It looks like that Google can’t decide which navigation works best for everyone, the old black navigation bar or the new navigation announced in November. Now a few months after the new navigation was introduced, Google still uses both interfaces together which is a little annoying when using different Google products and browsers. (more…)
Things are not really going Google’s way in the first weeks of January so it seems. At least, if you look at the outside perspective of things. From the inside they did some pretty nifty things with the launch of Search Plus Your World for example.
From the outside however we have seen complaints about privacy, complaints about abusing their own products to push their own products and many other little hick ups which led us to think Google might be trying to kill themselves.
In the series of ‘ouch that hurts a little’ Google can add another to the list. A ruling Tuesday in a Paris court found Google guilty of abusing the dominant position of Google Maps. (more…)
Imagine this: You are looking for a second hand car and you spot a type of car you like on the streets. What do you do? You might write down the type of the car, go home and look it up. You then might be able to find it on E-Bay.
Or… you take a picture of that car and hit search and find it on E-Bay. Pretty smart, right? Great search engine who did that! But it is not Google or Bing taking the next step in visual search, it is the auction site itself who thought of this idea. Their newest version of the Motors iPhone app does just that. (more…)
As you may know I am not a big fan of Klout or the services like Klout. Simply because it in most cases gives people the wrong impression of influence. You can be an influencer with a low Klout score or you can seem to be an influencer because you may have a high Klout score while in fact nobody cares about your opinion.
Still it is inevitable that we have to deal with services like this, because it is how we try to get a grip on the whole ‘influence’ matter. Because influence and authority will matter. We’ve seen it with Search Plus Your World. The more influence you have the more visible you get to be, so you need to be as visibile as possible. And your influence is going to be worth money. Lots of it. And Klout is one of the first to actually show us that. (more…)
Bradley Horowitz, Vice President Product Management Google+, has announced that teenagers are now allowed to sign up for the network. This means that Google+ is now open to a whole new group of potential users because before this announcement you’ve had to be at least 18 in order to join.
In most countries you now have to be at least 13 to use the service. In some countries the minimum age is higher, in the Netherlands for example it’s 16 and in Spain and South Korea 14. These are now the same requirements Facebook has when it comes to age regulations. (more…)
SEO’s have been noticing fluctuations again over the past week or so, suggesting that another Panda Update might be around the corner. Today Google has confirmed to SearchEngineland they indeed have done a new ‘Panda Update’, which is numbered as being Panda Update 3.2.
Searchengineland says Google has confirmed that they have done a ‘data refresh’ about a week ago. This means that there were not made any algorithmic changes, just another run through by Google, a so called ‘minor update’.
The last Panda Update was from last November and that was also a minor update. Google did the last bigger update in October.
Google launch of Search Plus Your World has lead to a lot of discussion on different levels. There is the “do we want to get this much personalized?” question, there is the FTC “is Google favoring their own products too much” question and there is a privacy question floating around, but most of all its the “Has Google turned Evil?” question.
The mantra which used to define Google, ‘do no evil’ seems to have turned against them on the public opinion, or at least that of the tech industry. That could really hurt Google as a brand, but there is one other area in which Google could be hurting: the employees. Are the happy with Google changes? And what if they’re not, does that matter? One thing is clear for them it’s: follow the leader (Page) or leave. (more…)
When Google first launched Google+ there was a lot of rumor about the ‘real name policy’ which Google uses. You are only allowed to sign up to Google+ (and now to all Google products at once) with your real identity. Using a pseudonym is not allowed.
Google now launches a new feature to Google+ which will allow users to add a nickname to their Google Profile. Note though that the nickname is not the same as a pseudonym. Setting up an anonymous Google+ account will still not be possible. (more…)
Ok, I won’t be repeating it too much, but it is true. Google is pushing Google+ in every possible way they can. Google+ is the center of attention for Google, and they will try anything to get people to use the service.
Since last week Google has found a new way of getting peoples attention towards Plus, with an interesting side effect: it might threaten services like Quora. (more…)
There are many products developed or bought at Google. Most of the products come from the famous 20 percent time at Google. Some of them actually become separate successful products, like GMail for example. Others are mostly meant to be part of a ‘bigger’ project, like for example Urchin, which was meant to be the installable version of Google Analytics and played a huge part in the development of that product.
But sometimes these products lose their use and at that point Google wants to ‘clean them up’. Last week Google announced the ‘death’ of no less than six products, including Urchin and the Social Graph API. That is not needed anymore with Google’s other social identifying tools. (more…)
In the past you could sign up for a Gmail account and that would be it. If you wanted a YouTube or Picasa account you could connect your Gmail to it, but you had to sign up independently for it. The same for your G+ account when Google first launched the service: even though they were connected you had to ‘sign up’ first.
Now if you decide to get a Gmail account you won’t have to sign up separately for all the other services anymore. Your Google Account is now also your Google+ account, your YouTube account and other Google products.
If you now go to the Google sign up page you will see that Google has redesigned the page and that they focus on the entire Google experience: “Your Google Account is more than just Search.” (more…)
Who owns your website? On paper it is you. Because you are the one who is putting the content on your pages. In a perfect world you would however focus on your target audience and would fit the page so they would find what they are looking for within a micro second. In reality it is neither you or your customers who decide what goes where. It is companies like Google and Facebook who in the end make the decisions.
Google just made another decision for you. In a post on their Inside Search Blog Google announces an algorithmic change which makes Google one of the important deciders when it comes to what you put where on your site. Google’s newest change punishes those sites that have too many ads ‘above the fold’. At the same time they don’t seem to live up to their own rules. (more…)
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