What is interesting is the amount of content which the Panda Update actually created. There are quite a few websites reporting about it and if you do a blog search you will find many blogposts about it. The Panda Update also was an inspiration to those using video as their content. A quick look around showed that we could possibly make an entire movie out of the different videos concerning the Panda Update. Take a look at some of the videos we found (warning, some are better than the other!). (more…)

Google Now Showing Special Snippets for List Pages

new-snippet-intro

I have had several people asking about a new way of snippets they were seeing in Google result pages. Some thought this was some sort of testing by Google. It is not, it is a new feature which was rolled out last week: snippets for list pages.

When pages consists mostly out of lists Google has found a way to show (part) of these lists in the snippet. This means that if you have a list on your page, that list might just be part of the snippets. Opportunity knocking! (more…)

Want to Work At Google? Hack Them and Leak!

google-codesearch

An interesting (possible) job-hiring by Google became clear yesterday. It seems as if Google is about to hire Florian Rohrweck, an Austrian blogger and developer. On his blog he mentions he is about to sign a contract with the search giant.

So why is this special? Because Rohrweck got his job by digging into Google+ source code and revealing Google+ features, even some which have not been launched yet. Google figured the best way to shut him up was hiring him. (more…)

Facebook and Google – who influences who?

facebook-google-influence

This is a guest post by Marcus Tober, co-founder and CTO of Searchmetrics, the world leader in search analytics software. As the company’s CTO, he is responsible for advanced technology research, product development, and SEO consulting programs. 

The link between the main social networks and Google rankings is a complicated one. For example, do pages with lots of shares and likes in Facebook rank better in search engines or is it the other way round? Earlier this year Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz analyzed various data points that did show a correlation between Facebook Shares, Likes and Comments. This led him to conclude that Facebook could indeed be impacting Google’s SERPs.

We wanted to look at this in more detail so we checked our own Searchmetrics data from Germany. First we looked at the 20,000 most important keywords (based on different weighting factors like for example search volume) in Google Germany’s index. From that we analyzed the top 30 URLs on each keyword – what was the Facebook activity in terms of Shares, Likes and Comments on these pages? (more…)

How Does The Google Algorithm Work? 500 Changes Last Year

How does the Google Algorithm really work? Wouldn’t we all like to know. It would make some our jobs a lot easier. Or maybe it would leave us with no jobs, because if Google would just tell us how to rank, what job would an SEO have?

Google will never reveal its algorithm I suspect. But they are trying to be a bit more ‘open’ towards their public. At least, they are trying to look more open. And so they made this video about the Google Algorithm. Even though they won’t tell you everything about the algorithm it is still a very useful video. Did you for example know they made 500 changes to the algorithm last year alone?

You Can Now Ignore People in Google Plus (Without Them Knowing)

ignore-on-google-plus

Google believes Google Plus should be a reflection of the real world. And in the real world there are people in your environment which you may not want to see or hear all the time. So you ignore them.

Google today launched a new feature on Google Plus which does just that: ignore people. You won’t hear them, you won’t see them. But they will be there. It is a ‘light’ version of blocking.

Where blocking limits the way people interact with you, “Ignore” means people will still see your updates, can comment on your posts and is still ‘in the loop’ so to speak. (more…)

Google Analytics rolls out Multi-Channel Funnel reports for all accounts

Google has announced that as of yesterday (August 24) all Google Analytics accounts will have Multi-Channel Conversion Funnel reports available. Previously available to only a limited amount of accounts, Google has now decided to roll out this feature for all users in the new version of Google Analytics.

Below is a short video from Google explaining what these Multi-Channel Funnel reports are:

(more…)

Google Adjusts +1 button: Now You Can Share on Plus from the Button

Google+1-share

It took a while for Google to create this feature, and some like Alex Moss, even beat Google to it, but finally it is here: the option to share a webpage on Google Plus using the Plus One button. In the video below Timothy Jordan explains how it works.

It is simple. If you click the +1 button you get an extra option: share on Google Circles. If you click that you can add a comment, choose your circle and publish it to your Circles profile. (more…)

Page 25 of 45« First...10...22232425262728...40...Last »