I get asked many times weekly whether I think businesses should take Google+ seriously. The answer is always a big fat yes, not so much because of the power of the network, but because there is going to be a significant influence on all Google products, including search.
But there is more, as this infographic, made by Blueglass for Chris Brogan, shows us. (more…)
Last week at SXSW 2012 Guy Kawasaki got to ask questions to Vic Gundrota, the guy in charge of Google+ at Google. And asking is what he did. Find the entire talk below.
The sound is not perfect but it does give some nice insights. This also is the interview on which the Wall Street Journal bases its conclusions about the future of Google. (more…)
How do search and social get together? Well, Google is trying hard to make that work in Search Plus Your World and Bing is doing the same sort of effort, ‘less visible’ for us. But there are more ways. For example when Google buys a Social company and hires a social celebrity.
AllthingsD reports that Google has bought ‘Oink’ which is a product from “Milk”, the latest Kevin Rose product. According to AllthingsD’s sources the entire company is moving to Google, including Kevin Rose. (more…)
It is one of those days that articles pop up out of nowhere bringing ‘news’ that might ‘shake the search engine industries foundations’ like never before. It is one of those days that people try to point you at the same article over and over again.
As a blog owner who writes about search engines you immediately wake up on signals like that. What did Google do now? Which change did they make? So with excitement I started reading the article on the Wall Street Journal entitled “Google Gives Search a Refresh”. Here’s something big again! While reading the article I however got less and less excited and got more questions than answers out of it. (more…)
Google is the dominant force in many countries World Wide. In the UK Yahoo and Bing might have thought they still had a chance but that dream now seems to have shattered if we look at the numbers released by Experian Hitwise today.
Experian Hitwise shows us that Google Sites now account for almost 92% of all searches conducted in the UK in February 2012. That means Google has grown again, almost a percentage, whereas Bing and Yahoo saw a decline. (more…)
One of the most named points of criticism towards Google is their openness. In the past when you had a Googler at an event you were sure he or she was not going to say a word more than necessary.
In the past year or so this has changed. Google is much more focussed on openness. It might be triggered by the infringements they have gotten where especially the US government has complained about Google being to ‘vague’ or it might have been triggered by the fact that Google for many has become the ‘big and dangerous’ company and they want their brand image to go back to the ‘tech boys’ it was before.
Fact is they are a lot more open, or at least they seem to be. On conferences Googlers seem more open, Google is now giving us monthly updates on their changes, and this week they post a video of their Search Quality Meeting. An 8 minute video showing us the meeting it is all about, or as Amit Singhal says: “This meeting is the heart of what we do, what we approve, how we run search.” (more…)
I think most of us use Google Webmaster Tools to get extra information about websites and to add different kind of sitemaps. For some years now it’s possible to add extra users to a specific website in Webmaster Tools so that they can see the collected data to, edit settings, etc. At first it was a big hazzle to add new uers but since the beginning of March 2010 this is easy to do by just adding somebodies email address. (more…)
One of the ‘big names’ at Google at the moment is Amit Singhal. Singhal, who will be keynote at SMX London in a few months, is SVP of Search and has a big influence on where Google is heading.
Bloomberg Television’s Emily Chang spoke with Amit Singhal about the future of search. An interesting talk which you can see below. He talked about mobile, how search should evolve and he also addressed some of the criticism which has been out lately concerning privacy issues and new products like SPYW. (more…)
Google is on the move again making minor adjustments to the SERPS. Usually that means within reasonable amount of time we will be seeing more bigger changes at Google, so it is time to keep our eyes open again.
Yesterday we spotted that Google is now offering you the possibility to thank your Google+ friends who +1-ed an item so it would show up in your search results. Today we can highlight another three changes to how Google displays personalized results in the SERPS. (more…)
Google’s Panda Update now seems to be a monthly refresh of the Google Index, changing the search landscape constantly. It means that every month sites can either get more or less visibility.
For an SEO this can be frustrating. One month they are the winners, next month the losers. You can hardly make any predictions anymore, except for that your site needs to be ‘Panda proof’ all the time: you need the unique content and you need the value in the site.
Next to the Panda update there is the Venice update, which is focussed on improving local results in the SERPS. Sometimes things happen which you wouldn’t predict but are actually quite obvious. What was thought to be the last Panda Update showed some suprising stats in the UK for example. Searchmetrics calculated who ‘won’ and ‘lost’ in visibility. The biggest winners (Twitter, YouTube and the BBC) were not surprising. The biggest losers were: Amazon.com, Live.com and Apple.com. There is a logical explanation for that however: its the Venice Update. (more…)
Here’s another interesting small change I just spotted in the search results. We are now all familiar with the “your friends X,Y,Z and x-number of people +1′d this” texts below the search results. It shows us who of our friends, or to be more specific who from our social circles, have shared, or +1ed a specific search result. It is part of personalized search and it will trigger most of the searchers to click on a result quicker than they would if there was just a title, link and description.
Now Google seems to have taken another step to make things more personal and to ‘push’ Google+ at the same time. Next to a ”your friends X,Y,Z and x-number of people +1′d this” text it now says “Thank them”. And you can “thank them” on Google+ off course. (more…)
Google is constantly trying to get a grip on spam, both on the organic as on the paid side of search. They have entire spam teams dedicated to finding and getting rid of those trying to falsely manipulate not just the results, but also the users.
One of the main areas in which spammers are active is free web hosting. Many spammers try to get cheap and easy ways to create hundreds of sites all aimed at spam. That means that those who think they have a nice site for cheap money might just be part of a network which is not considered to be ‘clean’ by Google. Potentially that could hurt also the ‘innocent’ ones.
Google therefore is now trying to protect these users and is giving hints and tips to those free or low cost web hosting services to make sure spammers will not abuse them. (more…)
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