An interesting (possible) job-hiring by Google became clear yesterday. It seems as if Google is about to hire Florian Rohrweck, an Austrian blogger and developer. On his blog he mentions he is about to sign a contract with the search giant.
So why is this special? Because Rohrweck got his job by digging into Google+ source code and revealing Google+ features, even some which have not been launched yet. Google figured the best way to shut him up was hiring him. (more…)
Russian search engine Yandex is slowly taking steps towards a bigger reach, inside and especially outside of Russia. After going public in May and changes to their search tools this is the first time Yandex moves towards social: they bought online newspaper generator The Tweeted Times.
The Tweeted Times is, like paper.li, a service which generates a ‘newspaper’ of items which were shared by your social connections, in this case people you follow on Twitter. The move seems strange but has everything to do with getting social search into Yandex. (more…)
Google believes Google Plus should be a reflection of the real world. And in the real world there are people in your environment which you may not want to see or hear all the time. So you ignore them.
Google today launched a new feature on Google Plus which does just that: ignore people. You won’t hear them, you won’t see them. But they will be there. It is a ‘light’ version of blocking.
Where blocking limits the way people interact with you, “Ignore” means people will still see your updates, can comment on your posts and is still ‘in the loop’ so to speak. (more…)
It took a while for Google to create this feature, and some like Alex Moss, even beat Google to it, but finally it is here: the option to share a webpage on Google Plus using the Plus One button. In the video below Timothy Jordan explains how it works.
It is simple. If you click the +1 button you get an extra option: share on Google Circles. If you click that you can add a comment, choose your circle and publish it to your Circles profile. (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…)
On State of Search we’ve reported earlier about Yandex as being one of the possible threats to Google’s current worldwide domination. Today Yandex has made a major step towards internationalization of the search engine with rolling out the new search platform ‘Reykjavík’.
Reykyavík is built to deliver search results based on the user’s language preferences. This means it will display more English results for users who often visit English web resources. The company calls this the ‘first step towards personalized search’, I call it the first step towards internationalization. (more…)
Original title: Is Google Partnering up with Amazon? Tests Suggest they are
Update: it seems as if a Chrome Plugin, “awesomescreenshot” might be the cause of these results showing up with certain people. This is not yet confirmed but could explain things. Google has not confirmed or denied anything was going on.
“Do no Evil” was a motto which was created a while ago. Everything which Google did had to be tested to that motto. Was it potentially evil? Don’t do it. Many believe that the motto is no longer in use and hasn’t been in use for a while. We’ll probably won’t know until another Googler or another Stephen Levy-type of journalist will report on it from inside Google walls. But if the tests some are seeing at the moment are true than another major group of Google-dislikers will probably arise.
Several people have mentioned on Twitter and in a blogpost that they are seeing “Amazon Results For…” on some of their queries. These results are placed on top of the regular search results, pushing down not only the regular results but also other shopping results. So far it is unclear whether this is a test, something Google is really doing or if it is a deal with Amazon or not. (more…)
We already noticed in July that there were Google Plus posts (public ones) showing up in the SERPS. Now Google has made it official: the latest update to Google Social Search are Public Google+ Posts. Google announced this on their blog.
You can now see results being accompanied by “NAME shared this on Google+”. So this is not direct content from Google+, but shared links through Google+. (more…)
When I first saw it I was a bit surprised. At first I thought I had set up some kind of alert. But I didn’t. Then I thought it must have been something which was there before, but I just hadn’t noticed it. It wasn’t, it is brand new.
Facebook has released a new feature which I personally feel is a smart move and a nice one, something worth competing with Google Plus. And something which can drive traffic. Facebook now shows you links to a Facebook Page when multiple friends post updates have mentioned that specific page. At the same time we are going to see some changes to the like button. (more…)
To be really honest, I kind of figured that the Google Book project to digitize the books world wide would die a slow death after Google saw a settlement on the topic declined in the US last year. But now all of a sudden its back. With a deal in a country where Google had a lot of troubles with the book project before: France.
The book project has been under fire ever since Google first started to work on it. Google was seen as the evil company trying to steal away the content from publishers and authors, resulting in several lawsuits world wide. (more…)
Over two years ago Microsoft and Yahoo! signed a deal to become partners instead of competitors in their shared domain of search. They formed the new Search Alliance. One part of the deal was that Microsoft’s Bing would become the search engine behind Yahoo!. The transition started in August 2010 in USA and Canada, but Europe has been waiting patiently in anticipation. Until today! Yahoo! is officially starting the transition merging their organic results with Microsoft (Bing) for the European properties including; UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. (more…)
After Microsoft published its latest quarterly earnings last month, their Bing search engine received a lot of criticism. Microsoft’s earning figures showed that the division which is responsible for Bing was making a loss of $2.6 billion in the last fiscal year.
That’s quite a big loss to make, but that’s nothing new to Microsoft. They have a history of launching business models at a loss in order to grab a large chunk of market share (Xbox for example). (more…)
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