Posts About ‘Google’

How Personalized is Google Search Really?

spot-the-difference

Search and Social is all about personalization these days. Google has seen the light: if we can personalize the web for our searchers, we will be the ones they turn to for their most relevant information. No more clutter, no more irrelevant news, no more content you didn’t want to see in the first place.

In basis Google’s idea, and Facebook’s for that matter, is not that bad. Personalized means for example that we get advertising tailored to our needs. Like cars? You’re getting cars! Do you have small kids? You might like these diapers.

But it goes a lot further than just the advertising. Clicking on links means you are telling companies like Facebook and Google what you like, or maybe even don’t like, based on the amount of time spent somewhere or your reaction on for example Twitter, Facebook or Quora. You are ‘feeding’ the search engines, social networks and other online companies with your data so they can give you as personalized data as possible. Data like for example search results. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Personalization can have its advantages but also its disadvantages. And how far is Google with this anyway? Are we all seeing totally different search result pages? Time to dive into this for a little bit. I’ll write about this in several posts over the next few weeks, trying to ‘unfold’ personalizations and the directions Google is heading in to. (more…)

Facebook now second-most popular in UK

facebook-europe

UKOM/Nielsen reports that for the first time ever Facebook surpassed Microsoft to become the second-most popular website in the UK. They grew 7 percent compared to a year earlier to 26.8 million visitors in Britain in May.

With that Microsoft falls back to the number three spot. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing sites combined were still good for 26.2 million visits from Brits. Google is still leading the dance with 33.9 million. Nielsen came to these numbers by looking at their panel of 50.000 people. (more…)

Google now showing +1 Counts and ads the local aspect: ready for spam?

+1-intro

Searchenginewatch reports that Google is making another step in integrating social into their search results. Again it has to do with the +1 button. Searchenginewatch editor Danny Goodwin noticed that Google has started to put number of +1′s sites have received in their search results.

I haven’t seen then myself, but Danny reports he saw it “Safari on a Mac and IE7 on a PC, not logged in to Google.” Which seems kind of surprising since until now you have to be signed in to Google to actually see the results. (more…)

Google: One Billion a Month

one-billion

One Billion, A one with nine zeros: 1000000000. That is a huge number. And that number is now connected to Google. Not because they make that cash (they make more than that), but because it is the number of unique visitors to their websites. A month.

The numbers are astonishing and come from Comscore who released the numbers this Tuesday. Comscore says it is the first time ever that a Internet company hits these kind of numbers. (more…)

Google Now Warning WordPress Users They Need To Update

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If you own a WordPress website and you haven’t updated your WordPress version lately you might be getting a warning soon. And no, this is not the warning you get when you open the WordPress CMS, it is a warning from Google.

Last week the first people started noticing that Google had sent them a message within Google Webmaster Tools saying they should update their WordPress versions. I myself today got an e-mail from GWT saying one of my sites needs an update. (more…)

New Google Tests Suggest Change Come Fast

Google-buttons-gone

Again some new Google tests have been found ‘in the wild’. The tests again are focused on the design. This time the changes came from around the globe, not just the US, which suggests they might be more than ‘just’ tests and that we could be seeing these changes go through a lot quicker than you might expect.

The biggest changes to the design in the tests which came out were the drop of the “I’m feeling lucky” button and the grey area on top and on the left in the text from the sidebar and a blue search icon. Some changes have been seen before which also is an indication that Google is getting more serious with this. (more…)

We’re doing Google’s job for them

Crawling: check. Indexing: check. Ranking: check.

You’ve all heard about the Google +1 button and the recent Schema.org announcement. Big news, both of those, but something is rubbing me the wrong way about all this newfangled stuff Google is pumping out. Namely that Google is getting us to do the hard work for them.

Google, as a search engine, exists to find all the information on the web (crawling), make sense of what it finds (indexing), and serve us with the most relevant content for any given query (ranking). This, in a very simplified nutshell, is Information Retrieval, and it’s what search engines do.

However, it seems search engines are actually quite poor at this. Or at least poor enough that they think they need us – the masses – to do the hard work for them. (more…)

Schema.org – What does it really mean for us

schema-org

Its now been just over a week since the three major search engines announced a unified approach to “create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages”. The announcement made almost simultaneously by Google, Bing and Yahoo is in simple language a way of standardising markup – such as microformats – for any party wishing to utilise the schema.org framework. According to the official schema.org site the requirement for a new schema was bourne out of three main issues

  • Webmasters – Schema.org provides a single resource for webmasters to go to rather than the existing fragmented approach.
  • Search Engines – Provides a centralised structured approach required in order to ‘improve search’. In real terms – pages can be interpreted as required with no potential for misintepretaton’
  • Users – With structured data – users will have a better experience from services such as search engines. We have already seen evidence of this via Googles Microformats adoption however further takeup of schemas.org should see this translate across multiple engines. (more…)

Where is all the talent going? Facebook gets most

talent-traffic

I always tell people that the generations below us will be the ones actually making big changes to the digital world because they are raised with online always being there, whereas we (or at least people my age ;) ) were raised without the Internet. It makes that you have a different way of thinking all together.

I always thought it would take decades, but the ‘new’ generation however is already here. I am growing older faster than expected maybe, but more important: the current generations already knowledgable in this matter. They have been raised digitally most of their lives. That makes them an interesting target for companies like Google and Facebook. Which means that there is a ‘war’ going on between the big digital companies to attract the best talents out there. This infographic by Top Prospect Data Labs shows us who is winning this war: Facebook gets the most talent so it seems, or at least, they are getting the most people, if they are the biggest talents also we can’t see in this picture. (more…)

Google +1 Button is here, Get your Data to Google!

+1-on-site

After the launch in beta of the +1-button Google yesterday finally launched the official button. Now everybody can put the +1 button on their website. On their blog Google showed how you can put the button on your site. The code which before was discovered by a Dutchman now is publicly available.

Most probably we will be seeing many sites implementing the button over the next few days. Chances are that the button will replace the Google Buzz button which still can be found on many sites, doing nothing.

The button will help make the pages on your website more visible for people who have friend who recommended the page. The page will then be visible in the SERPS via the “XXX +1′d this” tagline below the result. (more…)

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