Some people have been talking about seeing major rankings changes, wondering if Google has released another Penguin update. According to Matt Cutts ,who spoke at SMX Advanced last night, Googe has not released a new one (or a new Panda update).
Google did release a Penguin refresh in late May, and that did lead to some recoveries. WPMU has been the one in the spotlight, showing that it is possible to recover. While being in the spotlight couldn’t have hurt. Cutts says it’s possible to recover without talking to Google:
Follow @mike20Mike Evans@mike20 RT @iPullRank: Both penguin and panda are algorithmic. You can recover #smx << Disagree with this. Confuses algorithm with predictable
Original Article (06/05): It looks like Google is launching Flight Search in Canada in both English and in French. The company announced this in a blog post on the ITA Software blog, but the post is currently not live. The feed, however, did come through my RSS reader, providing the news.
If you go to google.ca/flights, there’s nothing there at the time of this writing (the U.S. version is google.com/flights), though you do get flight results if you search for a flight from google.ca:
“Now you can find and book flights from Canadian airports, complete with all the benefits of our Flight Search product,” says Google Travel Commercial Director Gianni Marostica in the missing blog post. “You can use Flight Search to book travel to over 500 international destinations. If your ideal destination or airline isn’t yet available, don’t worry — we’re working hard on expanding our global coverage and adding more routes and airline partners in the future. Our goal is to make booking travel as fast and enjoyable as possible.”
Flight prices for Flight Search in Canada, of course, are listed in Canadian dollars.
Google is celebrating the opening of the first drive-in theater with a new doodle on its homepage. When you click the play button, the show begins.
The doodle comes with some appropriate sound effects and video (including an Android dashboard figure, a monster movie and the intermission screen). The only thing missing is a couple making out, though a girl does put an arm around her boyfriend. It ends with a popcorn tub that says, “Google”.
Google has uploaded the video to YouTube if you want to just watch it here:
When you click the doodle, Google shows you “The history of the drive-in theater” as the top result. It’s an Inventors page on About.com, which gives us a lesson on this classic form of entertainment:
Richard Hollingshead was a young sales manager at his dad’s Whiz Auto Products, who had a hankering to invent something that combined his two interests: cars and movies.
Richard Hollingshead’s vision was an open-air movie theater where moviegoers could watch from their own cars. He experimented in his own driveway at 212 Thomas Avenue, Camden, New Jersey. The inventor mounted a 1928 Kodak projector on the hood of his car, projected onto a screen he had nailed to trees in his backyard, and used a radio placed behind the screen for sound.
According to this account of the drive-in theater’s history, the drive-in opened on Tuesday June 6, 1933 on Crescent Boulevard, Camden, New Jersey, and it cost 25 cents for the car and 25 cents per person to get in.
Update: Google is now showing a Wikipedia result over the About.com result. This result says: “Hollingshead’s drive-in opened in New Jersey, June 6, 1933, on Admiral Wilson Boulevard at the Airport Circle in Pennsauken, a short distance from Cooper River Park.” It cites The New York Times as the source of this info.
As Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points out, some people are complaining that Google chose to go with this doodle instead of a D Day Google, as today is also the anniversary of that.
Google launched the +1 button, even before people knew about Google+, the social network. It was a way to tell Google that you felt a particular piece of content or search result was one of quality, and deserved to rank well in Google’s search engine. Now, Google’s Matt Cutts has admitted that it’s not really a great quality signal.
Cutts participated in a keynote discussion at SMX Advanced in Seattle, where he was asked about Google+ and SEO. According to a liveblogged account of the conversation from SMX sister site Search Engine Land, Cutts said, “When we look at +1, we’ve found it’s not necessarily the best quality signal right now.”
It’s unclear whether he meant this is the case versus other social signals (like Facebook likes) or whether social signals in general aren’t the best indicators of quality. It could be both in reality. I made the case here, why social is not always a great indicator of relevancy, but there’s also the matter of how frequently people are actually clicking on +1’s, compared to Facebook likes, tweets, and other social buttons.
During the keynote, SMX’s Danny Sullivan asked Cutts if you have to be on Google+ to rank well in Google. According to the liveblog, his response was, “No!!!! It’s still early days on how valuable the Google+ data will be.”
For Google’s sake, I hope Google+ and +1s do evolve into better quality signals, because Google sure seems to be placing a pretty good amount of eggs in the Google+ basket, tying it into its various products, and making it Google’s “social spine”.
In a Google help center article, it says, “+1’s can help improve Google Search too, since you can see which pages your social connections have +1’d right beneath search results and ads.”
Google says:
+1 gets conversations going. Click the +1 button to give something your public stamp of approval. Then, if you want to share right away, add a comment and send it to the right circles on Google+.
The next time your friends and contacts search on Google, they could see your +1. You’ll help them find the best stuff on the web – and you might just start up another conversation!
Googe’s Matt Cutts participated in a keynote discussion at SMX Advanced, and as you might have guess, the topics of Google’s Penguin and Panda updates came up more than once.
Matt McGee liveblogged the event for the SMX-affiliated Search Engine Land, and quoted Cutts throughout. Cutts also answered a bunch of questions on Twitter, so some of those tweets will be sprinkled throughout this article.
The first question was about Penguin. According to this liveblogged account, Cutts said, “We look at it something designed to tackle low-quality content. It started out with Panda, and then we noticed that there was still a lot of spam and Penguin was designed to tackle that. It’s an algorithmic change, but when we use a word like ‘penalty,’ we’re talking about a manual action taken by the web spam team — it wasn’t that.”
He also said, “WPMU had a pretty good number of links from lower quality sites.”
Some comments Cutts made in the past about starting over with your site if you were hit by Penguin, scared some, but this was brought up again during the keynote. “Sometimes you should. It’s possible to recover, but if you’re a fly-by-night spammer, it might be better to start over,” he’s quoted as saying.
Have you ever been in the position in which you needed to conduct a search but couldn’t find the words that were suitable to query? If so, software company Visual Purple hopes to help through an effort it calls Gooey Search. WebProNews writer Chris Crum first told you about the Gooey Search project a couple of weeks ago, but we recently spoke with Ed Heinbockel, the President and Founder of Visual Purple, to find out more about the concept.
The idea for Gooey is to provide a stripped down version of Google’s search results that eliminates spam and “bubbles up” only the most relevant results. It has no desire to become the next “Google killer,” and actually, is described by Heinbockel as an “intelligent layer” that sits on top of Google’s results.
The company has launched a Kickstarter project in hopes of raising $125,000 to bring its technology to consumers in the form of an iPad app and a Firefox browser add-on.
As Heinbockel explained, Gooey’s results allow users to interact and customize their search experience. The company specifically provides a Gooey Graph that lets users delete and stack the results in order to find what they need.
“Our belief is that people will gravitate to a more interactive venue to do things and this is just a way to provide an interactive venue – an intelligent, interactive venue – to Google results,” said Heinbockel.
“Our technology does all the reading for you and bubbles up what you’re really looking for and lets you navigate those results,” he added.
Gooey Search also takes a strong stand on privacy, which, of course, is a topic that is gaining continuous attention in regards to Google. The search giant enacted its new privacy policy on March 1 of this year amid outcries from consumers and privacy activists.
“Essentially using Google or any of the popular search engines… without going through something like Gooey or DuckDuck [DuckDuckGo] just to do basic stuff, you basically relinquish any rights to privacy,” Heinbockel points out.
Adopting a model similar to SETI@home, the platform is built on GisterPRO, which is a premium version of Gooey geared toward researchers and analysts. The difference, however, is that GisterPRO is cloud-based and Gooey is based around groups that are crowd-based clouds.
In other words, when a search is conducted, it is distributed bit-by-bit to a large group of users. Heinbockel tells us that the technology behind Gooey cannot attribute a search to a given node or computer, thus giving users complete privacy and anonymity.
“For an organization or company or individual to reassemble that search in a cohesive and coherent fashion is virtually impossible,” he said.
Even with these privacy protections, why would a searcher use Gooey over a Google alternative such as DuckDuckGo? We posed this question to Heinbockel, who told us that, while DuckDuckGo and other search engines provide anonymity, they lack the “intelligent layer” that Gooey provides. As he explained, Gooey reads all the results but returns only the most relevant results for users. He believes this is a win for users since it gives them the best information while also saving time.
Going forward, Heinbockel told us that it would “make a lot of sense” for a Google or Bing to use a product like Gooey for its advanced search system. Although no talks are currently in the works, he said Gooey would be open to discussions if the right opportunity presented itself.
With the capital the company anticipates bringing in through the Kickstarter project, it hopes to make Gooey Search available to everyone and also raise awareness that such a product exists.
The deadline for the Kickstarter project is June 8.
At E3, Microsoft announced, among other things, that Internet Explorer is coming to the Xbox 360 this fall. That means that tons of Xbox users will have easy access to browsing the entire web right from their favorite gaming console. It also means that Microsoft will have an opportunity to significantly increase searches on Bing.
Granted, there is a paywall element at play. Microsoft will require users to have an Xbox Live Gold account to use IE. Still, it’s a chance for the company to push its browser, and perhaps its search engine in front of a hard core (as well as casual) gaming base more than ever.
Last year, Bing came to the console in very limited fashion. Microsoft launched Bing Voice Search, enabling users to find content across Netflix, Hulu Plus, Comcast Xfinity on Demand ,HBO Go, Zune, and other programs on Xbox Live. This was part of the company’s “future of TV” announcement. Is Bing the future of TV?
And no, we’re not talking about product placement in television shows, of which there is plenty.
I’ve long held the belief that Xbox would be Microsoft’s greatest weapon for increasing its share of the search market. Xbox is huge, and Microsoft could reach people in a place where Google has so far struggled: the living room. While Google tries to figure out Google TV, Microsoft already has a hugely successful set-top box, if you will.
Speaking of Bing Voice Search on Xbox, Microsoft announced it’s expanding this feature into 12 additional markets (that’s added brand exposure for Bing if nothing else): Australia, Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain and Switzerland.
“Soon users in 15 countries speaking 7 languages will be able to get full voice search support,” Bing said in a blog post. “In addition, in some countries and languages, you will be able to search for content genres such as comedy, drama and action, and also will be able to use your voice to search user generated content on YouTube.”
Microsoft isn’t playing Bing up too much in the IE news, but as you can see in the image above, it appeared in the demo. You can watch the whole event here, courtesy of Gamespot:
How much do people want to search the web on a gaming console though? Well, perhaps more than before. As previously reported, IE on Xbox will support Kinect and SmartGlass, so users don’t have to use a game controller to operate it.
Some might consider Microsoft to have the competitive edge when it comes to social search, for that matter, given that Bing is now tightly integrated with Facebook. The new, more social Bing is available to everyone in the U.S. as of last week. If people find value in their social connections for search, they’re most likely going to get more out of Bing than Google in that regard, as Google doesn’t have the kind of Facebook (or Twitter) data Bing does, relying more on Google+ and other public data.
“With sidebar, Bing brings together the best of the web, with what experts and your friends know, giving you the confidence to act,” said Bing VP Derrick Connell, when unveiling the new Bing. “This new way to search lets you share, discover, and interact with friends like you do in real life. If you’re on the go, you’ll notice we’ve optimized the layout and placement of the social results on the mobile device for smaller screen sizes and for touch input, so the user experience will be different than what people see on a PC.”
The big screen will add a new element to the equation. As Microsoft continues to experiment with the cross-section of search and social media , using its So.cl social network as a testing ground, perhaps they’ll be able to find better ways to tap into that in the living room. So.cl already has a video chat Hangout-like feature.
“You may not always see friends you expect to show up for a number of reasons,” Connell notes of Bing’s social features. “Bing uses public Facebook information and content you’ve given Bing permission to use, such as friends’ photos on Facebook. We won’t match friends based on other Facebook content such as status updates or check-ins. Bing also respects you and your friends’ privacy settings so you won’t see friends who have opted out of Facebook instant personalization or blocked the Bing app.”
Assuming that Microsoft has learned its lesson from its own antitrust regulation of the past, we can probably expect an option for users to switch their default search engine when IE hits Xbox. The question is, how many will bother to do so. It at least gives Microsoft the opportunity to get users to try Bing (and ultimately serve them ads).
Do you have an Xbox 360? Will you be searching with Bing? Let us know.
Google announced that will start showing new warnings when it believes users’ accounts may be the target of state-sponsored attacks.
Google says it will show the warnings when it has specific intelligence, though the company won’t share what that intelligence is. The company announced this in a blog post today.
“You might ask how we know this activity is state-sponsored,” writes Google VP Security Engineering, Eric Grosse. “We can’t go into the details without giving away information that would be helpful to these bad actors, but our detailed analysis—as well as victim reports—strongly suggest the involvement of states or groups that are state-sponsored.”
“We believe it is our duty to be proactive in notifying users about attacks or potential attacks so that they can take action to protect their information,” adds Grosse. “And we will continue to update these notifications based on the latest information.”
The company has been especially aware of the ongoing epidemic of state-sponsored espionage since it experienced its own major hacking incident in January of 2010, which was implied at the time to have been carried out by the Chinese government, a notion further confirmed by WikiLeaks’ leaked State Department cables. In March of that year, Google began showing users warnings when it detected suspicious behavior on their accounts. A Google spokesperson tells me those warnings will continue, and that the new “state-sponsored” attack warnings will be added as a separate alert.
Google notes that just because you see the new warning, doesn’t mean that your account has been hijacked. It just means it believes you are a target. If you see the warning, Google says you should: “create a unique password that has a good mix of capital and lowercase letters, as well punctuation marks and numbers; enable 2-step verification as additional security; and update your browser, operating system, plugins, and document editors.”
Google also says the warnings are not shown because its own systems have been compromised or because of a particular attack.
Following the “Periodic Table of SEO” session at SMX Advanced today, was the Mad Scientists of Paid Search session.
SMX’s description of the session says, “Our mad scientists emerge from their PPC labs, where they’ve been assembling keywords words, bidding strategies and other assorted parts into monster PPC campaigns. Attend this session to see how they’ve successfully enhanced paid search performance with rigorous testing and trial and error. Their creations are abnormally effective!”
The speakers list was as follows:
Moderator: Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster (@mvanwagner)
Q&A Moderator: Joseph Kerschbaum, Vice President of Client Services, Clix Marketing (@joekerschbaum)
Speakers:
Michael Behrens, SVP eMarketing, WebMetro (@MichaelBehrens)
Benny Blum, Director, Strategy & Analytics, eSearchVision (@bennyblum)
Ryan Hutchings, Director, Online Marketing, VacationRoost
Matthew Mierzejewski, Vice President of PPC, RKG
As usual, attendees tweeted their own takeaways and highlights from the panel. Here’s the best of what was said:
This season of AMC’s Mad Men has been thrilling, poignant, heartbreaking, surprising, and might possibly have catapulted the show back into the title of “Best on TV” (apologies to Game of Thrones). Each episode has been masterful, reigniting the week-to-week excitement that I (and many others) haven’t felt since season one.
And all of that excitement means that the brands featured in the show have the opportunity to see a spike in interest. After all, it is a show about advertising (among other things, of course). And what could be better advertising for a product than to be featured in Mad Men?
Even if the product is portrayed in a negative light, it can still generate buzz. In the case of Jaguar, there’s no telling exactly why people took to Google to seek information, but they did – in droves.
A quick look at the search data confirms this. The big spike you see is on Monday, May 28th, the day after Sunday’s Mad Men episode featured the car company. The search spike occurred mostly in California, New York, Texas, and Florida:
Like I said before, Jaguar hasn’t been receiving all positive press from Mad Men. Although the company has been portrayed as creating a car that’s sexy (like a mistress), Jaguar cars have also been called impractical and their reliability has been questioned. There’s also that sleazy part about a Jaguar exec demanding sex from buxom beauty Joan in order to sign off on Sterling, Draper, Cooper, Price’s representation.
Jaguar USA has been following along with the show on Twitter:
And about that amazing scene where Lane Price attempts to commit suicide inside his new Jaguar but the car won’t start? Jaguar’s North American VP of Marketing had this to say about it:
As soon as we see the tailpipe with cloth in it, we know this is going to be bad. “It won’t START. The car won’t start!” We have never been so happy to see our car not start. How weird is this? Maybe he doesn’t know how to use the choke?”
But despite some of the more negative aspects of Jaguar’s image on the show, Google searches show that it got people interested.
And this season of Mad Men didn’t just give Jaguar a boost, but another one of their clients saw a spike in searches as well. Earlier episodes featured pitches involving Heinz Baked Beans, a search term that saw some major spikes on, you guessed it, Mondays following Mad Men episodes. It’s fitting that the search popularity spike the most in the U.K., where 2.3 million Brits eat Heinz Bean(z) every day.
In April, Google announced that DoubleClick Search V3 would soon provide users with the ability to report on search queries. Today, Google announced that on May 31, the search query reporting feature was released to all customers.
“This powerful new feature provides you with insight into the search queries, or terms, that are driving visits for your ads and the revenue you derive from these queries,” Google says in a blog post. “Due to search engine broad and phrase matching, your ads are often triggered for more search queries than the exact keywords that you’re bidding on. While this is desirable, often you’ll want to view the exact queries that are triggering your ads and the cost and revenue impact of those queries.”
The reports are designed to provide insights into the queries, which are driving traffic to your sites, as well as the revenue that traffic drives.
Users can go to a campaign or ad group, click the “Search Queries” tab above the performance summary graph, and see the queries along with the visits and revenue they generated.
The reports can be downloaded, using the Download tab, so they can be analyzed offline. Reports can also be scheduled for regular delivery.
“If you see a query that you think will perform better with a higher bid and you’re not already bidding on it, you can add them to any campaign: select the query in the table and click Add keywords. You can also set up the match type, bid, and URLs for these new keywords,” explains Google. “You can even decrease your costs and increase the ROI of your campaigns by adding negative keywords that you find in the query list. To do this, select a search query and click the Add campaign negative keywords or Add ad group negative keywords button. You can add them as campaign-level negatives or to each ad group.”
Google says the search query reports are only the beginning of more advanced reporting in DoubleClick Search V3.
Google, which has essentially ruled the search world for years, once recognized the value of realtime search, and Twitter search in particular. The two companies had a deal, which would enable Google users to get quick, real-time results from Twitter for timely queries. Last year, that feature went away, as the two companies failed to come to terms to extend the deal.
Since then, the lack of the feature has left a glaring hole in Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. One example where this was particularly evident, around the time of Muammar Gaddafi’s death.
While Twitter has said that the two companies talk frequently, there hasn’t been much to indicate that the deal and feature will return in the near future. Meanwhile, people are searching the hell out of Twitter. And just think. Every time someone uses Twitter to do a search, it’s an example of an instance where they’re not using Google to search.
There’s more to Twitter search, however, than just sifting through the most recent things people have tweeted.
“News breaks on Twitter, whether local or global, of narrow or broad interest,” says Twitter analytics research scientist Jimmy Lin, Research Scientist, Analytics . “When news breaks, Twitter users flock to the service to find out what’s happening. Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most meaningful to them; the speed at which our content (and the relevance signals stemming from it) evolves make this more technically challenging, and we are hard at work continuously refining our relevance algorithms to address this. Just to give one example: search, boiled down to its basics, is about computing term statistics such as term frequency and inverse document frequency. Most algorithms assume some static notion of underlying distributions — which surely isn’t the case here!”
Twitter has put out a new study (pdf) about “churn” in tweets and real-time search queries. The abstract is as follows:
The real-time nature of Twitter means that term distributions in tweets and in search queries change rapidly: the most frequent terms in one hour may look very different from those in the next. Informally, we call this phenomenon “churn”. Our interest in analyzing churn stems from the perspective of real-time search. Nearly all ranking functions, machine-learned or otherwise, depend on term statistics such as term frequency, document frequency, as well as query frequencies. In the real-time context, how do we compute these statistics, considering that the underlying distributions change rapidly? In this paper, we present an analysis of tweet and query churn on Twitter, as a first step to answering this question. Analyses reveal interesting insights on the temporal dynamics of term distributions on Twitter and hold implications for the design of search systems.
The study reaches the following five conclusions:
Churn. Term distributions change rapidly—significantly faster than in web search for the head of the distribution. Even after discounting trending terms promoted by the platform, churn rates of top real-time queries are up to four times higher than those of web searches. For the tail of the distribution, churn drops quickly, and appears to be lower than that observed in web queries.
Unobserved terms. Similarly, rates of out-of-vocabulary words are higher for top Twitter queries, but lower at the tail of the distribution. This translates to rapid changes in the top user interests, but relative stability in the topics for which users seek real-time results.
Update frequency. Although query churn is consistently high, during major events it can further increase dramatically, as queries change minute by minute. In fact, to maintain accurate collection statistics requires frequent term count updates—in intervals of 5 minutes or less, according to our data.
Churn patterns. The time period in which a query remains a top one varies, as does its decay pattern; na¨ıve approaches such as fixed term frequency decays may not be able to correctly model frequency changes over time.
Predictability. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some query churn may be predicted from past observations, providing a potential source for addressing this issue.
“During major events, the frequency of queries spike dramatically,” says Lin. ” For example, on October 5, immediately following news of the death of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, the query ‘steve jobs’ spiked from a negligible fraction of query volume to 15% of the query stream — almost one in six of all queries issued!”
Lin talks about the Japan Earthquake as another example of Twitter’s power, highlighting yet another event, in which today’s Google would be playing second fiddle to Twitter search, in terms of rapid, realtime info.
Last month, Google announced that the Google+ Hangouts on Air feature was rolling out to all users. Today, Google says the roll out is now complete.
Hangouts on Air lets Google+ users broadcast hangouts to anyone who wants to watch (as opposed to being limited among a handful of friends). Here’s a quick look at the feature, in case you’re not familiar with it:
Google’s Matthew Leske shared this in an update on the social network:
Matthew Leske1 hour agoQuick update to Hangouts On Air We've now rolled out to 100% of users in over 220 countries and territories! (goo.gl/4nzRJ)
Just look for the new "Enable Hangouts On Air" option when starting a hangout. We can't wait to see what you'll share with the world. #googleplusupdate #hangoutsonair18 6 Powered by socialditto
“Typically Google+ features roll out onto our global infrastructure over a period of time,” saysGoogle+ VP, Product Management, Bradley Horowitz. “I’m delighted to see that Hangouts On Air is now available to all of our users, ‘in over 220 countries and territories!’”
Now that Google is making Google+ the backbone of local business search, businesses should be able to take advantage of the Hangouts On Air feature, and expand their audiences significantly. I wonder if the Hangouts On Air feature will come up in Google’s upcoming Google+ Local workshop.
Google software engineer Matt Cutts will be returning to SMX Advanced in 2012. As the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt’s been dealing with webmaster issues for Google since 2000 and is well known to many advanced search marketers from his blog and public speaking.
Matt will participate in an always popular and engaging “You&A” format keynote, in which he’ll address questions from the SMX Advanced audience. So bring those questions, and don’t miss out on this SMX Advanced tradition!
Just don’t expect any Panda or Florida t-shirts. Cutts tweeted:
He didn’t say anything about Penguin apparel. There are certainly plenty of fashionable options in the market:
Hopefully he’ll show up in the “Come at Me Bro” (Google’s first shopping result):
Either way, I’m sure the subject of Penguin will come up more that once at the event. Google’s Penguin update was designed to tackle webspam. That is Cutts’ department, after all.
Last week, Google revealed Google+ Local, which appears to be about merging Google+ business pages with Google Places. Google says it wants to show you “everything you need to know” about it, and it will do so in a Workshop Happy Hour on Wednesday June 6 from 6-8PM at the Google Cambridge office.
“We’ll have a presentation on Google+ Local and show you how to use this new feature to add an extra layer of socialization to your search, your business, and give you a chance to ask any questions you might have about the product,” Google promises. “We’ll also be serving a scrumptious array of gourmet local (of course!) bites, beer from New England breweries and a selection of wines.”
Google asks attendees to bring their own laptops. If you wish to attend, you need to RSVP using this form.
On the form, Google asks if you have a Google+ account, and says if not, it will send you info on how to create one before the event, “so that you’re totally up to speed”.
It looks like they’ll be hosting more of these things, because there is also a checkbox option for those who “can’t make this one, but would like to attend a workshop at some point in the future.”
Google is really ramping up its efforts in the local business arena. It looks like they’re getting ready to launch a bigger suite of offerings for businesses, tapping into some of the services they’ve acquired over the last year, such as TalkBin and Punchd. More on all of that here.
There has historically been a lot of talk about whether or not Google is evil. The company brought this upon itself, by making “do no evil” a part of its public policies.
Interestingly, the Google Book Search Twitter account tweeted the following this morning:
The tweet, as the link reveals, is actually a quote from a book of essays, poems and plays by Oliver Goldsmith, author of the 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield. The full quote, from The Good-Natured Man, is:
“Don’t, my life’s treasure, don’t let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.”
It’s not uncommon for the Google Book Search Twitter account to tweet quotes from various publications in its database, but this one, being about evil, caught my eye, given the company’s relationship with the word.
In its 2004 Founders’ IPO letter, Google included a section carrying the header, “Don’t Be Evil.” Here’s what it said:
Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served-as shareholders and in all other ways-by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.
Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see.
The part about not accepting payment for inclusion has been in the spotlight in recent weeks, now that Google seems to have somewhat reversed its stance on that, with its new Google Shopping results. It’s interesting that one thing Google once considered evil, appears not be seen in that light by the company any longer. It’s worth noting, however, that not everyone (even outside of Google) thinks this is necessarily evil either.
Google’s own code of conduct both begins and ends with bits about not being evil. The preface says:
“Don’t be evil.” Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably and treating each other with respect.
The Google Code of Conduct is one of the ways we put “Don’t be evil” into practice. It’s built around the recognition that everything we do in connection with our work at Google will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct. We set the bar that high for practical as well as aspirational reasons: Our commitment to the highest standards helps us hire great people, build great products, and attract loyal users. Trust and mutual respect among employees and users are the foundation of our success, and they are something we need to earn every day.
The code of conduct (last updated just over a month ago), concludes: “And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!”
Given that the tweet came from the Google Book Search account, it also seems worth bringing up the fact that last week, a judge granted class action status to authors suing Google over the company’s book scanning.
Google debuted Trusted Stores last fall, and now the company has acquired the assets and patents of Kikscore to make the program better. Kikscore offers its own online trust score system, which is about to be discontinued, in favor of Google’s.
We are excited to announce that the KikScore technology and certain assets have been acquired. As of June 28, 2012, the KikScore service will no longer be available to customers. We recommend that our customers check out the Google Trusted Store product as an alternative to the KikScore service. In fact, we wrote this post last October that describes how complimentary the KikScore and Google Trusted Store products are for small businesses. We are very proud of the more than two years that we offered the KikScore service and are so grateful to the 1700+ small business customers that we have served globally.
Back in 2008 this all began at a Fuddruckers in Northern Virginia. The road from there to today has been filled with great highs, some deep lows, overcoming immense challenges all while dealing with the occasional kicks to the gut that most startups typically experience. It has been a sincere pleasure for the entire KikScore team to serve so many small businesses and also work to help them be successful through this blog, tweetchats and our December 2011 white paper. There is still great work to be done for small businesses and that is why we are so excited that an industry leader will be able to build off of the technology, platform and IP that we spent our blood, sweat and tears building, developing and launching.
The blog post about how complimentary KikScore and Google Trusted Store products are is interesting. It lists five things that Google’s program didn’t cover, like: who is behind a website, where the site is hosted, who is behind the business that runs the site, who manages the business (and do they have a track record of financial reliability), and does the business have any liens or judgements pending against them.
“Incidentally, a lot of these questions are actually answered by sites that have a KikScore seal on their site,” the post said. “So that also helps answer how is KikScore different than the Google Trusted Stores. If you use KikScore, shoppers at online stores get a look into who is behind the business, the management, website history, customer feedback along with a dynamic and real-time trust score that gives shoppers an indication about whether level of trustworthiness for website owner.”
Perhaps these are some areas where Google will be able to take advantage of the acquisition. The post makes another interesting point, however, in that Google’s program was focused on online stores, whereas KikScore’s is on small businesses of all types, such as: lawyers, doctors, contractors, plumbers, etc.
Google created some ripples throughout the e-commerce industry this week when it announced that Google Shopping will be replacing Google Product Search. This is way more than just a name change, it’s a transition from a free service for merchants to essentially a paid inclusion vertical search engine, which will see “sponsored” listings appear on regular Google search result pages.
Some have equated the whole thing to Google shifting its policy away from “do no evil” to something along the lines of, “OK, do some evil.” Not everyone considers this to be so evil, however (the evil talk really just comes from Google’s own wording in its Founders’ letter at IPO time, which mentioned paid inclusion).
Amit Kumar, CEO Of marketing app provider Lexity, sees it all as a very good thing for e-commerce.
“We think this is the right direction for merchants and Google,” Kumar tells WebProNews. “While the free Google Product Search program was great for some SMB retailers, in general the results were hit or miss – there was very little predictability on whether products would show up in search results, how often, and detailed statistics were not available.”
“On the other hand, our customers that participated in paid advertising through the Product Listing Ads program have much more visibility into how their products are faring, and have much more control (for instance, the ability to control which products get promoted more aggressively, which products should not be shown in Google’s search results, etc),” he adds.
“In addition, having multiple potential display units showing essentially the same kind of products was very confusing to the users, and also to merchants who were trying to manage their presence on search results,” says Kumar. “Having all of these consolidated into one helps brands manage their presence better, and users get a better shopping experience.”
On the other side of the coin, one WebProNews reader commented, “Many small companies have used Google ( Froogle, Base, Shopping ) as their resource for free advertising of their products. This is just an attack on those small companies and only allow companies who can afford to pay to do so. The only thing I think Google should do to help the small companies is make a CPA Cost per acquisition model were a small amount say 5% of each sale would be taken.”
Another reader commented, “This is clearly an attack on small business that use Google Shopping to advertise products. Google basically used their user data for the future purpose of creating this mess. Who is making these decisions? What the users think is no longer important? It’s all about money now, and I really think it’s time for class action and antitrust suits.”
Well, there are plenty of regulators with their eyes on Google these days. That doesn’t mean, however, that Google will actually face antitrust regulation, though the European Commission has given Google about a month to come up with some changes before possibly moving forward to court and fines for the company.
Google tends to stick with the “competition is always a click away” stance. That’s hard to dispute.
In May, Google made some changes to how ad rotation works in AdWords, changing it to a 30-day period, at which point AdWords would optimize to show higher performing creatives. After some users expressed concerns, Google announced today that it has made some adjustments.
Google says it will expand the even rotation period from 30-days to 90, so there’s a longer testing window for new ads. Google is also offering an opt-out option, so advertisers can continue to have their ads rotate evenly indefinitely.
With the modified Rotate evenly setting, our tests indicate that we will provide you with more valuable traffic in an automated, efficient manner. We’ve found that, on average, optimized creative rotation results in an increase in click-through rate and an increase in total conversion volume for advertisers. Here’s an example describing the benefit (note: data is intended for illustrative purposes only):
Advertisement A has a 3% CTR, while Advertisement B has a 1% CTR. Under the original Rotate evenly setting, the ads would show roughly evenly, resulting in an average CTR of around 2%. Under the new setting, Advertisement A will show more frequently after the even rotation window has passed, bringing the average CTR closer to 3%, or a 50% increase in clicks. Our systems will also continue to run Advertisement B for a low fraction of traffic to continue to test how well it performs.
If you want to opt-out of the rotation setting, there’s a form here. Changes will go into effect on June 11. Google says it will offer an opt-out option right in the AdWords interface if there is high enough demand.
As you may have read, Google is now showing messages to users in China, when they try to perform certain queries that it will not work. Users have been getting errors, as illustrated in this video:
Google says the problems are not caused by its own systems, leaving many to assume it’s directly related to Chinese censorship, a situation, which ultimately led to Google pulling out its Chinese search engine, and redirecting Google.cn to its Hong Kong search engine. Still it is the Hong Kong version, when used from mainland China that produces these issues.
So now, when users try to enter potentially problematic queries, Google suggests they try an alternative query.
Google’s Matt Cutts had this to say about Google’s new feature on Google+:
Matt Cutts17 hours agoI'm really glad we're providing a tool and surfacing information about when trying to search in China might result in your connection breaking. 87 19 Powered by socialditto
Not everyone is buying the new feature as a “transparent” effort:
Follow @mattcuttsMatt Cutts@mattcutts @iandanforth I work closely with someone who worked on this, and I’m incredibly proud of that work. Lots more transparency in a needed area.
Here’s another conversation Cutts had about it on Twitter:
Follow @amacAlex Macgillivray@amac Google predicts queries China’s firewall will find problematic, warns users & prompts query changes to avoid GFW http://t.co/0lPtuRiz Wow
Follow @nelsonNelson Minar@nelson @amac wow that is amazing. I love how Google refers to a “connection interruption” without attributing intent.
Follow @mattcuttsMatt Cutts@mattcutts @nelson lots of things could be causing a connection interruption. We’re just giving pragmatic, empirical advice. 🙂 cc @amac
Follow @nelsonNelson Minar@nelson @mattcutts Maybe it’s the bit patterns of those specific characters in UTF-8, somehow causing disruptions in the cable impedance.
As usual, webmasters are speculating that there may have been a Panda update refresh. Once again, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable is pointing toa WebmasterWorld thread where such discussion is taking place.
Various people are reporting that they’re seeing significant changes, speculating that there was an update on May 30. We’ve reached out to Google for confirmation one way or the other. Sometimes they’ll confirm, others they won’t. Sometimes they’ll tweet about the refreshes. Other times they won’t.
Right after Google told us last week there hadn’t been a Penguin update since the first one, Matt Cutts tweeted this:
One thing that I’m pretty sure of, however, is that Google will be releasing its monthly list of algorithm changes in the near future. It’s the last day of May, which means it’s just about time to see what all Google has done over the past month. These are always full of interesting nuggets of information.
Mike Evans @mike20
Matt Cutts 
CheapSmartphoneDeals @csmartphonedeal
The idea for Gooey is to provide a stripped down version of Google’s search results that eliminates spam and “bubbles up” only the most relevant results. It has no desire to become the next “Google killer,” and actually, is described by Heinbockel as an “intelligent layer” that sits on top of Google’s results.
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