Eric Schmidt can always be woken up to make a remark which might just go around the world. So when he took the stage at LeWeb 2011 last week our ears were wide open. And we were not disappointed.
Next to a lot of ‘commercial’ talk from Schmidt there were a few lines which drew the attention. For example he stated:
“The social signal, the people you ‘hang with’ is actually a ranking signal”. (more…)
I’ve always been optimistic about the intentions of search companies and the possibilities for more competition in the European search market. At the beginning of this year I wrote a post on State of Search named What Bing needs to bring to the table in 2011 Sadly at the end of this year I have to conclude search in Europe has even more become a one company show. Nor Bing, nor any of the other competitors like Yandex, Yahoo!, Blekko or Wolfram Alpha has taken even the smallest slice from Google of the search pie. (more…)
Last week YouTube announced not only a new design for YouTube, but also a new feature which will replace the old “YouTube Insights”: YouTube Analytics.
With YouTube Analytics YouTube aims at getting video creators more involved. With video becoming more important not only because YouTube is the second largest search engine out there, but also because videos show up in Universal Search, it is a welcome feature. After all, more insights in your statistics can help you make better videos, which get more views and thus a better visibility on the web. And it can drive traffic to your website.
Time to take a closer look at the new YouTube Analytics. (more…)
Last year Facebook rolled out a feature which gave many people the creeps. From that point on you could get a suggestion from Facebook if you had put up a picture with a friend in it. The suggestion was that you would tag that friend. The creepy part was that Facebook already had recognized the friend and had the tag ready to go.
It lead to some pretty big discussions left and right about whether or not Facebook should do this. Especially the fact that it was an opt-out feature was important here. At that time Google already mentioned they too knew how to do face-recognition, but they were hesitant to use it, because of privacy issues.
Google has now waited an appropriate amount of time since the Facebook discussions and has decided to go and use the technology. But in a ‘good’ way. (more…)
Whenever Eric Schmidt talks we always keep our ears open, because the former CEO of Google will either say something extremely clever or something extremely controversial. So when he sat down for an interview with Gwen Ifill at the Washington Ideas Forum in Washington, D.C., on October 5, 2011, we kept our ears open. Did we hear or miss something…? Well, you be the judge first, is there something he said which is controversial? Let us know…
Google uses many signals in ranking. Sometimes the rankingfactor “trust” is mentioned. But what is meant by that? Matt Cutts decided to explain. There is no ‘trustrank’, but they are looking at how believable the reputation of a page is. Google uses a lot of different words for that.
SEOBook has a very nice set of infographics which they publish regularly. This one is all about how Google killed the long tail with stuff like Google Instant, localization, updates like Mayday and Panda, verticals, scrapers and the ‘not provided’ keywords.
Are they right? (more…)
The year is almost over and the new year is approaching rapidly. That new year, 2012, might not start off as well for Google as hoped. Google can expect a more than 400 pages counting document from the European Commission (EC) with objections and allegations of abuse of dominance.
Based on a complaint which goes a few years back from search engines Foundem, eJustice and Ciao!, the EU started investigating Google about a month ago. Their complaints now apparently have lead to a document of accusations against Google.
Google knows the accusations are serious because Eric Schmidt has been sent out to travel to Europe to pay a “courtesy visit” to the European Commissioner Almunia this week. (more…)
Google has decided it wants to share more often the changes it makes to improve the search quality of their SERPS, which means algorithms and SERPS. Last month we already mentioned several changes. Google now feels we should be updated each month. That’s why they will be giving a monthly update on their blog.
This month they again made clear they have improved their search. Another ten changes, some more important than others. The most important ones? More autocomplete predictions, fresher and more complete blog search results and original content. (more…)
Both Google and Facebook have major privacy issues. And both of them made deals with the FTC to kind of get a grip on that. But who is worse, Google or Facebook? Let’s take a look… (more…)
Google has released a video following up on their video about improvements to search. They now look at the “evolution of search”. To be honest, its much more about the Evolution of Google than the evolution of search, but its still a very interesting video to watch.
It’s been a few weeks since Google announced changes to the Adwords Quality Score algorithm, and although PPC isn’t my main discipline, I can certainly see the effect that update has had on the five PPC accounts I’m involved with. Some keywords that previously had a Quality Score (QS) of 5+ have dropped to a score of 2+, and this has had a direct effect on their placement, despite the same amount of budget spend. I know there’s still a huge school of thought that insists that PPC and SEO are separate entities and never the twain shall meet, but the latest move by Google is forcing the gap between the two to close even further. So, what is Quality Score and why is it so important? Well, if you’ve ever had working experience of Adwords, you’ll know that Google uses QS to ascertain both the relevance of an ad as well as the relevance of the keywords and landing page of the destination URL of that ad. Other determining factors include a decent Click Through Rate (CTR) as well as the ad/campaign’s historical performance. (more…)
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