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 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…)
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…)
When Google first launched realtime search everybody got excited. Finally they picked up on Twitter and showed us real time results. For a short period there was a real hype going around (it even got me a link and quote on the BBC-website). And then it went quiet.
It turned out the realtime results in the middle of a page were mostly ignored by users. Then Google moved the realtime results to a separate page within Google, only showing the ‘real time block’ in special cases. All that time the real time results were mostly results from Twitter and Google’s latests indexed blogs. Now it seems that Google finally is broadening realtime search. A Quora thread and following Techcrunch-post indicate that Google Realtime Search now also shows results from Quora, Gowalla, Me2day, Twitgoo, and possibly others.
The thread-owner, Dan Leveille, noted that if you do a search for “site:quora.com” in the realtime search section you get Quora results from just minutes ago. You get questions, answers and votes. (more…)
Ever since I first saw Blaise Aguera y Arcas present about Photosynth I have been impressed by what Microsoft is doing with the technique. Based on the technique which makes use of images made by you and me and posted for example on Flickr, Microsoft developed several new products like Streetside, StreetSlide imagery and live video in maps.
Microsoft really has some nice material there, yet Google Streetview also remains dominant here. That without a doubt will have something to do with the market share of Bing.
At the Where 2.0 O’Reilly conference Microsoft’s Blaise Aguera y Arcas talked about yet another impressive new feature concerning imagery/mapping connection: the Read / Write World. (more…)
“User intent”. These are two words I’ve written and said a lot in the past 1,5 years. It’s the ultimate goal of the search engines: finding out your user intent and delivering you with results based on that intent.
But “user intent” is really hard to grab. The search engines try to grab it as much as they can by making the results as personal as possible. In the US Google has made the next step in trying to find the intent by making search news even more personal. (more…)
It is kind of a miracle that sites like Groupon and Livingsocial have been able to dominate the field of online deals for that long without any interference of the ‘big boys’ out there: Google and Facebook. Now within a short period of time both successful social deal – sites saw the two biggest players on the web enter their markets.
Google last year tried to buy Groupon but failed. Groupon felt is was just too successful to be bought out. So Google then decided to start working on their own offering site and last week Google offers made its beta-appearance. And if that wasn’t enough competition yet Facebook this week decided to launch “Social Deals“. (more…)
Last week I spoke at an internal event of a big company and afterwards I was talking to somebody who said to me “That Bing thing, that is never gonna make it right?”. I then replied that I thought it was gonna make it, but that in The Netherlands it simply wasn’t there yet in its full potential, but in the US it had already grown to a 30% market share.
Now slowly Bing seems to be also taking a bit of a bigger piece of the pie in the UK. According to Hitwise they are now the fastest growing search engine in the UK. (more…)
We cannot longer be ignoring Bing as a major competitor in the search market, at least when we are looking at the US that is. According to Hitwise Bing now has over 30% market share there.
In the last month Bing gained almost 2% market share growing from 28.48% in February to 30.01% in March. It’s rival Google lost about the same share and went from 66.69% to 64.42%. Bing’s partner in crime Yahoo also so a rise: Yahoo powered searches went from 14.99% to 15.69%. (more…)
Almost a year ago I spoke at a travel conference in the Netherlands. At that same conference someone from Google was speaking. When asked if Google would be going into travel and would become a competitor to all the travel sites in the room, the answer was clear: no.
Until Google bought a company called “ITA Software“, which according to its website is “is a leading provider of innovative solutions for the travel industry”. This company is now acquired by Google. Under “stiff conditions” the Justice Department, which had looked into the deal, allowed the purchase.
Google is paying $700 million for the ticketing software company. To make the deal happen they had to live up to some restrictions. They for example buy the license to the software for five years, so they are not fully owners. They promised however they would continue to upgrade it and establish firewalls to protect ITA clients’ intellectual property. (more…)
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…)
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…)
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