Google’s Transparency Report shows that Google was asked to remove over a billion links over the past 12 months and has complied with copyright holder requests 90% of the time. TorrentFreak crunched the numbers and found that Google was asked to remove 1,007,741,143 total links from 945,000 different domains. TorrentFreak says that a total of 908,237,861 links were deleted.
The music industry dominated the take down requests, with over a quarter billion over the last 2 years by BPI, which represents the UK’s recorded music industry. Nearly 98% of url’s reported by this organization were removed.
The contention is that music “doesn’t just happen,” it’s an investment. A recent report by IFPI, Investing In Music, details the significant investment of the music industry (particularly record labels) make in creating hit songs and popular artists. The report says that music companies invest US$4.5 billion annually in discovering, nurturing and promoting artists. It’s no wonder they are actively fighting illegal sharing of their product.
File sharing sites were the biggest targets of the removal requests:
eBay announced last week that in order to make their Google links more SEO friendly they have created “browse pages.” They said that in the past, a click from a search result to eBay would often be to an eBay search result itself.
Those of us in the SEO world know Google hates search results going to more search results. Google killed directories in their results and those kinds of results are similar.
With eBay’s new browse pages, they have organized the results to be more what a consumer would expect to see when clicking a search result. The pages include pictures of various similar items broken down by brand, type and price and include summary descriptions.
eBay Says This Move Was Prompted by Millennials
“We’ve noticed something lately,” said eBay in a blog post. “New online shopping patterns have emerged, especially with Millennial buyers. Instead of visiting specific online retailers for a single-purchase transaction, shoppers are using search engines to turn up results based on keywords.”
They say that this behavioral change is because buyers are looking for inspiration and guidance, and they’re more inclined to explore and discover to find what they want.
I could be wrong, but it sounds like it was more of an SEO play than a reaction to new Millennial behavior. But, whatever the reason, it’s definitely a better page for the Googler to land on than another set of search results.
Made Possible by Structured Data and RPIs
Earlier this year eBay announced to the consternation of some of their sellers that all products would be requiring Required Product Identifiers (RPIs). This structured data enabled eBay to make these new “browse pages” and helps them improve the shopping experience for buyers.
eBay told their sellers: “The most amazing part? All of these improvements were made possible by you. By adding Structured Data and Required Product Identifiers (RPIs) information to your listings, you allowed us to better organize site inventory and create a new, more relevant shopping experience for eBay buyers.”
In a blog post last week Google declared 2016 as the year of the supershopper. They define a supershopper as someone who is shopping primarily on their mobile device, looking for deals on the best products and constantly searching Google to so all of this.
“With the ability to instantly discover, research, and purchase, shoppers around the world are more informed and more efficient than ever before – they’ve transformed into supershoppers seemingly overnight.” said Julie Krueger, Retail Managing Director at Google. “We all have that friend – the one who somehow knows the latest brands, the season’s must-have products, and where to find the best deals at the snap of a finger.”
Google says that in 2015 over 50% of holiday shoppers were open to buying from new retailers and that 76% of mobile shoppers have switch their intended brand or retailer after searching Google.
“It used to be that shoppers would thumb through catalogues or stare longingly at the holiday window displays, but mobile is now the super shopper’s go-to source for inspiration,” says Krueger. “Over 64% of smartphone shoppers turn to mobile search for ideas about what to buy before heading into store. And 1 in 4 mobile video viewers in the U.S. have visited YouTube for help with a purchase decision while they were at a store or visiting a store’s website.”
They also report that people more than ever before are search for phrases like “best gift” indicating that they are using search to find quality, not just deals. Google also believes that shoppers are looking for unique gifts too, reporting that searches related to “cool gifts” grew 80%.
Mobile Search: A Door to the Store
Searches on mobile are still really about driving business to the brick and mortar store, rather than just pure online shopping. “Although more and more people are willing to buy on mobile, we know that mobile is still used predominantly as a door to the store,” said Krueger. “In fact, 76% of people who search for something nearby on their smartphone visit a related business within a day, and 28% of those searches result in a purchase.”
They say that once in the store, shoppers use their mobile device to find deals and information about the products they are interested in.
From a retailers perspective, expect online conversion rates to increase across devices as the holidays get to full stride. Google says that last year on mobile, sales were up 30% on Black Friday and 50% on Cyber Monday.
Links are a topic on the mind of every webmaster, search marketer and entrepreneur, especially as it relates to ranking in Google search results. The funny thing is, Google really, really doesn’t want you to worry about links, because of course, that wouldn’t be natural.
I thought it interesting to raise up a few comments Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller made during his latest Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout, that illustrate how much Google doesn’t want us to worry about links.
One hangout participant stated that as a teacher he gets a lot of links from random places, some that might even be considered bad neighborhoods and asked; Are these kinds of links good for me or bad for me? Is Google giving me credit for them? Is Google penalizing me for them? Is Google discounting them? Should I disavow them? Should I not worry?
“I like that last option,” said Mueller. “In general, if these are normal links, organic links, that are happening that are pointing at your content, then I would just let them be. That’s the way the internet works, people link to your content.”
He added, “If your students have blogs and they think, oh, this is actually a teacher that knows what he’s talking about, then that’s a good link. That’s not something you need to disavow just because maybe it’s a sitewide link or in the blog role. I wouldn’t worry about where people are linking from. If these are organic links that are at your site, that’s perfectly fine.”
The caller stated, “So in best case scenario, I get credit for them. In worst case scenario, Google will discount them. But nothing to worry about being paralyzed or anything like that?” Mueller answered, “Exactly.”
Another person asked, “Are you ever going to create an episode just for the discount of links? Like a hangout just for that kind of subject, because I still feel like it’s discounted. If you had, let’s say, five bad links, and that link– I think there was an example there from the “New York Times.” So that “New York Times” link will also be discounted by accident, or no, it won’t? It’s just still a gray area there with this whole discounted link thing going on.”
“Yeah, but in general, that’s not really something you need to worry that much about,” answered Mueller. “That’s kind of the way our algorithms are picking up these links and trying to figure out, how should we treat these links? And that’s something that we’ve been doing in the past as well. That’s even in the basis of PageRank, in the sense that not all links are the same, and we need to figure out how to value the individual links.”
“But that’s not something that as a webmaster you really need to worry about, because you can’t really control that,” he said. “From that point of view, it’s hard to say we could do a whole Hangout just on links, because ideally in the background, there is this big, big sign saying, you shouldn’t be playing with links. And if we’re talking the whole time about how to make links look natural, then that’s essentially contradicting the other one.”
Google released today an updated Transparency Report on their copyright removal requests from Google search results. These requests come from copyright owners who claim that sites linked to in Google search results are violating copyright laws. Often these pages are auto-scraped exact copies of a site trying to steal Google visits and ad clicks.
“The report hasn’t changed much since 2012 and was getting a little rusty,” posted Google’s Manager of Public Policy & Government Relations, Jess Hemerly. “So today, we’re releasing a new version of the report that makes it easier for you to understand the data.”
Here are the changes that Google noted:
Examples of removal requests, similar to the annotations we added to government requests to remove content last year. These illustrate the range of things we’re asked to remove and the decisions we make in response.
A new Explore the Data page, which lets you search the database of removal requests and see a more detailed list of reporting organizations, domains, and copyright owners.
An explanation of how copyright notice and takedown is applied to Google Search, which we hope leads to a better overall understanding of the process.
Google also made some earlier changes to other sections of the Transparency Report according to Hemerly:
In late July, we published the data on government requests for user data for the second half of 2015. We coupled this update with a blog postabout some of the recent advances in surveillance reform, including the Judicial Redress Act and the EU-US Privacy Shield.
At the beginning of August, we added added YouTube and Calendar to ourHTTPS Report Card, continuing to show our progress toward secure connections for people across our products. Learn more about YouTube’s efforts on the YouTube Engineering blog.
A few weeks ago, we updated the government requests to remove content section with data for the second half of 2015. The data show an upward trend in governments asking us to remove content from our products and services, with content on YouTube, Search and Blogger cited most frequently.
From July to December 2015, the top three products for which governments requested removals were YouTube, Web Search, and Blogger.
Google introduced a new version of its Google Merchant Center today that offer more efficient navigation and makes additional shopping programs easier to find. The Google Merchant Center enables online retailers to connect their products to Google so that their products are included in search results, YouTube and partner websites.
Responsive New Interface
“With updates to Merchant Center, you’ll see a fast, responsive new interface, aligned with the modern look and feel of the rest of Google’s products,” says Sven Herschel, Product Manager for Google Shopping at Google. “We’ve changed Merchant Center navigation by bundling common tasks and actions. For example, you can use the new Home page to view recent announcements and dashboard data for your account, and you can find consolidated product feed and product data quality information under the Products page.”
The Merchant Center is the place for ecommerce sites to upload their product data to Google, literally letting millions of shoppers see their online and in-store inventory.
Explore Google Programs for Your Products
“Merchant Center now lets you discover new ways to apply your data to promote and sell your products,” said Herschel. “Use Merchant Center to explore additional Google programs for your products, including Local Inventory Ads, Merchant Promotions, Product Ratings and more, while continuing to manage and configure your product data for Shopping ads.”
Additional Updates to Merchant Center Features
Google has also made updates and improvements to improve speed and functionality so that retailers can get their products online more quickly including Feed Rules, their Diagnostics Page and Currency Conversions. Find more info on those here.
Google announced that on January 10, 2017 they are going to lower the mobile search ranking of sites with interstitial ads popping up in front of content. This is something that many mobile searchers will applaud and many publishers will not be too happy about.
“To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly,” posted Google Product Manager Doantam Phan . “Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller.”
People have become very upset over intrusive popups on mobile devices because it significantly degrades the user experience. “I can’t stand all this stuff popping up on my phone,” commented Bonnie Akridge. “I wish they would get rid of it all. Much of what I read is already mobile friendly but I get the question box do I want to switch to mobile friendly. All this crap is so flipping annoying. I didn’t sign up for this and I hate it being force on me.”
An internet marketer had a somewhat different reaction. “I’ve always hated those popups that come up and block the page (especially on mobile),” stated S. Kyle Davis. “Now it seems that Google has made the use of “interstitials” a ranking point. Good to hear! Of course, any time Google does something like this, the opposite reaction is that it is making things harder for advertisers (thus making it harder for content producers to make money and continue producing content). However, I always hope that it pushes us to find better, less obtrusive and more effective ways to communicate paid messages to audiences.”
Although this initially applies to only mobile search rankings, its a reasonable prediction that Google will extend this to desktop rankings as well in the future, effectively killing interstitial and popup advertising on the internet.
“Although the majority of pages now have text and content on the page that is readable without zooming, we’ve recently seen many examples where these pages show intrusive interstitials to users,” says Phan. “While the underlying content is present on the page and available to be indexed by Google, content may be visually obscured by an interstitial. This can frustrate users because they are unable to easily access the content that they were expecting when they tapped on the search result.”
Google specifically does not want sites to show a popup that covers the main content either immediately or delayed, they don’t want any ads that have to be closed by the user and they consider large top ads to be effectively the same as an interstitial. So they are going to penalize sites where ads dominate above the fold space.
They did offer exceptions where they won’t rank lower sites with interstitials that are a response to a legal obligation such as age verification, are part of a login process or small top banners.
“Remember, this new signal is just one of hundreds of signals that are used in ranking,” said Phan. “The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.”
Google is gearing up to be the go-to place for Rio Olympic Games information. “Next week, the 2016 cauldron will be lit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where thousands of athletes will come together to represent the strength and pride of their home countries with the world as their audience,” says Google Product Manager Jonathan Livni, in a post on the Google Search blog. “In celebration of the next chapter in Olympics history, we’re bringing the best our products have to offer to help people around the world stay up-to-date with the Olympic Games Rio 2016.
Livni lists these products that will help you keep up with the Rio Games:
Discover the event schedule, medal counts, and athlete information in Search
Get results and view TV schedules in 30+ countries
Watch official broadcasters’ event highlights on YouTube in 60+ countries
Explore Rio and venues in Google Maps
Keep up to date with the latest search Trends from around the world
“If you search on the Google app on Android and iOS, you’ll also see an option to get automatic updates on top event and medal wins, so you’ll never miss a beat,” says Livni.
YouTube & The Rio Olympics
“In the last 12 months, over 23,000 years of content have been watched on YouTube for the four most popular Olympic Games’ sports alone – athletics, gymnastics, diving and swimming, and volleyball,” commented Google’s Christoph Heimes, Head of News and Sports Partnerships, EMEA at YouTube. “To put this in perspective, that’s the equivalent of watching all 17 days of the Olympic Games, 24 hours a day, not once, but over half a million times. Nearly two thirds of that viewership has happened on mobile devices — and even more in countries like the U.S., U.K. and Japan.”
YouTube is sending 15 of their top creators to Rio to live stream everything except the games themselves, because NBC will be broadcasting these considering they paid $1.226 billion for the rights! You can also watch NBC and other official broadcasters’ video highlights on YouTube in more than 60 countries around the world, including the BBC (U.K.), America Movil (Latin America excluding Brazil), NHK (Japan) and many others.
Google will link all of these official broadcasters’ highlights directly into Google Search and YouTube Watch Cards for the Rio Games.
According to the YouTube Summer Games Report by the Google Trends team, the majority of time spent watching sports content happens on mobile. In the past 12 months, mobile devices accounted for 65% of Olympic sports videos global watch time.
Sports related content drives fans not just to YouTube, but to search as well. The Games are motivating more searches globally than the last World Cup and past two UEFA European Championships.
Brands on YouTube Tying into Rio Olympic Games
Brands are also heavily committed to the Rio Games, uploading ads celebrating the athletes, culture, and passion around the Olympic Games, and they are being watched in big numbers.
“From April 2016 through June 2016, ads from Worldwide and National Olympic Partners have already received the equivalent of over 400 years worth of watch time,” stated Heimes. “From epic wins to all-star performances, YouTube will bring you the best from Rio, before, during and after the Games through official broadcaster channels and celebration via content creators.”
“Even if you’re a world away, preview the places where the world’s most talented athletes will make history and explore the breathtaking beauty of Brazil,” said Livni. “We hope you’ll let Google be your guide.”
Pokemon Go, launched July 6, 2016, is arguably the fastest growing game ever. In that spirit YouTube Trends wondered just how big is it? “We asked the YouTube data, and can confirm that “Pokemon Go” is a unique video game phenomenon like no other,” commented YouTube Lead Gaming Curator Jeff Rubin in a blog post for Yahoo Trends. “After just a few weeks, it’s clear “Pokemon Go” is big.”
That’s Jeff Rubin in the lead pic above.
Overall Pokemon Go Stats
Craig Smith over at DMR scoured the web for Pokemon Go stats seen in his blog post. Here are a few of the most illustrative stats on the popularity of Pokemon Go:
From a peak of over 25 million US active users, there are now just over 20 million.
Users are spending 43 minutes a day playing, more than any other social app.
YouTube Pokemon Go Stats
“We compared the launch week of Pokemon Go’s with the launch week of other blockbusters from 2016,” he said. “We found that the launch of “Pokemon Go” received twice as much watchtime as “Overwatch,” and three times as much as “Tom Clancy’s The Division.” Overall, since launch, “Pokemon Go” has racked up millions of hours of watchtime and consistently been one of the top 3 games on YouTube (trailing only “Minecraft” and “Grand Theft Auto V”).”
Rubin noted that one video related to Pokemon Go on YouTube is the “2014 Google Maps April Fools’ Day prank”, which has seen its views and watchtime pop up since the game was launched.
All Pokemon Go players must swear allegiance to one of three teams – Team Mystic, Team Valor, or Team Instinct. Using YouTube search and watch data they were able to determine which team is the most popular. “We found that, in terms of search queries, Valor jumped out to an early lead but was soon overtaken by Mystic,” Rubin said. “They’re currently running neck-and-neck, both ahead of Team Instinct.”
He says the best part of Pokemon Go’s popularity is that the Pokemon theme song is back! “And that’s the way we like it,” Rubin says!
Facebook’s goal is to connect with everyone, yes every single person in the world. Not just that, but Facebook wants to connect to everyone at all times, in every waking moment. Facebook envisions a future where you will always be engaging with some part of the Facebook ecosystem, whether it’s on its mega social platform at Facebook, using it’s search engine, messaging a business associate or communicating on video or via a virtual reality environment.
But first lets talk business.
“I often talk about how when we develop new products we think about it in three phases, said Zuckerberg. “First, building a consumer use case. Then, second, making it so that people can organically interact with businesses. And then third, on top of that, once there’s a large volume of people interacting with businesses, give businesses tools to reach more people and pay. And that’s ultimately the business opportunity.”
During the earnings call yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg opened the curtain into Facebook’s plans, strategies and dreams for the future. He first provided the latest metrics illustrating Facebook’s continued success, 1.7 billion people now use Facebook every month, and 1.1 billion people use it every day. He said that Facebook revenue grew by 59% year-over year to $6.4 billion, and advertising revenue was up 63% to $6.2 billion.
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook said that Q2 ad revenue grew 63% and mobile ad revenue hit $5.2 billion, up 81% year-over-year, and was approximately 84% of total ad revenue. Facebook is now truly a mobile app rather than a desktop experience for the vast majority of its users.
Zuckerberg said that they continue to see excellent growth and over the past year Facebook has added over 200 million people using Facebook on a monthly basis. Time spent per person increased double digit percentages year-over-year across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. And that doesn’t even include WhatsApp yet.
Facebook is still growing rapidly and that’s because it has continued to evolve. It’s evolution has happened because of increased bandwidth, technological advancements, acquisitions of new platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram and most importantly continuing to be on the cutting edge of what people want in a social network. All of this while simultaneously building a successful business model that pays for this evolution.
What’s really interesting however, is how Zuckerberg sees Facebook transforming in the future. “Our results show our progress as we work to make the world more open and connected across our three-, five- and ten-year horizons,” he said. “Over the next three years we are focused on continuing to build our community and help people share more of what matters to them. The next five years are about building our newer products into full ecosystems with developers and businesses. And over the next ten years we are working to build new technologies to help everyone connect in new ways.”
Facebook is seeking to be the world’s business platform, not just the peoples. More on this below in the Search section on a Facebook future where it is competing with LinkedIn.
“We’re excited to announce that we now have 60 million monthly active business Pages on Facebook,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. “We also continue to grow the number of active advertisers on our platform. This shows that both our free and paid products are providing value to marketers of all sizes around the world. We continue to focus on our three priorities — capitalizing on the shift to mobile, growing the number of marketers using our ad products, and making our ads more relevant and effective.”
Trust me, this is just the beginning of Facebook’s morphing into both a personal and business platform in the future.
The Future of Facebook is Video
Facebook used to be mostly text and over the years they changed to be photo centric, with many people using Facebook as their family photo album. People still do that but Zuckerberg envisions a huge change coming. “We see a world that is video first, with video at the heart of all of our apps and services.”
“Over the past six months we have been particularly focused on Live video. Live represents a new way to share what’s happening in more immediate and creative ways,” Zuckerberg said. “This quarter Candace Payne’s Chewbacca mask video was viewed almost 160 million times. Live is also changing the way we see politics, as news organizations and delegates go Live from the Republican and Democratic conventions. And we have seen in Minnesota and Dallas how Live can shine a light on important moments as they happen.”
At Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London, Nicola Mendelsohn, VP EMEA at Facebook, predicted that the Facebook newsfeed will be all video in 5 years. “It will definitely be mobile. It will probably be all video,” Mendelsohn said. “I just think if we look, we already are seeing a year on year decline in text. We’re seeing a massive increase as I’ve said on both pictures and video. So yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say video, video, video.”
“When you think about what’s happening on video on our platform we’re really excited by the production and consumption of video and we’re seeing the full range from people posting the things in their personal lives; the power of what a mobile phone can produce and distribute now is pretty incredible when you compare it to just a few years ago to some of the most sophisticated content producers in the world producing for us,” added Sandberg.
Facebook Focuses on Search
Facebook is moving into the search space aggressively, definitely to help it compete with Twitter and perhaps even Google in the future. Facebook launched true keyword search in late 2014 that allows users to search not just profile names or just your friends posts, but also everyone’s public posts. And, if you didn’t know, all postings default at public, which means that anyone can search for your posts.
The first goal for Facebook with search is to become more like Twitter, where people post their thoughts, feelings and most importantly news reports, especially the on-the-scene kind. When the next plane lands in the Hudson, Facebook wants the survivor standing on the wing to use their platform to post about this breaking news, not Twitter. More precisely, Facebook wants you to use Facebook Live to stream your personalized live news coverage.
“We’re making good progress on core services within the Facebook app, like Search,” Zuckerberg stated. “A growing way people use search is to find what people are saying about a topic across the more than 2.5 trillion posts in our network. Now, people are doing more than 2 billion searches a day, between looking up people, businesses and other things that they care about. Continuous, steady improvement to services like search are an important part of helping people connect and realizing our mission.”
He also said this in minimizing their true plans, in my opinion.
So I’d say we’re around the second phase of that in search now. We have a pretty big navigational use case where people look up people and pages and groups that they want to get to and look at and search. One of the big growing use cases that we’re investing a lot in is looking up the content in the ecosystem and that is an area that we’re very excited about which helps people find more content.
But certainly there’s a reasonable amount of behavior in there which is looking for things that over time could be monetizeable or commercial intense and at some point we will probably want to work on that but we’re still in the phase of just making it easier for people to find all the content they want and connect with businesses organically.
But what’s their next goal? Facebook has certainly focused on the business use of their platform as they continue to look for monetization opportunities. My guess is that Facebook will seek to compete with LinkedIn as the business platform of record.
Over the last few years LinkedIn has certainly moved from a glorified directory of business professionals to a platform for business related news, conversation and connection. Facebook has the platform but would need to figure out how to easily separate family life from business life, which could be done rather easily. With Microsoft buying LinkedIn, Facebook will be highly motivated to compete.
Google tried to compete with Facebook with Google+ and it failed miserably, but that’s because it’s harder to get people to change their social habits than it is their search habits. You don’t need your friends to use Facebook Search in order for you to find it useful, but you definitely need your friends to move to a new social platform to make it work for you. That was Google’s dilemma, but it won’t be Facebook’s.
“Since it refocused on keywords, Facebook is now seeing 2 billion searches per day of its 2.5 trillion posts,” stated TechCrunch writer Josh Constine. “That’s compared to 1.5 billion searches per day in July 2015, and 1 billion in September 2012. That’s a 33% climb in just 9 months.”
That’s lets than half a reported 3.5 billion searches per day on Google. The difference is that Google’s searches are monitizable, while Facebook searches, not so much. However, this must scare the heck out of Google because it shows how ingrained people are to use Facebook for search. Therefore, over time I predict that Facebook will add web indexing to it’s search engine. They already have 3.5 billion searches, why not open up search to everything and in the process open up a huge monetization opportunity.
One other prediction, Facebook will disconnect its search app from just Facebook.com, just like they did Messenger. Then, voilà, Facebook is competing with Google.
Making Instagram Stronger
Instagram was purchased by Facebook for $1 billion while it was just getting off the ground. It is now center to its plans on connecting with everyone in the world on a constant always on basis. That’s why Instagram is so important to Facebook, it has a foothold with younger people and its active user base is not a clone of Facebook’s, so it expands the corporate Facebook’s universe of connectivity and engagement.
“Over the next five years we are working hard to build ecosystems around some of our newer products,” said Zuckerberg. “Instagram now has more than 500 million monthly actives, with more than 300 million daily. Now we’re working to make the experience more engaging.”
He said that when Instagram, despite user pushback, began to rank its feed in order to improve the experience, that they are already seeing a “positive impact” with people spending more time and share more content within the platform.
As always, business is important to Zuckerberg as well. “We’ve also introduced our advertising tools on Instagram and we’re seeing marketers engage with people in creative and innovative ways.”
Messaging with Messenger & WhatsApp
“In the two years since we separated Messenger from the main Facebook app — which was a controversial decision at the time — we’ve improved performance and given people new ways to express themselves,” commented Zuckerberg. “Now, for the first time, more than 1 billion people are using Messenger every month.”
Facebook sees a huge opportunity with messaging because it moves them closer to their goal of connecting everyone on a constant always on basis. That’s why they paid $22 billion for WhatsApp, which is a service that barely had a business model.
“I’m also happy with the updates we’re making to WhatsApp — which also has a community of more than 1 billion people,” said Zuckerberg. “This quarter we launched new desktop apps and end-to-end encryption, and millions of people are using WhatsApp’s voice calling features.”
Facebook has big plans for messaging because not only does it help them bring even more people into Facebook’s universe, but it moves them into the business space, where Facebook desperately wants to be, because that’s where the money is.
“The scale we’ve achieved with our messaging services makes it clear that they are more than just a way to chat with friends,” Zuckerberg noted. “That’s why we’re also making it easier for people to connect with groups and businesses as well. We are going to keep focusing on this over the next several years.”
Facebook owned messaging has now taken over standard text messaging according to Zuckerberg.
“Between Messenger and WhatsApp I think we’re around 60 billion messages a day which is something like three times more than the peak of global SMS traffic.”
It’s incredible to think that Facebook now owns the messaging space. Who would have thought that 3 years ago?
New Technologies
“I’m also excited about the early progress we’re making on our 10-year initiatives,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during their recent earnings announcement. “We are investing in new technologies to give more people a voice — including the 4 billion people around the world who aren’t yet online — and helping more people take advantage of the opportunities that come with the internet.”
Facebook is seeking to connect everyone in the world, regardless of any obstacle. It’s a long term plan, but Facebook is on it.
“One of the biggest opportunities to grow our community is in developing countries where connectivity is less advanced than what we take for granted here at home,” Zuckerberg said. “So over the past couple of years, we’ve began making steady improvements to our apps to make them work regardless of the device or connection people are using. We also built a light-weight version of our Android app, called Facebook Lite, that is tuned to work on 2G networks and is now used by more than 100 million people.”
Virtual reality is another huge area of investment for Facebook, especially with their $2 billion purchase of Oculus. They see VR as an extension of connecting and sharing. Know one really knows the future of VR, but it will be deeply engrained in advertising in the future and since all of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising, they need to be in this space.
“We believe that virtual reality can help people share richer experiences and help everyone understand what’s going on around the world,” said Zuckerberg. “It’s really early for us in VR but we’re hitting some important milestones. As of the second quarter more than 1 million people a month are using Oculus on mobile phones through our Gear VR 4partnership with Samsung.”
Zuckerberg also commented on the potential revenue importance of their investment in VR:
“More than 300 apps are already available at the Oculus store for Gear VR, we’ve filled all of our pre-orders for Oculus Rift and we are seeing increasing demand from retail as stores plan for the holidays. While it’s still early for augmented reality, we’re doing AR research and are seeing lightweight versions of AR technology today in mobile apps like MSQRD.”
Facebook is Just Getting Started
“So that’s a recap of the progress we’re making in our 10 year plan,” said Zuckerberg. “We have a saying at Facebook that our journey is only 1% done — and while I’m happy with our progress, we have a lot more work to do to grow our community and connect the whole world. That means making big investments and taking risks — focusing not just on what Facebook is, but on what it can be.”
In a deal with LyricFind, Google is now displaying lyrics in search results starting immediately. LyricFind is the world’s largest lyric licensing service with over 4,000 publishers in its catalog. Lyrics will be seen both in Google’s search results and within Google Play Music.
“We’re happy to expand the depth and quality of lyrics available on Google’s services,” says LyricFind CEO Darryl Ballantyne. “We’re working together to make lyrics available to a larger audience in a faster and more efficient way.”
We're happy to announce our partnership with Google! Through this new deal, LyricFind will add lyrics from 4,000… https://t.co/upKXDG6cZg
LyricFind, founded by Darryl Ballantyne and Mohamed Moutadayne bills itself as “the world’s leader in legal lyric solutions.” The company was founded in 2004.
Billboard spoke to Ballantyne and got this quote indicating that the partnership will generate millions more in royalties to its publishing partners:
“It should be a significant revenue stream,” Ballantyne said. “I can’t get into the rates, but we expect it to be millions of dollars generated for publishers and songwriters as a result of this. It’s all based on usage. Royalties are paid based on the number of times a lyric is viewed. The more it’s viewed, the more publishers get paid.”
Included in the over 4,000 music publishers that LyricFind currently licenses are all the majors – Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner/Chappell Music Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing (including EMI Music Publishing), and Kobalt. According to LyricFind, they are also the exclusive third-party lyrics licensor for Universal Music Publishing Group, the world’s largest music publisher.
Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand wrote an interesting piece on how RankBrain has now become the third most important ranking factor behind content and links. According to a report on BackChannel RankBrain is being used on almost ALL search queries helping determine the most relevant results and their order:
Google is characteristically fuzzy on exactly how it improves search (something to do with the long tail? Better interpretation of ambiguous requests?) but Jeff Dean says that RankBrain is “involved in every query,” and affects the actual rankings “probably not in every query but in a lot of queries.” What’s more, it’s hugely effective. Of the hundreds of “signals” Google search uses when it calculates its rankings (a signal might be the user’s geographical location, or whether the headline on a page matches the text in the query), RankBrain is now rated as the third most useful.
“It was significant to the company that we were successful in making search better with machine learning,” says John Giannandrea. “That caused a lot of people to pay attention.” Pedro Domingos, the University of Washington professor who wrote The Master Algorithm, puts it a different way: “There was always this battle between the retrievers and the machine learning people,” he says. “The machine learners have finally won the battle.”
RankBrain announced in October 2015 in a Bloomberg article and video (below) is a machine learning algorithm that uses big data from billions of search queries, who’s searching, who clicks what, geolocation, etc. to better determine what a user expects to see in the search results.
Google has been very secretive about RankBrain since October but did references it recently in a post on their Google Cloud Platform Blog. The post, by Google Hardware Engineer Norm Jouppi, was about how machine learning is now powering most of Google’s applications including Street View, Inbox Smart Reply, voice search and Google Search. Norm commented about a “stealthy project at Google several years ago to see what we could accomplish with our own custom accelerators for machine learning applications.” This “stealthy project” resulted in Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) which is now powering machine learning features at Google.
It’s fascinating how fast Google implements new technology in its applications:
TPU is an example of how fast we turn research into practice — from first tested silicon, the team had them up and running applications at speed in our data centers within 22 days.
TPUs already power many applications at Google, including RankBrain, used to improve the relevancy of search results and Street View, to improve the accuracy and quality of our maps and navigation. AlphaGo was powered by TPUs in the matches against Go world champion, Lee Sedol, enabling it to “think” much faster and look farther ahead between moves.
Rich Cards are Google’s latest version of its enhanced mobile friendly search results that from a site owners point of view can lead to more visitors and business if you follow the Rich Card protocol. Rich cards are a new search result format building on the concept of rich snippets, using schema.org structured markup to display content in a more engaging and visual format. Google believes that this approach provides the mobile Google searcher a better user experience.
2. New Search Console reports
Per Google – “We launched a new report in Search Console to help developers confirm that their rich card markup is valid. In the report we highlight “enhanceable cards,” which are cards that can benefit from marking up more fields.”
On WebProNews we also wrote about Google’s launch of ‘Property Sets’ within their Search Console, allowing webmasters to combine apps and sites within a single group in order to monitor overall clicks and impressions within a single report. It will be rolling out to all users over the next couple of days. This is a great feature for those that have many subdomains as well.
3. Real-time indexing
Per Google – “Instead of waiting for content to be crawled and indexed, publishers will be able to use the Google Indexing API to trigger the indexing of their content in real time.”
There have been a handful of updates to the Search Console API (formerly the Webmaster Tools API). This is the API that lets you add sites to a Search Console account, retrieve data and diagnostics, and submit sitemaps. One update is the addition of pagination in Search Analytics. You can request over 5000 rows of data for your site without having to iterate through filters. Additionally, crawl errors now include “linked from” info from the start.
Google announced that they have provided an update on their use of AMP, an open source effort to speed up the mobile web. In a WebProNews article we quoted Google News engineering director Maricia Scott, “Our tests have shown that AMP documents load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than the equivalent non-amp’ed result. In many cases these stories will load instantly.”
Per Google – “App streaming is a new way for Android users to try out games without having to download and install the app — and it’s already available in Google Search. Check out the session to learn more.”
Attention webmasters, you now need to make sure that your site is Rich Card friendly so that you can gain more Google search referrals. Google has already launched Rich Cards for two search categories, recipes and movies. More content topics will be added over time.
Rich Cards are Google’s latest version of its enhanced mobile friendly search results that from a site owners point of view can lead to more visitors and business if you follow the Rich Card protocol. Rich cards are a new search result format building on the concept of rich snippets, using schema.org structured markup to display content in a more engaging and visual format. Google believes that this approach provides the mobile Google searcher a better user experience.
Below is an example of the evolution of mobile search queries with rich cards displaying carousels where search results scroll horizontally. Carousels can contain cards all from the same site or from multiple sites.
“For site owners, this is a new opportunity to stand out in Search results and attract more targeted users to your page. For example, if you have a recipe site, you can build a richer preview of your content with a prominent image for each dish. This visual format helps users find what they want right away, so you’re getting users who specifically want that especially delicious cookie recipe you have.”
For developers, Google offers documentation on how to implement Rich Card’s for your site and also created a gallery with a list of various business verticals that demonstrate how various kinds of structured data can produce rich results in Google Search.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone first launched Jelly a couple years ago. It was something of a Q&A service billed as a “new way to search.” It didn’t really catch on, and work halted. Then, seemingly out of the blue, early this year, Stone announced that Jelly would return thanks to his “renewed enthusiasm” and “entirely new approach” to the product.
This time, users don’t need an account to search, and Jelly combines artificial intelligence with human decisions. On Thursday, Stone announced that the new Jelly is live after a period in closed beta.
“Jelly is the only search engine in the world with an attitude, an opinion, and the experience of people to back it all up,” he wrote in a post on Medium. “Only Jelly can say you asked the wrong question. Only Jelly can give you answers you wanted but didn’t think to ask. Only Jelly will deliver a thoughtful answer to your anonymous question. This is all because Jelly is humanity plus technology.”
Jelly uses a routing algorithm. Stone explains, “Each query and every answer is freighted with metadata. But all this science is in service of getting you the right responses from the right folks. People who can help because they’ve been there, they have the experience, they have the opinion, and most importantly, they have the answers you need — and you can follow up with them too.”
Jelly still carries the baggage of a very fundamental question that it did when it launched the first time. Do people want to search like this? More specifically, do they want to search for something and then wait a period of time before getting their answers? Optimistically, I’d say it depends on the type of question. Realistically, I’d say probably not. It would be one thing if search engines like Google were really bad at their job, but they’re not. They’re getting better all the time.
Before I started writing this article, I asked Jelly, “Why is Jelly supposed to be more useful now than it was when it launched the first time?”
Last year, eBay launched Promoted Listings, an ad format that enables sellers to get multi-quantity items in front of potential buyers in search results and only pay when the ad is clicked and the item is purchased.
The format has been available for the following categories: Health & Beauty, Musical Instruments & Gear, Toys & Hobbies, Home & Garden, Baby, Sporting Goods, Jewelry & Watches, Clothing, Shoes & Accessories, Cameras & Photo, Video Games & Consoles, Computers/Tablets & Networking, Consumer Electronics, and Cell Phones & Accessories.
The company just announced the addition of seven more categories that can now take advantage of Promoted Listings to boost visibility. These include: Antiques, Collectibles, Dolls & Bears, Pottery & Glass, Sports Mem, Cards & Fan Shop, Stamps, and Travel.
Sellers can have up to 500 listings per campaign, and can promote up to a third of their eligible inventory in the categories listed.
Starting on May 1, eBay is giving Anchor Stores subscribers $25 per quarter in credit to use toward Promoted Listings. The credits expire at the end of each quarter.
Google made a handful of television-related announcements at the National Association of Broadcasters Show television industry event.
For one, Google Search will start showing live TV listings serving as your TV guide in a way that you probably hoped it had in the past. You can edit your provider for accuracy. It works for both shows and movies, which is cool.
The company also announced DoubleClick’s Dynamic Ad Insertion, which it says makes ads “hyper relevant” for viewers across any screen.
“By creating individual streams for every viewer using server side ad insertion, we are able to deliver a better, more personalized viewing experience that looks and feels as seamless as TV today,” explains Daniel Alegre, President of Global Partnerships at Google. “And not only will this work for both live and on-demand TV but it works across directly sold and programmatic.”
For DoubleClick for Publisher clients, Google announced that it will “seamlessly enforce” the level of control that has been established in TV across all inventory, whether sold directly or indirectly.
“That means, we are able to honor competitive separation – so two automotive ads don’t appear in the same commercial break – and other rules like making sure an alcohol and children’s cereal ad don’t appear in the same commercial break,” says Alegre. “This has been major blocker to enabling programmatic to work for TV. And now you no longer need to turn down attractive opportunities from advertisers interested in transacting programmatically because of compliance concerns.”
New TV partners include MCN, Roku and Cablevision, which have all signed on to use DoubleClick for Publishers to serve ads.
Finally, Google announced that it is collaborating with Autodesk on a new cloud-based rendering solution called Maya for Google Cloud Platform ZYNC Render. More on this here.
eBay announced new browsing modules for shoppers, leverage its structured data better and help users surface listings with savings, best-selling products, etc. The modules include “shop by brand” options and other ways to look at category pages without using keyword searches.
“Many users want to click to browse through items that they are interested in rather than rely on keyword searches,” said Dominique Bouchon, eBay’s Director of Search Front-End Product Management. “If we only surface a long list of listings, we miss the opportunity to surface the most interesting products and listings. We now have an algorithm that can instantly and intelligently surface them to our users.”
A new “save on” module is populated with best-priced listings via an algorithm that leverages the structured data to instantly identify listings where the price is lower than trending prices.
A “best selling” module surfaces relevant products rather than just listings. It can take a product category, such as digital cameras or guitars and surface the most popular models.
“Notably, the ‘Shop by’ guidance module at the top of many of our new results pages offer a ‘guided tour’ type of experience,” eBay says. “It helps navigate our very large selection of items by highlighting the key aspects we’ve learned that most people use to drill down from tens of thousands of results to the most relevant results.”
The company says one goal of the modules is to better serve users coming to eBay from Google results. The new experience will provide these visitors with better guidance on products.
The company says it has more browse module and search news in the pipeline for the coming months, so stay tuned for that.
Earlier this week, eBay made improvements for users searching for product identifiers. Last week, it revealed its big Spring Seller Update, which has a lot of changes for sellers.
eBay announced improvements to its product identifier search experience in an effort to help sellers make it easier for buyers to find the right items.
Now, buyers can search for items by entering their GTIN, UPC, EAN, ISBN, or MPN directly in the search bar. Listings that include these identifiers will of course get better search visibility.
eBay is telling sellers to make sure and add this info to any listings that are missing them ASAP.
“Now, when buyers use a product identifier to search for an item, their results will include all the listings matching that item,” eBay says in an announcement. “To better streamline the search experience, we’re also changing the way eBay item number search works. Now, when you search for an item by its unique eBay item number, only active items that match will show up in the results.”
It adds, “To search for sold or completed items that are no longer active, you can:
Search for the item number and then click on Completed Listings in the left hand pane; Or look up your items in My eBay (or the Seller Hub when it becomes available later this summer); Or you can navigate to any eBay item by going directly to this URL by putting your eBay item number at the end of it.”
On Thursday, a report from Bloomberg came out indicating that Verizon is poised to make a first-round bid for Yahoo and that Google parent Alphabet is considering doing the same.
The report also said that AT&T and Comcast, and Microsoft have all decided not to bid at this time, and that Time Inc., Bain, TPG, and others are still in the cards. IAC/Interactive Corp., News Corp, and Disney have all been mentioned as potential suitors at one time or another.
The due date for first-round bids had been reported as April 11, but Kara Swisher at Re/code is now reporting that Yahoo has moved the deadline to April 18, giving suitors another week. Swisher, who has reported much Yahoo insider info over the years, cites sources close to the situation and “blabby bankers” as her sources here. Here’s what she says about Google:
Hey, over there, Google is sure interested. (The truth is, its M&A unit crunched the numbers as they should, but an offer is highly unlikely!)
After the regulatory difficulty Google has had in partnering with Yahoo in the past, it’s unclear how these things would work if Google were to try and move forward with such an acquisition.
Earlier this week, Facebook announced a bunch of new live video features, giving users more ways to discover, share, and interact with live video as well as more ways to personalize live broadcasts.
The new features include Live for Groups and Events, Live Reactions, Replay Comments, filters and doodling, an Invite Friends feature, a live video destination, and a Live Map, which provides a visual way to look at public broadcasts that are currently happening.
On Thursday, Facebook announced an update for live video in the search realm. For one, they’re making it easier to discover live videos in topics that are trending.
“If relevant Live video is available, it will be included in the Search results pages for these topics so you can get a direct, first-hand look at what’s happening,” the company explains in an announcement. “You’ll also see a new indicator that lets you know when relevant Live video is available for a Trending topic.”
“Expect to find Live video in a small handful of Trending topics for now,” Facebook adds. “As more people start creating and sharing Live video, we’re excited to see these perspectives make Trending topics an even better experience.”
There’s a dedicated search experience for the aforementioned livd video destination, which is coming to the mobile app. User will be able to find more videos across Facebook by typing keywords into the search bar.
Obviously the implications of all of this for businesses is that your videos can potentially be easier for users to discover beyond the News Feed.
