Posts on State of Search about ‘Google’

Google stops all Street View cars in Germany

Streetview-Germany

Germany was probably one of the countries which was the most difficult towards Google when it comes to Streetview. The Germans just didn’t seem to like the privacy concerns around it. At least, some Germans didn’t. And they now seem to have ‘won’.

According to Searchengineland Google has stopped all Street View cars from driving around and taking pictures in Germany. It is a bold move, especially after Google had recently won a case in German court which made Streetview legal in Germany. (more…)

Larry Page taking control: reorganizes Google management and bonus system

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It’s not even taken Larry Page one week in his new role as CEO to make big changes to how Google works. We already heard of the departure of executive Jonathan Rosenberg earlier this week, but now news has come out that Page has a major reorganization of his management team on Thursday.

Page put executives in charge of individual business units at Google, reporting straight to Page himself. Several executives have made a promotion, including Andy Rubin (became senior vice president of mobile) and Vic Gundotra (became senior vice president of social). (more…)

Page level link Metrics less important, social signals more important in ranking factors?

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SEOMoz looks at what rankingfactors are important for Search engines (read: Google) every so many months/ years. This year they again consulted many SEO experts to find out what they think are the important ranking factors to keep an eye on.

At SMX Munich SEOMoz’ Rand Fishkin presented some preliminary results of that data and the data of research they did on over 10,000 keywords in the SERPS. The data is as said not definite yet but it is always nice to look at the findings so far.

The preliminary research shows not surprisingly that social signals have become much more important than two years ago, but what it also interesting is that it seems that page level metrics have become a lot less important than before. Read some findings and look at Rand’s presentation below. (more…)

Google loses autocomplete case: cannot “suggest” Italian company is a fraud

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In Milan, Italy, Google has lost a case which was started against them by an Italian businessman who was ‘suggested’ to be a fraud or conman when searchers looked for his company name in Google.

The autocomplete function from Google suggested that the company they were looking for was truffatore (“con man”) and truffa (“fraud”).

Google tried to “get out” of the claim by stating they are a hosting provider. That way they would be falling under the protection of the E-Commerce Directive’s safe harbour provisions. That protects hosting providers from claims like this. The court however felt the autocomplete function has nothing to do with hosting and was a production from Google. (more…)

Google’s April fools jokes: Gmail motion, Teleport Search and a Google Autocompleter

GMail-motion

When Google launched +1 last week there were several people out there who believed it was an early version of Google’s April Fools joke. After all, every year Google tends to do one or more pranks to fool the community.

+1 didn’t turn out to be the joke, but on April Fools Day Google made up for that with several jokes. They introduced Gmail Motion, “a new way to communicate” with Gmail: controlling Gmail with your body. Based on that technology they supposedly built lots of new products in no time, with Google Teleport Search (in Chinese only) being my personal favorite. But they also showed us YouTube 1911 and they were hiring Google Autocompleter. Maybe not all as believable as possible, but sure a few you can at least laugh a little bit about. An overview. (more…)

Page’s first days in office: Product chief Jonathan Rosenberg resigns

jonathan-rosenberg

Starting this week things at Google are different. We’ve known for a few months now that Eric Schmidt would be stepping down as CEO and Larry Page would be taking over. This week that change is being made. No more quotes from Schmidt but we won’t be bored with Page’s renewed reign if signals are right. In his first week we see in the upcoming departure of product chief Jonathan Rosenberg.

Let’s make one thing clear: Page did not fire Rosenberg. Jonathan Rosenberg was asked, together with the other executives, to long-term, multiyear commitment plan about their future at the company. Rosenberg stated that he had always planned to step down in 2013 because then his daughter would go to college. He didn’t feel planning ahead would then make sense. (more…)

Google +1 site button found in code by Dutchman (Update: loop closed)

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A young Dutch programmer, Ivo Schaap, has discovered that the Google +1 button for on websites which supposedly was going to be launched somewhere later this year is already available.

He started looking around in code and came up with a couple of pieces of code which make the buttons.

“I looked around the code, and looked some more, untill I found the button endpoint hiding from me, obfuscated, in a stray piece of javascript.” (more…)

Google +1, will it succeed? The experts don’t agree

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With the launch of “+1″ Google seems to have made another step in the revealing of their social layers. This one without a doubt is one of the bigger changes so far. We wrote about it this morning, but we also asked several experts in the industry to shine their light on the matter.

We asked Rand Fishkin, Kelvin Newman, Joost de Valk, Peter Young, Mikkel de Mib Svendsen, Andy Atkins-Krüger, Kristján Már Hauksson, Ciarán Norris and Liana Evans the question “What do you think the Google +1 feature will mean for Google’s social efforts, will they now succeed?”. As you will see, the opinions differ! (more…)

Microsoft files complaint against Google in Europe over YouTube

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Microsoft has filed an official complaint against Google with the European watchdogs. Microsoft accuses Google of not allowing competitors, like Bing, to get data from YouTube to rank them in their specific search engines. It also says that Google deliberately is making YouTube videos un-playable on Window Mobile phones and believes Google is discriminating would-be competitors.

Brad Smith, Senior Vice President & General Counsel at Microsoft, explains in a long blogpost why Microsoft is filing. He claims that Google is using a pattern to remain the dominant force in Europe. (more…)

Google +1: the pieces of the social puzzle are coming together

button-+1

With the official launch of “+1″ yesterday Google took yet another step towards getting all the pieces of their social puzzle together. After failures with social experiments like Orkut and Buzz Google now has decided it will be adding social features to their search results, so called ‘social layers‘, which eventually will turn out to be Google’s new approach to social.

The +1 button they launched yesterday doesn’t seem to be that new. After all, we have all seen the “stars” in search wiki and the mentions of social sharing on sites like Twitter. But the +1 button does do a little bit more than just that. It is sharing to your own network and it is connected to your Google Profile which seems the be the center of attention when it comes to Google’s social efforts. I’d like to look at some obvious questions with maybe some not so obvious answers. (more…)

Google giving more shape to social person search: last twitter updates

new-tweet

It’s the most done search on the web: the ego search. People looking for their own name. But also many people look for other peoples names, like the ones they are going to meet for the first time, either in a meeting or on a date for example.

I’ve stated before that it would be interesting to actually get a page which you can monitor yourself that would show up in the Google results for your own page and with the new and updated Google Profiles Google seems to have done just that. And Google is now taking another step.

The Google Profiles are showing up more and more in the SERPS and it seems that Google has made a change to how they show Twitter results when you search for a name. (more…)

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