Posts on State of Search about ‘News’

Page’s first days in office: Product chief Jonathan Rosenberg resigns

jonathan-rosenberg

Starting this week things at Google are different. We’ve known for a few months now that Eric Schmidt would be stepping down as CEO and Larry Page would be taking over. This week that change is being made. No more quotes from Schmidt but we won’t be bored with Page’s renewed reign if signals are right. In his first week we see in the upcoming departure of product chief Jonathan Rosenberg.

Let’s make one thing clear: Page did not fire Rosenberg. Jonathan Rosenberg was asked, together with the other executives, to long-term, multiyear commitment plan about their future at the company. Rosenberg stated that he had always planned to step down in 2013 because then his daughter would go to college. He didn’t feel planning ahead would then make sense. (more…)

Google +1 site button found in code by Dutchman (Update: loop closed)

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A young Dutch programmer, Ivo Schaap, has discovered that the Google +1 button for on websites which supposedly was going to be launched somewhere later this year is already available.

He started looking around in code and came up with a couple of pieces of code which make the buttons.

“I looked around the code, and looked some more, untill I found the button endpoint hiding from me, obfuscated, in a stray piece of javascript.” (more…)

Microsoft files complaint against Google in Europe over YouTube

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Microsoft has filed an official complaint against Google with the European watchdogs. Microsoft accuses Google of not allowing competitors, like Bing, to get data from YouTube to rank them in their specific search engines. It also says that Google deliberately is making YouTube videos un-playable on Window Mobile phones and believes Google is discriminating would-be competitors.

Brad Smith, Senior Vice President & General Counsel at Microsoft, explains in a long blogpost why Microsoft is filing. He claims that Google is using a pattern to remain the dominant force in Europe. (more…)

Google +1: the pieces of the social puzzle are coming together

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With the official launch of “+1″ yesterday Google took yet another step towards getting all the pieces of their social puzzle together. After failures with social experiments like Orkut and Buzz Google now has decided it will be adding social features to their search results, so called ‘social layers‘, which eventually will turn out to be Google’s new approach to social.

The +1 button they launched yesterday doesn’t seem to be that new. After all, we have all seen the “stars” in search wiki and the mentions of social sharing on sites like Twitter. But the +1 button does do a little bit more than just that. It is sharing to your own network and it is connected to your Google Profile which seems the be the center of attention when it comes to Google’s social efforts. I’d like to look at some obvious questions with maybe some not so obvious answers. (more…)

Google giving more shape to social person search: last twitter updates

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It’s the most done search on the web: the ego search. People looking for their own name. But also many people look for other peoples names, like the ones they are going to meet for the first time, either in a meeting or on a date for example.

I’ve stated before that it would be interesting to actually get a page which you can monitor yourself that would show up in the Google results for your own page and with the new and updated Google Profiles Google seems to have done just that. And Google is now taking another step.

The Google Profiles are showing up more and more in the SERPS and it seems that Google has made a change to how they show Twitter results when you search for a name. (more…)

Yahoo is back baby! Executive opens attacks at Google and predicts purchases

Yahoo-Money

Yahoo seems to be gearing up. With the launch of Search Direct last week it clearly showed it has not given up on search just yet. But the former search giant now seems to have declared war. Or at least they decided to become more visible. And they are doing so with a loud voice.

According to a story in The Wall Street Journal Yahoo executive Steven Mitzenmacher last week at the Global Technology Symposium in Menlo Park made clear Yahoo is alive and kicking and back. He noted that Yahoo had been off the acquisition agenda for a few years but is now ready to roll: “We’ve come out now… guns blazing”. They are looking to buy. (more…)

Can SEO companies be held responsible for counterfeit by their clients? Yes says judge

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Imagine this: a client comes up to you asking you to build them a new e-commerce website. Let’s say they are selling golf clubs. However, it turns out that the golfclubs were counterfeits, illegal copies of trademarked goods. Is that your problem?

No says an SEO company in the US, but yes, says judge Margaret B. Seymour of the U.S. District Court for South Carolina. She says the company “Bright Builders” was “guilty of contributory trademark infringement and unfair trade practices for allegedly assisting in the construction and hosting of the e-commerce site CopyCatClubs.com.”

And here comes the add on: the original owner of the website was fined $28,250. The company which build and SEO-ed the website however was ordered to pay $770,750 in statutory damages. Wow. (more…)

New Media Ads in Adwords target movie and TV ad makers

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Things are merging more and more in Google. We have Universal Search and within the Ads we already had display off course. And in the past year Google has launched many new ad formats. Now Google ads another very important new format into the ads: video. So called “Media Ads” will be appearing in the paid ads. Simply speaking we will see videos.

You will see a video player in the results which will expand when you click it. The video ad will then take over the Google search page and play.

The new way of ads is not like Video Extensions, which Google has had longer. Where Video Extensions attaches a video player to the Adwords as, Media Ads is a “standalone format designed to put your videos front and center.” In other words: you are throwing the videos in the face of the searchers. (more…)

Yahoo launches Search Direct: an instant answer

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Just when you thought Yahoo was gone and lost they wake up from the dead. At the same time SES New York is going on, at the other side of the US, in San Francisco, Yahoo organized a press event in which it announced: Search Direct.

Search Direct is a service which gives you the answers to your search queries before you hit the actual search button. Sounds familiar? Yes, it is much like Google Instant. Yet Yahoo takes a little bit of a different approach. (more…)

SERP Change highlight: your Google Reader Subscriptions in SERPS

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We again highlight a few changes in the SERPS. Google is constantly changing them and it’s hard to keep track, so we try to sometimes highlight one or two of them. Today another interesting find again by UK SEO Andrew Girdwood. He noticed that Google is taking another small step with the integration of social into the search results: your own Google Reader subscriptions. This is not a new feature, Google has been doing this for a while, but not many actually see it.

We all now are familiar with the “shared by” messages which indicate that somebody inside your social circle has shared a specific page on one of their social networks. In most cases this is Twitter. We are also all familiar with the “starred results”, the results you either star in the SERPS or save as a Google Bookmarks. These usually show up at the top of the results. (more…)

Google gets fined €100,000 for privacy breach in France

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The Associated Press reports that France’s privacy watchdog CNIL has given Google a fine of no less than €100,000 ($141,300) for privacy issues in relation to Streetview.

The fine is apparently given for “improperly gathering and storing potentially sensitive data from Wi-Fi networks for its Street View application”. This means they have collected e-mail, passwords and other personal information while driving around France collecting the data. (more…)

Majestic SEO now able to find fresh back links within 24 hours

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Links! You need links! That is probably one of the major things a marketer hears when he or she is discussing the future and ranking possibilities of their websites. But where to get those links? And how to check if they are there?

The first paragraph you just read is something which many marketers will recognize and it is the reason for existence for many tools out there that give you insight in links. Tools that either use search engines like Google or Yahoo, tools that use other tools and tools that scrape the web themselves. All these tools have one issue however: is the link still there? And how fresh is the link. Majestic SEO, one of the tools that scrape the web themselves, now believe they have the absolute reign when it comes to freshest back link data. They claim that with their tool you can now discover backlinks which were created only 24 hours earlier. (more…)

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