Posts on State of Search about ‘News’

Yandex goes public at $25.00 per share

Google doesn’t take them seriously, but many in the East of Europe and the countries below Russia certainly do. And for a reason, they are growing rapidly and making new functionalities and taking new steps all the time. Who? Well Yandex off course.

Yandex earlier announced it was going public and today announced the pricing of its initial public offering. 52,174,088 Class A ordinary shares will be available for $25.00 per share. The Class A ordinary shares will begin trading today on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol “YNDX”. (more…)

Eric Schmidt named Media Person of the Year

Now what if you were CEO of a big company and wanted to become “Media Person of the Year”. What would you do? Show up in the press a lot off course. And be controversial. Maybe that is what brought Eric Schmidt to his several epic quotes.

Or it is just a coincidence. What is happening is that Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, has been named Media Person of the Year by the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. (more…)

‘Majestic Million’ ranks the top 1 million websites based on links: co.cc wins

There was a time when tools were simply tools and once you would have made them that would be it. Updates would hardly be made. In this time in which things go faster and faster tools tend to send out updates monthly or even weekly. Majestic SEO for example has been evolving a lot since they started, and with success. The tool to use when you are looking to dive into backlinks has now released its latest feature: Majestic Million.

Majestic Million is a list of all the websites you can imagine, based on the number of back links they have. You can then specify which sites you want to see in a list and you can off course see where your own site is ranked. (more…)

News near you: local, mobile and personal integrated by Google

Yet again Google has launched a new feature. And again it seems to be part of their bigger strategy which has to lead to a more social like Google: news near you. If you are an Android or iPhone user living in the US you can now go to news.google.com and you will be prompted with a request to share your location. If you accept, “news near you” will be available.

The feature was introduced by Google News Product Manager Navneet Singh. The new service from Google lets you see news from the location your phone tells you where you are. You can personalize it further on the personalization page where you can determine whether you want news on specific topics. (more…)

Facebook Behind Whisper Campaign Against Google

Earlier this week I reported about a “whisper campaign” which had been set up against Google by PR Company Burson-Marsteller, trying to get media outlets to report about privacy issues around Google’s social circle and Gmail. The whisper campaign backfired at Burson-Marsteller when the story came out on USA Today.

At that time the client which had hired Burson-Marsteller to set up the campaign was unknown. We immediately thought of companies like Microsoft, Apple or Facebook. But Burson-Marsteller was smart enough to mention them too in their e-mails as being companies who were dancing around on thin ice when it comes to privacy matters. Now is revealed, and confirmed, that it was indeed Facebook that had hired Burson-Marsteller. The reason? Google tried to use Facebook data for their search results. (more…)

PR-Company Supposedly Started Whisper Campaign Against Google

The world of PR is a strange one. Some might think it is nothing more than sending out a few press releases. It however is a lot more than that. And it also has a dark side to it. PR agencies also are very well versed in lobbying. Trying to get politicians to vote a specific way or trying to get journalists to write about a specific topic. Now that sometimes can get into a grey area. Because the ways to get people to vote or write in a specific direction differ very much.

PR company Burson-Marsteller doesn’t have the best name in the market when it comes to campaigns like this. And it now seems as if they tried to ‘nail’ Google on privacy matters using a so called “whisper campaign” (Wikipedia: “a method of persuasion in which damaging rumors or innuendo are spread about the target”). They tried to get several top media outlets in the US to write news stories and editorials about how Google was invading privacy from Americans using their Social Circle features. (more…)

Linkdex and Yoast team up in newest update of WordPress SEO Plugin

An exciting new cooperation takes place in the world of tools, SEO and WordPress. Linkdex, the SEO tool we recently reviewed with great enthusiasm, will be showing up in a surprising place: Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin.

Joost de Valk has built and expanded this plugin a lot in the past year and not without success. The plugin has been downloaded over 200.000 times already. The newest update will bring the number of downloads up really fast. (more…)

Google is Testing New Search Result Pages, Opinions on Twitter differ

Google has been making quit some changes to its SERPS in the past months, most of which we reported on here on State of Search. Only a few days ago we highlighted some tests Google was doing.

And just when the ink is dry Google decides it is time for yet another “test”. This time a little bit bigger then the others though, if we can believe our sources but also those on Twitter, which are with a lot more. Many people are spotting a new way of presenting the search results. The comments differ, but in general people think they are ‘ugly’.

The biggest change we can see from the screenshots going around Twitter (I haven’t spotted this in the wild myself yet) are the not-underlined results which we talked about earlier this week, much more “white” on the page and in some cases a dotted line between the results. (more…)

Dutch government discourages Google Maps and encourages the paid version

Now, I’m all for privacy and being open and making people understand of the consequences when it comes to the use of some services, especially Facebook and in some cases Google. But in this case I think there is somebody being a bit to eager.

In the Netherlands, the Local Affairs Office decided to warn Dutch municipalities for the use of Google Maps because of privacy issues. This warning was based on a 68 page counting research which showed that many municipalities use Google Maps on there websites but don’t have any idea about the privacy consequences of that usage. The most remarkable result of the report however is that they advice the municipalities to use not another free service, but the paid Google Maps service, which costs 7000 euros a year or develop a tool for 550.000 euros. Talk about useless spending of public money… (more…)