Posts on State of Search about ‘News’

Google Makes Surprising Book Deal with French Publisher Hachette

To be really honest, I kind of figured that the Google Book project to digitize the books world wide would die a slow death after Google saw a settlement on the topic declined in the US last year. But now all of a sudden its back. With a deal in a country where Google had a lot of troubles with the book project before: France.

The book project has been under fire ever since Google first started to work on it. Google was seen as the evil company trying to steal away the content from publishers and authors, resulting in several lawsuits world wide. (more…)

Google now allows URL submission through Webmaster Tools

Manual URL submissions have been the laughing stock of the SEO world for a long time. URL submission services are often seen as scams because a well built website with enough incoming links shouldn’t need URL submissions to find their way to the search engine indexes. However the possibility to manually add URLs is still available in Google, Bing and Yahoo!

Surprisingly Google just announced they will add new ways of submitting new pages and updated pages to Google’s index. (more…)

Yahoo is officially transitioning its organic results to Bing from today!

Over two years ago Microsoft and Yahoo! signed a deal to become partners instead of competitors in their shared domain of search. They formed the new Search Alliance. One part of the deal was that Microsoft’s Bing would become the search engine behind Yahoo!. The transition started in August 2010 in USA and Canada, but Europe has been waiting patiently in anticipation. Until today! Yahoo! is officially starting the transition merging their organic results with Microsoft (Bing) for the European properties including; UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. (more…)

Universal Search: how often are they shown on Google’s SERPs?

Last week Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land reported on a study done by Searchmetrics about which types of universal search – results from specific vertical searches such as videos and images, shown in addition to normal web page results – appear most often in Google’s American SERPs.

Now Searchmetrics has sent State of Search similar data for UK search results, and it appears the trends follows that of Google.com closely. First of all, what jumps out is that universal results are a part of the vast majority of SERPs. Less than 30% of Google’s results pages do not have a universal element to them. (more…)

Adobe Edge: SEO-friendly web animations?

Yesterday Adobe, the company behind the much loved and even more hated Flash technology, introduced Adobe Edge. In their own words:

“Adobe® Edge is a new web motion and interaction design tool that allows designers to bring animated content to websites, using web standards like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3.”

In other words, Edge promises to do the same as Flash, but this time it’ll be based on web standards. Which means that, in theory, Edge animations can be SEO-friendly. (more…)

Will Google move Adwords ads toward the bottom of the SERPs?

Google has been experimenting a lot with the lay out of the search interface. Last friday they introduced a new search interface for tablets. This new interface differs from the desktop interface in many ways, but one important difference is that the AdWords advertisement will only be shown at the top and the bottom of the SERPs. In the landscape mode there will be a maximum two ads at the top and three at the bottom, in the portrait mode there will be a maximum three ads at the top as well as at the bottom. Side ads will be disappearing completely. (more…)

Growing pressure on Microsoft over Bing

After Microsoft published its latest quarterly earnings last month, their Bing search engine received a lot of criticism. Microsoft’s earning figures showed that the division which is responsible for Bing was making a loss of $2.6 billion in the last fiscal year.

That’s quite a big loss to make, but that’s nothing new to Microsoft. They have a history of launching business models at a loss in order to grab a large chunk of market share (Xbox for example). (more…)

Google testing new clean search interface for tablets

Update: Google just officially announced this interface as the new search interface for tablets.

Google keeps testing new search interfaces. This time we ran into a more rigorous change of interface discovered by Amit Agarwal.

This new search interface is much cleaner with more white spaces. The sidebar has moved to the top as well as the filters. The Next Web argues that the interface probably occurred on a tablet, but Amit doesn’t mention this.

However this speculation can be taken very seriously. (more…)

Bing tests the unthinkable

This is a guestpost by Jeroen Smeekens from E-Difference (original post in Dutch). Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily State of Search.

Ads between the organic search results. Have they gone mad at Microsoft? Like Google, Bing runs several different tests each day, showing different types of search engine result pages to its users. Some tests only show tiny changes, and regular users probably won’t even notice them. Others tend to be a lot bigger. But Bing just did the unthinkable and just stuffed its ads between its organic results. Shaking my head Bing, shaking… my… head! (more…)