Sometimes you run into a video which immediately triggers you. Like the video from Big Think, who interviewed Malcolm Gladwell. Galdwell is a staff writer with The New Yorker and tends to look at things from a different perspective. Which is something which triggers the mind.
In this case he talked about new technologies and he questions whether or not we need the new technologies. It is part of a bigger interview which you can see below. Here is the part where he talks about Google:
Google and Facebook have become huge competitors in the past few years. Where they started of as two completely different services on the web they now are connected like no other. The biggest battle is not between Google and Bing, but between Google and Facebook.
But a study performed by Pagelever shows something interesting: the two are also connected to each other in a way that they need each other. Social Media activities trigger search, but more importantly: search triggers Social Media. The study shows that 27% of Facebook’s referrals come from… Google. (more…)
Google is constantly looking for ways to improve their UI. In the past year the chances to the Google result pages (SERPS) have been immense. And it looks like we can be expecting some new changes soon. Again new tests have been found. This time its an ‘icon-less’ test.
In the test Google has gotten rid off all the icons on the result pages. Icons in the left sidebar and the +1 icon, the cached page link and the preview icon are all gone. That makes for a ‘cleaner’ result page. What is interesting is that you might be able to ‘opt-in’ on this test. (more…)
Every day a lot of people spot different experiments within Google. Google after is always trying to improve user experience. For his website Websonic.nl Michiel Wester collected some examples of the latest experiences spotted in the wild. He was kind enough to also share them with us here. (more…)
Google has got many different faces. There are all the great services they offer, for free, on the one hand. And on the other hand there is the (indirect) price you pay for the services: information. The information-part is what rises questions about privacy-issues. The question is how much we really care about our privacy, but that’s for another time. For now, look at the video below and see how a feeling about Google can be expressed. But are they right or wrong…?
It’s one of the many rankingfactors within Google: your urls. One of the talks I have a lot is whether people should use dashes or underscores in their urls because many sites have underscores. The answer is dashes off course. But why? Matt Cutts explains it in this video. Over at Searchengineland Matt McGee extracts the differences in behavior when it comes to dashes and underscores between Google and Bing.
Google’s updates always make sure we have a lot to discuss, with the recent Panda update off course being one of the most discussed updates. But in fact we shouldn’t be surprised when Google does an update, they have done many in the past. This infographic shows several of them. (more…)
Google’s biggest problem is not Facebook. It is not Microsoft or it is not Social. Google’s biggest problem is spam. And they have been fighting it for years, with Matt Cutts leading the way. Their ‘War on Spam’ is a fierce battle and sees a lot of obstacles, which are shown very nicely in this infographic by SEO.com. (more…)
Oh don’t we all love the fact that Google’s testing efforts have become much more visible to all of us? I was talking to co-blogger Jeroen van Eck about it yesterday, is Google doing a lot more testing, are the tests more visible than before or do we just report on them a lot more? Probably it is a combination. Now Google also starts to confirm tests, like in this case the tests with the infinite scrolling.
We have seen them before: tests with infinite scrolling Google results. No more pagination, no more being on page two, three or even 99 or more. All of us on one page: scrolling down will load the next ten links and so forth. (more…)
Bas and Roy were joined by Microsoft’s EMEA Marketing lead Cedric Chambaz. Cedric discussed the Bing – Yahoo transition in which the ‘backend’ of Bing and Yahoo is merged, making that you will find the same results on both websites. Cedric explained what they had done and also explained the difference between the transition and the updates to Bing. A must listen to really learn the insights on the transition.
After Cedric left Bas and Roy discussed some of the current developments with Google buying Motorola, patents and Google and Amazon as the main topics.
Missed it? You can listen to the show below with the shownotes.
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Searchmetrics earlier this week responded quickly to the latest move from Google in their algorithm updates. The Panda Update which was rolled out World Wide and thus in Europe last week saw winners and losers in the different countries.
We already saw the list of Germany earlier this week, now Searchmetrics has released the list of winners and losers in France and is giving us more details on the winners and losers in Germany. It turns out that if you lose, you lose big and if you win, you only win a little. According to Searchmetrics visibility can go down to almost 99%, but winning only means a few percentages gain. (more…)
People have been seeing tests (really!) from this for the past few weeks, but Google has now made it official: there is a new way of showing sitelinks, and not just that: instead of the ‘old’ 8 links, we now get 12 sitelinks.
The change was announced on the Google Blog where they showed the evolution of sitelinks: from a single row to a set of 8 links, to 12 sitelinks with descriptions. The sitelinks now look a lot more like ‘regular’ links. (more…)
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