Google is making it easier for site owners who use Google Custom Search to add Google Analytics Site Search tracking from their custom search engine.
“Google Analytics Site Search reports provide extensive data on how people search your site once they are already on it. You can see initial searches, refinements, search trends, which pages they searched from, where they ended up, and conversion correlation. In the past we admit that setup was a little challenging,” says Google software engineer Zhong Wang.
“If you are already a Google Analytics user (and your site has the Google Analytics tracking code on its pages), go to the Custom Search Engine management page, select your CSE’s control panel and click on Google Analytics from the left-hand menu,” explains Wang. “We’ll display a list of your Google Analytics web properties so you can select one and tell us the query and category parameters that you want to track.”
When changes are saved, Google generates a new code snippet that you can copy and paste into your site. Then, you can access Site Search reports from the content section in Google Analytics.
In other Google Analytics news, sites in German got the go ahead to start using it, as Google announced in a German blog post. More on that here.
Yahoo wants you to know that it still takes search seriously. Every so often, they feel the need to remind everyone.
Today, Ethan Batraski, Director of User Intent & Experiences at Yahoo Search put up a blog post talking about how Yahoo is going to continue to fight in search, and how some of its product experiences are “so radically different, you’ll sit back in your seat thinking, ‘what the &$%# just happened?’”
He also provided three bullet points of “what search looks like” to Yahoo over the next 18 months:
From destination to companion: Access and convenience are two key components in the search game. In the next 18 months, Search will be a companion experience that gives you answers immediately and instantly without leaving the page you are on – effortlessly.
From fragmented to seamless: Consistency and simplicity are two key components in the search game. Users are increasingly searching on multiple devices. In the next 18 months, your devices and platforms will be seamlessly connected, allowing you to start an experience on one device and continue effortlessly onto another, with simple access to any information on any other devices. Search will be evolving into a beautiful and consistent multi-modal experience that simply integrates into your everyday life.
From more information to better information: Relevancy and depth are two key components in the search game. When you search for something — say, Adirondack chairs — do you really care that we returned 9,150,000 results? Probably not. In the next 18 months, Search will focus on a deep experience that gives you only what you want to know, taking into account your search history, click behavior, demographics, social graph, and browsing history to provide you with a 1:1 experience. It will tell you why it served you the results it did and allow you to pivot on a number of aspects to further tune the page. It will no longer be a search engine designed for the masses, it will be a search engine tailored just for you. Some call it a results page; I call it an intent satisfaction experience.
Can Yahoo win a substantial share of the search market back from Google? Tell us what you think.
Google has redesigned Product Search. There is a new look and feel to go along with some new features that have been integrated, courtesy of Google’s acquisition of Boutiques.
The new home page is different, obviously (pictured above).
“By increasing the size of each image, simplifying much of the text around the images, and lightening the text color, we’ve emphasized the more visual aspects of apparel shopping,” says Burak Gokturk of the Google Commerce team. “We’ve also integrated the most popular search refinements from Boutiques. Using the same innovative machine learning and computer vision technologies we developed for Boutiques, you can now browse dress collections that match the color, silhouette and genre you desire.”
“And because we think browsing and discovering new items is what makes shopping fun, we’ve added a feature to Product Search that makes it easy to do just that. Let’s say a particular dress catches your eye,” adds Gokturk. “Now, you can explore similar styles and discover new designers by clicking on that dress and viewing dozens of visually similar ones. We think you’ll find this fun –and addictive!– and we hope it brings that element of surprise and discovery we all love with brick-and-mortar shopping to the online shopping experience.”
Boutitques.com and other Like.com sites will be transitioned into Google Product Search on October 14.
Bing is using videos on its homepage now, in place of photos. Not always, but sometimes.
The Bing homepage and its generally striking photos is possibly one of the most pleasing features of the search engine, at least for those who appreciate photography. Judging from today’s, this will only be enhanced by the new addition of video.
It shows a nice view of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.
The first video is US-only, but Bing will be rolling out the video homepage in other markets in the next few months. It requires an HTML5-enabled browser.
In other search engine homepage news, Google took the big blue arrow pointing to Google+ off after a two-day run (at least in the US).
Google announced that it has made it “easier” to choose the result you want. It’s not as major as it sounds. Essentially, they just made an adjustment to how Instant Previews work. Here’s the full announcement:
In addition to some recent changes to the look and feel of search, today we’re making it even easier to see Instant Previews of your search results. Sometimes you’re searching for a page with a specific type of visual – like a seating chart when you want to buy baseball tickets – but can’t tell from the results page which one will have exactly what you’re looking for. Or you’ve already seen a specific page and would recognize it in an instant if you saw it again. You can now quickly glance at a preview of the page without having to click and see if it’s the page you want.
Instant Previews have been around since last year, allowing you to click on the magnifying glass to the right of the result to see a visual overview of a page. Now these previews are no longer even a click away: if you move your mouse over a search result, arrows will appear. Hover over them to see a visual preview of that result.
Conduit, if you don’t know, is the largest global network of browser and mobile app publishers (accounting for 260,000 members and their 250 million users), and now all of the apps in its network are discoverable in Bing.
“The move marks a major step towards solving app discoverability in the desktop browser. The feature will be rolled out to all members of the Conduit network over the next few weeks,” a spokesperson for Conduit tells WebProNews. “For example, when searching for ‘Groupon app,’ Bing returns organic and sponsored links to the Groupon site, as well as the official Groupon App powered by Conduit. Results will appear based on relevancy.”
Conduit entered a partnership with Microsoft back in December. As a result, Conduit publishers can provide their customers direct access to Bing. Now, the deal appears to be more beneficial to Conduit app publishers as well.
“Our relationship with Microsoft has enabled our publishers to offer an even greater experience to their customers and will add more fuel to the already impressive growth of Conduit’s massive network,” said Conduit President Adam Boyden. “The inclusion of Conduit-powered apps in Bing not only represents a step forward in app discoverability, but also an opportunity for any publisher who monetizes via content, traffic or engaging their users.”
“The inclusion of Conduit-powered apps in Bing search results is one more way that we are providing people with information to help make their everyday lives easier,” said Chris Nelson, Sr. Director, Strategic Partnerships for Bing.
Yesterday, Bing announced some new Action Buttons in search results, which allow users to take part in specific tasks on sites right from the search results page. This includes things like downloading software, renting a car, and checking a flight status.
Google announced that it is making mobile site optimization a new factor of ad quality for AdWords campaigns that are driving mobile search traffic.
Google began limiting ad serving on high-end mobile devices when landing pages contained Flash-heavy content last year. Now, Google is taking the mobile user experience up a notch.
There are plenty of non-AdWords reasons to offer a good mobile experience, particularly as more and more people are using their mobile devices as a major Internet access point, if not their main Internet access point. Sooner or later it’s going to get to the point where it’s just as critical to have a mobile-optimized site as a desktop-optimized site, if that point isn’t already here.
“The best consumer experiences on mobile devices happen on websites that are designed for mobile,” says Google Mobile Ads Product Manager David Nachum. “We all know the difference that sites designed for mobile make in pure usability – they are designed for the smaller touchscreen, making it easy to find what you are looking for and interact with. We believe that giving consumers the best possible experience on their mobile device is critically important. A poor mobile web experience can negatively shape a consumer’s opinion of a brand or company and make it hard for them to engage or make a purchase. A recent study which asked users about the performance of mobile websites found that 61% of users# are unlikely to return to a website that they had trouble accessing from their phone.”
To make a long story short, if your AdWords landing pages are optimized for mobile, they will perform better, and “generally drive more mobile traffic at a lower cost” according to Nachum.
If you need a little help in getting optimized for mobile, he points to a free tool Google recently launched that helps you create mobile pages in Google Sites.
There is also a webinar about best practices for mobile sites.
Bing announced the release of “Action Buttons” in search results today. These are buttons on certain types of search results (including travel-related) that allow you to engage in specific actions related to that result.
Think about things like checking into a hotel or a flight, checking on a flight status, booking a flight, renting a car, etc.
“Now when you search across 7 popular categories – including airlines, couriers (e.g. FedEx), restaurants, banks, rental cars, software downloads and hotels – you will be presented with buttons for top actions on the site, that directly take you to the page where you can complete your task,” explains Bing Program Manager Deepak Vijaywargi.
“Based on how people search, our algorithms now determine top actions and corresponding links in the site for a given category with high precision,” says Vijaywargi. “For instance, with airlines the top 3 tasks are: check-in to a flight, check the status of a flight or book a flight. For software sites, if you are searching for a specific product you likely want to download it. For car rental agencies, you’d like to rent a car, find out locations or contact them.”
Bing pitches the feature as an extension of its deep link inclusion on search results, but I’d say this is probably one of the most interesting things Bing has done with its results in a while. Bing has always positioned itself as wanting to get you the answers and get things done as quickly as possible, and this should, in theory at least, help with that.
It will be interesting to see if Google borrow’s the idea.
Twitter has acquired Julpan, a social search company founded by Ori Allon, who is credited with the creation of the Orion Search Engine, and an algorithm Google bought the rights to for use in search refinements. He left Google last year to start Julpan.
Behind our products is a new type of search engine powered by the social web. Our algorithms crunch social activity like status updates, tweets, facebook likes, and rss feeds right as it’s happening to provide you with the freshest relevant content.
In addition to helping us rank content the social and realtime web allows us to understand the context of a query at any given moment. For example, if you searched for “london” during the recent London riots our search engine will automatically adapt and present you with “london riots” results.
Allon has been named Director of Engineering at Twitter. In a note on the Julpan site, he posted the following message:
I am very proud to announce that Julpan has been acquired by Twitter.
We founded Julpan more than a year ago. In that time we’ve created innovative, early-alpha-stage search technology that analyzes social activity across the Web to deliver fresh and relevant content to users.
Twitter houses an industry-leading engineering team that is tackling some of the Internet’s most interesting opportunities. With more than 230 million Tweets per day on every subject imaginable, Twitter gives us a chance to make an even greater contribution toward instantly bringing people closer to what is most meaningful to them. We look forward to joining forces with Twitter’s engineering team to explore how we can best integrate and optimize Julpan’s innovations.
I’d like to personally thank the talented engineers, architects and designers of Julpan. I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people with whom to invent some of the world’s best social search technology.
According to Liz Gannes at All Things D, the Julpan team of 12 is going to Twitter’s New York office.
Just as we were discussing how dead or not dead Google+ is, Google has gone and announced new features and opened the service up so you no longer need an invitation.
Among the new features is a search feature, which was strangely absent from the beginning (considering this is Google we’re talking about).
“Just type what you’re looking for into the Google+ search box, and we’ll return relevant people and posts, as well as popular content from around the web,” says Google SVP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra. “If you’re into photography, for example, then you’ll see other enthusiasts and lots of great pictures. If you care more about cooking, then you’ll see other chefs and food from around the globe. In all cases, Google+ search results include items that only you can see, so family updates are just as easy to find as international news.”
Here’s what it looks like when you search in Google+:
Google+” src=”http://cdn.ientry.com/sites/webpronews/article_pics/plus-search1.jpg” title=”Search on Google+” class=”aligncenter” width=”616″ height=”476″ />
Google+” src=”http://cdn.ientry.com/sites/webpronews/article_pics/plus-search2.jpg” title=”Search on Google+” class=”aligncenter”>
Users with supported devices will happy that Google has launched mobile hangouts. Supported devices are those with Android 2.3+ and front-facing cameras, but iOS support is on the way.
Google also introduced some more Hangouts-related features called Hangouts Extras. These include screensharing, Sketchpad and Google Docs support, and hangout naming. These are only being previewed so far:
Google also introduced Hangouts On Air, which lets you broadcast your hangouts to bigger audiences and record them. You can still have up to 9 people actually join, but anyone else can watch it as well. They’re only doing this with a limited number of broadcasters to start, but anyone can watch. They’re doing one with will.i.am on Wednesday.
Interestingly, Gundtora says now that Google+ is open for everyone, they’re moving “from field trail to beta”. As far as most users are concerned, these labels are probably irrelevant.
I’m hearing some reports of site-wide ranking demotions over the weekend that have a similar pattern to what we saw with Panda. That is, lots of keywords affected, but the demotions are not at all uniform the way we often see in a site-wide penalty.
Has anyone else seen something like this recently? How about (we can hope) any improvement in rankings for a previously Pandalized site?
Some noticed similar changes. Some saw sites previously “pandalized” rise, and some reported that they saw no changes.
One member responded that they had “sustained dip on sites with a local relevance, beginning on the 17th,” and “sustained 40%-50% increase on niche-info type sites, started on the 13th.”
It’s unconfirmed that this was actually Panda, but it may very well have been. Barry Scwhartz is already calling it Panda 2. 5. He lists the dates of previous iterations, and they seem to come about once a month, so it would appear that a September version would be about due.
Philip Su is a software engineer at Facebook who spent 12 years working at Microsoft. Now, he’s put out a scathing post about Bing, or more specifically, the people behind Bing.
“I was reminded of Bing today during a depressing conversation with a former coworker who soldiers on, nobly, in That Great Darkness,” he writes in the intro. “Though it’s been several years since I left, I still remember Bing as the time when I most despaired for Microsoft’s future.”
“Bing is a madhouse. The inmates are running the asylum, and it’s rotten to the core…” the post continues. “And I’m not talking about the product.” He then adds, “Bing is solid. But it doesn’t matter because nobody cares.”
He goes on to discuss company politics and how the Bing team is “filled with overly politicized people pursuing Machiavellian schemes to forward their career ambitions.”
And he does indeed go on about it.
In a status update on Facebook, Su said, “This blog post about Bing took me three years to write. Though I felt it needed to be said, loyalty to my past coworkers prevented me from speaking openly. Enough of those former coworkers have now been crushed by The Machine that I must speak out.”
While the whole thing is just the viewpoint of one engineer, he is getting a lot of feedback on the post. Interestingly, some of that feedback seems to reflect the sentiments expressed by Su. In a Facebook comment, Maria Sommerfield writes:
I called my girlfriend who works for MSFT in a different department to find out why exactly my husband could be so miserable at work at one point. OMG, Maria he is at Bing, she said. I hear it is a nightmare over there. Fortunately he is over at Google now. Being the nice guy he is he has never once said anything bad about those Bing drama, but I always got my man’s back and I remember. All’s well that ends well and he is loving working for Google.
Ramesh Vyaghrapuri commented:
I left the company way too late. All the way back in 2003, there were horror stories from all over the company (so I don’t think Bing was *special*) but most employees preferred complaining behind doors and letting it be.
The lack of transparency *is* the worst thing that can happen to a company. Now, there was no transparency even in 1997 and things worked fine. But lack of transparency makes it a *stable* setup that a few rotten apples can’t destroy all the good work done by people before them.
Microsoft employee Rangan Majumder wrote:
Very candid post, Philip. Most of the folks you speak of are gone from Bing for at least a year. Bing is not perfect but honestly it is the least politically driven team I’ve worked on in Microsoft. Bing has been about metrics and bottoms up decision making from the beginning. In fact, it has to be, otherwise it doesn’t scale and won’t succeed; doing the right thing for the user always takes first priority. Sure there are people who are ambitious career wise, but those who don’t do the right thing for the user don’t last. I know I have ex-coworkers from Bing who work in Facebook Seattle now with you; did they really feel this way about the team?
In the comments of the post itself, an anonymous poster writes, “Thanks for writing this. Along with most people in my group at Microsoft, I’m looking for a job. I can’t wait to write my version of this story. It’s not just Bing. The Microsoft I loved is gone.”
It’s worth noting that as Su is a software engineer at Facebook, Bing and Facebook have a pretty strong partnership.
Last week, Bing launched its version of personalized search in “Adaptive Search”. Watch our recent interview with Bing’s search director Stefan Weitz here.
Many of us have wondered why Google+ didn’t launch with a search feature. I mean, it’s Google. Still, there are ways to search it that should suffice, at least until Google finally launches an official feature.
Developer Andrew Shen, for example, has created a browser extension called Search Extension for Google Plus, which searches Google+ public contents and profiles. It includes filters for
If you don’t want to install anything, you can still use the search engine, as it’s simply available at googleplussearch.chromefans.org. It’s built on Google Custom Search. On the site, it also provides “Hot Trends” from Google+.
Also, don’t forget that Wajam recently started letting users add their Google+ circles to its social search experience. This will allow results from people you’re connected with on Google+ to appear in results as you search Google, Bing, Yahoo and various other sites.
It has seemed fairly clear since Google launched Google+ that Facebook was worried to at least some extent. That’s not to say Facebook thinks it’s on the cusp of becoming the next Myspace, but when a giant like Google takes your product head on, you have to pay attention, and it’s no doubt a little harder to brush off than if a no-name startup tried the same thing.
That start-up faces a much larger hill to climb in generating a brand and an audience. Google has a built in audience, and it’s enormous. It has a brand that has been turned into a verb. And that was years ago (though it’s still used very frequently).
So while Facebook may not be in any immediate danger, and Google+ may or may not ever become half the size of Facebook, it’s smart of Facebook to look at what is working with Google+ that some people might like better when comparing to Facebook’s user experience. That’s what Facebook is doing. They did (and continue to do) the same thing with Twitter, and Facebook still reigns supreme in social media.
The latest change is subtle, but noteworthy. They have locked the top navigation bar at the top of the screen, so as you scroll down the page, it is always visible. That means you can always see your notifications and the search box.
Google is also testing locking its navigation. It’s already live on image search, and probably just a matter of time before it’s across Google properties. If you use Google+, this navigation bar contains a link to your Google+ profile and a status update box. That means you’re never too far away from Google+ while you’re using Google.
In Facebook’s case, the sticky navigation bar could increase engagement with the notification counter always visible. Interestingly, it also keeps the search box visible. This could also increase engagement, but if Facebook does more with search, as it has often been speculated that they will (especially now that they’re in such heavy competition with Google), search is always right there. This could potentially make Facebook a greater threat to Google in the search realm. Facebook already taps Bing for its web search results, and Bing is already growing its market share little by little.
Interestingly, the sticky Facebook navigation bar doesn’t keep the publishers box for posting status updates at the top at all times.
Other things Facebook has done lately that are kind of Google+-esque:
Circles-like sharing. Last month, Facebook announced new sharing features that make it easier to share things with the people you actually want to share them with. This has been one of the things that people have found most appealing about Google+‘s Circles.
New friend list options. Just this week, Facebook announced some new options for friends lists, which is really kind of an extension of that last feature. Also like Circles, it’s a way to separate your friends.
Subscriptions. Also this week, Facebook also announced subscriptions for profiles that share information publicly. Basically, it’s just a way to follow people without them having to follow you back. Twitter has done this for years, but it seem to have taken Google+‘s arrival to get Facebook to offer similar functionality.
There have also been other random signs that Facebook is a little worried about Google+. For example, remember when Facebook blocked that Google+ user’s ad? Facebook has also been stingy about Google+ users getting their FB contacts into Google+.
The point is, in the few short months since Google+ launched, Facebook has rushed to do things that make the two services more alike. To be fair, Google+ (without question) borrowed plenty from Facebook to begin with, but the differences between the two seem to be getting less and less.
That is one major reason why Google+ itself faces a tremendous uphill battle. Facebook is giving users less reasons to like Google+ better. And Facebook already has all of the users. Meanwhile, Google+ gets to keep trying to convince people that it’s the place to be as opposed to Facebook.
Google did finally launch the first Google+ API, which should help in making Google+ more useful as third-party apps are able to build around it.
It’s not as if Facebook and Google+ can’t co-exist, but Google has put a lot of time and resources in to making Google+ the best Facebook competitor it can be. Will it all be worth it?
Who should be more concerned about its rival’s recent moves: Facebook or Google? Tell us what you think.
We got an email today from the FairSearch Coalition with a witness list for Google’s upcoming hearing with the Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights.
The hearing takes place on Wednesday, September 21 at 2:00 p.m. The witness list is as follows:
Panel I Eric Schmidt
Executive Chairman
Google Inc.
Mountain View, CA
Panel II Jeff Katz
Chief Executive Officer
Nextag, Inc.
San Mateo, CA
Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Yelp, Inc.
San Francisco, CA
Thomas O. Barnett
Partner
Covington & Burling LLP
Washington, DC
Susan A. Creighton
Partner
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, PC
Washington, DC
FairSearch also attached what it calls it refers to as a “Fact Sheet”:
They also put together a list of Google quotes here.
FairSearch, as you may know, was formed mainly to see Google’s acquisition of ITA Software blocked. It’s made up mainly of competing travel sites. Google actually just launched Flight Search this week, based on ITA technology.
While the coalition was unable to see the acquisition blocked it still continues to fight Google on competition policy.
It should be quite interesting to learn the results of the hearing.
You have to hand it to Google. They get pretty creative with their Google Doodles. Sometimes, the real creativity is in the actual doodle itself. Lately they’ve been putting out some pretty cool ones with animations and different interactive elements. Sometimes, however, the creativity lies in simply deciding when to run a doodle.
For example, who would have expected Google to mark the occasion of the 118th birthday of the man who discovered Vitamin C? Don’t raise your hand if you don’t work at or with Google, because I won’t believe you.
That’s what they have done today. It’s the 118th birthday of Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, a Hungarian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937. He is credited with the discovery of vitamin C and the components and reactions of the citric acid cycle. NobelPrize.org has a nice bio of him.
He died in 1986 at the age of 93.
Consider just how important vitamin C is, and you might say to yourself, “Yes, this guy absolutely deserves a Google doodle.” But would it have ever occurred to you if Google didn’t do it?
It’s always nice to see the artistic creativity that goes into Google’s doodles. And today’s is nice visually, but often the coolest thing about Google doodles is simply the education they can deliver. Think about how many more people will know who Albert Szent-Gyorgyi is now because Google changed its logo today. How many people will click on that doodle out of curiosity and learn something new? And something worth knowing at that.
This week, comScore reported that 65.09% of all U.S. searches are Google searches. They’re not all from the Google home page, but considering that Americans conducted nearly 20 Billion core searches in August, I think it’s safe to say that a lot of people see Google’s doodles.
In that spirit of learning about vitamin C, here are some charts showing the amount of vitamin C in various plants and animals (via Wikipedia):
Yahoo announced a new redesign to its search results pages, which are available on web search, image search, Yahoo News, Yahoo Blogs, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports.
“We have been working to unify the search experiences across web, multimedia, and vertical search results pages with a design that is clean and intuitive,” says Yahoo’s search team.
The features of the redesign include a “cleaner and simpler” look, automatic tabs, which appear below the search box to show you specialized content for other verticals (images, video, sports, etc.), and filters on the left side, which may remind you of Bing and Google.
Here are some screen shots:
Yahoo has also made some new additions to image search. There is now a larger pool of Facebook images included (which come from public profiles and fan page), a richer “latest” pictures experience, and better recommendations at the end of galleries.
Google has launched a new version of Google Goggles for Android, which will let you you know when you take pictures that Goggles can actually recognize.
“With this new opt-in feature in Goggles, you can simply photograph an image using your phone’s camera, and Goggles will work in the background to analyze your image,” explains software engineer Pavel Vodenski. “If your photo contains items that Goggles can recognize, the app will notify you.”
“Photos you take with your phone’s camera will only be seen by Goggles if you enable the Search from Camera feature,” adds Vodenski.
To do this, simply launch Goggle Goggles, go to settings under menu and enable it.
No word on when the feature might come to other devices, such as the iPhone. Kind of like the Instant Upload feature of Google+.
It’s version 1.6, and is available in the Android Market.
A couple weeks ago, Google announced the expansion of its NFL-related search results to include more information, courtesy of its partnership with ESPN, which had already expanded its MLB results in the past.
Now, Google has announced further expansion of its MLB results. This time, it’s from MLB.com. Now, for MLB.com results, users will see more information, lie the latest scores, schedules and team standings.
Additionally, there will be direct links to game previews, live updates, recaps, and box scores.
The offering follows an announcement from Yahoo this week about an expansion of its own partnership with MLB.com, which is comes with the launch of MLB Full Count on Yahoo Sports.
“MLB.com Full Count lets fans follow live Major League Baseball action throughout the remainder of the regular season featuring live look-ins to key plays and pivotal moments, and in-progress video highlights from around the league, as well as statistical data and historical footage relevant to the day’s action,” a spokesperson for Yahoo told us.
There have been a whole lot of announcements from the major search engines this week, that all webmasters should be aware of – especially from Google, because while its market share may have slipped slightly (while Bing-powered search has grown a bit), it’s still by far the most used search engine.
While not exactly an announcement, Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts did post a video discussing reasons why Google Toolbar PageRank would drop. We talked about this a little bit more here, but you can hear exactly what he had to say in this video:
There is a part in there where he mentions that if you were caught selling links, but have stopped and want to earn Google’s trust back, you should submit a reconsideration request. On that note, Google announced that it is getting “more transparent” with its reconsideration requests.
Better Communication
“Now, if your site is affected by a manual spam action, we may let you know if we were able to revoke that manual action based on your reconsideration request,” explain Tiffany Oberoi and Michael Wyszomierski of Google’s Search Quality team in a joint blog post. “Or, we could tell you if your site is still in violation of our guidelines. This might be a discouraging thing to hear, but once you know that there is still a problem, it will help you diagnose the issue.”
“If your site is not actually affected by any manual action (this is the most common scenario), we may let you know that as well,” they add. “Perhaps your site isn’t being ranked highly by our algorithms, in which case our systems will respond to improvements on the site as changes are made, without your needing to submit a reconsideration request. Or maybe your site has access issues that are preventing Googlebot from crawling and indexing it.”
Google says it’s not able to reply to individual requests with specific feedback, but that now webmasters will be able to find out if their site has been affected by a manual action and will know the outcome of the reconsideration review.
Google Using Blocked Site Data in Algorithm
Earlier this year, Google announced some new domain blocking features, which included a browser extension, and a link next to search results, which allow users to block sites that they don’t like. This was part of Google’s big quality clean up initiative, which also includes the Panda update and the +1 button. Initially, the sites blocked were on a personalized basis, but that is no longer completely the case. Google search quality engineer Johannes Henkel is quoted as saying, “We’ve also started incorporating data about sites people have blocked into our general search ranking algorithms to help users find more high quality sites.”
Pagination and View-All in Search Results
Google is “making a larger effort” to return single-page versions of content in search results, when the content is broken up among multiple pages. Think multiple page articles and content slideshows. Google says users tend to prefer single page versions of content, but sometimes these can load slowly, so there are also times when the multiple pages work better.
“So while a view-all page is commonly desired, as a webmaster it’s important to balance this preference with the page’s load time and overall user experience,” Google indexing team software engineers Benjia Li & Joachim Kupke say in a joint blog post on the Webmaster Central blog.
You can read more about the technical specs here. They summarize it all nicely: “Because users generally prefer the view-all option in search results, we’re making more of an effort to properly detect and serve this version to searchers. If you have a series of content, there’s nothing more you need to do.”
To better optimize your view-all page, you can use rel=”canonical” from component pages to the single-page version; otherwise, if a view-all page doesn’t provide a good user experience for your site, you can use the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes as a strong hint for Google to identify the series of pages and still surface a component page in results.
They talk even more about the specs of using rel=”next” and rel=”rev” in this post.
Rich Snippets for Apps
Google is also showing rich snippets for apps in search results now. They’re getting info for these from various places including: Android Market, Apple iTunes and CNET.
“Before you install a software application, you may want to check out what others think about it and how much it costs,” says product manager Alejandro Goyen. “Starting today, you’ll be able to get information about the applications, including review and price information, right in your search results.”
That’s something to consider if your business has an app. It’s a reputation factor.
Editing in YouTube
This isn’t exactly a search feature, but when you consider how big a role video can play in search marketing and that YouTube is the second largest search engine, it’s certainly worth your attention. YouTube has launched new editing tools that allow you to easy edit videos right from YouTube itself.
This should help you improve your videos, which are not only searchable on the second largest search engine and embeddable across the web, but often appear right in the results of regular Google searches. This new editing functionality will make it easier to try new things with less successful videos and potentially make them more viral.
Bing Adaptive Search
Ok, getting away from Google, Bing has launched adaptive search, which is essentially its version of personalized search. The company says it “helps decipher the intent and context of each search you conduct based on your search history.”
“The concept of personalized search is not a new idea, but Bing continues to focus on it and drive progress as the search space evolves,” a representative for Bing tells WebProNews. “In fact, Bing views personalized search as less of a ‘feature’ and more of what to expect from search.” “Ultimately, the goal is to reduce ambiguity and help people find what they’re looking for more quickly,” he adds. “The personalization can be pretty subtle to the naked eye, but the more Bing learns about your intent the more personal it will become. And Bing also wants to be sure a diverse set of results still show up so people aren’t locked in a ‘filter bubble’. We think this provides a good balance.”
You’ve been dealing with this kind of thing with Google for quite some time, but it does throw in another SEO factor to consider for Bing, which as previously mentioned continues to gain market share.
WebProNews is interviewing Bing’s Stefan Weitz as I write this, so check back at WebProNews for more on this soon.
“The Web Grepper searches for unique data information and trends that are embedded in code and cannot be found on any other search engine,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews. “For example, you could search to see how many pages request your user information when you visit, the types of targeting information the site collecting, or how many sites have ‘Like’ vs ‘+1′ buttons, etc.”
Users can submit questions to the tool and the Blekko community votes on a daily basis on which questions will be analyzed.
These aren’t the only things going on in search this week, but these are some of the more noteworthy things that are likely to have a bigger impact on most site owners, than say things like Flight Search and Baseball scores.
Blekko announced the launch of a new search analytics tool Web Grepper.
“The Web Grepper searches for unique data information and trends that are embedded in code and cannot be found on any other search engine,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews. “For example, you could search to see how many pages request your user information when you visit, the types of targeting information the site collecting, or how many sites have ‘Like’ vs ‘+1’ buttons, etc.”
CEO Rich Skrenta says, “With Web Grepper, we’re offering our users unique access to the blekko index and embedded information that cannot be found on other search engines. “This allows users to uncover incredibly useful data that was previously inaccessible through a keyword search.”
Users can submit questions to the tool and the Blekko community votes on a daily basis on which questions will be analyzed.
This is an extension of the whole community-driven philosophy behind Blekko – and ultimately search in general. See Blekko’s slashtags.
The results will be displayed in a report.
Blekko says it will make sure it’s not being used as a hacking tool to get personal info by manually reviewing “greps” and monitoring malicious data mining behavior.
