“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: 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…)
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…)
With Google in the middle of working on changes in their strategy and Bing taking advantage by winning some market share in the US as well as in the UK it might be worth looking a bit to the east. There Yandex is slowly becoming a force which in the near future might be one we should take into account.
Yandex has been building on both their market share and their features steadily in the past year. And it is starting to show. They not only fired several features out there, they also launched their english version of Yandex.ru, Yandex.com. This version is pretty good to work with actually and might just be an interesting competitor to Google and Bing.
And Yandex is expanding in different ways. They have now announced it has implemented WebVisor, an analytics tool for tracking user behaviour on a website, which they bought late last year. (more…)
Germany was probably one of the countries which was the most difficult towards Google when it comes to Streetview. The Germans just didn’t seem to like the privacy concerns around it. At least, some Germans didn’t. And they now seem to have ‘won’.
According to Searchengineland Google has stopped all Street View cars from driving around and taking pictures in Germany. It is a bold move, especially after Google had recently won a case in German court which made Streetview legal in Germany. (more…)
In Milan, Italy, Google has lost a case which was started against them by an Italian businessman who was ‘suggested’ to be a fraud or conman when searchers looked for his company name in Google.
The autocomplete function from Google suggested that the company they were looking for was truffatore (“con man”) and truffa (“fraud”).
Google tried to “get out” of the claim by stating they are a hosting provider. That way they would be falling under the protection of the E-Commerce Directive’s safe harbour provisions. That protects hosting providers from claims like this. The court however felt the autocomplete function has nothing to do with hosting and was a production from Google. (more…)
Ask anybody on the web which companies scare them the most when it comes to privacy matters. In nine out of ten cases there are two names mentioned: Google and Facebook. After all, they are the companies that gather and hold the most information from its users.
Both companies also get taken to court once every few months by a country or some sort of commission. That can be for antitrust issues, but also for privacy matters, think Streetview in for example Germany. Google and Facebook however have now turned things around: they are suing France over privacy matters. (more…)
When Google launched +1 last week there were several people out there who believed it was an early version of Google’s April Fools joke. After all, every year Google tends to do one or more pranks to fool the community.
+1 didn’t turn out to be the joke, but on April Fools Day Google made up for that with several jokes. They introduced Gmail Motion, “a new way to communicate” with Gmail: controlling Gmail with your body. Based on that technology they supposedly built lots of new products in no time, with Google Teleport Search (in Chinese only) being my personal favorite. But they also showed us YouTube 1911 and they were hiring Google Autocompleter. Maybe not all as believable as possible, but sure a few you can at least laugh a little bit about. An overview. (more…)
Just when you thought Yahoo was gone and lost they wake up from the dead. At the same time SES New York is going on, at the other side of the US, in San Francisco, Yahoo organized a press event in which it announced: Search Direct.
Search Direct is a service which gives you the answers to your search queries before you hit the actual search button. Sounds familiar? Yes, it is much like Google Instant. Yet Yahoo takes a little bit of a different approach. (more…)
We have been waiting for their arrival for a while, but finally the ‘official’ Bing has landed on the mainland in Europe. In France to be exact. And this invasion is supposed to be the upset to a dominance of Bing as the major search engine in France. A huge task for the head of Microsoft France’s Consumer Internet Division, Gregory Salinger.
In an interview with the French newspaper Le Journal du Net Salinger expresses the high ambitions he and Microsoft have in France: they want to be number one. (more…)
More than half of UK residents are on Facebook. With over 62 million people living in the UK and over 30 million people on Facebook, it makes “being on Facebook” on of the main online activities in the UK.
According to Joanna Shields, Vice President & Managing Director, EMEA for Facebook, the social networking site has grown with over 4 million users in the UK since September 2010. With that they surpass the 30 million users. She said this at the Financial Times Digital Media and Broadcasting Conference which was held in London on March two and three. (more…)
Something is up with Google and profiles. Maybe the rumors which are going around at SXSW about Google newest social efforts, supposedly called Google Circles, might have some ground after all.
Last week I reported about the new Google Profiles lay out. Google really seems to be moving with the Profiles because The Next Web noticed that on the Profiles Help Page it says “All private profiles will be deleted after July 31, 2011.“. What is Google up to? (more…)
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