Posts on State of Search about ‘News’

Marketeers, Google and Bing are forgetting to make use of the snow

Snow in garden

It’s snowing out there. There is no denying it. Take a look at my garden and you know that a big part of Europe is having some issues when it comes to the weather. Many parts are covered in snow which leads in some cases to panic. Trains stop working, traffic is jamming and flights are being canceled. In Norway they are used to this Lisa told me and they look at us with some pity, but here we are all a bit confused. How do we handle this?

And believe it or not, the weather is even influencing the way we search. Looking at search trends in the past few weeks you can see that the weather is keeping us busy. It’s another proof of how a marketeer should always look at what is going on around him or her and act on it. The same goes for the search engines. Google and Bing for example, they must be noticing something is going on. Right? Well, it doesn’t seem to be that way. Both marketeers as the search engines are not using the snow the way they could be using it to actually grab that “user intent” they’re always talking about. (more…)

Bing starts chase: updates on Maps, Local, Mobile, Travel, Image Search and Facebook

bing-android

If you live in or near San Francisco you can attend a lot of great conferences, gatherings or press events. One place I would have liked to have been this week was the Bing Search Summit.

At the Summit Bing presented a lot, and I mean a lot, of new features. This might be the actual start of the chase Bing is preparing towards Google.

One of the things Bing announced that Facebook likes will become more important in ranking but there are also changes announced on local, Maps, Mobile, Travel and Image Search. (more…)

Yahoo to cut another 700 jobs

It seems as if it’s about time that Yahoo really reconsidered their business model. And by the looks of it they really are. Search is shifting to Bing with more migration to be expected in 2011, but more is happening at Yahoo at the moment.

News is now out that Yahoo, with Christmas being around the corner, is playing Scrooge to a potential part of their staff. Apparently 5% of Yahoo’s current staff will not be having a very good Christmas. After weeks of speculation apparently about 700 people will today hear they will soon be out of a job. (more…)

More complaints about Google putting their own content first, but is that bad?

It’s a well known discussion: does Google favor their own sites above others in their rankings? And do they change these results manually instead of letting the algorithm decide? That kind of discussion has been around ever since Google is dominant in search, so almost for the entire last decade.

In the last couple of weeks however there seem to have been an increase in these kind of ‘rumors’. More and more competitors are complaining about Google changing the results in favor of their own. There is the law suit in Europe where the EU is looking into anti-trust matters (which by the way is instigated by a competitor which is owned by Microsoft) but that case has been going on for years already. Then there was the Harvard study which seemed to prove Google was putting their own links on top.

And last week there was the issue with Tripadvisor who’s reviews were not showing anymore on Maps, but it was unclear whether or not Tripadvisor had pulled these temselves. Now again, Tripadvisor comes forward. As one of the ‘competitors’ complaining about Google’s rankings. Together with amongst others health site WebMD.com and local-business reviews sites Yelp.com and Citysearch.com they are complaining that their links are being pushed lower on the results page in favor of Google sites.
(more…)

Tripadvisor blocks Google Places, but Google doesn’t know…?

Google has got a high local focus at the moment, if any prediction has to be made Google will most probably focus on social, personal, mobile and local. However, Google is not the first to go local. There were many verticals before Google who figured local was the best way to go. With Google focussing more on the local front these verticals might just not like what the search giant is doing.

It now seems as if the first signals of that are emerging. Tripadvisor, one of the biggest sites when it comes to reviews for local: hotels, restaurants but also flights and trip ideas, seems to have blocked Google from showing their results in Google Places. The strange thing is that Tripadvisor says it has blocked Google where Google said it was a bug and the reviews would return shortly. (more…)

Is this the new “Google +1″? Leaked screenshot might indicate more

We’ve been talking about “Google Me” several times before here on State of Search and almost always it has been ‘guessing’ about what it would be. Sure, we’ve seen some of the new social layers popping up, like social sitelinks, hotpot and “shared by“. But we’ve never seen the real “Google Me”, which is expected in spring 2011.

Last week it became clear that the internal name used for the project was no longer Google Me but “Google +1″. But still we didn’t have a clear idea of what it would be. But today Techcrunch received a screenshot which very well might be what we can expect from “Google +1″. (more…)

Google Maps Mobile goes 3D on new Nexus S

So Google did decide to make a follow up on their Nexus One phone. This week Google presented the Google Nexus S, manufactured by Samsung, with the new Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” operating system. Mobile is as important as ever for Google. That clearly shows. But the phone business itself doesn’t seem to be something which Google is really very interested in being in. However, that what’s ON the phone is where Google’s focus lies.

It is therefore interesting to see what Google does when it comes to mobile search, Android and mobile applications. One of them being for example Google Maps on Android. Today and yesterday the D Mobile conference takes place in San Francisco. There Android chief Andy Rubin gave a sneak peak of the new Maps application. And guess what: Google is going 3D. (more…)

Google enters E-books market, launches E-Bookstore and becomes an affiliate network

Today Google announced that it has opened its very own bookstore. Not one where you can get a cup of coffee, sit down and read through paper books, but an online bookstore. No, not like Amazon either. You can’t get books delivered to your house. It’s a store for e-books. And we are not just talking scanned books by Google here.

With over 3 million titles in store and with 4,000 publishers as partners Google has really made an effort here. Amongst the partners there are major industry names like Simon & Schuster and Penguin and the Oxford University Press and Reed Elsevier. (more…)

Google gets social layer by layer, next step: social sitelinks

The actual “Google Me” in its full potential apparently will not be there until spring 2011 but in the meanwhile it does look as if Google is pasting the new social layers onto their search results step by step. After the “shared by” layer which was spotted in October and Hotpot in November, this time its Google itself revealing another one: Social sitelinks.

Do a search for “Twitter” or “YouTube” and you will see a friends name, combined with, if they have it, a profile photo. (Be aware, it doesn’t seem to be happening on every search, try several times if you don’t see it or update your Google Profile) The link goes to the friends’ content on the specific website. In my case when I search for Twitter I get Danny Sullivan and Zee, chief editor of The Next Web. The weird thing is that Google also returns Bing and Yahoo as my friends… (more…)

The World Cup 2018 Bid: Trying to find out who has the most support

Today in Zurich Switzerland a lot of high placed people come together. They are all anxious to find out who will be organizing the FIFA World Cup Football in 2018 (and 2022, but we’ll focus on the 2018 one here). The final round is between four candidates: Netherlands/Belgium, Spain/Portugal, England and Russia.

During the day the four candidates can make their final impressions on the members of the FIFA who will be casting their votes in the afternoon. In the countries which are candidates this topic has been in the media a lot in the past few days. And almost everybody says the decision has not been made yet and that it all comes down to the last day. Also everybody says that its very important for the FIFA members to know how the support is within the countries. That is difficult to measure.

But maybe we can help the decision makers in Zurich a little bit to see if we can find out what the general feeling is in the different countries. And since we are heavy online users, we’ll be using some online tools to find that out. After all, we always say that online can tell us everything about how people feel, what they are doing and that we can predict based on these numbers. Lets see if we can find out who should be winning the bid… We’ll be using the four big sources on the web currently: Google, Facebook, Twitter and Bing. And we’ll be only using the free available tools they offer. (more…)

Google’s PR-damage-control: call in the special forces and change the algorithm

There was a lot of rumor this week about an extensive article in the New York Times which told the story of a merchant who seemed to be “winning” in the Google algorithms with a rather unusual marketing strategy: being mean to customers. Yesterday Google responded. And guess what, they went full force and called in the special forces and changed the algorithm…

Many sites picked up and analyzed the story. We also talked about it on the State of Search radioshow this Tuesday and Jeroen wrote a post “Bad publicity as fuel for your rankings” about it. Probably the best analysis of the article was given by Danny Sullivan on Searchengineland. (more…)

Page 38 of 42« First...102030...35363738394041...Last »