Posts on State of Search about ‘Google’

UPDATE: Black Navigation Bar here to stay?

Google-black-navigation

Update on this post (originally called Two new SERP tests: Black Navigation Bar and Urls on top – May 26 2011): More and more people are seeing the black navigation bar we talk about below. It looks like this might be here to stay. Google hasn’t announced anything on it so far, but the number of people seeing the black navigation bar (which looks a lot like the one you see when logged in to WordPress) indicates Google might be already rolling this out. The url above the search results is also seen more often so it seems Google is actually serious with these changes.

The constant testing in the Google SERPS is hardly news anymore. We saw many of them already and last week showed some tests that hadn’t made it. Today we can again show you two tests in the SERPS.

First we see the black navigation bar, second Google seems to be testing with urls above the snippet result instead of below. (more…)

+1 Button is coming to Europe, but might slow your site down

+1-button

I implemented the +1 button in my Google Search on Google.com as soon as it became available. Why? Because I wanted to see what it did and if it worked or not. And I got used to it pretty quickly. Last week I was doing a lecture and talked about the +1 button there. Nobody had used it, a few had heard of it and only one or two had actually seen it. It shows how we live in a different world. But more important it shows Google’s US focus, after all, it was only available on the .com. So far at least.

Google has now announced it will be rolling out the +1 button ‘around the world’. Yet that ‘around the world’ should be taken with a grain of salt: they are starting off with four other local Google search pages. The others will follow “soon after”. (more…)

How Personalized is Google Search Really?

spot-the-difference

Search and Social is all about personalization these days. Google has seen the light: if we can personalize the web for our searchers, we will be the ones they turn to for their most relevant information. No more clutter, no more irrelevant news, no more content you didn’t want to see in the first place.

In basis Google’s idea, and Facebook’s for that matter, is not that bad. Personalized means for example that we get advertising tailored to our needs. Like cars? You’re getting cars! Do you have small kids? You might like these diapers.

But it goes a lot further than just the advertising. Clicking on links means you are telling companies like Facebook and Google what you like, or maybe even don’t like, based on the amount of time spent somewhere or your reaction on for example Twitter, Facebook or Quora. You are ‘feeding’ the search engines, social networks and other online companies with your data so they can give you as personalized data as possible. Data like for example search results. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Personalization can have its advantages but also its disadvantages. And how far is Google with this anyway? Are we all seeing totally different search result pages? Time to dive into this for a little bit. I’ll write about this in several posts over the next few weeks, trying to ‘unfold’ personalizations and the directions Google is heading in to. (more…)

Google now showing +1 Counts and ads the local aspect: ready for spam?

+1-intro

Searchenginewatch reports that Google is making another step in integrating social into their search results. Again it has to do with the +1 button. Searchenginewatch editor Danny Goodwin noticed that Google has started to put number of +1′s sites have received in their search results.

I haven’t seen then myself, but Danny reports he saw it “Safari on a Mac and IE7 on a PC, not logged in to Google.” Which seems kind of surprising since until now you have to be signed in to Google to actually see the results. (more…)

Google: One Billion a Month

one-billion

One Billion, A one with nine zeros: 1000000000. That is a huge number. And that number is now connected to Google. Not because they make that cash (they make more than that), but because it is the number of unique visitors to their websites. A month.

The numbers are astonishing and come from Comscore who released the numbers this Tuesday. Comscore says it is the first time ever that a Internet company hits these kind of numbers. (more…)

Why is Google Voice Giving Back Different Suggestions?

microphone-search

So Google launched Google Voice Search last week at their Inside Search Event. Wowza. Well, that is what many people think if you check Twitter. You can now talk to Google! And it will give you back results! At least, it works sometimes, like this Tweeter says it: “You click it and say what you want to google. It works sometimes.”

The feature has been taken from the mobile search, where you already could ‘talk to Google’ for a while. Last night I started playing with the feature on my computer. It turns out it is still a bit buggy sometimes, and I don’t mean because sometimes it just doesn’t understand what you are saying. It seems as if Google is using a different Google Suggest database for voice search, because in most cases the “suggestions” I got from Google were totally different from those I get when I do a textual search. (more…)

Google Now Warning WordPress Users They Need To Update

update-alert-2

If you own a WordPress website and you haven’t updated your WordPress version lately you might be getting a warning soon. And no, this is not the warning you get when you open the WordPress CMS, it is a warning from Google.

Last week the first people started noticing that Google had sent them a message within Google Webmaster Tools saying they should update their WordPress versions. I myself today got an e-mail from GWT saying one of my sites needs an update. (more…)

New Google Tests Suggest Change Come Fast

Google-buttons-gone

Again some new Google tests have been found ‘in the wild’. The tests again are focused on the design. This time the changes came from around the globe, not just the US, which suggests they might be more than ‘just’ tests and that we could be seeing these changes go through a lot quicker than you might expect.

The biggest changes to the design in the tests which came out were the drop of the “I’m feeling lucky” button and the grey area on top and on the left in the text from the sidebar and a blue search icon. Some changes have been seen before which also is an indication that Google is getting more serious with this. (more…)

We’re doing Google’s job for them

Crawling: check. Indexing: check. Ranking: check.

You’ve all heard about the Google +1 button and the recent Schema.org announcement. Big news, both of those, but something is rubbing me the wrong way about all this newfangled stuff Google is pumping out. Namely that Google is getting us to do the hard work for them.

Google, as a search engine, exists to find all the information on the web (crawling), make sense of what it finds (indexing), and serve us with the most relevant content for any given query (ranking). This, in a very simplified nutshell, is Information Retrieval, and it’s what search engines do.

However, it seems search engines are actually quite poor at this. Or at least poor enough that they think they need us – the masses – to do the hard work for them. (more…)

Google +1 Button is here, Get your Data to Google!

+1-on-site

After the launch in beta of the +1-button Google yesterday finally launched the official button. Now everybody can put the +1 button on their website. On their blog Google showed how you can put the button on your site. The code which before was discovered by a Dutchman now is publicly available.

Most probably we will be seeing many sites implementing the button over the next few days. Chances are that the button will replace the Google Buzz button which still can be found on many sites, doing nothing.

The button will help make the pages on your website more visible for people who have friend who recommended the page. The page will then be visible in the SERPS via the “XXX +1′d this” tagline below the result. (more…)

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