Posts on State of Search about ‘News’

Eric Schmidt: “Google Not Favoring Plus”

One of the main first responses to Google’s launch of ”Search Plus Your World” yesterday was that Google was favoring themselves over other Social Networks, an accusation which is in the line of many accusations in the past year: is Google favoring themselves in the search results? It never seemed more clear than this time that Google indeed is favoring themselves over others. Even Twitter responded to the launch with a statement which hinted in that direction, but more about that later.

At CES 2012 Danny Sullivan stepped up to Eric Schmidt to confront him with that issue. Schmidt was crystal clear in his comments: he feels Google is not favoring their own product, they would love to add both Facebook and Twitter to this feature, but hey, they don’t want to give Google their data. He clearly points at the ‘others’ in this part. (more…)

The Next Step in the Google+ Masterplan: “Search Plus Your World”

We know that Google is pushing Google+ as much as they can, trying to make Google+ the center of everything they do. And they would love it to be the center of everything they do. And as I highlighted right after the launch of Google+: we will be seeing integration with search results sooner or later.

Today Google has taken a next, very important and very big step towards just that: “Search Plus Your World”. From now on you will not just find content from the web, your search results will be mixed with personal results which have been shared with you personally. (more…)

Speaker Submissions and Registration A4UEXpo Barcelona opens

A4 U Expo Europe has been located in Munich, for the past few years. The successful Affiliate show, which also has a close connection to the SEO-industry, was very successful in Germany but decided it needed to ‘broaden its horizon’ and is going south: to Barcelona.

Today A4U opens up the registration for this show, as well as the submission for speaker proposals. The A4U Expo show starts June 19th. (more…)

New Google Search Improvements – Encrypted search goes regional

Like every month in the past few months Google posted a list of all recent improvements the team made to search on their blog. In December Google published about 30 improvements, 9 of these were blogged about earlier so 21, listed below, are fresh and new.

Codenames

In addition Google now will use codenames for almost all improvements because they are easier to talk about, to remember and they can also be funny. Google explains:

“Our old question-answering feature in search was codenamed “DAFFIE,” which stood for the “Database of All Fact Fiction Information and Exaggeration.” In 2010 the team did a complete overhaul of the system and released a new short answers feature. Amit Singhal, thinking of Daffy Duck, decided to codename the new system “Porky Pig”, because Porky Pig was trying to kill Daffy Duck. The team laughed thinking that Amit was just confused (everyone knows Elmer Fudd is the hunter). But, it turns out Amit was right, as he often is. In 1937 in the original cartoon to feature Daffy Duck, Porky Pig was in fact hunting Daffy.” (more…)

You Think Google+ Loses The Attention? December Saw Biggest Use Ever

Opinions about Google+ differ a lot. Some love it because of all the interaction they are getting there (more comments), others have lost interest all together. Fact is that as a social network it still has a long way to go.

But if you did lose interest because your feed kept showing the same people and you figured others would have lost interest too, you might be wrong. Experian Hitwise, who always checks the numbers, reported a few days ago that Google+ is not suffering at all. On the contrary, at least in the US. The month December 2011 was the “biggest month to date” for Google+. (more…)

Don’t Wait, Try The New Google Bar Right Now

Google announced last November the black navigation bar (codenamed Sandbar) above all products will be replaced only a few months after it was introduced with a new and bigger gray bar.

This means that all links currently above every property to different products like Google Images, Google Maps, Google News, etc. will be clustered in one simple dropdown menu. This new list is activated by hovering over the Google logo in the upper left corner as you can see in the screenshot below. (more…)

New Google Test: Subscribe to Newsletter From The Paid Search Results

Google is testing a new format for ads, one in which it will become much more easy for advertisers to get people to subscribe to their e-mail lists. Tests show that Google might be putting a “Subscribe to newsletter” option in the paid results.

The tests have been around for a few weeks now and according to several blogs it is being tested by some US email marketing firms like VerticalResponse, Constant Contact and AWeber. (more…)

Majestic SEO giving away the top 1 million websites

It’s Christmas Day and Majestic SEO decided it was time for a present of their own. Majestic is now giving away a CSV file of the top 1 million websites (as of today), based on the Majestic Million list.

The list can be downloaded for only a small amount of time between now and (probably) new years, so you better be fast! (more…)

Google Lets It Snow, In Their SERPS

Do you remember that several years ago people would decorate their blogs and websites with all sorts of moving stuff, especially around Christmas? And it wasn’t just the personal websites which got that decoration, business sites as well. That seems to have drift over in the past few years. But Google is now bringing that back.

A special ‘easter egg’ which Google developed now lets it snow inside Google’s SERPS. Do a search for let it snow on Google.com and your screen will be filled with snow flakes. And not just that, the screen also gets a frozen look, meaning the search results slowly disappear. (more…)