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…)
In case you missed it, a few weeks ago Google seems to have made a quiet change to how Google Analytics records visits coming from Image Search results.
Whereas previously Image Search showed up in your Google Analytics as a referral visit – and thus allowed you to easily filter it from your reports – now it seems Image Search visits are part of the organic search traffic in your Google Analytics reports. (more…)
Google is constantly looking for ways to improve their UI. In the past year the chances to the Google result pages (SERPS) have been immense. And it looks like we can be expecting some new changes soon. Again new tests have been found. This time its an ‘icon-less’ test.
In the test Google has gotten rid off all the icons on the result pages. Icons in the left sidebar and the +1 icon, the cached page link and the preview icon are all gone. That makes for a ‘cleaner’ result page. What is interesting is that you might be able to ‘opt-in’ on this test. (more…)
Every day a lot of people spot different experiments within Google. Google after is always trying to improve user experience. For his website Websonic.nl Michiel Wester collected some examples of the latest experiences spotted in the wild. He was kind enough to also share them with us here. (more…)
Google has got many different faces. There are all the great services they offer, for free, on the one hand. And on the other hand there is the (indirect) price you pay for the services: information. The information-part is what rises questions about privacy-issues. The question is how much we really care about our privacy, but that’s for another time. For now, look at the video below and see how a feeling about Google can be expressed. But are they right or wrong…?
Oh don’t we all love the fact that Google’s testing efforts have become much more visible to all of us? I was talking to co-blogger Jeroen van Eck about it yesterday, is Google doing a lot more testing, are the tests more visible than before or do we just report on them a lot more? Probably it is a combination. Now Google also starts to confirm tests, like in this case the tests with the infinite scrolling.
We have seen them before: tests with infinite scrolling Google results. No more pagination, no more being on page two, three or even 99 or more. All of us on one page: scrolling down will load the next ten links and so forth. (more…)
Searchmetrics earlier this week responded quickly to the latest move from Google in their algorithm updates. The Panda Update which was rolled out World Wide and thus in Europe last week saw winners and losers in the different countries.
We already saw the list of Germany earlier this week, now Searchmetrics has released the list of winners and losers in France and is giving us more details on the winners and losers in Germany. It turns out that if you lose, you lose big and if you win, you only win a little. According to Searchmetrics visibility can go down to almost 99%, but winning only means a few percentages gain. (more…)
People have been seeing tests (really!) from this for the past few weeks, but Google has now made it official: there is a new way of showing sitelinks, and not just that: instead of the ‘old’ 8 links, we now get 12 sitelinks.
The change was announced on the Google Blog where they showed the evolution of sitelinks: from a single row to a set of 8 links, to 12 sitelinks with descriptions. The sitelinks now look a lot more like ‘regular’ links. (more…)
Google Translate can be a handy tool. But to be honest, a lot of the times the translations you get back can be really really crappy. But it is getting better, that is true. Still in my opinion Google Translate is there for the quick interpretation, knowing what something is about, not for the actual translations itself. If you optimize a website do not use Google Translate to translate a story and put that on your site. You will not get the right text, I can assure you that.
Still, this video below shows a nice way of how Google Translate can work. And apparently it does work for ordering Indian food! Then again, I can’t really check, because I don’t speak Indian. Still, its a nice video 
.
The tests showing Amazon results on top of the search results reminded some readers of the video “Epic 2015″ (Sequel to Epic 2014) a video which ‘predicts’ the future. The video becomes astonishing accurate if you think about what Google and Amazon could be up to. Is this what we want?
This weekend I was having dinner with friends and we came on the subject of YouTube and how many videos there are online at the moment. The numbers are huge. “Can you imagine the serverpark that YouTube and Google have?” my friend asked me. I knew they were big, but to be honest I didn’t have a real idea of what they looked like. But Eric Schmidt was right when he said “We can more or less know what you’re thinking about” because along comes a tweet from Fili, a Googler yes, can you believe that. He retweeted a video which was shot in 2009 but which gives a great view of how these datacenters look like.
Original title: Is Google Partnering up with Amazon? Tests Suggest they are
Update: it seems as if a Chrome Plugin, “awesomescreenshot” might be the cause of these results showing up with certain people. This is not yet confirmed but could explain things. Google has not confirmed or denied anything was going on.
“Do no Evil” was a motto which was created a while ago. Everything which Google did had to be tested to that motto. Was it potentially evil? Don’t do it. Many believe that the motto is no longer in use and hasn’t been in use for a while. We’ll probably won’t know until another Googler or another Stephen Levy-type of journalist will report on it from inside Google walls. But if the tests some are seeing at the moment are true than another major group of Google-dislikers will probably arise.
Several people have mentioned on Twitter and in a blogpost that they are seeing “Amazon Results For…” on some of their queries. These results are placed on top of the regular search results, pushing down not only the regular results but also other shopping results. So far it is unclear whether this is a test, something Google is really doing or if it is a deal with Amazon or not. (more…)
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