WebProNews

Tag: Search

  • Search Gets A Lot More Interesting On Jellybean [Google I/O]

    Google announced the latest version of Android, Jellybean, today at Google I/O. Included are some search upgrades. There are three main search features new to the operating system: richer Knowledge Graph displays, better voice search (with what appears to be Google’s Siri competitor), and something called Google Now.

    As far as better voice search, it’s faster, is better at natural language and it talks back to you. More on Google’s Siri competitor here.

    As far as the Knowledge Graph goes, Google has simply made some design tweaks to the interface for Jellybean, with a beautiful, full-screen look at the increasing database of info accessible from search results.

    Google Now is Google’s way of getting you relevant information before you even search for it. Google has been talking about doing something like this for years, and it looks like it’s finally coming to fruition.

    Google Now “gets you just the right information at just the right time,” Google says, adding that it does so “automatically.”

    If you choose to allow it, Google Now uses your search history, your location history and your calendar to figure out what you might need, when you need it.

    For example, Google figures out when you commute from home to work, and back, and will tell you how long your route is, and give you a faster route if there is a lot of traffic. For public transit, it tells you when the next bus or train will arrive. With Google Places, it shows you bars and restaurants around you as you walk down the street, and will recommend things to order at them when you actually go to one.

    Google says Google Now will help you get to appointments on time. It will tell you when to leave, based on bus times, and how long it will take to get to the bus stop, how long the bus ride will take, etc. It will tell you if you have an upcoming flight you’ve searched for, and Google will keep you up to date on the status of the flight (delays, cancelations, etc.).

    Google Now

    Google Now also keeps track of your favorite sports teams without you having to set your favorites up. “You’ve already done that by searching on Google,” the company says.

    Users will be able to access Google Now by tapping on the search box or swiping up from the bottom of the screen.

    There are cards that keep tabs on your your various Google Now-related updates. Google says these cards will get smarter as you use them, and they will be adding more cards in time.

  • Do You Like The Google Experience Better This Way?

    If you’re not a fan of the black bar that appears at the top of the page when you use Google, there’s a trick to getting rid of it.

    Techno-net posted the following video showing it off (hat tip Barry Schwartz):

    To use Google without the bar, you can simply add ?esrch=Agad::Public to the end of the URL. For instance, https://www.google.com/?esrch=Agad::Public. If you start from there, you can search like normal, and your experience will continue without the black bar.

    So, if you really hate the black bar, I’d suggest bookmarking the link above, and start using that as your starting point for Google searches. Personally, I have no problem with the bar, and find that it helps to easily navigate to other services at times.

    What do you think? Black bar or no black bar?

    Techno-net also put up a video recently, showing off another navigation style Google is testing.

  • The Everywhereist Has A Brain Tumor, Names It Steve, And Blogs About It

    Geraldine, the travel blogger behind The Everywhereist, has a brain tumor.

    As we’ve been covering the SEO industry for many years, many of our readers may know her best as Rand Fishkin’s wife. Rand, as you probably know, is the CEO of SEOmoz, and as Geraldine explains, The Everywhereist is as much a love letter to her husband as it is a travel blog.

    That love is on display, probably as much as it has ever been, as Geraldine has blogged about her tumor, which she has named Steve.

    In her post, Geraldine writes:

    As for why I named it Steve, … well, duh. What else was I going to name it? There is no one to whom I am particularly close who is named Steve. I’ve never kissed a boy named Steve. I’ve never uttered the phrase, “Steve, I love you.” And Steve is nice and short and easy to add to a long list of unrepeatable words. Behold:

    “Fucking goddamn miserable piece-of-shit Steve.”

    See how well that works? It kind of rolls off the tongue, really. And considering how many big words we’ve had to deal with over the last couple of weeks, I’m inclined to stick to something short and sweet and monosyllabic (this must be how the Kardashians feel).

    Rand comments on the post:

    Fucking goddamn miserable piece-of-shit Steve.

    Hey, look at that. It DOES roll off the… er… keyboard.

    I’m really proud of you KTL. You’ve been a trooper, and you’ve been so awesome to me these last few weeks. I love that you wrote this, too. You know it’s been tough for me to keep it secret, and I almost feel like part of the reason you’re publishing is to make me feel better. Thank you. I love you. I promise to be (mostly) nice and patient with your Mom while we wait at the hospital.

    p.s. We’re not religious, so mentions of various deities may confuse us.

    Rand has also been tweeting about the situation:

    Geraldine says the doctors are confident the tumor is not a not a glioma, but rather pilocytic astrocytoma. Characteristics of this, according to the National Brain Tumor Society, which Geraldine linked to, include:

    • Slow growing, with relatively well-defined borders
    • Grows in the cerebrum, optic nerve pathways, brain stem and cerebellum
    • Occurs most often in children and teens
    • Accounts for two percent of all brain tumors

    The good news, Geraldine says, is that that the doctors say there’s an 80% chance that Steve is benign, and that even if the tumor is not benign, “odds are he’s still very easily treatable.”

    Finding out a loved one has a brain tumor is tough news to hear. I know. I’ve lived it. I can’t imagine what it must be like to find out you have one yourself. These two have clearly kept in good spirits about the whole thing, or at least as good as anyone could keep. Considering the circumstances, the outlook seems pretty positive.

    Best of luck to Geraldine and Rand.

  • Google Has A Class To Make You Less Stupid At Search

    Google announced a new online course for learning about how to become a Google power searcher. The course consists of six free 50-minute classes with interactive activities and opportunities to connect with others using Google Groups and Google+ (including Hangouts On Air).

    Those who pass the post-course assessment will get a printable Certificate of Completion, which the company will email you.

    “Our course is aimed at empowering you to find what you need faster, no matter how you currently use search,” says Google Education Program Manager Terry Ednacot. “For example, did you know that you can search for and read pages written in languages you’ve never even studied? Identify the location of a picture your friend took during his vacation a few months ago? How about finally identifying that green-covered book about gardening that you’ve been trying to track down for years?”

    This, Ednacot says, you can learn in these six classes.

    “Power Searching with Google blends the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) learning format pioneered by Stanford and MIT with our social and communication tools to create what we hope is a true community learning experience,” Ednacot adds.

    Registration for the classes is open today, and ends July 16. Course-related activities will end on July 23, 2012.

    If you’d rather learn how to build a search engine yourself, a Google engineer has a class for that too. Matt Cutts has some suggested reading, as well.

    Google will be offering plenty more education to developers at Google I/O this week (starting on Wednesday).

  • Everything Google Thinks Small Businesses Should Know About SEO In Under 10 Minutes

    Google has put out a new video called “SEO for startups in under 10 minutes”.

    Google says the video would be good to watch if you work on a company site with under 50(ish) pages, hope to rank well for your company name (and a “handful” of related terms – “not lots of terms”), and want to be smart about search engines and attracting searchers, but haven’t kept up with the latest search news.

    If you are interested in the latest search news, however, you might want to know that Google just launched a data refresh for the Panda update.

    Google also updated its Webmaster Academy this week to include more videos. These are the ten videos webmasters should watch, according to Google.

  • Google Just Rocked Nearly 1% Of Search Queries With A Panda Refresh

    Google announced that it has pushed a new data refresh for the Panda update, which originally launched in February of last year. This is the second such refresh this month.

    On June 12, Google tweeted that a refresh was rolling out, which affected less than 1% of queries in the U.S. and 1% worldwide. Now, they’ve tweeted again, saying:

    On a somewhat related note, one webmaster claimed to have recovered from Google’s Penguin update over the weekend. A Google spokesperson tells us that there was no Penguin refresh that they’re aware of. When we saw WPMU recover from Penguin, it had happened as Google rolled out a refresh.

    To learn more about the difference between an algorithm update and a data refresh, see what Google’s Matt Cutts has to say about it here.

    Image: Pandara – The Heavy Metal Panda! (YouTube)

  • These Are The 10 Videos Webmasters Need To Watch, According To Google

    Google has updated its Webmaster Academy site to feature more videos. Some of the videos on the site are old, but some are brand new. None fo them are incredibly long, so if you have a few minutes to spare, I recommend watching all of them.

    Some webmasters are pretty used to videos from Google’s Matt Cutts, and he does appear in some of these, but there are also some other faces in the mix.

    Of course the site itself has complementary information to go along with the videos, but watching the videos themselves is a good start. Here they are:

    Google’s Matt Cutts explains how search works:

    Jen Lee of Google’s search quality team explains how to find your site on Google:

    Cutts talks about snippets:

    Alexi Douvas from Google’s search quality team talks about creating content that performs well in Google search results. It’s worth noting that this one was uploaded just today (post Panda and Penguin):

    Michael Wyszomierski from Google’s search quality team talks about webspam content violations:

    Betty Huang from Google’s search quality team talks about how malicious parties can spam your site:

    A hairless Cutts (for more on that story, see here) discusses how a site that focuses on video or images can improve its rankings:

    Lee talks about using sitemaps to help Google find content hosted on your site:

    An introduction to Google+:

    Cutts and colleague Othar Hansson discuss authorship markup:

  • This Webmaster Changed A Page’s Internal Linking Structure, Recovered From Google’s Penguin Update

    Another webmaster has claimed to have recovered from Google’s Penguin update.

    In a WebmasterWorld forum post (via Barry Scwhartz), member neildt said that they noticed a page they thought had been hit by Penguin, had returned to ranking for the keyword phrase they were targeting. “Now it’s either just a coincidence that it has returned, or it is due to the changes we made throughout our site for this page based on why we were hit by Penguin,” neildt wrote.

    “Basically from the 24th April when we appeared to be affected by Google’s Penguin update, I took a totally random page that was affected and changed the internal linking structure that pointed to the page,” neildt wrote. “Before the 24th April this page would rank on page 1 of Google for ‘hotel name’ and ‘hotel name city’ as example phrases we were targeting. After this time, the ranking for those phrases was beyond page 30 of Google’s SERPS.”

    “Until yesterday (Sunday 24 June) when I checked if these phrases had made any progress and there were some changes in Google’s SERPs,” neildt continued. “To my surprise we are ranking on page 1 for ‘hotel name city’ and page 3 for ‘hotel name’.

    At this point, it’s unclear whether or not Google launched a data refresh for the Penguin update over the weekend. We’ve reached out to the company, and will update when we learn more.

    Schwartz, who linked to the forum thread where this Penguin recovery is being discussed, says he has heard other rumors of a Google update, that may have occurred on Thursday night.

    As far as Penguin goes, clearly it is possible to recover. You may or may not need to start with a freshly designed site, but make sure you’re in total compliance with Google’s quality guidelines. For more details on another recent recovery, read here.

    When the webmaster from that story recovered, there had been a Penguin data refresh.

    Image: The Batman Season 4 Episode 2 (Warner Bros.)

  • Google Says These New Local Ads Will Increase Click-Through Rates By 100%

    Google has redesigned its local ad formats for Google Maps for Mobile. The company says the new formats have performed well in tests, increasing click-through rates by 100%.

    The calls to action, like “click to call” or “get directions” have been made more prominent in the new formats, making them more clickable, according to Google. There’s a new hyperlocal marker, which shows how close the user is to the advertiser’s business location.

    Additionally, when a user clicks the ad, it will take them to the advertiser’s website within the app itself.

    You can see the difference in how the new formats look, compared to the old here:

    New mobile local ads

    “Ads in Google Maps for Mobile are one of many ways advertisers are delivering relevant local answers to people’s questions on mobile,” said Mobile Ads product manager Jay Akkad. “Likewise, a recent campaign from T-Mobile shows how search ads, combined with location extensions, enabled them to reach users close to their store locations across mobile search and maps.”

    “Mobile technology is enabling people to connect with businesses in new ways via smartphones and tablets,” said Akkad. “People use search and click to businesses’ websites, but they are also clicking to make phone calls, find directions to walk into local stores, and more.”

    The new design is rolling out today to newer versions of Android.

  • Google Wants To Know How Satisfied You Are With Its Results

    Google is testing a new way for users to give feedback on the quality of search results. In light of algorithm updates like Panda and Penguin (along with their subsequent data refreshes), people have plenty of feedback to offer (at least on the forums, and in blog comments).

    A Google spokesperson gave us the canned statement, “As you know, we always ask for user feedback in a range of forms — from live experiments to inviting people in to our UX labs — in order to improve our products. This is one of our experiments — one of many signals we take into consideration to make search better.”

    The experimental feedback box was discovered by Nathan Sauser (h/t:Search Engine Land). The box asks users: “How satisfied are you with these search results?”

    Users can then choose from:

    • Very satisfied
    • Somewhat satisfied
    • Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
    • Somewhat dissatisfied
    • Very dissatisfied

    Sauser writes on his blog, “Does this mean Google is going to start crowd-sourcing their results? Are they waving the white flag and admitting they can’t get rid of spam and asking for every user’s opinion? Seems like this is a can of worms they should be wary of opening.”

    I don’t know about all of that, but that doesn’t mean Google isn’t taking feedback into consideration. We’ve seen plenty of examples where Google has implemented features for various products based on user feedback. Google has been really good about listening to feedback, particularly since Google+ launched, where Googlers are always engaging with users.

    Currently, the normal Google search results feedback experience consists of a link at the bottom of the page, which links you to a form that looks like this:

    Results Feedback

    It’s worth noting that the experimental feedback box is much more simplified, compared to the options in the standard form. Perhaps Google could get better feedback that way.

    Well, how satisfied are you with Google’s search results?

  • Check Out This Potential Google Search Interface

    As Google will often do, it is currently testing a new interface for its main search product. The experiment includes a top navigation style, eliminating the left panel completely. Every search option resides above the search results.

    Techno-Net discovered the interface and posted the following video demonstrating it (via Alex Chitu):

    As Chitu notes, the interface shares some similarities with Google’s current tablet experience, in that navigation is delivered horizontally above search results, though there are still some differences. For example, when you click “More” on a tablet, the options expand horizontally. In the video above, options expand into a vertical drop down menu.

    There’s a very good possibility we’ll never see this interface come to fruition. Google runs over 20,000 search experiments a year. Still, the similarities to the tablet version may increase the odds that we’ll see something similar. Google may be looking to create a more uniform experience across devices.

  • You Better Have More Than A Great Site If You Want To Rank In Google

    In a thread in the Google Webmaster Central forum (hat tip: Barry Schwartz), a user claimed to have lost all of their traffic over the weekend, and to have found thousands of “fake backlinks”.

    The user asked what they can do to make Google know the links have nothing to do with them.

    Well, Google’s Matt Cutts recently indicated that Google may soon launch a tool that will let you tell Google to ignore certain links, but also interesting is what Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller (pictured) said in response to this user’s post.

    Mueller said:

    From what I can tell, your site is still fairly new – with most of the content just a few months old, is that correct? In cases like that, it can take a bit of time for search engines to catch up with your content, and to learn to treat it appropriately. It’s one thing to have a fantastic website, but search engines generally need a bit more to be able to confirm that, and to rank your site – your content – appropriately.

    That said, if you’re engaging in techniques like comment spam, forum profile link-dropping, dropping links in unrelated articles, or just placing it on random websites, then those would be things I’d strongly recommend stopping and cleaning up if you can.

    Emphasis added.

    Google, especially in the last year or two, has talked up the importance of quality content probably above all else, so it is interesting to see Google so openly talking about how that’s not necessarily enough.

    Consider that when Google launched the Penguin update, Google’s Matt Cutts said in the announcement, “We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites.”

    Of course, this is still important, but if that’s all you got, it sounds like you better have some patience too, even if Google is all about freshness too.

    Watch this video from Google’s Maile Ohye for some good SEO ideas as far as Google is concerned:

    Image: Mueller’s Google+ Profile

  • Matt Cutts: Google’s Updates Are Car Parts, Data Refreshes Are Gas

    Google frequently updates its algorithm, and sometimes these updates have huge effects on numerous sites. Panda and Penguin are two of the most well-known these days. Google also launches regular data refreshes for these updates.

    While even these data refreshes are enough to keep webmasters on their toes, they are much smaller than the updates themselves.

    Google’s Matt Cutts has talked about the difference between an algorithm update and a data refresh in the past. He put out a blog post all the way back in 2006 on the topic. Given that this was years before Panda and Penguin, it seems worth highlighting now, as businesses continue to struggle with these updates (tip of the hat to Search Engine Journal for linking to this post).

    Here are the straight forward definitions Cutts gave:

    Algorithm update: Typically yields changes in the search results on the larger end of the spectrum. Algorithms can change at any time, but noticeable changes tend to be less frequent.

    Data refresh: When data is refreshed within an existing algorithm. Changes are typically toward the less-impactful end of the spectrum, and are often so small that people don’t even notice.

    In that post, Cutts also pointed to a video of himself talking about the differences:

    Algorithm updates involve specific signals being tweaked. For instance, PageRank could matter more, or less, Cutts explains in the video. With a data refresh the input to that algorithm is being changed. The data that the algorithm works on is being changed.

    He uses a car metaphor, saying that an algorithm update is like changing a part in the car, such as the engine. A data refresh, he says, is more like changing the gas.

    Data refreshes happen all the time, he says. PageRank, for example, gets refreshed constantly.

    In the end, I’m not sure how much any of this matters to the average webmaster. If your site was hit by an update, or by a data refresh, you probably don’t care what the technical name for it is, as long as you can identify the update it’s based on, and make the necessary adjustments to gain back your Google traffic.

  • Greplin Turns Into Cue, Adds Functionality

    Personalized search service Greplin announced that it has changed its name to Cue, made some adjustments to its functionality, and is now resides at CueUp.com.

    Greplin let you search through many social networks, Gmail, and various other points of personal data.

    “In the last year, we’ve received so much feedback from our users. We’ve learned that you’re busy and you need your technology to work for you, instead of the other way around,” the company said in an email. “Many of you wanted a better way to contact the people you care about, get where you’re going, and stay informed. We’ve used all your input to create Cue. It has all the elements of Greplin that you’ve come to rely on, plus some new features designed so you’ll always be one step ahead.”

    It’s quite true that Greplin took some time on the user’s part to make usable. It required users to add services and wait for the service to process all the data needed to become useful, at least in my experience.

    Here are a few glimpses of the new service:

    Cue

    Cue

    Cue

    Cue

    Now, Cue is only available as an iPhone app, whereas Greplin was available on as a standalone web product. A web product is on the way, however. No mention of an Android app.

    In the email, the company says:

    Here’s how Cue will help you know what’s next:

    • Your email, contacts and calendar become an intelligent snapshot of your day.
    • Your events are automatically connected to related emails, phone numbers, and addresses.
    • Get the details you need to change or cancel reservations, check into flights, track the arrival of packages, or text friends that you are running late.
    • See up-to-date contact info alongside recent communications and the contact’s latest posts on Facebook and Twitter.

    It will be interesting to see if Cue can gain more ground in its new form that Greplin was able to. As other popular apps like Instagram and Flipboard have proven, iOS is as good a place to start as any.

  • Twitter Focuses On Search As Google Struggles With Its Mission

    Should Google worry about losing a portion of its search market share to Twitter? Most people probably don’t think about Twitter so much as a search engine, yet it’s the go-to place for up-to-the-second updates on any event in the world. News often breaks on Twitter before actual news publications get to it.

    Twitter search is a way not only to search for news, but to search for opinions on just about anything. Opinions, of course, can sway decisions. The fact that anyone can easily add their voice to any discussion using Twitter (much more easily than they can even with a blog), makes Twitter an incredibly powerful source of information in (but not limited to) real time.

    Google’s stated mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google does a pretty good job of that in a lot of ways, but it is (and will always be) a work in progress. The world’s information is coming in faster than ever, and while Google can continue to make strides in other areas of information, real time is an area where the search giant has simply fallen behind.

    Google used to be better at real time information organization and accessibility. There was a feature called realtime search, and it would appear on search results pages when users searched for queries related to topics that were heavy in realtime updates. The problem is that this was primarily powered by Twitter, and the deal that Google had with Twitter to get that data was not renewed once it expired last year.

    I don’t think a ton of people are switching to Bing because of Google’s lack of realtime search. Bing, which actually does have access to Facebook and Twitter data that Google does not, isn’t really doing much in the way of useful realtime search integration as far as I can tell. That doesn’t mean it won’t, but I also don’t think it’s a big enough deal to most people to make them switch search engines.

    That said, Google has left a gaping hole in its search results, which will simply send people to Twitter for this kind of info. If they’re looking for realtime tweets, they’re not going to find them on Google, so Google is essentially giving them a reason to search somewhere else.

    It just so happens that Twitter has been working on making its search better. Om Malik made some interesting points about Twitter and search in an article today, suggesting that Google should worry more about Twitter than Facebook. He writes:

    Twitter’s search ambitions are becoming clearer with the people it is adding to its search team. For instance, it recently hired away John Wang, a well-known engineer in the search business from LinkedIn. In addition, the company added Ruslan Belkin as a Director of Engineering, Search and Relevance. Twitter has also made its search better, or at least faster, as it noted in a blog post. They have added related queries and spelling suggestions to their search.

    Offering personalized search with more relevant results, surfacing related images and videos related to the query are somewhat reminiscent of the efforts made by Google on its search offering.

    At LinkedIn, Wang was responsible for search technology, and worked on developing “large-scaled realtime streaming semi-structured search systems to make the awesome LinkedIn data more consumable,” according to his LinkedIn profile page.

    On Belkin’s profile, his job at Twitter is described as, “Locking in Twitter’s dominance as the place on the Internet where users go to find and discover the most relevant and personalized in-the-moment content, insights, events, people to follow, and things to do.”

    Also a LinkedIn vet, his team worked on LinkedIn’s real time search platform. His position at the company was associated with projects like LinkedIn Signal (described as “Applying professional faceted search to the real-time stream”) and SenseiDB (described as a “Real-time search platform powering LinkedIn Homepage, LinkedIn Signal and the network updates stream”).

    While Google is probably happy to acknowledge any area where other companies can compete, from a regulatory standpoint, from an actual competitive standpoint, Google’s biggest worry is people’s decreased reliance on Google search. That doesn’t have to come from shifting market share to a direct competitor like Bing. It can (and more likely will) come from people simply finding better ways to access information, which in most cases, is likely through a combination of different sites, apps and services. Twitter is one such service.

    Google+ could be a major component in filling the realtime search void of Google’s search results. The company has hinted in the past that they would like to use Google+ to do so. Users are already getting a large dose of Google+ in their search results in terms of personalization, but on the realtime, public data search front, the results just aren’t there. People just aren’t using Google+ like they’re using Twitter. Even some that use Google+ regularly are only posting updates limited in visibility, thanks to the lauded Circles functionality that was one of the main selling points of the social network in the first place.

    In other words, Google can’t return the kind of realtime results it was getting with Twitter, using Google+ updates. That info flood isn’t happening in the same way. Twitter is almost all public. That makes it easy, from the privacy standpoint, when the data is available. Sure, Twitter has privacy settings, but by default, it’s public, and few bother to make adjustments. People are just tweeting out whatever they want for the world to see, and that’s happening very, very rapidly. With each tweet, Google is another step behind in its mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. They may catch up to those tweets eventually (and Google has certainly come a long way in its indexing speed), but how relevant is the average tweet when it’s not happening in real time?

    Google simply is not the best place to find out what people are saying about the event that’s happening right now. No wonder the text on Twitter’s search page (pictured above) plays that up.

  • Will Yahoo Abandon Search?

    Will Yahoo Abandon Search?

    Reports indicate that Yahoo is considering unloading its search business, and focusing on its stronger media business.

    Last month, we reported on rumors that Yahoo’s “Search Alliance” with Microsoft may not play out for its full ten years.

    Motivity Marketing CEO Kevin Ryan said, at the time, “There’s a lot of rumors in the business that [it] isn’t going well, and that it’s not going to make the full-decade run.”

    Now, Kara Swisher at All Things D reports, “Yahoo is also considering turning its entire search business over to Microsoft, with which it already has an ad partnership.”

    Eric Jackson at Forbes has some interesting ideas for options for Yahoo, which, also include exploring partnerships with Facebook, Apple, or even Google. Given the the company’s relationship with Microsoft, the concept Swisher is reporting on seems like it makes the most sense, though there’s always the possibility that the two companies could rework their current deal, as Jackson notes.

    Yahoo launched its most significant contribution to search in recent memory when it launched Axis, its browser add-on/mobile browser, last month. As an add-on, it was clunky and intrusive, but as a mobile browser, it had some advantages over Safari, giving iPhone and iPad users a legitimate browser alternative.

    Yahoo launched Axis for iOS first, seemingly trying to combat Google in a place where it wasn’t dominant – as a browser on Apple’s popular devices. Unfortunately for Yahoo, Apple announced significant upgrades for its own Safari browser at its Worldwide Developers Conference last week, including Chrome-like search functionality, which will give people already used to Safari less reason to switch over to Axis.

    Of course none of this means that Yahoo will completely abandon search. You might say Axis was a sign that the company is still very much interested in search. Then there’s the fact that Yahoo’s search market share stopped spiraling downward, according to the latest comScore numbers.

    Still, media seems to be Yahoo’s strong suit. Just last week, Yahoo announced a major partnership with CNBC to share revenues and news content.

    Yahoo’s homepage is still a major Internet destination, largely powered by the company’s media content.

    While Yahoo’s leadership is still up in the air, the company did just appoint a new EVP and Chief Revenue Officer to oversee its ad revenue and global operations. That would be Michael Barrett, formerly of Google.

  • Google’s New Local Ratings Costing Businesses Clicks?

    It seems that Google’s decision to replace its star rating system with Zagat scores for local search results isn’t a huge hit with some businesses.

    Do you like Google’s new approach to local business ratings? Let us know in the comments.

    Last month, Google revealed what appears to be the primary reason it acquired Zagat, when it announced Google+ Local, effectively replacing Google Places with Google+ infused local results and Zagat scores.

    “Each place you see in Google+ Local will now be scored using Zagat’s 30-point scale, which tells you all about the various aspects of a place so you can make the best decisions,” Google explained, when Google+ Local was announced. “For example, a restaurant that has great food but not great decor might be 4 stars, but with Zagat you’d see a 26 in Food and an 8 in Decor, and know that it might not be the best place for date night.”

    Some businesses claim to be losing traffic because Google replaced its ratings system with Zagat’s scoring system. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to an interesting thread in the Google Product Forums.

    There, Dr. Rodney McKay writes, “I know for a fact that I am not the only one that feels this way as I have talked to others who have also experienced the same problem. Everything about Google+ seems to be fine if not better than Google Places except for the removal of the stars. Ever since they removed the star ratings, my actions or clicks went from 30 – 60 or more a day to 0 – 5. I am still on the first page of Google for relevant search terms and in most cases I am also the first listing, I am also receiving the same amount of impressions as before, but the absence of the stars has caused an obvious hit on my Google Business Listing effectiveness. Injunction with that, I have seen a drastic decline in business. Is there not a way to compromise and use the Zagat reviews as well as the stars?”

    Some have suggested that Zagat scores are more suited to restaurants, and aren’t so great for other kinds of businesses. There’s no question that Zagat has historically been restaurant-focused. Even now, if you go to Zagat.com, it’s all about restaurants. The welcome message says:

    ZAGAT.com, the world’s original provider of user-generated content, provides trusted and accurate restaurant ratings and curated restaurant reviews for thousands of top restaurants worldwide. Our robust restaurant search and rich free features help diners easily find the best restaurant for every occasion, every time – from New York to Los Angeles, London to Tokyo, Paris to Beijing and everywhere in between; from the most elegant restaurants for fine dining to casual, inexpensive spots for family meals, you’ll find it all on ZAGAT.com.

    Yet Google has thrust the Zagat system across the much broader local business search space. I don’t see why the system couldn’t actually help some businesses, as Zagat is a pretty well known restaurant guide. However, it might be less helpful in other industries. Currently, you can search for shoe stores, for example, and still get the new scoring system, rather than the starred reviews:

    John's run walk shop

    It’s a somewhat confusing system, given the food element of Zagat. When you click to “learn more about our scores and reviews,” Google explains that you may see scores depicted in one of two ways: “Scores with multiple aspects” or “Overall scores”.

    Multiple Aspects

    overall scores

    As we see in the case of the shoe store above, Google shows the overall. That way it doesn’t have to show the “food” element.

    “When we don’t have enough user ratings on different aspects, we will just show an overall score,” Google explains. “An overall score is comparable to a score in the primary aspect for a location, like food for restaurants.”

    Perhaps the system will get better in time for more than just restaurants, as it’s used more.

    The new system is definitely much broader than the previous star system, given its larger scale. 17 out of 30 doesn’t sound incredibly great but if you look at the scale, 16-20 represents “good to very good”. 0- 30 is pretty wide range to cover the four individual ratings Google goes by:

    3 Excellent
    2 Very Good
    1 Good
    0 Poor to Fair

    Google takes the average, and multiplies it by ten to come up with averaged scores.

    One person comment on Schwartz’s article, “People understand star ratings. Any kind of visual rating (progress bars, stars, thumbs-ups) just works. They don’t understand numbers. And when higher ratings are in red… it’s even worse. Numbers in red usually mean danger. Anything in red means danger unless it’s properly used to grab attention and visibly labeled as a call to action. It’s freaking common sense.”

    It would be interesting to know the local SEO effects of Googe’s move to the Zagat system. Survey results released this week indicate that many of the top ranking factors are directly related to reviews. Here are how a few of them ranked, according to that (out of the top 90):

    7. Quantity of Native Google Places Reviews (w/text) (REVIEWS)
    18. Product/Service Keywords in Reviews (REVIEWS)
    24. Quantity of Third-Party Traditional Reviews (REVIEWS)
    26. Location Keywords in Reviews (REVIEWS)
    31. Velocity of Native Google Places Reviews (REVIEWS)
    34. Quantity of Reviews by Authority Reviewers (e.g.Yelp Elite, Multiple Places Reviewers, etc) (REVIEWS)
    46. High Numerical Ratings by Authority Reviewers (e.g.Yelp Elite, Multiple Places Reviewers, etc) (REVIEWS)
    49. Overall Velocity of Reviews (Native + Third-Party) (REVIEWS)
    50. Quantity of Third-Party Unstructured Reviews (REVIEWS)
    52. Quantity of Native Google Places Ratings (no text) (REVIEWS)
    53. High Numerical Ratings of Place by Google Users (e.g. 4-5) (REVIEWS)
    62. Velocity of Third-Party Reviews (REVIEWS)
    69. High Numerical Third-Party Ratings (e.g. 4-5) (REVIEWS)
    74. Positive Sentiment in Reviews (REVIEWS)

    Of course, these are all based on survey responses from before Google announced Google+ Local.

    What do you think about Google’s new ratings system? Do you like it better or worse? Let us know in the comments.

  • Using Video To Recover From A Google Algorithm Update

    Dr. Melody King, VP of marketing at Treepodia, recently wrote an article called “Pushing Back on Google Penguin: How to Improve SEO with Video Links“. It’s not so much about Penguin, as it is generally improving your ranking using video. Really, this is about doing better in search, regardless of whether you’ve been hit by an update, but with so many hit by updates like Penguin and Panda, webmasters are looking for ways to quickly recover. Done right, video just might be a great way to do so.

    We reached out to King to discuss this a bit further. She says a site can bounce back quickly after being hit by an algorithm update, by using video.

    “Google starts indexing the video sitemap practically immediately,” King says. “I’ve seen immediately many times, but I hate to state it as an absolute. As soon as the videos are indexed they are eligible to start displaying in the universal search results, and in most cases that means video appears at the top of page.”

    On strategies to get maximum SEO value out of video, King tells us, “Put the results of your SEO research into the sitemap creation in a formula structure. I.E. Meta Title = Keyword + Brand + Category + Product name.”

    “The goal is to target the long tail searches that are popular & appropriate for your items,” she says. “Doing it in a formula format makes this task super quick and easy. With Treepodia, the retailer tells us the desired formula and we take care of the rest. The formula can be unique for different segments of the catalog too – this piece is valuable to retailers depending on their unique product set and spread.”

    “You should host your own videos with a e-commerce video platform, which will allow you to add critical elements such as add-to-cart links, cross & up sell, analytics, etc. This also gives you greater flexibility with the sitemap content (thumbnail image, meta title structure, etc.) and piece of mind that the videos are being indexed to your domain,” says King. “The ability to get videos indexed to your domain that are hosted by YouTube is a recent addition, and it’s reliability is still under debate. However, it is a business decision to decide to ALSO syndicate your videos to YouTube as well.”

    “I’d also say that social backlinks are the best, and people are WAY MORE LIKELY to Facebook share a video than a static image or textual product description,” adds King. “User generated product review videos would be the ultimate social video for an ecom shop, since it is likely to be cute, funny, entertaining, etc. (all great ingredients for a viral or semi-viral product video). An ecommerce video platform can also help filter, manage, and A/B test user generated videos for this purpose.”

    “YT is the second largest search engine & your site will get PageRank from the website link in the About section – but is it worth it to invest the time to manage the channel? Your call,” she says. “I’d say yes (especially since YouTube is an insanely powerful social avenue – see stats here), but many retailers I’ve spoken to are not drinking the Kool-Aid, yet.”

    When asked about the importance of on-page text for video pages, King says, “Actually, we recommend using video to improve the PageRank of existing category, brand, and product pages – especially product pages because of the sheer volume.”

    Another article on the subject of video SEO published this week recommends 9 YouTube tips for better ranking. While Amanda Dhalla at Video-Commerce.com elaborates on each of them, they come down to: Don’t be lazy, optimize your titles, maximize descriptive text areas, use annotations, create playlists, encourage sharing, customize your channel, use calls to action for conversions, and be unique.

    Chris Atkinson at ReelSEO also posted a good video SEO article this week, discussing video metadata and its search benefits.

  • Why Does YouTube Search Suck For Mobile Devices? [Updated]

    People have been complaining about the YouTube mobile experience for years. It’s just not the same as it is from the web. There are certainly plenty of similar complaints for numerous other popular sites and apps, but YouTube’s mobile apps have developed a reputation for just not being as great as YouTube itself.

    The search feature from YouTube’s mobile apps, specifically, will often not deliver the same results as the YouTube desktop search feature.

    Google and the YouTube know the mobile experience doesn’t match the desktop experience, and a YouTube product manager has weighed in on the topic in a discussion on Quora.

    One user asked, “Why is Youtube’s search from mobile devices so inferior to its web-based search?”

    YouTube’s Matthew Darby responded, “Mostly, because not all content is available on all devices. Content owners are given the option to exclude content from some platforms, particularly when monetization is not available. This often means the video you’re looking for isn’t available on that device, and so it’s removed from the search results you see. The most obvious example is iOS, which doesn’t have a lot of content available for this reason, including music videos from the major record labels.”

    Update: A source close to the situation tells WebProNews that this response is not totally accurate. For example, the source says, there is major label music video content that is accessible via mobile devices.

    Sure, iOS is indeed an example, but plenty of Android users have complained as well, so let’s not turn this into a Google vs. Apple thing. Googling “why does youtube mobile search suck,” the first result is “Does anyone else think the Android YouTube app sucks?” from androidforums.com.

    “For some reason when I search stuff on YouTube.com I get much more results than I do on the mobile app,” the user who started that thread complained.

  • Google’s Matt Cutts Weighs In On Suing Over Search Rankings

    Here in the U.S. past legal battles have pretty much established that search rankings are a matter of free speech. Otherwise, we’d have probably seen a lot more search rankings-related lawsuits by now (though it hasn’t stopped complaints about how Google shows its own content in search results).

    Still, the topic has come up yet again. A blogger, who goes by the name of Fogus, got some discussion going on Twitter:

     

    He then blogged about the tweet, adding, “After tweeting I thought a little deeper and came to fear the possibilities.”

    He mentions the ordeal currently facing The Oatmeal, in which it is being threatened with a suit by what he calls “a content bottom-feeder”.

    Fogus’ post was picked up on Hacker News, where Google’s own Matt Cutts talked about the notion of suing companies over PageRank (h/t: Search Engine Roundtable). Cutts says in his comment:

    On the search engine side, there’s been a couple of solid court decisions in the United States:

    – In SearchKing vs. Google, a company sued because it didn’t like its rankings/PageRank. SearchKing had been selling links that passed PageRank, which violates Google’s quality guidelines. The court determined that “PageRanks are opinions – opinions of the significance of particular web sites as they correspond to a search query. Other search engines express different opinions, as each search engine’s method of determining relative significance is unique. The Court simply finds there is no conceivable way to prove that the relative significance assigned to a given web site is false.” As a result, Google was entitled to “full constitutional protection” for its opinions.

    – In KinderStart.com vs. Google, a company sued Google over a lower ranking. The judge not only dismissed that case, he allowed sanctions against KinderStart’s counsel for making various claims (like Google skewing results for political/religious reasons) that couldn’t be proven. So in the U.S., we have a couple very nice court cases that establish that search engine rankings are opinions and protected speech. If someone tried to sue over a set of search results, I believe they would find that a very hard case to make.

    Of course, things like libel and defamation apply online as well as offline.

    You can read the full text of the court decision for SearchKing vs. Google here (pdf). You can read KinderStart.com vs. Google here (pdf).

  • Matt Cutts: Here’s What You Should Read To Learn About Search Engines

    Google’s Matt Cutts posted an interesting video today, responding to a user-submitted question:

    “What resources (textbooks, online PDFs etc) would you recommend to people interested in learning more about LSI, search engine algorithms, etc?”

    Cutts first suggests checking out the original PageRank papers. “So there’s a whole bunch of different stuff about the anatomy of a large-scale hypertext search engine and then also a bunch of papers about PageRank,” he says .

    Here’s The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

    Here’s “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web” (pdf).

    Cutts also recommends some textbooks. “One is Modern Information Retrieval,” he says. “That’s got a lot of good stuff about the scoring and the science and thinking about that. And then there’s also one called Managing Gigabytes. I think Ian Witten wrote that one. And that one is just a little bit more about the logistics and being able to horse around that much data and thinking about some of the machine’s issues and how does a large scale engine work.”

    Here are some links:

    Modern Information Retrieval
    Managing Gigabytes

    “So those three together, and then of course, you can always do searches,” says Cutts. “Google Research actually has a ton of different papers that we’ve published. So you might want to look into that a little bit as well. But basically PageRank, the early Google papers, can give you an idea of how to write a very simple search engine that can scale to 100 million documents or so, Managing Gigabytes, and Modern Information Retrieval, and that will give you a pretty good view of the sort of different parts of the space.”

    Here’s a list of all the areas of focus Google Research has papers on:

    Google Research areas of focus