WebProNews

Tag: Search

  • Matt Cutts Is Disappearing For A While

    Just ahead of the holiday weekend, Google’s head of webspam Matt Cutts announced that he is taking leave from Google through at least October, which means we shouldn’t be hearing from him (at least about Google) for at least three months or so. That’s a pretty significant amount of time when you consider how frequently Google makes announcements and changes things up. Is the SEO industry ready for three Matt Cutts-less months?

    Cutts explains on his personal blog:

    I wanted to let folks know that I’m about to take a few months of leave. When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she’d get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as last month and as early as 2006. And now, almost fifteen years later I’d like to be there for my wife more. I know she’d like me to be around more too, and not just physically present while my mind is still on work.

    So we’re going to take some time off for a few months. My leave starts next week. Currently I’m scheduled to be gone through October. Thanks to a deep bench of smart engineers and spam fighters, the webspam team is in more-than-capable hands. Seriously, they’re much better at spam fighting than I am, so don’t worry on that score.

    He says he wont’ be checking his work email at all while he’s on leave, but will have some of his outside email forwarded to “a small set of webspam folks,” noting that they won’t be replying.

    Cutts is a frequent Twitter user, and didn’t say whether or not he’ll be staying off there, but either way, I wouldn’t expect him to tweet much about search during his leave. If you need to reach Google on a matter that you would have typically tried to go to Matt Cutts about, he suggests webmaster forums, Office Hours Hangouts, the Webmaster Central Twitter account, the Google Webmasters Google+ account, or or trying other Googlers.

    He did recently pin this tweet from 2010 to the top of his timeline:

    So far, he hasn’t stopped tweeting, but his latest – from six hours ago – is just about his leave:

    That would seem to suggest he doesn’t plan to waste much of his time off on Twitter.

    So what will Matt be doing while he’s gone? Taking a ballroom dance class with his wife, trying a half-Iornman race, and going on a cruise. He says they might also do some additional traveling ahead of their fifteen-year wedding anniversary, and will spend more time with their parents.

    Long story short, leave Cutts alone. He’s busy.

    Image via YouTube

  • Bing Adds New Twitter Search Features

    Bing Adds New Twitter Search Features

    Bing announced on Friday that it is rolling out a feature that lets you search for specific Twitter profiles or hashtags. If you just do a hashtag search, it will give you results for recent tweets for it like so:

    If you start your search with an “@,” it will recognize that you’re looking for a Twitter handle:

    It will also show tweets from other people related to that person’s Twitter handle.

    Bing is also including celebrity gossip from Twitter in regular celebrity searches. If you search for Ashton Kutcher, for example, it may include tweets from accounts like Us Weekly and and E! News.

    Bing and Twitter renewed their search deal in November, which continues to give Bing Twitter access unavailable to Google.

    Images via Bing

  • Apple Reportedly Buys Another Search Company

    Earlier this week, Apple unveiled its new operating systems for Macs, iPhones, and iPads. As previously reported, there are some significant search-related features and changes that would appear to suggest Apple is really looking to be more of a search provider.

    Now, TechCrunch is reporting that the company has quietly purchased “social search engine for places” Spotsetter, which will apparently serve as another cog in the Apple search machine. The cog, however, will not be in the form of Spotsetter’s actual product. They already shut that down.

    A blog post from the company six days ago says:

    With fondest emotions, I’m announcing that we are closing down Spotsetter app. We still have big dreams for personalized search for places and look forward to seeing great progress in this area. Thank you everyone for your support over the past years!

    TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez writes:

    The deal, we understand, was mainly about acquiring the technology and the talent of the two founders, ex-Google Maps engineer Stephen Tse and Johnny Lee (whose LinkedIn profiles also now point to their move to Apple).

    Some of the company’s team also joined Apple, but not all.

    Here’s a video from Robert Scoble looking at Spotsetter a couple years ago. The founders talk about the technology behind it:

    The product was essentially a local search tool that tapped into the user’s social media connections to deliver relevant results.

    Apple has acquired other search-related companies in recent memory. This should fit into the company’s broader search plan alongside Topsy and Cue.

    Image via YouTube

  • Is Apple Weaning People Off Google?

    Is Apple Weaning People Off Google?

    As you’ve probably heard, Apple revealed its new Mac and iOS operating systems on Monday – OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 respectively. While the company didn’t exactly pitch them as such, it revealed some new features, which some think are designed to take on Google in the search department.

    Do you think people will use Google any less as a result of new features unveiled by Apple? Let us know in the comments.

    Apple didn’t come out verbally swinging at Google Search, but it certainly had digs at Android. Working up to the iOS 8 presentation, CEO Tim Cook dropped some iOS stats: over 800 million iOS devices sold, 100 million iPod touch units, 200 million iPad units, and 500 million iPhone units. They’ve had over 130 million new-to-Apple customers in the last year.

    “Many of these customers were switchers from Android,” Cook said. “They had bought an Android phone by mistake, and then had sought a better experience and a better life. And decided to check out iPhone and iOS. Nearly half of our customers in China in the past six months switched from Android to iPhone.”

    According to Cook, 89% of iOS users are running the latest version of the OS, compared to 9% for Android. Over a third of Android users are running a version from four years ago, he said.

    “That’s like ancient history,” said Cook. “That means that these customers are not getting great new features. They’re not able to run your latest apps. They don’t get security updates that they may need to stay safe. This is particularly important for Android, which dominates the global malware market.”

    iOS 8’s Spotlight feature lets you pull down on the home screen, execute searches, and find matches from the app store, Wikipedia entries, news, maps, songs from your own library and iTunes, movie theater results, content for streaming, etc. In Safari, you can get Spotlight suggestions in addition to Google suggestions. They’re also adding some new search-related features to the App Store, including top trending searches and related searches. Photos also gets some search improvements, like search suggestions based on location, time, and albums.

    Of course Siri also got some improvements, including Shazam song recognition, the ability to purchase iTunes content, streaming voice recognition, and 22 new dictation languages.

    Apple’s new emphasis on search was more obvious on the desktop though, with Yosemite. Interestingly, while Google still appeared in the Spotlight feature on iOS, in Apple’s presentation, Microsoft told Danny Sullivan that Bing “is powering Spotlight for both the forthcoming versions of Mac OS and iOS.” Apple did show Bing for the Yosemite feature.

    The feature here lets you click on the magnifying glass and get a big search field right in the middle of your Mac’s screen. From there, you can quickly search through applications, documents, contacts, calendar, mail, messages, dictionary, calculator, system preferences, Wikipedia, Maps, News, App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks Store, “Top websites,” movie showtimes, and Bing. No mention of Google. We saw Apple get closer with Bing last year after distancing itself from Google in other ways like (most famously) dropping Google Maps, and adding Bing integration to Siri. Now, they appear to be taking it up a notch.

    Sullivan even speculates, “It’s also a sign that Apple might be moving to turning Siri into its own branded search engine. Spotlight is handling a variety of different search tasks, similar to how Siri can. That’s a big change, and it could be a move toward Apple further distancing itself from Google search by using Siri as a stand-in.”

    How long until Apple’s deal with Google completely evaporates, and Google is no longer the default for Safari, and is all but gone from the iOS experience without users having to manually add it?

    Really, it would seem that Apple is encouraging users to use any search engine BUT Google. On its OS X Apps preview page, Apple says:

    Safari now gives you more control over your privacy on the web. You can open one Safari window in Private Browsing mode — which doesn’t save your browsing history — while keeping others in regular browsing mode. So while you do your online banking privately in one window, your browsing history is still being saved while you surf in another. You can also now search the web using DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn’t track you.

    Apple also announced a new SDK for iOS 8 with 4,000 developer APIs. Who knows what will come from all of that? There’s no question that Apple’s latest iOS release is very geared towards developers, and that in and of itself could mean more iOS-first approaches for new apps, leaving Android playing catch-up, which wouldn’t be good for Google in general.

    Among its developer offerings are tools for developers to create experiences that enable users to interact with home devices (locks, lights, cameras, doors, thermostats, plugs, switches, etc) and health info. That’s some very personal stuff, and could eventually play into the search experience as well. It all points towards the iDevice as the controller to pretty much a person’s entire life. Google, of course, has its own approach to some of this stuff, but it could all end up turning into separate search engines for separate ecosystems. Apple users will have their search engines, and Android users will have theirs (Google), and ultimately, that could cost Google some market share and ad dollars.

    Of course there are plenty of iOS-using Google users who aren’t going to be willing to completely abandon Google, even if they have to make some adjustments manually. Bing has come a long way though, and plenty will likely be willing to give it a try. In fact, Bing is celebrating its fifth birthday, outlining just how far it really has come.

    Apple is showing no signs of reversing course, and making its software any more Googley. Google’s developer conference is later this month. We’ll see what they’e got up their sleeve.

    Do you think Apple can hurt Google in search? Share your thoughts in the comments.

  • Google Responds To Link Removal Overreaction

    People continue to needlessly ask sites that have legitimately linked to theirs to remove links because they’re afraid Google won’t like these links or because they simply want to be cautious about what Google may find questionable at any given time. With Google’s algorithms and manual penalty focuses changing on an ongoing basis, it’s hard to say what will get you in trouble with the search engine down the road. Guest blogging, for example, didn’t used to be much of a concern, but in recent months, Google has people freaking out about that.

    Have you ever felt compelled to have a natural link removed? Let us know in the comments.

    People take different views on specific types of links whether they’re from guest blog posts, directories, or something else entirely, but things have become so bass ackwards that people seek to have completely legitimate links to their sites removed. Natural links.

    The topic is getting some attention once again thanks to a blog post from Jeremy Palmer called “Google is Breaking the Internet.” He talks about getting an email from a site his site linked to.

    “In short, the email was a request to remove links from our site to their site,” he says. “We linked to this company on our own accord, with no prior solicitation, because we felt it would be useful to our site visitors, which is generally why people link to things on the Internet.”

    “For the last 10 years, Google has been instilling and spreading irrational fear into webmasters,” he writes. “They’ve convinced site owners that any link, outside of a purely editorial link from an ‘authority site’, could be flagged as a bad link, and subject the site to ranking and/or index penalties. This fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) campaign has webmasters everywhere doing unnatural things, which is what Google claims they’re trying to stop.”

    It’s true. We’ve seen similar emails, and perhaps you have too. A lot of sites have. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable says he gets quite a few of them, and has just stopped responding.

    It’s gotten so bad that people even ask StumbleUpon to remove links. You know, Stumbleupon – one of the biggest drivers of traffic on the web.

    “We typically receive a few of these requests a week,” a spokesperson for the company told WebProNews last year. “We evaluate the links based on quality and if they don’t meet our user experience criteria we take them down. Since we drive a lot of traffic to sites all over the Web, we encourage all publishers to keep and add quality links to StumbleUpon. Our community votes on the content they like and don’t like so the best content is stumbled and shared more often while the less popular content is naturally seen less frequently.”

    Palmer’s post made its way to Hacker News, and got the attention of a couple Googlers including Matt Cutts himself. It actually turned into quite a lengthy conversation. Cutts wrote:

    Note that there are two different things to keep in mind when someone writes in and says “Hey, can you remove this link from your site?”

    Situation #1 is by far the most common. If a site gets dinged for linkspam and works to clean up their links, a lot of them send out a bunch of link removal requests on their own prerogative.

    Situation #2 is when Google actually sends a notice to a site for spamming links and gives a concrete link that we believe is part of the problem. For example, we might say “we believe site-a.com has a problem with spam or inorganic links. An example link is site-b.com/spammy-link.html.”

    The vast majority of the link removal requests that a typical site gets are for the first type, where a site got tagged for spamming links and now it’s trying hard to clean up any links that could be considered spammy.

    He also shared this video discussion he recently ad with Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani.

    Cutts later said in the Hacker News thread, “It’s not a huge surprise that some sites which went way too far spamming for links will sometimes go overboard when it’s necessary to clean the spammy links up. The main thing I’d recommend for a site owner who gets a fairly large number of link removal requests is to ask ‘Do these requests indicate a larger issue with my site?’ For example, if you run a forum and it’s trivially easy for blackhat SEOs to register for your forum and drop a link on the user profile page, then that’s a loophole that you probably want to close.
    But if the links actually look organic to you or you’re confident that your site is high-quality or doesn’t have those sorts of loopholes, you can safely ignore these requests unless you’re feeling helpful.”

    Side note: Cutts mentionedin the thread that Google hasn’t been using the disavow links tool as a reason not to trust a source site.

    Googler Ryan Moulton weighed in on the link removal discussion in the thread, saying, “The most likely situation is that the company who sent the letter hired a shady SEO. That SEO did spammy things that got them penalized. They brought in a new SEO to clean up the mess, and that SEO is trying to undo all the damage the previous one caused. They are trying to remove every link they can find since they didn’t do the spamming in the first place and don’t know which are causing the problem.”

    That’s a fair point that has gone largely overlooked.

    Either way, it is indeed clear that sites are overreacting in getting links removed from sites. Natural links. Likewise, some sites are afraid to link out naturally for similar reasons.

    After the big guest blogging bust of 2014, Econsultancy, a reasonably reputable digital marketing and ecommerce resource site, announced that it was adding nofollow to links in the bios of guest authors as part of a “safety first approach”. Keep in mind, they only accept high quality posts in the first place, and have strict guidelines.

    Econsultancy’s Chris Lake wrote at the time, “Google is worried about links in signatures. I guess that can be gamed, on less scrupulous blogs. It’s just that our editorial bar is very high, and all outbound links have to be there on merit, and justified. From a user experience perspective, links in signatures are entirely justifiable. I frequently check out writers in more detail, and wind up following people on the various social networks. But should these links pass on any linkjuice? It seems not, if you want to play it safe (and we do).”

    Of course Google is always talking about how important the user experience is.

    Are people overreacting with link removals? Should the sites doing the linking respond to irrational removal requests? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    Image via Twit.tv

  • Google: People Expect Search Ads To Be Locally Relevant

    Google: People Expect Search Ads To Be Locally Relevant

    Google is sharing some new research on local search from Ipsos MediaCT and Purchased, which the search giant commissioned in order to get a better grasp on consumers’ local search behavior.

    The research looks at over 5,000 people, who completed an online survey or logged their smartphone search and in-store activities in a mobile diary.

    “Here’s what we learned,” says Bao Lam, Performance Ads Product Marketing Manager at Google. “People expect search ads to be relevant to their context and location. If they search for ‘car rental’ or ‘Mexican restaurant,’ they prefer ads that are customized to where they happen to be and that help them take the next steps in their shopping journey.”

    76% of participants said they search for local info using a computer or tablet from home, with 24% saying they do so from work, and 18% saying they do from hotels or motels. For smartphones, the numbers are: 53% from home, 51% on the go, and 41% from stores and malls.

    “More than 60% of consumers say they’ve used ads with location information like address, directions, phone number or a click-to-call button,” says Lam. “And, more than 70% of consumers who have used location information in ads say that information is important. Consumers choose stores close to where they happen to be. 72% of consumers who searched for local information on their smartphone visited a store within 5 miles.”

    You can find the full report here.

    Image via Google

  • Google: Links Will Become Less Important

    Links are becoming less important as Google gets better at understanding the natural language of users’ queries. That’s the message we’re getting from Google’s latest Webmaster Help video. It will be a while before links become completely irrelevant, but the signal that Google’s algorithm was basically based upon is going to play less and less of a role as time goes on.

    Do you think Google should de-emphasize links in its algorithm? Do you think they should count as a strong signal even now? Share your thoughts.

    In the video, Matt Cutts takes on this user-submitted question:

    Google changed the search engine market in the 90s by evaluating a website’s backlinks instead of just the content, like others did. Updates like Panda and Penguin show a shift in importance towards content. Will backlinks lose their importance?

    “Well, I think backlinks have many, many years left in them, but inevitably, what we’re trying to do is figure out how an expert user would say this particular page matched their information needs, and sometimes backlinks matter for that,” says Cutts. “It’s helpful to find out what the reputation of a site or of a page is, but for the most part, people care about the quality of the content on that particular page – the one that they landed on. So I think over time, backlinks will become a little less important. If we could really be able to tell, you know, Danny Sullivan wrote this article or Vanessa Fox wrote this article – something like that, that would help us understand, ‘Okay, this is something where it’s an expert – an expert in this particular field – and then even if we don’t know who actually wrote something, Google is getting better and better at understanding actual language.”

    “One of the big areas that we’re investing in for the coming few months is trying to figure out more like how to do a Star Trek computer, so conversational search – the sort of search where you can talk to a machine, and it will be able to understand you, where you’re not just using keywords,” he adds.

    You know, things like this:

    Cutts continues,”And in order to understand what someone is saying, like, ‘How tall is Justin Bieber?’ and then, you know, ‘When was he born?’ to be able to know what that’s referring to, ‘he’ is referring to Justin Bieber – that’s the sort of thing where in order to do that well, we need to understand natural language more. And so I think as we get better at understanding who wrote something and what the real meaning of that content is, inevitably over time, there will be a little less emphasis on links. But I would expect that for the next few years we will continue to use links in order to assess the basic reputation of pages and of sites.”

    Links have always been the backbone of the web. Before Google, they were how you got from one page to the next. One site to the next. Thanks to Google, however (or at least thanks to those trying desperately to game Google, depending on how you look at it), linking is broken. It’s broken as a signal because of said Google gaming, which the search giant continues to fight on an ongoing basis. The very concept of linking is broken as a result of all of this too.

    Sure, you can still link however you want to whoever you want. You don’t have to please Google if you don’t care about it, but the reality is, most sites do care, because Google is how the majority of people discover content. As a result of various algorithm changes and manual actions against some sites, many are afraid of the linking that they would have once engaged in. We’ve seen time after time that sites are worried about legitimate sites linking to them because they’re afraid Google might not like it. We’ve seen sites afraid to naturally link to other sites in the first place because they’re afraid Google might not approve.

    No matter how you slice it, linking isn’t what it used to be, and that’s largely because of Google.

    But regardless of what Google does, the web is changing, and much of that is going mobile. That’s a large part of why Google must adapt with this natural language search. Asking your phone a question is simply a common way of searching. Texting the types of queries you’ve been doing from the desktop for years is just annoying, and when your phone has that nice little microphone icon, which lets you ask Google a question, it’s just the easier choice (in appropriate locations at least).

    Google is also adapting to this mobile world by indexing content within apps as it does links, so you if you’re searching on your phone, you can open content right in the app rather than in the browser.

    Last week, Facebook made an announcement taking this concept to another level when it introduced App Links. This is an open source standard (assuming it becomes widely adopted) for apps to link to one another, enabling users to avoid the browser and traditional links altogether by jumping from app to app.

    It’s unclear how Google will treat App Links, but it would make sense to treat them the same as other links.

    The point is that linking itself is both eroding and evolving at the same time. It’s changing, and Google has to deal with that as it comes. As Cutts said, linking will still play a significant role for years to come, but how well Google is able to adapt to the changes in linking remains to be seen. Will it be able to deliver the best content based on links if some of that content is not being linked to because others are afraid to link to it? Will it acknowledge App Links, and if so, what about the issues that’ having? Here’s the “standard” breaking the web, as one guy put it:

    What if this does become a widely adopted standard, but proves to be buggy as shown above?

    Obviously, Google is trying to give you the answers to your queries on its own with the Knowledge Graph when it can. Other times it’s trying to fill in the gaps in that knowledge with similarly styled answers from websites. It’s unclear how much links fit into the significance of these answers. We’ve seen two examples in recent weeks where Google was turning to parked domains.

    Other times, the Knowledge Graph just provides erroneous information. As Cutts said, Google will get better and better at natural language, but it’s clear this is the type of search results it wants to provide whenever possible. The problem is it’s not always reliable, and in some cases, the better answer comes from good old fashioned organic search results (of the link-based variety). We saw an example of this recently, which Google ended up changing after we wrote about it (not saying it was because we wrote about it).

    So if backlinks will become less important over time, does that mean traditional organic results will continue to become a less significant part of the Google search experience? It’s certainly already trended in that direction over the years.

    What do you think? How important should links be to Google’s ranking? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    Images via YouTube, Google

  • LinkedIn Charges You To View Full Names, But Only If You’re Logged In

    LinkedIn Charges You To View Full Names, But Only If You’re Logged In

    For some reason, LinkedIn is hiding the last name of some members on profile pages when you’re logged in. This appears to be happening at least when you’re searching for a person on Google. As far as we can tell, it makes no sense.

    Darren Nix at 42floors pointed this out in a blog post, though I noticed it the other day as well.

    “This morning I had a call with someone I hadn’t met so I Googled their name and, inevitably, clicked through to their LinkedIn profile,” Nix writes. “I was bemused to note that, although the search result in Google showed their full name in the title, their profile page obscured their name until I ‘Upgrade for full name’.

    He goes on to note that when he tried the same thing in Chrome’s Incognito mode (not being logged into LinkedIn), the profile displayed the full name.

    This happened to be when I was covering a Yelp blog post. I was quoting the author of the post in my post, but for some reason Yelp’s blog only gives you the first name and last initial of is authors, as well as their titles. In this case, it was Justin O., Business Development. Naturally, I Googled “Justin O., Yelp Business Development,” and the first result was for the LInkedIn profile of Justin Overdorff. The name was fully visible on the search results page. When clicking over to the LinkedIn profile, however, like Nix, I was surprised to find a profile displaying his first name and last initial, while also being invited to “upgrade for full name”.

    When clicking to upgrade, you’re invited to “see full names to network effectively” by paying an annual fee of $99.95 per month or a monthly fee of $119.95.

    If you replicate the search and LinkedIn visit, you get the full name (for free).

    Odd.

    LinkedIn will release its latest earnings report this afternoon.

    Images via LinkedIn

  • Pinterest Gets Better At Vertical Search, Launches ‘Guided Search’

    Pinterest Gets Better At Vertical Search, Launches ‘Guided Search’

    Pinterest is positioning itself as more than just a place to pin cool pictures. It also wants to help you find ideas for things. It’s not as though people haven’t already been using it for that purpose (especially for recipes), but now the company trying to make it easier.

    Pinterest announced the launch of Guided Search to help people find good ideas for things like where to plan vacations, what to have for dinner, etc.

    “It’s made for exploring, whether you know exactly what you want, or you’re just starting to look around,” explains Hui Xu, head of the discovery team at Pinterest. “There are more than 750 million boards with 30 billion Pins hand-picked by travelers, foodies, and other Pinners, so the right idea is just a few taps away.”

    “Now when you search for something (road trips, running, summer BBQ), descriptive guides will help you sift through all the good ideas from other Pinners,” Xu adds. “Scroll through the guides and tap any that look interesting to steer your search in the right direction. Say you’re looking for plants to green up your apartment, guides help you get more specific—indoors, shade, succulents—so you can hone in on the ones that suit your space. Or when it’s time for your next haircut, search by specific styles—for redheads, curly hair, layers—to find your next look.”

    As we noted in January, Pinterest is getting more serious about search. That was when it launched an improved recipe search experience, enabling users to search for ingredients (like whatever is in their refrigerators), to find collections of relevant recipes. It also includes filters like vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, paleo, etc.

    The company considered that feature part of its “more useful Pins” initiative, which uses structured data (like ingredients, cook time, and servings) to display more info right on the pin.

    As Pinterest continues to make its search features more useful, it’s going to be even more of a go-to search destination for specific verticals. It will be interesting to see how many verticals it can make as useful as its recipe search.

    Guided Search is rolling out in English on iPhone and Android, and will hit the web and everywhere else “soon,” according to the company.

    Image via Pinterest

  • Google Starts Weekly Trends Roundup

    Google Starts Weekly Trends Roundup

    Google announced that it will be sharing “a regular look back” at some of the top trending searches each Friday. We’ll see if this lasts longer than the monthly lists of algorithms they used to post, or if people will become “bored” with them, and Google stops putting them out.

    Discussing last week’s trends, Emily Wood writes, “People were looking for information on Palm Sunday and Good Friday ahead of Easter; searches for both days were even higher than searches for the Pope himself. Turning to another religious tradition, with Passover beginning on Monday we saw searches rise over 100 percent for Seder staples like [charoset recipe], [brisket passover] and of course [matzo balls]. Alongside these celebrations, U.S. citizens observed another annual rite of spring: taxes were due on April 15, leading to a rise in searches for [turbotax free], [irs] and (whoops) [turbotax extension].”

    “But what made this year different from all other years? A rare lunar eclipse known as the ‘blood moon,’ when the Earth’s shadow covers the moon, making it look red, and which occurred on Tuesday. There were more than 5 million searches on the topic, as people were eager to learn more. (Hint: if you missed seeing the blood moon this time around, keep your eyes on the sky in October. This is the first lunar eclipse in a ‘lunar tetrad,’ a series of four total lunar eclipses each taking place six lunar months apart.)”

    “Game of Thrones,” (SPOILER ALERT), “who killed joffrey,” “”Mad Men,” “Boston strong,” “Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” “Chelsea Clinton,” “Gone Girl Trailer,” “The Fault in Our Stars,” and “Mrs. Doubtfire” also saw significant activity.

    Google is really emphasizing search trends lately. Last week, they launched email notifications for Google Trends.

    Image via Google

  • Should Apple Replace Google Search With Yahoo On iPhones And iPads?

    Rumor has it that Yahoo is focused on trying to convince Apple to switch the default search experience on iOS to Yahoo rather than Google.

    Would you like to see this happen? Let us know in the comments.

    Kara Swisher at Re/code, who frequently reports on chatter from within Yahoo, has sources who say CEO Marissa Mayer and SVP of mobile and emerging products Adam Cahan are leading an “aggressive effort” to convince Apple to do just that. Swisher writes:

    A number of Yahoo insiders I have talked to said her plan to pitch Apple on the idea as its marquee mobile search partner is far along. The company has prepared detailed decks, including images of what such a search product would look like, and hopes to present them to Apple execs.

    That has not happened as yet officially and no deal is imminent — it’s just the big honking goal of the new Yahoo effort, said sources. Still, several said Mayer has already buttonholed a few Apple executives on the topic, including its powerful SVP of design, Jony Ive, who knows the former Google exec well.

    It’s worth noting that Yahoo already provides default data for the iPhone’s weather and stocks apps, and Apple has tried to distance itself from Google reliance in the past. I probably don’t have to remind you about the time they dropped Google Maps in favor of their own maps product (with less than ideal results).

    Google is said to pay over a billion a year to Apple, but Yahoo has hardly been shy about throwing money around since Mayer took over. The company has pretty much been on a non-stop acquisition quest.

    Still, it could be hard for Yahoo to make a legitimate case to Apple when its own search product is powered by Bing, though Mayer is apparently determined to get away from that too.

    Danny Sullivan, who has been covering search for eighteen years now, doesn’t see it happening.

    “The biggest challenge Yahoo has is that it lacks any solid search technology. Sure, Yahoo has some for very specialized things,” he writes. “But the core technology to sift through billions of pages across the web and ferret out relevant results? Yahoo gave all that up as part of its deal with Microsoft years ago.”

    Mayer is said to hate the Microsoft partnership, and Swisher has reported in the past that she has the company working on two secret projects that would help it become more independent. The code names are “Fast Break” and “Curveball,” and they “could potentially get the company back into algorithmic search as well as search advertising,” the report said.

    Yahoo has also recently switched over to Yelp listings for its local search reviews, which could sit better with Apple than Yahoo’s previous offering (even if it doesn’t with business owners) Local search is, of course, very important to the mobile experience.

    Yahoo released its Q1 earnings report this week, with revenue up 1% year-over-year. Search revenue was up 5% at $445 million. Ex-TAC, it was up 9%. It was actually Yahoo’s ninth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in search revenue ex-TAC. Paid Clicks increased by 6 percent compared to the first quarter of 2013, and price-per-click increased approximately 8 percent compared to the first quarter of 2013.

    As Yahoo likes to show with acquisition after acquisition, it has pretty deep pockets. So does Google though, and it’s not going to just sit idly by.

    If Yahoo wants to really be taken seriously again in search, however, the kind of exposure being the default option on iOS would be a good start. You can say what you want about Yahoo’s search technology, but in the end is the average user even thinking about it? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t.

    Would you like to see Yahoo become the default search on iOS? Would you switch it? Let us know in the comments.

    Image via Tumblr

  • This Infographic Compares Search And Social Advertising Across 6 Important Metrics

    Kenshoo has put out an interesting infographic comparing the performance of search and social advertising.

    As it notes in the highlights, spend and advertiser revenue for both have been strong, social is growing faster, and both deliver positive ROI with revenue growing faster than spend.

    The most interesting part, however, is the side-by-side comparison of cost-per-click, spend, advertiser revenue, impressions, clicks, and click-through rate.

    kenshoo social and search advertising infographic

    On a related note, The Search Agency is sharing some findings from its “State of Paid Search” report.

    Image via Kenshoo

  • Google Still Needs Websites To Help It Answer Questions

    As Google’s Knowledge Graph continues to give users “quick answers” to their queries, it reduces the need to have to click over to another website.

    Google has quietly been serving a new kind of Knowledge Graph-style result, however, which actually appears to rely on good old fashioned organic results to fill in the missing gaps in “knowledge”.

    Dr. Peter J. Meyers at Moz.com, points out a few examples, and says they’ve been doing this since sometime in January.

    Typically, answer boxes that appear at the top of search results pages come from information from the actual Knowledge Graph, but look at this one for “september’s birthstone”:

    Knowledge Graph

    Just a plain ol’ eBay product page, which appears as the 8th regular organic result. Meyers shows another example with an Overstock.com page.

    He gives some other examples which point to more official sites like the American Gem Society, which makes a bit more sense than displaying an eBay result here (this was the case for “September birthstone”). One for “social security tax rate” displays an answer from IRS.gov. Again, that makes sense.

    The bottom line is that the Knowledge Graph simply doesn’t have enough knowledge to answer every query it needs to, so somewhat ironically, Google has to turn to the organic results it was downplaying in favor of the Knowledge Graph in the first place.

    Considering how often we’ve seen errors in the actual Knowledge Graph, you have to wonder what the potential for error in these newer types of answers is.

    Image via Google

  • Users Search For Specific Brands, Have To Scroll Past Competing Services From Google

    Website owners often complain that Google is pushing organic results down the search results pages by putting its own services at the top. Google’s response is something like, “You’re the corkscrew, and we’re the Swiss Army Knife.”

    One of our readers, by the way, had this to say in response, “Got it backwards google… knowledge graph is totally the corkscrew… fits awkwardly and you only need it once every 3 years or so and half the time it breaks the cork.”

    But now Google is even going so far as to put its own services in ads that appear above websites on searches for those sites’ actual brand names. That’s just messed up. Here you can see this in action with Google’s car insurance comparison tool appearing as “sponsored” over MoneySuperMarket. As illustrated in this Search Engine Roundtable article, this occurs on a an actual search for “moneysupermarket”.

    Google is also doing this on results for confused.com.

    Google launched the car insurance comparison tool in the UK in 2012, and then in France last year. Clearly they’re going above and beyond just trying to help users compare quotes, and into directly competing with specific brands that users are actually looking for.

    Remember when Google was a search engine?

    Image via Twitter

  • LinkedIn Recruiter Gets Searchable Custom Fields

    LinkedIn Recruiter Gets Searchable Custom Fields

    LinkedIn announced that it has made custom fields searchable in LinkedIn Recruiter, potentially making the search tool more useful for finding people based on very specific criteria.

    LinkedIn uses the example of a candidate who isn’t available until a certain date, and a recruiter that uses the custom field search to find him based on the noted date.

    To use the feature in a case like this, you would open LinkedIn Recruiter’s advanced search page, enter a date range, and in the “Availability Date” custom field, the candidate’s profile would appear.

    “Last year, we added Custom Fields to LinkedIn Recruiter to help you keep track of proprietary candidate information such as work authorizations or desired salary,” LinkedIn’s Prasad Gune says in a blog post. “Many Recruiter users found Custom Fields helpful to capture and organize customized information, but in order for them to be really useful, Recruiter users wanted to search them at a later date.”

    “To start, use the suggested custom fields, such as work authorizations and willingness to relocate, or create your own. For example, if you recruit for government agencies you may want to create a agencies is to create a security clearances field,” he says. “The possibilities for Custom Fields are endless, which is why I’m excited that they are now even more powerful because they are searchable.”

    LinkedIn recently started a series of tip videos for Recruiter, which may help you get more out of the service as well. Topics include saved search alerts, smart to-do lists, talent pipeline filters and custom search filters. You can find each of these here.

    Images via LinkedIn

  • Bing, OneDrive Team Up For Bing Rewards Promotion

    Can two segments of the same company team up? Aren’t they already a team? These are the questions we must ask ourselves as Bing teams up with OneDrive for a new promotion.

    Bing announced today that Bing Rewards members can use 100 credits to snag 100GB of free OneDrive storage for a year. That much storage usually costs $50 per year, but OneDrive is confident you’ll use Bing for at least a few days to rack up those credits to get free storage.

    For those unaware, OneDrive is the cloud hosting service formerly known as SkyDrive. Microsoft announced the name change back in January after it had decided to change the name instead of fighting over a trademark claim by UK network provider SkyBB. This is actually the second time Microsoft has had to change a product name with the Windows 8 Metro UI name being changed to the far less interesting “Windows 8 UI” after a trademark claim was filed by Metro – a German retail outlet.

    So, how good is OneDrive’s offer of 100GB of storage compare to other services? First things first, you might want to go with the offer if you already have 100 Bing Rewards credits. There’s nothing else of value to get unless you just want to donate a lot of money to charity. If you don’t have Bing Rewards or don’t want to save, there are some alternatives.

    First, Google Drive now offers 15GB of free storage. That storage is shared across both Drive and Gmail so you’re good if you don’t use email all that much. Another popular alternative is Dropbox which offers up to 18GB of free space, but there’s a catch. You get 500MB of storage for every friend referred so you’ll have to find and sign up 32 friends. The company also hosts a number of promotions around the year that can net you additional free space.

    In short, the Bing Rewards offer is probably the best way to get a lot of free storage. It just requires to build up Bing Rewards credits which can be earned through searching the Web via Bing. You’ll get 20 free credits for opening an account so might as well start now if you really want 100GB of online storage.

    Image via OneDrive/YouTube

  • Twitter Improves Search with New Filters

    Twitter Improves Search with New Filters

    It would be in Twitter’s best interest to become a true search destination – to have people check Twitter when they want to find photos, videos, and news on breaking topics. Search is just one arm of Twitter’s possible reach when it comes to being a true news distribution service. Simply scrolling up and down the timeline is the preferred method of use for most users, but every little thing the social network can do to improve search can only serve to make it more attractive.

    Enter a Twitter search update:

    Twitter has added a bunch of helpful filters to make wading through the vast waters of erroneous tweets a bit easier. Before, you could only narrow your search results to include people or photos only – but now you can refine your searches to pull tweets with videos or tweets with a newsy feel.

    Twitter has also added parameters to help you narrow down who you see in your search results – either all users or just people you follow, and either all users or only users in your area.

    Try it out – it looks like this one is a wide rollout. If you don’t yet see the new filters when you search, just give it time.

  • Google Adds Knowledge Graph Info To Regular Search Results

    Google has added a new drop-down box on some search results, providing information about the site the result comes from. It’s using the Knowledge Graph to provide this information.

    For example, this result from CivilWar.org provides such a box explaining that the site comes from Civil War Trust, a nonprofit organization. It even includes the founding date, and a little information about the organization itself, in this case, from Wikipedia.

    Google Knowledge Graph Results

    “As you choose the right search result for you — be that about the American Civil War or back pain — you want to know where the results come from,” says Google software engineer Bart Niechwiej.

    Google doe not display such boxes for all sites, and it’s unclear how Google chooses exactly which sites to include.

    “You’ll see this extra information when a site is widely recognized as notable online, when there is enough information to show or when the content may be handy for you,” explains Niechwiej.

    Still, there are plenty of results from well-known sites that aren’t displaying the boxes.

    Google says it expects to give more info about more sites as it continues to expand the Knowledge Graph. Let’s just hope that they also get better at keeping the Knowledge Graph accurate, as we’ve seen quite a few errors in search results. We wouldn’t want those spread further throughout the SERPs.

    Image via Google

  • Can Search Improvements Make Pinterest More Valuable To Businesses?

    Can Search Improvements Make Pinterest More Valuable To Businesses?

    Pinterest is becoming a better search engine, and it’s likely only getting started.

    Have you ever used Pinterest specifically to search for something? Do you think it is capable of providing helpful results for certain types of queries? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    This week, the company announced the launch of an improved recipe search experience. Recipes are one of the most popular verticals on the site, so this is a great place to start with the search improvements.

    “Now when you search for ingredients, say whatever is in your fridge, you’ll see a collection of relevant recipes as well as filters, such as vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and paleo,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews. “For example, if you search for ‘avocados, black beans and bell peppers,’ you’ll see recipes for quinoa salad, pork tenderloin with red bell pepper chili rub, and black bean quesadillas.”

    “This is the latest update to more useful Pins, which uses structured data, such as ingredients, cook time and servings, to display more information right on the Pin,” the spokesperson adds. “All recipe search results will show this rich information. Food is one of the most popular categories on Pinterest, and the new recipe search makes it easier than ever to find meal inspiration from some of the best recipes on the web, and plan great dishes tailored to your tastes.”

    “More Useful Pins” is an initiative the company launched last May. It added more info for product pins (pricing, availability and where to buy), recipe pins (cook times, ingredients, servings) and movie pins (content ratings, cast members, etc.).

    You can see where this stuff would serve to make Pinterest more efficient as a search tool.

    The new recipe improvements stem from the company’s acquisition of Pinterest-like recipe site Punchfork a year ago. Punchfork CEO Jeff Miller has led the development of this new product.

    It’s easy to see Pinterest expanding the strategy into more verticals. Travel, Local and Articles come to mind, given some of the announcements the company made last year.

    In November, it launched Place Pins, which show details like the address of a place, phone number, etc.

    Pinterest Place Pins

    In March, Pinterest announced its acquisition of Livestar, an app that helped people find local recommendations from friends and others. The product was shut down, and the engineering talent became part of the Pinterest team.

    In March, Pinterest launched redesigned article pins, providing more info like headlines, authors and story descriptions.

    Article Pins

    Search is a popular way to monetize a site, and the more Pinterest expands as a search tool, the better this tool could be for advertisers.

    The Wall Street Journal has an interview out with Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann. Asked about Pinterest’s business model, he says, “It will be getting them to discover the things they want. And it may be a product that they buy; it may be a service that they use sometime down the line. But it’s not purely transactional.”

    Earlier his month, Pinterest announced that it acquired VisualGraph, an image recognition and visual search company, consisting of two people who have joined Pinterest’s engineering team. Both have experience at Google. Kevin Jing began working for the search giant in 2004, and helped build some of its first machine vision applications. David Liu interned at the company, as well as at Facebook.

    “The acquisition of VisualGraph will help us build technology to better understand what people are Pinning,” a spokesperson for Pinterest told us. “By doing so, we hope to make it easier for people to find the things they love.”

    “On Pinterest, millions of people are curating and sharing billions of Pins everyday,” said Jing and Liu. “And these Pins are more than just images — they link to contents that can inspire and enrich people’s lives. We are excited for the opportunity to combine machine vision with human vision and curation, and to build a visual discovery experience that is both aesthetically appealing and immensely useful for people everywhere.”

    This technology should only help Pinterest improve its search experience.

    Danny Maloney is the CEO and co-founder of Pinterest analytics firm Tailwind. He tells WebProNews, “Pinterest is more of a discovery engine than a search engine, but I believe visual search could be a hidden gem of the Pinterest business model. Just as with Google or Bing, search on Pinterest tends to indicate users have a strong commercial intent. In many cases, search traffic over time leads revenue generated from pins to occur later in the pin’s life, even if it sees a good deal of viral sharing soon after being pinned.”

    “The acquisition of VisualGraph brings a couple of very talented engineers to Pinterest’s team,” he says. “I suspect most of their work is yet to be done, but the principle of Pinterest being able to understand images the way a human brain might is very powerful. Such capabilities should unlock better search results, improved content recommendations for users and an ability to organize and understand content at a much deeper level. Businesses will use this technology just by participating in the platform, as it will help their content surface to an increasingly better targeted audience.”

    Maloney says he expects the next steps in the evolution of Pinterest’s promoted pins ad product to come this year (which appears to indeed be the case based on what Silbermann told the Wall Street Journal). He thinks we’ll see the Pinterest ecosystem become “much richer” as third parties continue to build value-added tools that help businesses adopt the platform.

    “And of course, I expect deeper innovation on the consumer side, from continued localization bringing Pinterest to new countries to improved search and discovery capabilities and innovative new ways to organize content,” he says.

    Pinterest itself is only gaining momentum. It appears that it is not just a fad at this point. Content sharing to Pinterest increased by 58% last year, surpassing even email, according to a report from ShareThis (via MarketingCharts).

    Do you see significant business opportunities with Pinterest? Specifically with Pinterest search? Let us now what you think.

    Images via Pinterest

  • Stone: Jelly Will Probably Get A Search Feature, And Search Is Probably How It Will Monetize

    Biz Stone appeared on Bloomberg Television today to talk about Jelly. Bloomberg is sharing the interview, which gives us some insight into some possible directions Stone and his team may take the app in.

    Users have been wondering who all sees the questions that they are asking. It’s not everyone in their networks.

    “Well, not everybody,” said Stone. “My co-founder’s name is Ben Finkel, and we’re jokingly referring to this as Finkel-rank. What we’re doing is we’re taking all your social networks – now just Twitter and Facebook – we’re blending them together into one network and we’re sending your query out to a percentage of those people. And so, not everybody, but some of the people you know got that question.”

    You would think that search would be a key feature of a Q&A service like Jelly, and it may be eventually. Stone told Bloomberg that this may come later, and that they just don’t have that much info to search through yet.

    Jelly has indicated that more features are on the way.

    Search actually may be the key to monetizing Jelly.

    “I mean, right off the bat, just the fact that we’re thinking of ourselves as being in the search business, I think there’s a lot of opportunity,” said Stone. “It has been proven that is a good business to be in. It sounds strange to anyone in the business world, but it is kind of cart before the horse when you are dealing with this kind of business, because you really need to build up that base and prove that there is value before you can really begin to think about how you want to offer more value in the form of revenue generating products. So, we’re holding off, but we think there’s a lot of opportunity in the search space, mainly because there is an intent. When somebody comes to Jelly, they want something. And whenever somebody wants something, there is usually someone else who wants to get their attention.”

    We’ve already seen how brands can help out people on Jelly, so yes, there’s a lot of potential.

    Image via Google Play

  • This Is How Dumb We Must Sound To Google

    This Is How Dumb We Must Sound To Google

    College Humor has put out a pretty humorous video pointing out how stupid search queries would sound if you spoke them aloud to a person. In this case, Google is a person, played by Brian Huskey (NSFW language).

    Remember this next time you’re talking to Google Now.