Tag: Search

10 Obstacles Google+ Must Overcome

Google has a pretty large task in creating a successful social network. This isn’t the first time the company has tried to do this either, but early buzz about Google+ has been fairly positive, though there is certainly some negative out there too.

Google has its work cut out for it competing with the monster that is Facebook in the social networking space, even though Google says it’s not really a Facebook competitor. Right.

Google has plenty of obstacles to overcome if this is going to be a huge success. Here are some of them.

1. Most people don’t want to leave Facebook.

Sure there are plenty of people out there looking for a good alternative to Facebook. Some of them have found it with Twitter. Some want something better. That said, it is highly doubtful that the majority of Facebook users are looking for something else. They like Facebook just fine, and aren’t looking for a reason to leave.

Sure, it’s possible to use both, but as long as people still have the majority of their friends on Facebook, and not so many on Google+ this is going to be a hard nut to crack. Not an impossible nut, but a hard one.

2. People are already gravitating more toward Twitter.

Speaking of Twitter, it is growing pretty well. It’s also about to be integrated into the hugely popular iOS. Many of the users will also be using Facebook. Google+ is simply another thing to add to the list, and could be deemed an added burden.

3. Google’s previous attempts at social

Google doesn’t have the best track record or reputation when it comes to social. Some of this is simply perception, because YouTube is social and it’s obviously a huge success, but it was acquired by Google – not created by Google, and one could argue that it’s not the social aspect of YouTube that is its main driving force, but the simple fact that it has tons and tons of stuff to watch.

4. Google’s reputation for privacy

When Google launched Google Buzz, it was a huge privacy fiasco, and one that is still in the news. Google greatly damaged its reputation in the area of privacy with this. It’s not hard to find commentary throughout the web indicating growing distrust of the company in general, whether justified or not. Reputation can go a long way.

5. People largely still think about Google as search

One of Google’s biggest challenges is its existing success. Google has become synonymous with search. Google is a verb, that means to search for something on Google. People don’t think to go to Google to share things necessarily. They think to go to Google to search.

Yes, Google has many products that do many different things outside of the realm of search, but first and foremost to most people, Google is still search, and Facebook is friends. That’s another hard nut to crack.

6. The Like Button

Speaking of Facebook being friends, that “like” button that is everywhere on the Internet, has been quite powerful, and is the premier way that people share content now, I believe. Google has the +1 Button. Not so much. At this point (disregarding the Buzz button for a moment, which doesn’t have much to do with Google+ at the moment), publishers are asking people to either “like” this and share with your friends, or “+1” this so that other people that you may or may not know may be able to find it in search results for some query that may or may not be searched for. Which one is going to get clicked more?

7. The Retweet button

See numbers 2 and 6.

8. Bing

Back to number 5 for a moment. Google is synonymous with search, but it is still the key ingredient to keeping people using Google+. Meanwhile, Bing is just going to continue to gain market share. The more people using Bing as their default search engine, means the less people using Google, which will likely mean less using Google+.

Realistically, Bing currently doesn’t come close to Google in market share at this point. Whether it ever will remains to be seen, but so far it’s been growing fairly steadily, and now Google faces FTC scrutiny over its competitive practices. When Microsoft was in a similar situation, it greatly set the company back in innovation for years, many people say. Depending on the outcome of that, it’s hard to say what Google’s future will hold.

9. Yahoo

Yahoo still makes up another significant segment of search market share, and maybe even more importantly, It still has a very strong presence in other key areas like email,finance, news, etc.

Part of the Google+ strategy is that it extends across Google products. Some of these products compete directly with some of Yahoo’s strong points. Let’s not forget that Yahoo is also in the connected TV space, where Google is still trying to gain more significant market share.

10. Complexity

The sheer complexity of Google+ may also work against it, particularly when you pair it with number one. You’re trying to get people to use your service instead of Facebook’s, while trying to sell an overly-complicated concept (mainly with Circles. Read this explanation of the feature.).

In the end, it might not really be as complex as it seems, but again, perception goes a long way. If it even seems complicated at a glance, and all of your friends are already doing just fine on Facebook, how big is the incentive?

To be clear, I’m not saying any of these things mean that Google+ won’t succeed. It’s entirely possible that it could become a huge hit. It wouldn’t even have to dethrone Facebook to be a big hit. I think we can consider Twitter a hit, and it doesn’t even come close to Facebook in terms of users.

Suffice it to say, Google has its work cut out for it.

Read 39 Things You Should Know About Google+ here.

July 5, 2011
Social Media, Search & A Shrinking Web
Is the web shrinking? It is according to Ben Elowitz, founder and CEO of WetPaint. He recently wrote a very interesting guest post for AllThingsD about this topic, and we decided to pick his brain a little bit more.

“People are spending more time on Facebook and less time on the rest of the web,” he tells WebProNews. “If you look at the total amount of time people spent on Facebook from March 2010 to March 2011, it grew 69%. And if you look at the total amount of time people spent on the rest of the web, it fell 9%. This was staggering to me and it highlighted the critical importance of understanding and using the social web in an intelligent way. ”

He provided the following graph:

So if Facebook is taking consumption away from the rest of the web, we do we so often hear how great a referrer of traffic Facebook can be?

Elowitz says, “There is no doubt that Facebook is and will continue to be a strong referrer of traffic. Facebook has a deep relationship with their audience that starts its day with Facebook and uses it as a hub for the content they consume.

“Unlike Google and portals, which were intermediaries, Facebook is a home base; so users BOTH spend significant amounts of time at Facebook, and follow links to other sites.,” he continues. “That’s why even as Facebook is taking time away from other consumption, it’s also now the second most important – and rising – traffic distributor for most audiences. Like any distributor, a company needs to optimize for it and, let’s face it, Facebook is growing more complex each day. It’s not about just posting content into a newsfeed and calling it good. It’s much more. Media companies that do not invest in understanding and taking advantage of Facebook, will lose to socially-optimized competitors.”

We’ve recently been exploring this concept of the “Filter Bubble,” as Eli Pariser coined in a TED Talk – essentially the concept that web users are presented with a narrower view of available content based on search results, the Facebook News Feed, and many other sites personalizing content based on what they think is most relevant to us, while filtering out other content from visibility.

Elowitz’s take on this is: “I am a big fan of personalization because it can deliver the ultimate value to consumers. Let’s admit that most of us are exhausted trying to find what is most important or relevant to us. Think about how much time we spend searching for something. It’s a lot. If done right, personalization can cut out this immense time waster and deliver value much more quickly. That said, there are inherent risks with filtering what content is surfaced or is not surfaced based on a profile. This is a complex area and right now I am betting on the social web, and in particular, Facebook with their focus on building a world filled with identity.”

In his original article, Elowitz suggested that the “searchable web” is becoming less relevant. Would this mean that search itself is becoming less relevant? Perhaps it’s about the situation. I’ve written about this before to some extent. New services and apps that have emerged over the years have chipped away at our need to search in different ways, and will continue to do so. It’s not that search is becoming less important, it’s just that we don’t need it in as many cases as we used to. We’re simply finding different ways of consuming information.

“Search is highly relevant for users with a strong intent to find specific information or transact,” says Elowitz. “For example, when you are looking to buy a plane ticket, search will deliver you optimal results. As I mentioned in my post, search offers a utility relationship, connecting users to content for the briefest of transactions; for media, typically, it provokes users to just one page-view so they can find a piece of information, and then they move on.”

In his article, Elowitz said, “In the last year, Facebook’s share of users’ time online grew from one out of every 13 minutes of use nationwide, to one out of every eight. In aggregate, that means the document Web was down more than half a billion hours of use (that’s more than 800 lifetimes) this March versus last March. And in financial terms, that represents a lost opportunity of $2.2 billion in advertising inventory that didn’t exist this year.”

“There’s no way to know for sure what the exact amount is, since this is truly a lost opportunity versus what could have been,” he tells WebProNews. “But if the 9% decline in the rest of the web’s consumption were mirrored by a 9% decline in inventory (a reasonable, but uncertain, assumption), then it could have been much bigger than the $28.5B that eMarketer currently estimates the industry at. For the $2.2 billion estimate, I subtracted Facebook’s estimated $4 billion in revenues from the $28.5B to get ad spending on the rest of the web; and took 9% of that remainder.”

So, what does it all mean for SEO? Will social media visibility become more critical than search visibility? Is this already the case?

“Over the last decade, there has been only one great distributor of traffic; and the vast majority of digital media companies have done everything they can to please that deity in the hopes of earning more traffic,” says Elowitz. “But that was then; things have changed dramatically.”

“Investing in SEO will not help build the most important long-term value, which is a strong and loyal relationship with your audience. Given the rise of the social web, there is a huge opportunity for publishers to develop relationships directly with users and this will help the company massively long-term. This is why SMO (social media optimization) is more critical than SEO and why at Wetpaint we do not invest significantly in SEO. We know that if you focus all of your energies on winning in social, you will receive a halo effect from search.”

He claims the Wetpaint Entertainment media property still generates over 50% of its traffic from search with no SEO team, employee or consultant on staff.

In a recent newsletter, Elowitz gave the following advice to publishers looking to harness the power of social media:
- Know your economics. We know what a Facebook fan, an impression, a transfer to our web site are worth. On our Wetpaint Entertainment website, we’ve found that depending on how well we program a fan page, we can get 5 to 15 newsfeed impressions per active fan per day in the newsfeed. We see a transfer rate of 1% to 3.5% to our web site, and we multiply that by our repeat rate and on-site monetization to arrive at our lifetime customer value by channel.
-  Know your social promotion factors. We measure three key actions: Like, Share, and Comment. Industry benchmarks don’t cover it, and actual value varies enormously site by site. Looking at Likes and Comments for our “average” TV channels (e.g. Gossip Girl,American Idol), each interaction generates close to two new visits. Knowing this lets us manage the opportunity to delight existing audience while engaging them to reach new potential audience.
- Segment your fans so you know what works for whom. Facebook doesn’t make this easy, so it will need to be a creative D-I-Y project. While there’s not much support for segmenting a million fans of one brand page, you can set up multiple “honeypot” pages and compare via an A/B split test; or create subtopics that you can compare. We found, for example, that our click-through rate on our best performing channel was more than 2X better than average, while impressions-per-post can vary by more than 10X from highest- to lowest-performing channel. (Each of these gaps is an opportunity to improve, as I’ll discuss below.)  
- Relentlessly experiment and measure. At Wetpaint, we’ve made this a dedicated effort with a dedicated team: we call it “Black Ops,” and our special forces have the freedom to try whatever they can dream up – as long as they can measure the value of it. We validate the winning experiments and put them in our Playbook to roll out across all our properties. It’s rapid iteration at its finest. We can have a dozen or more experiments running at any given moment, and typically they take just 1-2 weeks to get a read on.
- Turn differences in performance into best practices. At the channel level, we scrutinize performance differences and determine by further experiments which factors control the outcomes. Then, post-level analytics show how each post performs relative to average. This reveals nuances of Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, so we can understand small changes that drive big impact on reach and engagement. That’s how we found that posts that include photos outperform posts that don’t by 50% or more; it’s also how we unearthed dozens of other insights that we have incorporated into our practices every day.
July 3, 2011
39 Things You Should Know About Google+

This isn’t every single thing there is to know about Google+. That could probably be a book rather than an article, and the Google+ Project has only just begun. If Google has its way, it will live on for years. Or it could go the Google Wave route. It’s just too early to tell.

Do you think Google+ will succeed? Share your thoughts in the comments.

While we’ll no doubt learn plenty more about Google+ as time goes on, here are some quick nuggets to get you a little more acquainted with it.

1. Google+ is currently available on an invitation-only basis.

2. Google does not consider it a Facebook competitor (at least publicly).

3. Google+ is currently available for download as an app in the Android Market.

4. When you download that app, it splits off the “Huddle” feature as a separate app.

5. Users can post status updates, and these appear on the Google Profile under a tab called “Posts”. The +1’s and Buzz tabs remain separate. I have to wonder if we’ll see Buzz and Posts merge eventually.

6. What is available now is “just the beginning” according to Google. These are just the first features or presumably many more to come.

7. Circles is one current feature. It lets you share things with different people (kind of like Facebook Groups) but with a very different user interface. Watch this video:

8. Another feature is Sparks. This looks for videos and articles it thinks you’ll like, so “when you’re free, there’s always something to watch, read, and share.” Filter Bubble anyone?

9. Hangouts is another feature. It’s basically group video chat. Google describes it as “the unplanned meet-up.”

10. Instant uploads is a mobile-specific feature. Photos upload themselves as you take them, and are stored in a private area on the cloud.

11. Huddle is another group-conversation feature for mobile. Essentially, it’s group chat.

The Stream

12. The stream is basically the equivalent of the Facebook news feed.

13. When you share something with Google+ it’s added to your stream and the stream of everyone you shared with.

14. The stream shows you what all of your Circles have shared with you.

15. If you mention a user, using the “+” or “@” symbols, the person may receive a notification that you mentioned them.

16. You can see who specific posts were shared with in the stream – whether they were shared publicly, to extended circles, or a limited group.

17. You can filter the stream by specific Circles.

18. You can chat directly in the stream

19. You can report inappropriate content.

20. You can search for people from the search box at the top of the stream.

21. Soon, Google says you’ll be able to search the stream itself from the search box.

22. If you leave comments on a post, you can edit or delete them.

23. The same goes for posts, but you can’t edit a post’s sharing settings after the post has been shared. However, you can delete the post and share again to different circles.

24. You can “reshare” posts made by others (like retweeting).

25. You can “mute” a post. This will let you stop receiving updates from a post, like if the comments get out of control for example.

The Google Social Network

26. You can use the “Google+ Bar” that appears at the top of various Google products as your connection to the social network.

27. When you’re signed in you’ll see your full name or email address displayed with a photo or avatar next to it, to help you identify which account you’re currently signed in to.

28. If you’ve enabled multi sign-in you can sign in to two different Google accounts and switch between them using the Google+ bar.

29. When you sign up for Google+, you’re also signing up for Picasa Web Albums, so all photos and videos uploaded to Google+ (including from your phone via Instant Upload) will also be available in Picasa Web Albums.

30. You can use the Google +1 button from the stream.

31. You can have a ton of friends on Google+. Robert Scoble quickly added over 1,000.

32. The central user interface is very Facebook-esque.

33. Google+ quickly became the butt of a lot of jokes (and even cartoons), but has also received a great deal of praise thus far.

34. With Google+ Google adds a “You” link to the recently redesigned (painted black) navigation bar across Google properties

35. You can view public Google+ content without actually being invited (Danny Sullivan has a guide on how to view it )

36. China is already blocking Google+. That didn’t take long.

37. Invitations have been listed on eBay.

38. There are already privacy concerns about Google+ but the Privacy Guide can be found here.

39. According to the Financial Times article, you can share something within a closed “Circle,” but somone from that circle can then reshare it with anyone, and even make it public.

Is Google+ destined to bring real competition to Facebook or will the hype fade? Share your thoughts.

July 2, 2011
Google Adds +1 Button Data to Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools

Google announced the addition of +1 button data to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools. These new metrics can show you how the +1 button actually affects the traffic to your site.

In WMT, there is a Search Impact report, which shows how +1’s affect your organic search traffic. “You can find out if your clickthrough rate changes when personalized recommendations help your content stand out,” says Google software engineer Dan Rodney. “Do this by comparing clicks and impressions on search results with and without +1 annotations. We’ll only show statistics on clickthrough rate changes when you have enough impressions for a meaningful comparison.”

An Activity report shows how many times your pages have been +1’d, from buttons on your site, as well as on other pages like Google Search.

An Audience report will show you aggregate geographic and demographic data about who is using the +1 button with your content. Google only shows this info, however, when a “significant” number of users have +1’d pages. They don’t say what number they consider “significant” to be.

Users will find a +1 Metrics menu on the side of the page, where each of these reports will be able to be found.

@googleanalytics
Google AnalyticsTrack your +1s in Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools http://goo.gl/2547K 1 hour ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto

Google is also showing how users share content using other buttons with Social Plugin Tracking in Google Analytics. This includes a Social Engagement report, which shows how site behavior changes for visits that include clicks on +1 buttons and other social buttons. “This allows you to determine, for example, whether people who +1 your pages during a visit are likely to spend more time on your site than people who don’t,” says Rodney.

Also included are the Social Actions report, which tracks the number of social actions taken on your site, and the Social Pages report, which lets you compare pages on your site to see which are driving the most social actions.

“Over the next few days (and if you’re using the default version of the latest Google Analytics tracking code), if you’ve added +1 buttons to your site we’ll automatically enable Social Plugin Tracking for +1 in your account,” Rodney says. “You can enable tracking for other social plugins in just a few simple steps.”

June 29, 2011
Today in Alternative Search Engines (Blekko, Wolfram Alpha)

Blekko announced today that it has teamed up with Foodily on recipe search. Foodily, a social recipe network, will curate Blekko’s search results for recipes, which the company calls “a cluttered and spam rich environment on most search engines”.

“Search has always been a personal experience but the escalating amount of spam on the Web is driving search to become social, where communities and groups of friends can help call out the best of results,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of blekko. “Foodily’s trusted community of cooks and food lovers will be a tremendous resource to blekko searchers.”

We talked to Skrenta last week about Blekko’s Zorro update, search quality, and filtering. The search engine is now integrating hundreds of its “slashtags” into search results. These are at the root of the human curation element of Blekko.

“Foodily’s mission is to help everyone find the food they want and love, and share it with their social circle. We’re excited to play a role in helping blekko searchers find great resources on food, cooking and recipes,” said Andrea Cutright, CEO of Foodily. “The Foodily community is rising to the challenge of bringing the best recipe content to the top, so we can all enjoy quickly finding that next great meal.”

ChaCha says it has “increased its accuracy and database of information” by adding computational knowledge from Wolfram Alpha. “This partnership means Wolfram Alpha will allow ChaCha users to access computed facts that cover over 100 topics,” a representative tells WebProNews. “This is in addition to ChaCha’s “ask-a-smart-friend” database that has already answered over one billion questions.”

In the partnership’s first day, Wolfram Alpha answered 32,000 of ChaCha’s incoming questions, ChaCha says.

June 29, 2011
Yahoo Updates Search Trends Tool Yahoo Clues

Yahoo announced some updaters to its Yahoo Clues beta today. Yahoo Clues is its search trends service,w hich shows you how people are searching, popular terms, etc.

The update includes a new key feature called Top Trends, which as Yahoo puts it, “allows endless exploration of the most popular search terms on Yahoo! Search.”

“Using filter selections, you can choose a combination of time range, gender, age group and geographic location, and even search term category – and Top Trends shows you what’s popular,” a Yahoo representative tells WebProNews.

It also features a new site design, expanded history from one month to one year (covering over three times as many search terms as the previous version), global coverage of English-language searches (previously US-only) and a new map, featuring trend analysis and top trends.

“Yahoo! Clues is one of the key tools behind the popular Yahoo! search trends stories, such as last week’s post on the Fourth of July searches, this year’s American Idol projections, Oprah’s Effect on web searches, or even search trends after major news events such as the Death of Bin Laden or the Japan earthquake,” the rep tells us.

The map feature is pretty cool, I have to say:

More info about the Yahoo Clues can be found in the Help Center.

In other Yahoo news, the company has expanded its partnership with Frontier Communications so that Frontier broadband subscribers in 27 states will be upgraded to a co-branded Frontier-Yahoo email offering powered by Yahoo Mail. This will take place later this year.

June 29, 2011
Google Talks Design Tweaks, and More to Come
Google has of course announced the Google+ Project, the company’s new approach at a social network. You may have noticed that there are some subtle design changes to Google properties as well – most noticeably a black bar going across the top.

When you get into the Google+ Project (it requires an invite), you will see a “You” link up there. For now, you get standard stuff like “web,” “images,” “videos,” “maps,” “news,” “shopping,” “Gmail,” and “more.” Google says its new design focuses on three key design principles, which it describes as:
- Focus: Whether you’re searching, emailing or looking for a map, the only thing you should be concerned about is getting what you want. Our job is to provide the tools and features that will get you there quickly and easily. With the design changes in the coming weeks and months, we’re bringing forward the stuff that matters to you and getting all the other clutter out of your way. Even simple changes, like using bolder colors for actionable buttons or hiding navigation buttons until they’re actually needed, can help you better focus on only what you need at the moment.
- Elasticity: In the early days, there was pretty much just one way to use Google: on a desktop computer with an average-sized monitor. Over a decade later, all it takes is a look around one’s home or office at the various mobile devices, tablets, high-resolution monitors and TVs to see a plethora of ways to access the web. The new design will soon allow you to seamlessly transition from one device to another and have a consistent visual experience. We aim to bring you this flexibility without sacrificing style or usefulness.
- Effortlessness: Our design philosophy is to combine power with simplicity. We want to keep our look simple and clean, but behind the seemingly simple design, use new technologies like HTML5, WebGL and the latest, fastest browsers to make sure you have all the power of the web behind you.
The bar running across multiple properties should help it promote Google+ greatly, as it kind of ties things together. This should be key in Google’s strategy. Interestingly, the bar doesn’t appear on all of the key properties. For me, it’s lacking from both Gmail and YouTube, at this point, which are arguably two of Google’s strongest social assets. It may still be rolling out, however:

@zavada01
Mark Zavada@ryanheiser I have the black “Google Bar” in my gmail this AM…. 4 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

Not everyone is thrilled with the black bar. Shocker. Here are a few examples of criticism from Twitter:

@Digeratii
Josh Helfferich“Hey, let’s take the one color we almost never use and make the navigation bar that!” ~Google 12 hours ago via Twitterrific for Mac · powered by @socialditto

@rod11
Rod BoothbyYo! @Google What’s with the ugly black bar at the top of my search results?!? Weren’t you all about simple and uncluttered? 8 hours ago via Power Twitter · powered by @socialditto

@BJSebastian
Bryan SebastianThe black menu bar at the top of the google home page is annoying… looks too much like the Bing home page. 11 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

@applefanboyy
TonyI still can’t get over the black bar on google, it just ruins the whole feel of google. It was nice the way it was, may e some gradient? 12 minutes ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

@bustext
alicksGoogle, your black nav bar blows. If I wanted a shitty UI I’d use Yahoo. 14 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

Google does say to watch for design changes across all of its products over the next few months. In fact, the company is already showing off some changes with Google Maps.

Before:

After:

In search results, Google is starting to show author images, based on the recently announced authorship markup.

YouTube has already received a significant change in design in recent memory, but that doesn’t mean we won’t see more. Also look for Google Music to get integrated with Google’s social efforts. It’s currently in beta, but Facebook is expected to launch a new music service soon, so I would assume Google would want Music to be a key part of its own social experience as well.
June 29, 2011
Ask Taps YouTube API For Enhanced Video Results

Online video continues to blow up, and a lot of startups are capitalizing on it. Ask says that as a Q&A site, it sees a larger percentage of “how to” questions around art, science, cooking and exercise that are “begging to be answered visually.” With that in mind, the company is taking what it says is a first step to making video a more integral part of its Q&A community.

It is doing this by integrating Google’s YouTube API into the Ask.com user community. When a user includes a YouTube link in their answer to a question, the response will include a full thumbnail and metadata info, including playback for the video within the page (similar to Facebook’s display). Video will be infused across Ask’s Answer products and web results. Ask’s “Smart Answers” will now more heavily embed video, and overall results will enable full play back of video on the results page.

David Amato, Director, Business Development at Ask tells WebProNews, “The API allows us to do a few things differently; most importantly, it will be easier for us to feature and scale video content across our site, both within user-generated answers and algorithmic responses. Currently we see around 1 million clicks a month go to YouTube to watch video; this will allow users the full video experience in the context of an answer to a question, right on the Ask.com site. And yes, this integration is a first step in laying the groundwork for richer video features down the road, such as the potential for users to record and upload their own video answers.”

Ask says the news is simply a first step of a “multi-pronged approach to integrate videos in various ways (that recording and uploading of video answers straight from mobile and desktop devices will come later this year).

“Video is hugely important for our users, and it’s becoming more critical for our partners as well,” Amato tells us. “Partners in our Branded Q&A pilot program will be able to distribute any of their own video assets in response to relevant questions from our growing community. Our Smart Answer units will showcase video directly within the answer itself, enabling partners who supply content to these units to present users with more helpful detail.”

When asked about mobile, he says, “These features are less relevant on mobile devices, most of which have the YouTube video player already embedded. That said, we will be adding video thumbnails to relevant answers in our iPhone app soon. We’ve also optimized video results in our recently launched smartphone-friendly site to include images that, once tapped, trigger the player to launch.”

Last month, we had a conversation with Ask CEO Doug Leeds. We asked him where Ask will be in another 5 years, and he didn’t mention video, but he did say, ““There is a huge opportunity before us. The Q&A category is bigger than ever because no one has cracked this quite yet – and we are in an excellent position to do so given our approach and history with the consumer. Also, you’ll see us continue to invest in mobile over the next five years, as Q&A behavior increasingly translates to mobile devices. We have a pretty aggressive mobile product roadmap. I’d like to see us as the dominant provider of mobile Q&A services a few years from now.”

Ask.com had over 60.5 million unique monthly visitors in the U.S. alone in May (Compete), and that’s up from the previous month. To put that into perspective, Twitter.com had only about 29 million. AOL.com only had about 49.

The YouTube API functionality will launch later this summer.

June 28, 2011
Google’s Own PageRank Drops

Yesterday, it was reported that Google had updated PageRank. People took to the forums to share their new PageRank numbers – many of which had increased.

It appears, however, that Google’s own PageRank has gone down from a 10 to a 9. Make of this what you will, but it is quite interesting that the controller of all PageRank would devalue its own.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, who first reported on this, says, “Does it matter? No. But it is interesting, nevertheless.” He provides the following screen cap:

Image credit: Search Engine Roundtable

Notice the mouseover text: “PageRank is Google’s view of the importance of this page.” And that’s from Google’s own toolbar. That makes it sound a little like it matters.

In late 2009, Google removed PageRank from Webmaster Tools, but decided to keep it in the Google Toolbar. Google has basically said that people worry about PageRank way too much. “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” said Google’s Susan Moskwa. “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

Yet they continue to leave it in Google Toolbar, and clearly many webmasters still feel like they should look at it.

Regarding Google’s own lower PageRank, one forum member in BlackHatWorld writes, “It’s just that some agencies are lately doing investigations against Google, so it may be the reason.”

That’s probably jumping to conclusions, but it interesting to bring up. The Department of Justice is looking into the company’s proposed acquisition of ad-optimization firm AdMeld, and the Federal Trade Commission just launched a broad investigation of Google’s business operations and competitive practices.

Google put out a blog post addressing this late last week, citing 5 principles that will “stand up to scrutiny” from regulators: doing what’s best for the user, providing the most relevant answers as quickly as possible, labeling advertisements clearly, being transparent, and letting users take their data with them if they decide to opt out of Google products.

June 28, 2011
Google Launches a Different Kind of Search Experience

Google has launched a site called wdyl.com. That stands for “What do you love?”. That is the all the site says with a search box and a heart button until you enter your query.

Once you enter it, you get a different kind of search results page. The page will show you a graphical interface with boxes for results in Image Search, Maps, Google Alerts, Patent Search, Google Trends, Product Search, Sketchup, YouTube, Books, Google Translate, Blog Search, Picasa, Google News, Google Earth, Google Mobile Search, etc. It also has boxes for various Google tools.

For example, if I tell Google I love “hamburgers” it will also show Gmail box telling me to email somebody about hamburgers, a Google Calendar box telling me to plan an event about hamburgers, a Google Voice box telling me to call somebody about hamburgers, a Google Moderator box telling me to organize a debate about hamburgers (a fantastic idea), a Google Groups box telling me to start a hamburgers discussion group (another great idea), and a Chrome box telling me to access hamburgers stuff on the web, faster.

The whole thing is nice and social too. You can share using all kinds of services like Gmail, Google Buzz, and…oh wait, that’s all.

Hat tip to MG Siegler at TechCrunch for first reporting on this, after receiving a tip from Xoogler (or ex-Googler) Antonio Alger. On a side note, if you Google “xoogler,” Google assumes you meant “Google” and automatically shows results for that.

It’s not clear if Google is really ready for this to be widely seen. Google hasn’t officially announced it at this point.

June 28, 2011
Google PageRank Gets an Update, +1 Button Goes Worldwide

If you’re still obsessing with Google PageRank score, as seen in the Google Toolbar, then you may be interested to know that it’s been updated. If not, you’re not alone. Disregard.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable is pointing to some forum threads indicating that Google has released an update to PageRank in the Google Toolbar. Indeed, there are a bunch of webmasters on the Digital Point and WebmasterWorld forums claiming their PageRank has changed. It was last updated in January.

PageRank is one of many signals (over 200, according to Google) that the search engine uses to determine rankings. The algorithm gets tweaked on a daily basis, and Google has put more emphasis on more personalized factors in recent times – things like location and social, not to mention alleged content quality.

Google has basically said that people worry about PageRank way too much. They even ditched it in Webmaster Tools n 2009. “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” said Google’s Susan Moskwa at the time.. “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

Though for some reason, they kept it around in the Google Toolbar. Some users just like to see it.

Something that might be a little more relevant to to 2011 is that Google announced today that the +1 button is rolling out globally. On the Webmaster Central Blog, product manager Kari Wilson writes:

Today, +1’s will start appearing on Google search pages globally. We’ll be starting off with sites like google.co.uk, google.de, google.jp and google.fr, then expanding quickly to most other Google search sites soon after.

We’ve partnered with a few more sites where you’ll see +1 buttons over the coming days.

Partners include The Telegraph, Last.fm, The Independent, and several others, though I’m willing to bet you’ll see them just about everywhere pretty soon.

It’s still largely unknown just how much these things are really getting clicked by users, but the buttons really offer nothing but benefits to publishers, as they provide a way for users to tell Google to rank this content higher.

For more on the +1 Button, read Google +1 Button: 31 Things You Should Know.

June 27, 2011
Google Transparency Report Gets an Update

Google has updated its Transparency Report. This was launched last September, showing the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests for Google to take down or censor content, as well as interactive traffic graphs showing info about traffic to Google from around the globe.

The latest round of data covers the second half of 2010, but they’ve also updated the design and added details. “We’ve highlighted some significant changes in the data and provided context about why those changes may have occurred during this reporting period,” says Google’s Matt Braithwaite. “We’ve also made it easier for you to spot trends in the data yourself. For example, we’ve changed the format so you can now see data on a country-by-country basis. We’re also clearly disclosing the reasons why we’ve been asked to remove content—such as an allegation of defamation or hate speech.”

“For the first time, we’re also revealing the percentage of user data requests we’ve complied with in whole or in part,” adds Braithwaite. “This gives you a better idea of how we’ve dealt with the requests we receive from government agencies—like local and federal police—for data about users of our services and products.”

@mattcutts
Matt CuttsGoogle just released an update of its Transparency Report: http://t.co/oby0MV7 Learn which governments request the most info. 13 minutes ago via Tweet Button · powered by @socialditto

It is quite interesting to look at which countries have increased their respective numbers of takedown requests. From July to December 2010, Argentina increased its requests by 83% compared to the prior reporting period. Requests by Hong Kong jumped 80%. Australia increased by about 72%, but Google says this was due to a change in how the company categorizes requests for data (though did not specify).

Regarding takedown requests from Brazil, Google says, “During the Fall election period in Brazil, the number of court orders issued from electoral courts rose, ordering removal of content related to political campaigns. In addition, one court ordered removal of more than 11,500 photos from Picasa. The lawsuit alleged that the photos contained images of pages from copyrighted books.”

Google also says it saw a significant number of content removal requests from both Croatia and Denmark for the first time.

Here in the United States, six court orders resulted in the removal of 1,110 items from Google Groups, related to a defamation case.

All of these and other countries can be viewed here.

June 27, 2011
Why SEO Disgusts Me
Before my SEO friends get their panties in a wad over today’s headline, let me emphasize that I understand the practical value and wisdom of basic Search Engine Optimization practices. There are many prinicipled people in the field doing good and useful work.

What tactics frustrate you the most? Comment here.

But the competition to out-fox the search engines is getting ugly. Beyond ugly.

I recently had a discussion with the CEO of a leading Midwest search firm who described their common practice of creating fake accounts to pump client links into the comment section of blog posts and forums.

The process goes something like this:
1. The company hires home-bound individuals or low-wage people in developing countries to freelance as professional blog commenters.
2. The blog commenters are trained on how to pose as fake people and comment in a way that does not alert the suspicion of Google or the author of the blog.
3. The freelance commenters are then given assignments, fake personas and email accounts to provide an appearance of legitimacy. A 50-year-old man in Indianapolis might be posing as a 30-year-old housewife in Pittsburgh, for example.
4. The commenters are compensated by the number of client links they can successfully work into a comment or forum — as many as five in one post.
Reality check. Isn’t this fraud?

I really don’t pay attention to the SEO shenanigans like this on a day to day basis but now these practices are starting to impact me and my precious time. Here is an example of this practice in a comment that was salted into the {grow} comment section by “John” –

This is good post. This is some good important facts about the corporate blogs. Do you have any information on how to manage comments on the blog. I think http://www. (web link to consumer electronics retail outlet) might have an idea. Chech it out.

And of course this linked website did not even have a blog. So now I am spending my time weeding out fake comments that elude the spam filter … and it happens every day.

I spoke to one of the freelancers hired by this SEO company to provide this faux commenting service. He’s otherwise unemployed and is doing it because he’s desperate for money. He’s good at what he does and rarely gets “outed.”

However as he described his work, he told me he feels guilty when people on the blogs actually want to engage with his fake persona. “I feel terrible about this,” he said. “I have to find some other work. I’m deceiving people as part of my job. I’m not in a position to engage with them because I’m a fake, which seems wrong.”

While Google fights against this kind of practice, it is very difficult to detect, and the “penalties” are so minor the risk is ignored by the SEO’s. And the volume of fake comments is likely to get worse. This firm alone has hired 300 fake commenters in the past 12 months and sees rapid expansion as a key competitive advantage.

The CEO of this SEO company does not consider this a “black hat” SEO practice — “it’s gray,” he said, “and we have many companies willing to pay us a lot of money to do it.” He bragged that one client has a monthly SEO bill of $200,000.

I recognize that there are many important business insights and strategies that can come from legitimate SEO professionals like:
- Keyword research + targeting
- Testing + optimizing content for users
- Content strategy direction
- Making sites search-engine friendly
- Leadership for analytics
- Opportunities for alternative search listings
- User experience improvement
… and more. But I’m concerned when it gets difficult to compete in the industry without engaging in fraudulent behavior. This is a slippery slope that will lead to regulation. All it will take is one high-profile case that blows the lid off these practices. And we will all lose if we have to endure new rules and the cost of compliance.

I want to do business with people who view ethics as black and white, not gray. I want to work in an industry where we can compete fairly without resorting to SEO fraud to cover up ineffective products, services and marketing plans. How about you?

Let us know in the comments.

Check out BusinessGrow.com for more articles by Mark Schaefer.
June 26, 2011
Google Study Looks at Key Role of the Web in Word of Mouth

Google says that everyday in the U.S. there are 2.4 billion conversations involving a brand, and that Google directly informs 146 million brand conversations a day. Google has shared some findings from a study on word of mouth, from which these figures are taken.

“More than half of consumers involved in these conversations [the 2.4 billion] say they’re likely to make a purchase based on what they talk about,” says Lisa Shieh of Google’s Inside AdWords crew. “We wanted to know more about how media and the Internet play into all this conversation, so we took a look at what effect the Internet and search have on word of mouth. The study shows how media and marketing channels provided content before, during, and after consumer conversations by surveying 3,000 adults across 12 categories.”

“It turns out that while most people still talk about brands face to face, their conversations are informed by the Internet more than any other media source,” she adds. And when they’re online, users go to search sites more than any other. This is even more true afterconversations, especially those sparked by TV. People follow up by searching for more information and prices more than any other online activity, including social media.

Some other findings from the study:
3.3 billion mentions of brands in a day
1.4 impressions per conversation
94% of WOM brand impressions occur offline.
The Internet is both the leading spark of Word of Mouth conversations and the top resource utilized to take action after conversation.
Search impacts more than 15% of all Word of Mouth conversations.
Word of Mouth impressions generated by search are 25% more credible and 17% more likely to lead to purchase than those generated by online social media sites.

The study, which gets into a lot of interesting graphs and charts, can be found in its entirety here (pdf). It shows that the Internet is the most important source of content in all phases of the conversation from before the conversation to during it, to after it’s over.

June 26, 2011

Is the personalization of the Internet a step backwards? Is the wealth of information that is accessible to us being reduced because the products we use are filtering it all so heavily? This is a discussion that has been gaining momentum in recent weeks.

Do you want your search results and news tailored to your tastes, or do you want more control? Let us know in the comments.

The topic was brought up most recently by alternative search engine DuckDuckGo, which calls out the major search engines for being too heavy on the content filtering. DuckDuckGo has set up a site at DontBubble.us, which provides something of a graphical slideshow to illustrate its point. If you strip out all of the graphics and sub-text, it reads:

When you search the Internet, search engines now show different results to different people. Results are tailored to who you are, based on your search history and your click history. Since you often click on things you agree with, you keep getting more and more of what you already agree with, which means other stuff gets demoted (effectively filtered). This begs the question: what are you missing?

In other words, you are living in a Filter Bubble that promotes things it thinks you’ll like, and demotes (effectively filters) out some of the rest, which may limit your exposure to opposing information. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to pop your filter bubble, because the technology is used so much across the Internet.

Then it turns into an ad for DuckDuckGo:

We offer you an alternative: a search engine that breaks you out of your Filter Bubble by default, plus other differences like real privacy.

Founder Gabriel Weinberg discussed these differences with WebProNews in an interview earlier this year:Of course, DuckDuckGo is not above some level of filtering. It’s already pre-filtered out results from sites like eHow, which many may applaud, but others may not appreciate. For all of the controversy that’s surrounded eHow, it also has its fans, and Demand Media, which owns it, claims to be taking action to make its quality better. The point is, there is some level of filtering going on, though this is more at the human level, than at the personalized algorithmic level.

The “Filter Bubble”

This “Filter Bubble” DuckDuckGo speaks of is a concept discussed by Eli Pariser in a recent TED Talk, which can be viewed here:

Pariser had some interesting things to say, speaking directly to executives from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other companies, who were in the audience. In his presentation, he included a couple of interesting quotes – from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt:

“A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” – MZ

“It will very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.” – ES

Pariser talked about being a political progressive, but liking to hear what conservatives have to say, but noticing that all of the conservative posts had disappeared from his Facebook News Feed because Facebook had noticed he was clicking more on liberal links than conservative ones.

“Facebook isn’t the only place that’s doing this kind of invisible algorithmic editing of the web,” he said. “Google’s doing it too. If I search for something and you search for something even right now at the same time, we may get very different search results…There is no standard Google anymore.”

This is a fairly well-known fact, but that doesn’t make it any less of a nightmare for SEOs.

He talked about having several of his friends search for “Egypt” and send him screenshots of their results, only to find they were very different. One person didn’t even have any stories about the recent protests, and this was apparently while they were the “big story of the day”. He went on to note that many sites (mentioning the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times and Yahoo News) are engaging in some kind of personalized content delivery behavior

If you take all of these filters/algorithms together, you get a filter bubble, he says – your own personal unique bubble of info, which depends upon who you are and what you do, and “you don’t decide what gets in . You don’t actually see what gets edited out.”

He equates the phenomenon to the “passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones,” with the humans being traditional human news editors. If algorithms are going to curate the world and decide what to show us, he says, we need to make sure they’re not just keyed to relevance, but that they will also show us things that challenge us or make us uncomfortable – basically give us other points of view.

“We need you to give us some control,” he told the executives in the audience.

I might argue that we as users do have control. In the end, we’re choosing what services to use, what people or brands to follow, what publications to read, etc. If you’re limiting your content intake to what Facebook is showing you in the news feed, what Google is returning in search results, etc. then yes, you are succumbing to the algorithmic editors. He makes some great points.

However, in the end, it is still up to us humans to dictate how we go about consuming our information. Even Google and Facebook have ways that let us see what we want, in terms of news. You can use Google Reader, for example, and subscribe to every RSS feed your heart desires, and you can see every headline from every publication offering these feeds. It can be quite a task to get through all of your feeds, if you’re subscribed to too many, but you are still in control of how you consume that information. If you want conflicting view points, you can subscribe to both Fox News and MSNBC.

If Google is returning you MSNBC links for news searches, you can go to Fox News and search for the same topics there. And vice versa.

All of that said, it can certainly get more complex when you’re talking about non-news content, there’s a lot of gray area.

Google’s 57 Signals

He also says a Google engineer told him that Google has 57 signals that it looks at to personally tailor your query results. These signals, I presume, are a certain subset of the over 200 overall ranking signals Google employs with its algorithm. Pariser says the 57 includes things like what kind of computer you’re on, what browser you’re using, and where you’re located. Google doesn’t like to get into signal-naming too much, though it does let us know about certain ones from time to time.

René Pickhardt, a Webscience PHD student, took a crack at naming at least 40 of them. These are by no means confirmed by Google, but it’s an interesting compilation. It includes things like: search history, frequency of searches, age, sex, use of advanced search commands, etc.

In the end, there is simply a ridiculous amount of information at our disposal, being uploaded to the web every single second. The concept of the filter bubble charges that our access to all of this is limited by what the algorithmic gatekeepers think we should be seeing. On the flipside, these gatekeepers are tasked with providing the information they deem most relevant to our daily content consumption (and search) needs. By not employing such filtering, they could be said to be adding more noise. It’s a complex issue, on which opinions vary. It’s convenience vs. information overload.

What do you think? Should Google, Facebook and others be filtering results based on who we are? Share your thoughts.

Tag: Search

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Google Transparency Report Gets an Update

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