Since Bing is gaining market share in the US and a little in the UK and we are always complaining that we don’t have the ‘right’ Bing here in Europe I figured it was about time to take a closer look at the differences between the two. So I decided to put up my “user” hat and act as a user searching for current events and compare the two. In the coming weeks I will be trying to compare Google to Bing based on searches related to current events. That way I hope to get a real insight into what the real differences are between the two search engines. Today I made a video about the differences between Google and Bing when it comes to the Royal Wedding which takes place tomorrow in London. (more…)
State of Search
Posts About ‘Google’
Google adding other social sources to realtime, social efforts evolve
When Google first launched realtime search everybody got excited. Finally they picked up on Twitter and showed us real time results. For a short period there was a real hype going around (it even got me a link and quote on the BBC-website). And then it went quiet.
It turned out the realtime results in the middle of a page were mostly ignored by users. Then Google moved the realtime results to a separate page within Google, only showing the ‘real time block’ in special cases. All that time the real time results were mostly results from Twitter and Google’s latests indexed blogs. Now it seems that Google finally is broadening realtime search. A Quora thread and following Techcrunch-post indicate that Google Realtime Search now also shows results from Quora, Gowalla, Me2day, Twitgoo, and possibly others.
The thread-owner, Dan Leveille, noted that if you do a search for “site:quora.com” in the realtime search section you get Quora results from just minutes ago. You get questions, answers and votes. (more…)
A Google board meeting got videotaped! (In 1999…)
It’s rare that you actually get to see what is going on within the Google Plex. In some cases you get a peek of what happens after working hours (are there “after” hours at Google anyway?). It is even more rare that you can actually look into a Google Board Meeting.
Yet somebody decided to bring a camera to a regular board meeting which shows some announcements of new employees and the celebration of some birthdays, amongst which Larry Page’s. The video has been posted on YouTube. But before you get too excited: it is a video of 1999, when Google was still a relatively small company, way before Eric Schmidt had even heard of the company.
State of Search radioshow – episode 52: Google and Facebook in a grey privacy area
Bas and Roy were amongst each other in this show. They discussed a TV show in Holland which ‘outted’ Facebook tracking non-users and other privacy issues came by with Google Profiles showing addresses in the SERPS.
The shownotes are below.
(more…)
Google further personalizes Google News
“User intent”. These are two words I’ve written and said a lot in the past 1,5 years. It’s the ultimate goal of the search engines: finding out your user intent and delivering you with results based on that intent.
But “user intent” is really hard to grab. The search engines try to grab it as much as they can by making the results as personal as possible. In the US Google has made the next step in trying to find the intent by making search news even more personal. (more…)
Update: Google puts your address in the SERPS, shows it to your social circle
Update: The address shown in the SERPS is probably shown within your social circle (see below).
Original title: Google puts your address in the SERPS, quick edit your profile and more autocomplete
It is becoming more than a day job to keep track of all the changes Google makes to their SERPS. We therefore sometimes try to update you with the latest developments in the SERPS.
Today again three changes which Google made to the SERPS: you in some cases can edit your Google Profile straight from the SERPS and Google has made some changes to the autocomplete feature, making it also work on word-by-word. Most remarkable however is your address showing up in the SERPS. (more…)
Groupon and Livingsocial get some big time competitors: Google and Facebook
It is kind of a miracle that sites like Groupon and Livingsocial have been able to dominate the field of online deals for that long without any interference of the ‘big boys’ out there: Google and Facebook. Now within a short period of time both successful social deal – sites saw the two biggest players on the web enter their markets.
Google last year tried to buy Groupon but failed. Groupon felt is was just too successful to be bought out. So Google then decided to start working on their own offering site and last week Google offers made its beta-appearance. And if that wasn’t enough competition yet Facebook this week decided to launch “Social Deals“. (more…)
A look inside a Google data center
It is not that often that you get the possibility to look into what Google is doing. It is even less often that Google decides to make an actual video of what they are doing. So it is interesting and nice to see what Google is doing with it’s data centers. This video gives us an insight in how the data centers from Google work.
Google and Privacy sensitive DNS data: spam team doesn’t use it
With the news of the iPhone tracking you whereabouts spreading around the web and now also Google being looked at when it comes to Android Google felt it had to get a video re-launched from just two weeks ago. In this video Matt Cutts answers a question about what Google does with the DNS data they are getting. To be really honest: it is a bit of a bumpy answer with a lot of ‘I think’ and ‘maybe’ in there. He knows one thing for sure: the webspam team doesn’t use it. But that doesn’t mean other teams at Google don’t 
.
Pouring Water on the Panda – UK Observations and Data Cautions Regarding Price Comparison
Google Panda update – communicated as an algorithm update designed to de-prioritise sites that were deemed to be low on user trust, sites that lack original non-commercial content, and sites that create, or copy content as something to chuff around commercial content. Live end of February in the US and rolling out to the UK April 11th/12th with seemingly a major target in the crosshairs – that being the price comparison sector.
Says who?
Well SearchMetrics, and Sistrix, in their “visibility” analysis which was neatly summarised on Holistic Search (more on “visibility” later). However I have my doubts as to the true business impact to the price comparison sector, having worked closely with many of the sites reportedly affected. In addition whilst there’s a lot of popular media coverage about the 94% drop in “search visibility” reported for Ciao; there’s yet to be a formal statement from Ciao themselves. Plus eHow owners Demand Media; in a statement issued yesterday are keen to point out some cautions about the measured data… (more…)
State of Search radioshow – episode 51: Google and more with @nicholastott and @judithlewis
Bas and Roy were joined by State of Search blogger Nichola Stott and her fellow SEO-Chick Judith Lewis. Several different topics were discussed, from the Panda update, to how others look at SEO as being ‘closed’, while the SEO world in many cases is very open.
Also Google wifi issues in Holland, Google’s powerplant business, its revenues and even the royal wedding were discussed, a full show all together!
The shownotes are below. (more…)
Low quality is messing up my search experience, bring on the Panda!
As an SEO in my everyday life I am often confronted with the fruits of labor of my industry. As well as my clients I am a user of the world wide web and a subject of the results of search engine optimization. Lately I have been confronted with a few quests for information about different topics which highlighted the results of SEO as an industry. And as a user I have to say I was not satisfied with the results I was offered.
While searching I caught myself refining search queries to exclude specific types of results, ignoring results from the first results page based on certain signals and being generally disappointed by the quality of many results. I have seen so many low quality results it really messed up my search experience. (more…)
Stay up to date with the latest articles