Posts About ‘News’

Google Launches Knowledge Graph: Direct (not SEO-able) Answers

At SMX London last Monday Amit Singhal was already talking about the direction Google was going in. He there gave the example of the Taj Mahal. Are you looking for information on the monument or the closest Indian restaurant with that name. Google wants to give the right answer on queries like that.

Last night Amit Singhal gave the same example in a blogpost which announced the launch of the “Knowledge Graph“, it is the actual roll out of the tests we saw last week. With Knowledge Graph Google wants to “help you discover new information quickly and easily.” Simply said: its about answers, not the links. At SMX Singhal also said “Google has always been about giving the best answer on search queries” and this is an extension to that given.

The data Google is showing is gathered from specific sources which means the SEOs can’t ‘touch’ it and will be part of the discussion on whether Google is ‘stealing’ traffic from sites.

What is it?

The Knowledge Graph is about connecting people, places and things and giving facts and data about the search you are doing. You are getting more information on the query than just the links to other sites. Google is actually giving you direct information in the SERPS.

The Knowledge Graph does a few things:

Find the right thing
Google figures out, based on your personalized data, what exactly you mean when you are looking for the Taj Mahal. But next to that they also show a box with results which could be about the other meanings of Taj Mahal.

Getting the best summary
Google says it can now better understand your query so it will give you facts on the search you are looking for and primarily shows you the data which fits your needs best. This is what we spotted last week as a test.

Deeper and broader
Finally Google says they give us more specific types of information, right in the search results.

How do they know?

Two questions arise: how does Google know what exactly we want and where do they get the data from?

To start with the first question: Google studies the users and looks at relationships, not just in sites but all entities together. They are taking the social graph and the link graph and are combining the data from there together. In short: they are tracking our every move to figure out what kind of results we would like to have returned. Are you looking for (Indian) food or restaurants a lot? Your “Taj Mahal” search will show you more information on the Indian restaurants close to you, while if Google has figured out you love travel or culture you will see more about the monument.

The second question is where do they get that information? Google itself says they primarily use public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. But it could also be that the data comes from another site. Google says it “currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects.” And at Searchengineland Danny Sullivan noted that Amit Singhal has said: “Wherever we can get our hands on structured data, we add it”.

First step to the end of SEO?

In his post Singhal also points out this is “a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.” Google is moving into the direction the Wall Street Journal was talking about: giving straight answers and ‘ignoring’ the regular ten blue links.

Is Google really moving away from the ten blue links and are we as website owners doomed? Is this the actual first step to the end of SEO as we know it?

According to Singhal at SMX this kind of traffic is not taking away traffic from most sites but some sites might lose some traffic. That sounds like trying to be politically correct and it reminds me of the things that were said about the ‘not provided’ in Google Anlaytics: they said it would be a small percentage, but it seems to be growing.

SEO will not ‘die’ over this, but it does mean that search is becoming much more about being visible within the results, you need to stand out, so the focus of many search marketers will not just be on ranking, but also on optimizing for the SERPS: making sure you stand out.

Google however is step by step changing search with first Search Plus Your World and now this. Whether or not they are changing it in the right direction remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure: they are far from done…

Find more on Techmeme, Searchengineland and Google’s official post

Forget Pagerank and Mozrank, Majestic Launches “Flow Metrics”

Linkbuilders love Pagerank and Mozrank. Even though Pagerank has no influence on rankings it shows us what a site and a link on that site can be “worth”. But is it the best way to figure that out?

Majestic SEO probably has the most insights on the worth of any link out there since they have the biggest database of links on the web. Majestic SEO feels Mozrank and Pagerank as well as the AC Rank they have been using could use some improvement. So they decided to develop a new quality metrics “Flow Metrics” with two “scores”: Citation Flow and Trust Flow. (more…)

Yahoo CEO Thompson Resigns over Resume and Disease

Things are going in all directions for Yahoo these days, but its far from a steady road ahead. Even though the former search giant keeps developing they are also experiencing a lot of headwind.

Yesterday Yahoo announced that its president Scott Thompson has resigned. His place will be taken for now by Yahoo’s global media head Ross Levinsohn. Thompson has been under fire for lying on his resume but health issues are supposedly also part of the reason he is leaving.

Thompson came from Paypal after Carol Bartz was fired last September and thus has not been in charge for very long. Recently it rumors came up suggesting Thomspon had been lying on his resume. This is one of the reasons the CEO is stepping down. (more…)

Bing Homepage Experiment Annoys Users

In the last couple of days Bing tested a rather unusual feature on the homepage which annoyed a lot of users. Users of Bing that were part of the test got a whole lot of new opened tabs when using the search engine because every time after typing a query and hitting enter a new tab was opened with the results. And this was just in Google Chrome and Firefox and these users were lucky because users of Apple browser Safari had the results opened in a new window… that is…. for every query…. every time….

The result of the test was that a group of users complained on Twitter with some of them thinking it was a bug on the homepage. After to many complaints Microsoft decided to shut down the experiment. “We heard the feedback, and we’re disabling the feature now.” Microsoft sayed. (more…)

Google Testing or Rolling Out Sources Results? (UPDATED)

Google is giving us more and more information within the SERPS which makes that we don’t need to be clicking on results anymore or we get many different kind of results to choose from. It is a matter of time before Google is actually answering the questions we are putting up into our search bar.

As a matter of fact, I am now seeing some results which do just that: giving us semantic results in the right navigation of Google. Specific searches are giving me specific answers. The interesting part is that it is only showing it to me on Google.co.uk and they log me out. (more…)

Yahoo Offering Small Businesses a Marketing Dashboard

I do many different types of training sessions. Many of the times it is in company, which means that its a large company which centrally organizes which products and tools they use.

Sometimes I do ‘open’ training sessions. In these sessions I usually get small business owners. They are looking for ‘free’ or ‘cheap’ tools with which they can track their online performance: analytics of sites of course, but also online mentions, brand reputation.

There are many free tools out there which you can combine and which can be quite useful. Most of them however are very ‘global’, not local. Yahoo now decided to get into the local opportunities by offering (US only for now) a “Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard”, a tool which will show you how your local online marketing is doing. (more…)

Google News Gets A Fresh Up, Incorporates Google+

When it comes to breaking news the past few years all sites have been surpassed by Twitter. Something breaks, there is always someone on Twitter talking about it. People tend to get their first news from Twitter, because its fresh. They will then start to look for news services for confirmation and more information on the news they found on Twitter.

Google News has always been a place where Google gathers all the data from news sites, making it a place, they hope, where people can find anything on ‘breaking’ stories. But Google News until now ‘only’ showed news sites as sources. Google now adds elements to that to make it more ‘fresh’ and real time. It is just not Twitter, its Google+ they are putting in there. (more…)

Google Puts Even More Focus on Local and Fresh Content

It has become a monthly drill now: Google posting their updates, the SEO community reporting on the updates. The ‘openness’ Google is giving us at least helps us bloggers to write about some things . But it also helps us get some insight in the number of changes Google is making daily. Last year at a conference I explained that Google makes over 500 changes a year. At this rate it is more like 700 changes which the search engine is making every year.

This month Google announced another 52 changes. The biggest one off course being “Penguin”, which is not mentioned in the post as such, but is mentioned separately as “our latest algorithm improvement to help you find more high-quality sites“.

All the changes are mentioned here, but I wanted to highlight a few which might be extra interesting to take a look at. Google clearly seems to have had a focus on local and fresh content push in the past month. Also we need to keep looking at our snippets. (more…)

Be Careful Where You Put Your +1s, They Might be Domain Based

The +1 button, are you using it a lot? Expressing your appreciation for a specific page you landed on. Just like the Facebook “like” button. It is a nice way of saying you like a page, and it has some other benefits, namely your authority showing up in the SERPS.

But you have to be careful, because it can have a totally different effect as well and you might show up where you don’t want to.

Now with the Facebook button you know that it might show up on your Facebook profile page, which means your friends can see that you’ve liked that specific page and if you go to a specific page you can see which one of your friends liked that page or website. Just look in the sidebar of State of Search and you will see some of your friends who liked this site (hopefully ).

Google Plus largely works in the same way. You won’t see a “+1″ popping up in the G+ stream but you will see on a page if someone has +1-ed that specific page (also see the right sidebar). There is however one extra ‘benefit’ to a +1: they might show up in the search results. (more…)

Is Google in Android Trouble? New Accusations of Dominance Abuse

According to the Guardian Ilya Segalovich, co-founder of Russia’s leading search engine, Yandex, has said Google is “abusing its dominance to shut out competitors in cyberspace”. Segalovich places his remarks in response to comments made by Sergey Brin almost two weeks ago in the same Guardian where he said web freedom is facing big threats.

Interestingly enough Brin apologized for the words he used in that specific interview only a few days after the interview on his Google+ page.

The Yandex’ founders remark is another sign that Google has some hurdles to take in Europe when it comes to the image of their dominance.

The remarks are largely aimed at Android, which has been under fire for the past few days with an Oracle patent case going against them. According to Segalovich Android is a “strange combination of openness and not openness” (more…)

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