Orkut. Google now indexes SVG. Google Adds Semantic Search Results with Google Squared. The holy grail in web search technology is to be able to ask a simple question, in natural language, and get a simple answer.
With Google's announcement today of Google Squared coming to its search results, the search engine has moved one step closer to that grail. According to the company's blog from one year ago today, when Google Squared first launched, "unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn't find webpages about your topic -- instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet.
" Now, that functionality is being added to Google's traditional search results in two ways. First, simple queries, such as Catherine Zeta-Jones date of birth, are getting some simple answers. Google Updates Social Search. There was a post earlier today from Google stating that they're ramping up the social elements in the SERPs.
For those not following closely, Google started it's social search elements (as a vertical and as a universal). Social and real time search have been making waves since 2009 or so. None of the major players really lasted. Google Search Becomes More Social, Integrates Flickr, Twitter & Quora. Google has launched major updates to Social Search, integrating information from Twitter, Flickr and Quora throughout its search engine.
The search giant launched Social Search in 2009; the feature integrates search results from your friends at the bottom of the search page. It utilizes social profiles connected to your Google Account to deliver items like photo or blog results that come from your friends. Google's now making some prominent changes to Google Social Search, and it is announcing three new websites that will appear prominently in social search results. We had a chance to speak with Mike Cassidy, product management director for search, about the changes.
The first major change is that Google Social Search results will no longer appear only at the bottom of the page, but will instead be "blended" throughout the page. Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets. Google: "Expect Some Big Changes Here Very Shortly" A WebmasterWorld thread links to some comments left by a Googler at YCombinator.com named moultano.
This Google warned of big changes coming to Google really soon. SEOs and Webmasters take this as a sign to be prepared for something major. Moultano from Google said: At the organizational level, Google is essentially chaos. In search quality in particular, once you've demonstrated that you can do useful stuff on your own, you're pretty much free to work on whatever you think is important. CONFIDENTIAL! Looks Like “Google +1″ Was Just Accidentally Revealed (Pic) No, Google Not Testing Infinite Scroll Web Results. Update: It seems like this was caused by a Chrome extension named FastestChrome.
So Google is not testing infinite scroll in the web results. Matt Beck, a reader, emailed me a video of Google testing a form of infinite scroll in the search results. Infinite scroll is when you do not have to click the next page button on the search results to see additional search results. Instead, scrolling down will automatically load more search results. Google Social Search Coming To Google Images. Google vs. Facebook: Who's Right & Who's Wrong? A week ago, Google made changes to its Terms of Service that effectively blocked Facebook from importing a user's data from Google without offering reciprocity.
Ever since, the two companies have duked it out in public, with public statements, comments on blog posts and even a warning that Facebook would "trap" your data. We spoke with a few members of the data portability community to see what they had to say about the debate between these two big companies and what it means for the rest of us. It's a Game of Strategy Eve Maler (aka XMLgrrl), host of the User-Managed Access group among other things, started off by reminding us that "Facebook's end-users are not its customers; they're the product.
" While Google's relationship to its end-users is much the same, she said, "it has developed a strategic stance on privacy and data portability that accepts and promotes greater user control of the personal data it sees, and this allows Google to capture the high ground in this debate. " Blue Arrows Hit Google Instant. Did you notice the blue arrow that’s showing next to the first result in Google’s listings?
It’s part of the new keyboard navigation system that rolled out for Google Instant this week. A reader contacted us about the arrow that he started seeing, and that caused me to see them for the first time myself. Google Instant: Impact on Search queries. Webmaster Level: All Webmasters, you may notice some changes in you Search queries data due to the launch of Google Instant.
With Google Instant, the page updates dynamically to show results for the top completion of what the user has typed, so this means people could be seeing and visiting your website much faster than before, and often without clicking the search button or hitting “enter.” While the presentation of the search results may change, our most important advice to webmasters remains the same: Users want to visit pages with compelling content and a great user experience. Showing more results from a domain. Webmaster Level: All Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site.
For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site: Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. We’re always reassessing our ranking and user interface, making hundreds of changes each year. Written by Samarth Keshava, Software Engineer. Google Suggest as a Context-Sensitive Spell Checker. This is one of the most useful features released by Google this year.
Google Suggest, which usually auto-completes your query as you type, is now also a spell-checker. Even if Google can't find popular queries that start with the words you've typed, it will still show a "did you mean" entry that corrects your spelling mistakes. The most impressive thing about this feature is that the spell checker is context-sensitive, so the suggestions are actually relevant. Google’s Shot of Espresso, Caffeine: SEO Response.
At the beginning of June 2010, Google initiated the Caffeine update: a complete search engine restructuring. Google Caffeine indexes content at a faster rate. i.e. every day, globally. Since the Google update, many sites have noticed a moderate to severe drop of traffic. In the past, the updates of Google’s search engine could take weeks or months. Old content, whether the content was still accessible or not, remained listed. This, in turn, gave site traffic and ranking, even if the page no longer existed. SEO Response Studies show the higher the ranking, the more traffic a site gets. Example: Day 1: You post an article on your site. Within a week, your fresh article that helped you rank in the 1 st position is now on the second page and quickly being buried. If your site has turned into a sieve and you’re losing traffic, you need to find out why before you chose which way to aim the largest part of your efforts. Google.
Cloning Is Lame. Google Should Do It To Facebook Anyway. Small companies clone big companies all the time. And by clone I don’t just mean steal a basic idea. I mean clone almost literally – they just plain rip off every single feature and hope for the best. It certainly saves time on user testing. Big companies, particularly big tech companies, don’t do this as much. Pride and ethics come into play at an individual and team level. Instead they tweak a little here, add a little there, and launch it as a variation of the original. And most of the time it doesn’t work very well. But pure clones work well. Caffeine: Google Finally Brews Its New Pot Of Web Results — 50% Fresher. Google MayDay Update – A Closer Look At Impact. By now, most of us know about the big change Google performed this past month to the algorithm known as the “Mayday” update.
We know also that it directly affected deeper page content and long tail SEO. Several people, including Brett Snyder over at SEER Interactive have come out with opinions on its impact on their sites, with mixed messages coming from across the industry as to whether there was a positive impact or a negative impact. I took it even further though, and have studied the impact by comparing multiple months and year over year across four client sites involving over 24,000 pages of content, and 248,000 site visits that came to those sites via more than 69,000 keywoord phrases.
Don’t Be Fooled Now before I go any further, I need to say that you may not know that I was a crime statistician a couple decades ago, who learned that you can make statistics prove anything you are seeking to prove. Other Factors to Consider. Google Cache URLs To Be webcache.googleusercontent.com? Google. It’s Official: Google’s Proposal For Crawling AJAX URLs is Live. Today at SMX West, Maile Ohye from Google confirmed that Google is indeed now crawling AJAX pages that use the standard proposed last Fall.
The documentation is live on Google Code and you can also take a look at my recent article about how to implement the standard and its pros and cons. Maile mentioned that the Google Web Toolkit team is eager to help with any implementation questions over at their community forums. If your site uses AJAX and have uncrawlable URLs due to a hash mark (#) as part of the URL structure, this implementation is likely worth looking into. Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Google Experiments With Paid Inclusion & Does “Promoted” Meet FTC Guidelines?
Just when you thought paid inclusion was finally dead with holdout Yahoo getting out of the space, it’s come back from the most unlikeliest of sources: Google. Below, a look at the experiment plus reexamining the FTC’s guidelines about disclosing paid ads. Google social search discontinued. Introducing Google Social Search: I finally found my friend's New York blog! Your friends and contacts are a key part of your life online. Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. Google Openly Profiles SEOs As Criminals. If we can stop talking about nofollow and PageRank sculpting for a second, maybe we can openly talk about the bigger story of last week’s SMX Advanced. The one that has to do with Matt Cutts taking the stage during the You&A and openly stating that Google profiles SEOs like common criminals.
I was naïve in my youth. Web Elements.