WebProNews

Tag: Search

  • Google Maps Gives Live Traffic Updates To A Lot More Cities

    Google is beefing up its live traffic feature of Google Maps. The company initially launched it in 2008, but the list of cities that actually could take advantage of the feature left a bit to be desired. For many, that changes now.

    The company announced today that it is bringing the feature to 130 smaller cities across the United States, as well as the capitals of Columbia, Costa Rica and Panama. Now more people can see if traffic in their areas is moving fast, slowly, or somewhere in between.

    You can access the feature from a web browser or Android:

    Google says it has also improved and expanded coverage in countries like: Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

    Back in June, Google expanded the feature into: Minsk, Belarus; Riga, Latvia; Tallin, Estonia; Mexico City, Mexico; Lima, Peru; Bucharest, Romania; and Johannesburg, South Africa.

    You can see areas with traffic data here.

  • Google Shows That It Cares If Your Site Is Optimized For Smartphones

    Google is testing a new mobile search feature, which displays a small smartphone icon next to results for pages that have been optimized for smartphones.

    The feature was first spotted by Bryson Meunier, the Director of Content Solutions at Resolution Media, who blogged about it, showing the following screen cap:

    Google SERP with Mobile-optimized icon

    He says he was seeing the icon next to Wikipedia and IMDB results, as well as for other sites with mobile content.

    Meunier also updated his post with an official confirmation from Google about the test, saying, “We’re experimenting with ways to optimize the mobile search experience, including helping users identify smartphone-optimized sites.”

    Perhaps there are more approaches out there in the wild.

    Google has been encouraging webmasters to optimize their sites for mobile for quite some time. In recent months, they’ve really ramped up this encouragement with their GoMo campaign.

    It’s in Google’s best interest to see that content is optimized for mobile phones as mobile search queries begin to grow. It doesn’t reflect very well on Google or the Google user experience when the search engine points to pages that are awkward for users.

    It’s obviously in webmasters’ best interest to provide users with optimized experiences to keep them from leaving their sites before converting.

    Hat tip to Barry Schwartz for pointing to Meunier’s post.

  • These 5 Videos Will Make You A Google Shopping Expert

    These 5 Videos Will Make You A Google Shopping Expert

    Google has released the following four Google+ hangouts discussing Google Shopping. The first is an intro and overview. The second is an intro to the Merchant Center. The third is about creative and optimizing product listing ads, and the fourth is about Google Trusted Stores and setup.

    Google recently shared this Google I/O session video about “empowering local shopping” with Google Shopping as well:

    If you take the time to watch all of these, you should be pretty informed about the Google Shopping process.

    Remember, Google will complete the transition from Product Search to Google Shopping this fall, and it’s already August.

  • Google Upgrades Custom Search Element

    Google announced today that it has a new version of the Custom Search element, the HTML markup that lets you add rich search functionality to various pages of your site via Google Custom Search Engine.

    “The Custom Search element renders a search experience (search boxes and results pages) on your site’s pages,” explains Google software engineer Ying Huang. “By controlling the placement of the Custom Search element on your pages and configuring your CSE settings, you can create customized layouts that are tuned for the look-and-feel of your website.”

    The search user interface with the new version renders based on the settings stored on the Google Custom Search Engine servers, and users will no longer have to copy and paste new element code into their sites when they modify their CSE from the control panel.

    The new version is supposed to reduce page load times, which could have a small affect on your page’s actual rankings in Google. All element code is loaded asynchronously.

    “Client-side customization allows you to overwrite global CSE settings on a per-page basis,” says Huang of the new version. “For example, you can enable search history, disable auto search on page load, configure different Google Analytics parameters, and more. Customization is done through an easy-to-use HTML syntax which does not require any Javascript knowledge.”

    Google says it will continue to support older versions of the Custom Search element, for now.

  • Google Updates Toolbar PageRank Again

    Google Updates Toolbar PageRank Again

    Google has updated the Google Toolbar PageRank again, for the first time since May. Obviously sites are moving both up and down, but we’re not seeing a ton of complaints so far.

    A lot of people are talking about the update on Twitter. Some are more enthusiastic than others. There are a few interesting nuggets out there.

    One person thinks freshness is playing a role in higher PageRank. Google has clearly put a great deal of emphasis on freshness in recent months. Fresh content tends to get surfaced much more. Greater visibility means more chances to pick up links.

    Here is a sampling of the Twitter conversation. Hat tip to Barry Schwartz for noticing some forum discussion about the update.

    As with last time, I feel compelled to also share this Matt Cutts video talking about how to identify causes of a PageRank drop:

  • Structured Data Dashboard Comes To Google Webmaster Tools

    Google has added a new feature to Webmaster Tools called the Structured Data Dashboard. The purpose, Google says, is to provide webmasters with more visibility into the structured data that Google knows about for their site.

    It comes with three views, which will let you see things like:

    Structured Data

    Structured Data

    Structured Data

    The first view is Site-level view, which aggregates data by root item type and vocabulary schema. “Root item type means an item that is not an attribute of another on the same page,” Google’s Webmaster Tools team explains. “For example, the site below has about 2 million Schema.Org annotations for Books.”

    The second view is Itemtype-level, and provides per-page details for each item. “Google parses and stores a fixed number of pages for each site and item type,” the team says. “They are stored in decreasing order by the time in which they were crawled. We also keep all their structured data markup. For certain item types we also provide specialized preview columns as seen in this example below (e.g. ‘Name’ is specific to schema.org Product).”

    The third view is Page-level view, which shows all attributes for each item type on a given page.

    As the company notes, you can use the dashboard to verify that Google is picking up any new markup, or discover any issues Google may be having with old markup.

  • Bing Gets Facebook Friend Tagging

    Bing Gets Facebook Friend Tagging

    Bing has announced a new social feature, which allows you to tag your Facebook friends when you share a search you’ve performed.

    As you may recall, Bing launched a new design a couple months back, complete with some new social features, allowing you to place your search experience and Facebook experience closer to one another than ever before. This new feature appears to be just an extension of that, making use of popular Facebook functionality.

    “When searching on Bing, simply enter a question or comment in the sidebar and type the name of a friend on Facebook to tag him or her (you can tag up to five friends at a time),” explains Bing Social Program Manager Kim Vlcek. “With your permission, the question will post on your Facebook timeline, and your tagged friends will be notified so that they can pitch in and help you find what you’re looking for. Remember – you are always in control of what you share through the sidebar.”

    Have you used Bing’s social features much? Have you found access to Facebook friends from the search engine to be effective in helping you find what you’re looking for?

    This is just the latest in various companies’ attempts to make search more social. Last week, we saw a new feature (which may just be in test mode) where Google is placing more Google+ content into search results.

    Wajam, which you can install as a browser add-on has added new social shopping features.

  • Opening Ceremony London 2012: Google Doodle Celebrates The Festivities

    The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games is just hours away, and the world is gearing up for a couple weeks of sporting brilliance.

    Internet giant Google is joining in the festivities (while based in the U.S., it has operations all over the world), and is featuring an Olympics-themed doodle on its homepage today, celebrating the opening ceremony.

    Here are some things that happen during the ceremony, according to London2012.com:

    • The Head of State is received at the entrance of the stadium by the President of the IOC. Jacques Rogge will greet the Queen.
    • There will be a parade of athletes – a procession of all participating teams, country by country, in alphabetical order (except for the Greek team, which enters first, and the host nation, which marches last.
    • Speeches are made by LOCOG Chair Seb Coe and Rogge.Then, the Queen will be invited to officially declare the Games open.
    • The Olympic flag is carried to the stadium, and hoisted, while the anthem plays.
    • An athlete, judge and coach from the host nation each stand on the rostrum and, hold a corner of the IOC flag in their left hand. They each raise their right hand, and take the Oath, vowing to compete and judge based on the rules of their sports.
    • The ceremony ends with the entrance of the Olympic Flame, which is passed through the athletes to the final Torchbearer, who lights the cauldron. This signifies the beginning fo the games, and the flame burns throughout.

    This is not the first doodle Google has featured this week. The company ran one on Tuesday, honoring pilot Amelia Earhart.

    On another Olympics/Internet-related noted note, EDF Engergy and Sosolimited have teamed up to put on what EDF calls the world’s first social media-powered light show. It uses tweets, and turns them into a real-time light show using the London Eye, a famous Ferris Wheel in the city, and determines the mood of the tweets to dictate the color of the lighting.

  • Now You Can Google By Handwriting

    Google announced a new feature for mobile search, called Handwrite, which lets you search Google from your smartphone or tablet by simply writing your query with your finger, rather than having to type it out with the keyboard (or use voice search).

    Check it out:

    To enable the feature, hit “settings” at the bottom of Google.com in your mobile browser, and enable “Handwrite”. Once you’ve saved the setting, it should appear on Google.com (you may have to refresh).

    “We designed Handwrite to complement rather than replace typing: with the feature enabled, you can still use the keyboard at any time by tapping on the search box,” writes Google software engineer Rui Ueyama. “Handwrite is experimental, and works better in some browsers than others—on Android devices, it works best in Chrome.”

    The feature is available for iOS 5 and up, Android 2.3 and up phones, and Android 4.0 and up tablets. It works in 27 languages.

    Google released a similar feature for Google Translate earlier this year. It was impressive then, and it’s nice to see it make its way to Google’s flagship search product.

  • Google’s 3D Maps Imagery Hits iOS Before Apple’s

    In early June, Google announced that it would be releasing a fully explorable, 3D version of Google Earth. Today, Google announced that the imagery is now available for iOS devices.

    In case you missed it, here’s the entire presentation from last month:

    Here’s a shorter look at the imagery:

    The imagery has been available on Android devices for about a month, but Google has still managed to beat Apple itself at getting 3D imagery on iOS devices. Apple’s will come this fall with the release of iOS 6.

    Google’s imagery is now available on the new iPad, the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4S.

    “A map must be comprehensive and accurate no matter where you are or what device you use,” says Google Earth Product Manager Peter Birch. “We also believe maps can be useful in ways you might not have imagined. With today’s release of Google Earth for iOS you can literally fly through breathtaking 3D city landscapes and images and follow virtual tours of places you’ve never been — all with a simple swipe of your fingertip. It’s a new, and I think magical way to explore the world in which we live.”

    “Also new in this release is a ‘tour guide’ to show you interesting places to explore,” says Birch. “We’ve put together short tours of thousands of famous places and historical sites across the globe so it’s easier than ever to discover amazing places. Just pull up the tab at the bottom of the screen to open the tour guide. Each image highlights a tours or place of interest in the area you are looking. Click on an item and you will be flown there. As you fly in and around the sites, snippets from Wikipedia provide additional information about the location. It’s like having a local expert right beside you! The tour guide is available for all iOS devices running iOS 4.2 and newer.”

    The latest version of Google Earth for iOS can be found here in the App Store.

  • Google Crams More Google+ Into Search Results

    Google is showing an “actively discussed on Google+” link underneath some search results, which are (as you may have guessed) actively being discussed on Google+. It’s unclear what the criteria are for such a result displaying this, but it is out there.

    Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable blogged about the feature, after spotting some chatter about it in the WebmasterWorld forum. He shows a result for one of his own article, which shows the feature. He says it is a test, but I have been able to replicate it for that same result, so if it’s only a test, I guess we’re in the same test group.

    Actively discussed on Google+

    If you click the “show” link, it expands to look like this:

    Expanded

    As I said, it’s unclear what the criteria are for a post to surface this feature. This particular link is from June 25, and only has one comment (also from June 25). That hardly seems “actively discussed”.

    Meanwhile, if you look at some of the “what’s hot on Google+” content in the search results, you may be hard pressed to find one with the “actively discussed on Google+” label.

    At first, I thought maybe it was only for authorship-enabled content, like Schwartz’s (the reason his photo appears next to the search result), but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Check out this Laughing Squid post, for example. It’s currently in the “what’s hot” section on Google+. It has 500 comments, including some from this morning. That, I would think, would qualify as “actively discussed on Google+”. However, the result in a regular Google search provides no such feature, and it does include authorship.

    What's hot on Google+

    Coffee cup result

    Perhaps the test group lies not with a certain set of Google profiles.

  • Facebook: Why Do Web Search? Google Does It So Well.

    Facebook is officially not interested in doing web search. Officially. For right now.

    Take that how you will. The Sydney Morning Herald published an interview with Lars Rasmussen, Facebook’s Director of Engineering, and former Googler (he’s the guy behind Google Maps).

    Here is an interesting snippet from the interview:

    “I am working on something very specific which is super exciting but it hasn’t launched yet so I can’t tell you much about it,” he says.

    What it is not, he stresses, is a go-after-Google product.

    “There are occasional articles out there about how people either speculate about us doing web search or people encouraging us to do web search,” he says, dismissing these reports as journalistic scuttlebutt.

    “I can’t predict what will happen in the future but I don’t think it will make sense for us at this stage to even begin to think about doing web search. Google does that so well.”

    First of all, it’s funny that he says Google does that well, rather than “Google and Bing” or just “Bing,” considering that Bing is Facebook’s partner on web search and powers Facebook’s web search results. Perhaps that’s the former Googler in him.

    Secondly, any Facebook search product that will apparently soon be unveiled, doesn’t necessarily have to be a “go after Google product” to give Google problems. Look at Twitter’s search feature. It certainly doesn’t aim to kill Google, but it does fill a major gap in Google’s offerings. Google simply can’t provide the realtime search power that Twiter can, without Twitter (their deal fell apart last year), so Twitter has something to offer in search that Google doesn’t.

    See what's happening right now on twitter

    What other widely-used social service has data that Google doesn’t have access to? I think you know the answer, and it’s much more widely used than even Twitter.

    It wouldn’t do any of us any good to speculate too much about what Facebook’s search offering might entail, but the point is that it doesn’t have to be an all out web search engine in the image of Google, Yahoo, Bing and others. It can be something different, and still be very significant to the search market and the Internet at large. Facebook has something like 900 million users these days. Sites all over the web are connected to Facebook’s Open Graph. It’s looking like Facebook may soon play a greater role in ecommerce, as well as personal finance (and the buying of physical goods and services).

    All of this calls for a greater search offering than what Facebook has today. Google, by the way, could also be considered a competitor to Facebook in these areas.

    The major search engines seem to agree that social signals are significant to search. No company on the planet has stronger social signals than Facebook, and that has to be worth something to search. Perhaps it doesn’t make sense for Facebook to launch a web search engine right now, but I’m not sure I agree that it doesn’t make sense for Facebook to even think about doing so. Either way, when that many people are using Facebook, the social network is essentially a web of its own.

    By the way, Facebook has already started testing ads in the search bar. This may be a precursor to something larger.

    Hat tip to Matt McGee for pointing to the interview.

  • Safari Gets More Chrome-Like. Should Google Worry?

    Google’s Chrome browser has plenty to offer that its competitors don’t, but the biggest thing in my mind, has historically been the omnibox, which lets you simply enter a search query into the address bar to search Google. Ever since first using Chrome, it’s been a struggle to use other browsers.

    For a long time, Chrome was the only browser to offer this functionality, though some competitors have finally caught up in this regard. Firefox, for example recently began offering similar functionality. IE and Opera have released versions that perform searches from the address bar as well.

    Apple announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference last month, that its Safari also now has such a feature. Apple calls it SmartSearch. Here’s what Apple has to say about it on the Safari site:

    Now there’s one simple field for both search terms and web addresses. When you enter a web address, Safari takes you right to the web page — and even fills in the entire URL. Safari finds what you’re looking for in a faster and smarter way. As you type in the field, Safari stays one step ahead and suggests a Top Hit — the closest match to what you’re looking for. Safari uses pages from your bookmarks and history to find a Top Hit, so you find the right web page fast.

    It’s not quite Google Instant, as Chrome has, but it’s a step in the right direction.

    Apple has users used to the Safari browser on their iOS devices, so it’s possible that such a feature could sway some users away from Chrome and other browsers, but Google did also launch Chrome for iOS last month as well.

    Interestingly, there are reports surfacing today suggesting that Apple may have ended development of Safari for Windows, which certainly wouldn’t play into that increasing market share scenario. Not sure what to make of that. Frederic Lardinois reports for TechCrunch:

    What seems to be completely gone from Apple’s site now, though, is any mention of the Windows version of Safari. Indeed, it looks like Apple has removed all download links for Safari from its site for the time being. This could be due to the fact that Apple is currently highlighting Safari’s new features in Mountain Lion (which pre-installs Safari 6), or because Apple has indeed ended development of Safari for Windows. Windows users can still download the old version from Apple, but the link is hidden on the company’s support page.

    Apple’s latest version of Mac OS X – Mountain Lion – came out today, and with that comes the latest version of Safari (6). The Safari update has reportedly also been made available to OS X Lion users.

    Other new Safari features include (as described on Apple’s site):

    Share button
    The Share button is built into Safari, so it’s easy to share web pages using Mail, Messages, Facebook, and Twitter.

    Offline Reading List
    Safari saves the web pages in your Reading List so you can catch up on your reading even when you don’t have an Internet connection. If an article in your Reading List contains multiple pages, Safari fetches the pages and stores them, so you can read the entire article offline.

    Tab View
    Use Multi-Touch gestures to switch between your tabs. On the trackpad, pinching in reveals your open tabs. In Tab View, a two-finger swipe navigates between them.

    Password AutoFill
    When you log in to a website, Safari offers to save your password for AutoFill, so you don’t have to type it the next time you log in.

    View passwords
    If you forget a saved password, you can find it in the new Passwords pane in Safari. Use your system password to authenticate, and you’ll see all your passwords.

    iCloud Tabs
    Pick up browsing right where you left off — on your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, or Mac. iCloud makes your open Safari tabs available on all your devices, so you can access the last websites you looked at.

    Smooth scrolling
    Thanks to hardware acceleration, web pages scroll smoothly in the browser window even when your Mac is loading new web page content.

    Do Not Track
    Safari supports an emerging privacy standard called “Do Not Track.” When you turn on Do Not Track or surf the web with Private Browsing, Safari asks the websites you visit not to track you online.

    Rename bookmarks in the bookmarks bar
    Click and hold a bookmark or folder to rename it.

    Improved hardware acceleration
    With improved hardware acceleration, Safari renders text and graphics even faster.

    Faster performance
    Safari speeds up JavaScript performance by up to 6 percent compared with Safari 5.1.

    As far as search is concerned, it’s also worth noting that Baidu has been added as a search option.

  • Google May Soon Really Push This Knowledge Graph Thing In Front Of Your Face

    Google is testing a new feature for its Knowledge Graph results. Alex Chitu at Google Operating System shows what it looks like (above). He credits someone by the name of Maarten with the find.

    The top row of Knowledge Graph results, according to Chitu, appear only once you click on a new “explore more” link that appears in the side panel Knowledge Graph results.

    The test was running yesterday, as evidenced by the Amelia Earhart doodle present in the screen cap. It’s not clear how many users are actually seeing this. My guess is not many. Google, as it will often tell us, runs numerous experiments all the time, and ordinarily, they are to small sets of users.

    Matt Cutts talked earlier this year about how Google runs 20,000 search experiments a year. Many of those, obviously, never see the light of day.

    All of that said, Google has expressed a great amount of enthusiasm about what it has done with Knowledge Graph, so it would not be surprising to see them play it up even more in search results. The company seems to view it as one of the most significant things they’ve done for search in years. Google considers it to be a step away from keyword-based search. “Things, not strings” they like to say.

    With this kind of mentality, it could make a great deal of sense to put such an emphasis on these results, right below the search bar, and ahead of the traditional search results. It really wouldn’t even be all that surprising if they did this without having to click the “explore more” link. Of course, doing so could ruffle any number of feathers among the crowd of antitrust complainers, who would likely only see it as Google promoting its own product (despite the data actually coming from a variety of third party sources (most notably, Wikipedia, which is often the top organic result for such queries already).

    It is looking, by the way, like Google is about to make some change to its results in Europe, as a settlement with the European Commission regarding antitrust matters.

    It’s also questionable whether the majority of Google users would prefer this approach to search results. After all, Google has gotten to where it is today without such a layout, and historically a sense of simplicity in design (which seems to be withering away in recent years). Google always claims to put the user first, so I’m sure they’re studying any feedback from this test very, very closely.

    If feedback is positive enough, and people click around on the top row of results a lot, who’s to say they wouldn’t implement the layout without the link?

    Image credit: Alex Chitu

  • Google Gives You A New Way To See How Many Pages You Have In Its Index

    Google has released a new feature in Webmaster Tools called Index Status. The feature shows you how many pages you have included in Google’s index at any given time.

    The feature appears in the Health menu in Webmaster Tools. It shows how many pages are currently indexed, but also shows you a graph dating back a year:

    Index Status

    “If you see a steadily increasing number of indexed pages, congratulations! This should be enough to confirm that new content on your site is being discovered, crawled and indexed by Google,” Google says in a blog post. “However, some of you may find issues that require looking a little bit deeper. That’s why we added an Advanced tab to the feature.”

    “The advanced section will show not only totals of indexed pages, but also the cumulative number of pages crawled, the number of pages that we know about which are not crawled because they are blocked by robots.txt, and also the number of pages that were not selected for inclusion in our results,” Google adds.

    When you click on the Advanced tab, you will see something like this:

    Index Status Advanced

    Google says the data you get from the tool can be used to identify and debug numerous indexing-related issues your site may have.

    Of course, the company also touts the feature as a way to bring “more transparency” to the table, much like its recent, confusing messages about links.

  • Government May Hold Google Back In Mobile Search Innovation, Even With Competition On The Rise

    Earlier this month, Google was reported to have submitted a proposal to settle with the European Commission with regards to concerns expressed by the Commission’s head of competition, Joaquin Almunia. Details of Google’s proposal were not made public, but newer reports indicate that Almunia has added the condition that Google’s changes to its search results be applied to mobile search, as well as desktop.

    This is according to a highly-cited Financial Times report (registration required), which indicates that Google could face a huge fine (in the billions), if Google and the Commission can’t reach an agreement. They’ve reportedly been negotiating since Google submitted its proposal at the beginning of the month.

    The initial concerns laid out by Almunia, include Google’s displaying of links to its own vertical search services (as if Google’s competitors are playing the game so differently), Google “copying content from competing vertical search services and using it in its own offerings,” agreements between Google and partners on websites in which Google delivers ads, and “restrictions that Google puts to the portability of online search advertising campaigns” from AdWords to competitors’ platforms. You can see these concerns, as discussed by Almunia (verbatim), here.

    It’s clear that the mobile approach to search is only gaining in importance as more and more consumers reach for their phones first, when looking to perform a quick search. Ironically, competition for Google is greater than it has ever been in the mobile space (see recent Apple announcements), and any restrictions set forth by government agencies will only hold Google back in the competitive landscape.

    It will be interesting to see if longtime Googler, and now Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer will be able to make any kind of mark for the struggling Internet giant. If I had to bet on any executive being able to turn search around for the company, Mayer would be on the short list of possibilities. If Google has its hands tied by government restrictions, it could be an opportune time for any such competitor to make significant moves. Yahoo has already been trying to make a bigger mark in mobile search with Axis. Mayer, no doubt, has plenty more ideas.

    Microsoft obviously has plenty of its own ideas about mobile search, as Bing continues to gain market share, little by little.

    Realistically, however, Google has already won over so many search users, who have been using Google for so long, it’s hard to imagine the company’s share of the market dropping too drastically (at least in the near term). User experience can go a long way, but brands and habits can be pretty hard to break.

  • Wajam Aims To Make Your Online Shopping Experience More Useful

    Wajam is launching a new feature for social shopping. If you’re unfamiliar with Wajam itself, it’s a browser extension that adds social search results to your search experience across the major search engines and other sites including Amazon, Yelp, YouTube, eBay and others. The company has now partnered with Shopping.com to offer consumers a comparison shopping experience service from more than 3,500 merchants. Of course it also includes data from your friends, much like the traditional Wajam experience.

    “The biggest advantage of Wajam Social Shopping is that we are giving users reviews and recommendations from people they trust, instead of strangers,” CEO Martin-Luc Archambault tells WebProNews.

    According to Wajam, 90% of people consult with a friend or expert before making a decision.

    “I actually purchased a baby carrier after seeing a tweet,” says Archambault, when asked to provide an example of when he has used his friends online activity to help make a purchasing decision. “And I frequently book hotels based on my friends’ online recommendations.”

    Archambault says Wajam is working on mobile, but doesn’t have any news on a launch date.

    More on the Wajam blog.

  • Ads Are Coming To Your Facebook Search Bar

    Facebook search, an admittedly tricky beast to tame, might be getting a bit more annoying for some users. That’s because the company is apparently testing a new feature called “Sponsored Results.” You would probably understand them to be ads in your search bar.

    According to TechCrunch, the Sponsored Results will appear as users type a Facebook search. For instance, if I’m searching for a Starbucks page I may see a Sponsored Result for “Star Line Coffee House,” or something similar.

    You’ll only see Sponsored Results that are very similar and most of the time in competition with the real results. That’s because they’re not keyword based ads. Advertisers who want to buy a Sponsored Result will have target a specific page that people are searching for.

    Apparently, the Sponsored Results will be sold on a cost per click basis to advertisers and they can choose to direct the ad toward a page search, place search, or app search. Sponsored Results will only appear on the search drop down bar, not on the results page.

    Here’s what they will look like – image via TechCrunch:

    For advertisers, it’s just another way to target Facebook’s user base of nearly 1 billion. For Facebook, it’s a quick and painless way to generate new revenue. For users, we’ll have to see how they feel about it. Google’s been putting ads at the top of search results for years, and people don’t seem to be all that perturbed by it.

  • Bing Integrates Foursquare Tips Into Social Sidebar

    Back in May, Bing unveiled a pretty significant redesign of their search results pages. The new design, which launched in the U.S. on May 16th, features a three-column format. On the left, you have your traditional search results. In the middle you have “snapshot,” which features relevant information like maps and images. and on the right is Bing’s “social sidebar,” which incorporates data from Facebook and other sources to allow you to see recommendations from friends across various social networks.

    Today, Bing has announced the first new social sidebar integration since that big launch – and it involves location-based app Foursquare.

    Now, searches will include Foursquare tips in the social sidebar, which gives Bing users even more information from the social community.

    The tips will show the Foursquare icon and will also contain a link to the location’s page on the network.

    “The tips that we surface on Bing depend on the venue you are searching for and your location. For example, if you’re in New York your Starbucks search results would be specific to that area and different than the results that someone might see if they search in San Francisco,” says Bing.

    For Bing users in the U.S., the rollout begins today. They say that more Foursquare integration is on the way

  • Guess Which Yahoo Search Feature Marissa Mayer Loves?

    Although some have argued that to succeed, new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer must learn how to deal with a company whose main focus is online media, not search, that hasn’t stopped Mayer from taking to Twitter to express good things about Yahoo search.

    On her first day as CEO of Yahoo, Mayer tweeted that she’s a big fan of the big “Download” button the Yahoo puts at the top of search results when you search for a program:

    Is this #ExactlyWhatYouWant?

    As the Mayer story goes, she came up as Google’s first female engineer, and by all accounts she had a big part in the development of the company as a search behemoth. Now, barely a day after leaving Google, she’s already enamored with this little Yahoo search function.

    But let’s not go too deep into a tweet, except to say that it’s good that Mayer is already publicly getting behind her new company. It appears that they did butter her up a bit with some Yahoo baby goodies, as yesterday we learned that Mayer is also seven months pregnant.

  • Google Gets Beautiful California State Park Street View Imagery

    Google has added new Street View, 360-degree panoramic imagery for five state Parks in California, and refreshed Street View imagery for most of the state.

    Here are some particularly scenic areas, where Google is now providing some amazing imagery. I don’t know if it’s quite as impressive as the new Hawaii imagery, but it’s still pretty nice to look at.

    Yosemite:

    Yosemite Park

    Redwood National Park:

    Redwood National Park

    Sequoia National Park:

    Google state park imagery

    Death Valley National Park:

    Death Valley National Park

    Joshua Tree National Park:

    Joshua Tree

    Bixby Creek Bridge:

    Bixby Creek