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…)
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…)
I always tell my students that one of the main differences between Twitter and Facebook is that Twitter is much more text focussed (the 140 characters), where Facebook is much more visual. Next to that Twitter is much more “newsy” and the updates are less permanent.
I can stop saying that now, if Twitter gets people to use the service the way they want to. Their redesign is very much focussed on sharing your status and less on news so it seems if you take a look at the introduction video they released. Besides that, I hardly use the web-version of Twitter, do you? Let us know what your thoughts are with the new Twitter design.
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…)
It was a shock when it first showed up above the search results. And then it started to show up above all Google products: the black navigation bar.
This navigation bar gives direct access to search, images, Google+ and all other Google products. It also shows your settings options and how many alerts you have from Google+. That black bar however is about to disappear again. (more…)
Google is constantly on the move. We could fill our blog entirely with Google news and changes if we wanted. Small ones, big ones, useless ones and important changes. Google itself this week decided to tell us about then changes they made to their algorithms.
The common denominator in most of the changes is meta information and especially snippets. Google seems to be pushing meta information like snippets in their algorithm to be better able to differentiate the different results. (more…)
Last week at the Searchawards Majestic SEO was voted as being the “tool of the year”. The linkresearchtool however doesn’t stop there, this week at Pubcon they will be announcing a new website as well as a new feature which will please many programmers: OpenApps.
“Majestic OpenApps” is set up to carry the tool further and have others program applications which can work with Majestic. It is also a smart response to the closing of Yahoo Site Explorer. (more…)
Update: Google’s Matt Cutts has confirmed that Google is indexing the comments (see below).
Google seems to be indexing Facebook comments which are used on blogs. The Facebook Comments are setup using Javascript and iFrames which usually should prevent it from being indexed. The website Labnol.org however found some comments on TechCrunch which are indeed being indexed.
Some tests show however that not every comment is being indexed. So far we can see that the profiles that are indexed at least have to be open to the public and permit subscriptions. But even then not every comment is indexed. (more…)
It looks as if Google is (partly) changing the way they are making money. Where before they made money by advertising or sponsored items in their specific products (think for example the sponsored listings in local), they now are charging for products or usage of API.
Where the launch of the paid version of Google Analytics and the according to some related ssl-issue already gave people some topics to talk about, Google now has announced it will be monetizing yet another one of their products: starting January 1 2012 Google will be putting a limit on the free usage of the Google Maps API. (more…)
Google today launched a few major updates on Google+ making the service finally available for Google Apps users, which also means that businesses are now able to use it.
At the same time Google launched several new features for Google+. The most important one of those changes is “Google+ Ripples”, which will allow you to see how posts get shared around Google+ in a graphic way. Google also introduces “What’s hot” their own version of trending topics. (more…)
Things at Google are not really going smoothly at the moment so it seems. There is lots of talk about privacy, Google not living up to their mantra (don’t be evil) and they are looked at with a lot of critical sight.
The finding which Col Skinner (aka @SEOSherlock) did and which was ‘broken’ on the 3 Door Digital website by Alex Moss sure will not help. Google seems to have made a huge mistake in Google Analytics which could have major privacy consequences. Clicking on a link in the exit pages overview opens up a random domain. (more…)
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