WebProNews

Tag: Search

  • New Google Feature Means Businesses Need Apps For Search Marketing

    New Google Feature Means Businesses Need Apps For Search Marketing

    The world of search engine marketing is ever-changing, and it’s no secret that mobile continues to take over the desktop. Google has a new feature, even beyond a related ranking signal for organic search on mobile devices, that gives businesses more incentive to have mobile apps for search marketing purposes. It essentially expands as search marketing-related benefit device-wide, as opposed to limiting it to the actual search results page.

    At Google I/O, Google announced the launch of something called Google Now On Tap. It’s a new feature in the latest version of Android, which the company unveiled in developer preview. You’d be forgiven if you missed that particular announcement as the company made many of them.

    Google Now on Tap is essentially a way for you to utilize Google Now on your own terms rather than in the confines of Google itself. While Google Now already served as a virtual assistant, this makes it even more so.

    Do you see Google Now on Tap as a new opportunity to increase visibility of your content? Share your thoughts about it in the comments.

    “Since we launched Google Now, we’ve been expanding the ways it can help and do more of the work for you,” says director of product management Aparna Chennapragada. “You can get notifications like where you parked your car, news stories based on your interests, or help with travel like your upcoming reservations. We’ve also gotten better at giving smarter answers to some of your questions (‘Is my flight on time?’) and at helping you get things done across your apps (‘Ok Google, play Sugar on Spotify’).”`

    “We’re working to make Google Now a little smarter in the upcoming Android M release, so you can ask it to assist you with whatever you’re doing—right in the moment, anywhere on your phone,” Chennapragada explains. “With ‘Now on tap,’ you can simply tap and hold the home button for assistance without having to leave what you’re doing—whether you’re in an app or on a website. For example, if a friend emails you about seeing the new movie Tomorrowland, you can invoke Google Now without leaving your app, to quickly see the ratings, watch a trailer, or even buy tickets—then get right back to what you were doing.”

    “If you’re chatting with a friend about where to get dinner, Google can bring you quick info about the place your friend recommends,” Chennapragada adds. “You’ll also see other apps on your phone, like OpenTable or Yelp, so you can easily make a reservation, read reviews or check out the menu.”

    When the user taps and holds the home button, Google presents options for its best guess of what might be helpful in the moment. If it doesn’t provide the right thing(s), the user can say, “Ok Google” from any screen or app. If it works as advertised it’s pretty smart. If you’re listening to a band on Spotify, Google says you can simply ask “who’s the lead singer?” and it will get you the answer.

    As Google notes, it shows apps from your phone that may help with what you’re doing based on context. It might tap IMDb for movie review, OpenTable for reservations, etc.

    There’s an SEO element to all of this. App indexing. Google recently made App Indexing a ranking signal for mobile search results on Android devices, and announced that it’s starting to index iOS apps as well. Google Now on Tap is another reason to utilize app indexing.

    Clickz says Google Now on Tap “makes app search optimization more critical than ever.” Emily Alford reports:

    While the announcement comes as a boon to app developers, it also means that it’s now more important than ever for brands to think about App Search Optimization> (ASO) along with SEO, since Google is taking both into consideration for Now on Tap, according to Danielle Levitas, senior vice president of research and analysis for App Annie, which provides app ranking data and mobile analytics for businesses.

    “Part of the reason Google is providing deep linking is to give developers another way to be discovered outside of the app store,” says Levitas. “SEO is still critical, but you’ve also got to think about ASO, which has to do with keywords for discoverability, how an app is described, and even its reviews. But Now on Tap actually makes mobile and the app experiences easier for brands to execute because they can think about discoverability as a continuum as opposed to these two very disparate platforms.”

    Google says Now on Tap another way to get apps in front of users at the right moment. If you have an app with content that people need to see, well, that applies to you. Luckily, beyond app indexing, there’s nothing else you really have to do to be integrated with Now on Tap. Just have your app indexed by Google.

    While optimizing for Google via app indexing is one thing, businesses will also need to market their actual apps in other ways to drive app installs. The more people who have your app installed, the more chances they’ll have to actually see the content within via Now on Tap. As the Clickz article points out, a lot of downloaded apps are rarely opened, and Now on Tap could be just what those apps need to get more engagement from the users who downloaded them in the first place.

    In other words, if you’ve found app creation to be a waste of time in the past because you didn’t think people would really use your app, this means that people may actually use it more, provided that you can convince them of its usefulness enough in the first place to get then to download it.

    Google does say it will have more details about everything once the release of Android M gets closer. In the meantime, I really can’t urge you enough to get your mobile apps indexed, and if you don’t have a mobile app, now is a better time than ever before to build one or have one built. It’s becoming a matter of visibility in Google, and that’s not even taking the Google Play Store into account, which is now doing paid search results like Google Search.

    It’s actually possible that your business may be able to take advantage of Now on Tap in the future without having an app, as the company is reportedly considering including website content in the feature at some point, but that hasn’t been announced.

    Does your business have a mobile app? Do you expect Google Now on Tap to make a significant difference? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    Images via Google

  • Google Maps’ Racist Results To Get the Googlebomb Fix

    This post contains language some may find offensive.

    Google says it screwed up and is sorry for pointing people toward the White House, historically black colleges, and other locations when shockingly racist search terms were entered into Google Maps.

    “We were deeply upset by this issue, and we are fixing it now. We apologize this has taken some time to resolve, and want to share more about what we are doing to correct the problem,” says Google.

    “At Google, we work hard to bring people the information they are looking for, including information about the physical world through Google Maps. Our ranking systems are designed to return results that match a person’s query. For Maps, this means using content about businesses and other public places from across the web. But this week, we heard about a failure in our system—loud and clear. Certain offensive search terms were triggering unexpected maps results, typically because people had used the offensive term in online discussions of the place. This surfaced inappropriate results that users likely weren’t looking for.”

    (GIF via the Washington Post)

    Long story short, Google’s practice of pulling in data from all across the web and using it to categorize and label places inside Maps kind of bit them in the ass.

    Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has a nice description of how Maps searches for ‘nigger house’, ‘nigger king’ wound up directing people toward the Presidential residence:

    To understand more, say Google knows about a local sporting goods store. The owner of that store might explain in the description it provides to Google Maps that it sells baseball, football and hockey equipment. It also sells other sporting equipment, but if these things aren’t also listed in its description or on its associated web site, the store might not be deemed relevant for those things.

    With the Pigeon Update, Google sought to correct this. Imagine that some customer of the site wrote a blog post saying that the store was a great place to get skiing equipment. Google, seeing the business named in that post, might effectively add this information to the business listing, making it relevant for skiing equipment. To our understanding, there doesn’t even have to be a link to the business site or listing in Google Maps. Using a business name alone might be enough to create the connection.

    Ok, so how is Google planning on fixing this?

    The same way they fixed another issue many years ago, apparently.

    “Our team has been working hard to fix this issue. Building upon a key algorithmic change we developed for Google Search, we’ve started to update our ranking system to address the majority of these searches—this will gradually roll out globally and we’ll continue to refine our systems over time. Simply put, you shouldn’t see these kinds of results in Google Maps, and we’re taking steps to make sure you don’t,” says Google.

    That “key algorithmic change” involved tackling Googlebombs – the practice many pranksters used to make sites rank for certain, often derogatory searches by linking to the site behind “obscure or meaningless queries.” If enough people link to George W. Bush’s page using the phrase “miserable failure”, then his page will pop up at the top of searches for the term “miserable failure”. That actually happened by the way.

    But Google made some algorithmic changes so that it doesn’t really work like that anymore. That’s surely what they hope to do with this whole Maps fiasco. Google is likely tweaking its algorithms to make sure the words and phrases associated with map listings actually appear on the location’s description and official pages.

    In other, depressing news, it’s 2015 and there are still a bunch of people calling The White House ‘nigger house’ online.

    Image via Cezary p, Wikimedia Commons

  • Google Puts Real-Time Tweets in Mobile Search Results

    Google Puts Real-Time Tweets in Mobile Search Results

    Earlier this year, Google and Twitter made nice and struck a deal to bring more tweets to Google search results. Today, the fruits of said deal are going live on mobile.

    Of course, it’s not as if you couldn’t surface tweets in Google search results if you tried – but this new deal gives real-time tweets more prominence in mobile search results.

    For instance, a search for Taylor Swift may display a carousel of her tweets at the top:

    Or a search for a timely topic like Malcolm X (it’s his 90th birthday today) might bring up a carousel of recent tweets about him:

    Of course, more specific Twitter-oriented searches like “NASA Twitter” or “#madmen” are more likely to pull up Twitter results, and place them higher up on the page.

    It appears that what some spotted in the wild earlier this month is pretty much how Google plans to use tweets – at least for now. Currently, these Twitter-heavy results will only show up for U.S. user searching in English, and only on the iOS and Android Google apps and the mobile web.

    The companies say it’s coming to desktop “shortly”.

    “It’s a great way to get real-time info when something is happening. And it’s another way for organizations and people on Twitter to reach a global audience at the most relevant moments,” says Google.

    “By deeply integrating Twitter’s real-time content into Google search, we hope you find it easier than ever to explore your interests across both Twitter and Google,” says Twitter.

    It’s important to note that this isn’t a rebirth of Google’s realtime search feature. But it is a step toward more real-time information in Google search. Twitter has over 6,000 tweets per second coming in through its firehose – and now Google, once again, has access to it.

  • Twitter Rolls Out New Search Interface

    Twitter Rolls Out New Search Interface

    Twitter’s new search experience, which we first told you it was testing in April, is now rolling out to all users on the web.

    The new search not only looks different (with that big bold bar at the top of results), but it also provides a few new filtering options.

    What used to be called “ALL” tweets is now called “LIVE”, and clicking on it will feed a live stream of all tweets rolling in regarding said search term. The options to filter by “accounts” (used to be “people”), photos, and videos is now up top, instead of on the left side. It’s a much more prominent placement for filtering options.

    The “more options” tab easily lets you save a search, embed a search, filter for more specific needs, or go to advanced search.

    Just for reference, here’s what the old search results looked like:

    “We’re rolling out a new search experience to users on web. Like other features, we will continue to iterate and improve on this, to make it even easier for users to find what they are looking for when they search on Twitter,” said a Twitter spokesperson.

    For a longer look into the new Twitter search, check out Chris Crum’s deep dive.

  • Google Says To Reach YouTube Users On How-To Searches

    Google Says To Reach YouTube Users On How-To Searches

    Google is giving marketers some best practices for capitalizing on major growth in how-to searches on YouTube. Believe it or not, these types of searches have seen 70% growth year-over-year. A whopping one hundred million hours of such content has already been watched in North America in 2015, it says.

    In other words, this is an opportunity for businesses who can provide high quality how-to content to attract some eyeballs.

    This information comes from a Think with Google article by David Mogensen, Head of B2B Product Marketing for YouTube and Google Display (via Marketing Land). According to him, people look for how-to videos increasingly on mobile with 91% of smartphone users turning to their devices for ideas while completing a task.

    These searches are on the rise across all age groups, but millennials are especially likely to search YouTube for how-to videos. According to Google, 67% of them agree that they can find a YouTube video on anything they want to learn.

    I guess that’s why Google Helpouts didn’t take off.

    “Being there in these moments may be the single most important thing a marketer can do, but many aren’t,” writes Mogensen. “Marketing is still largely planned against brand moments and milestones, and it is anchored to campaign flights and product launches—not personal moments like these. The reason for this is simple. Most marketing plans are grounded in traditional one-way media: Broadcast from brands to large audiences.” Without signals of intent, traditional media makes it impossible to know whether someone actually needs or wants your product.

    “But when people ask how to do something, that’s a need,” he continues. “That’s someone asking, ‘can you help me out?’ Digital media let brands respond to those questions and be there at the very moment someone needs them most. Brands that successfully do this can win loyalty and drive sales to boot. In fact, nearly one in three millennials say they’ve purchased a product as a result of watching a how-to video.”

    He talks about how Home Depot has a bunch of how tos for home improvement and how Valspar has content about various paint-related subjects.

    Home improvement, beauty, and cooking are among the most popular categories for how-to searches.

    As far as best practices, Google says to identify the “I-wan-to-do moments” in which people have a need that your brand can help with. It says to find these moments across the whole consumer journey and put them at the center of your strategy. You should also figure out what questions and concerns people have related to the types of projects you sell or the projects they’re used for, and then create the content to serve as resources for those, it says.

    Google also suggests looking at when how-to searches occur, and making your videos easier to find by adding descriptive titles, details, and relevant tags to each video. Promoting the videos is another option.

    One thing that Mogensen didn’t really get into that is certainly worth considering is how frequently videos appear in Google search results. You have to imagine that there are plenty of these how-to searches happening right on Google.

    We recently looked at a study on Google Universal Search trends, and video is the most frequent type of universal result Google shows. They appeared in 55% of search results pages analyzed. While the percentage of search results pages showing video results actually fell over the course of 2014, videos appear more often than anything else by far. 80% of videos displayed in Universal Search results came from YouTube.

    Image via Google

  • Soon You’ll Be Able To Easily Search For And Buy Things On Facebook

    Soon You’ll Be Able To Easily Search For And Buy Things On Facebook

    A new feature Facebook is testing could turn the social network into more of an e-commerce market place or digital swap meet. You’ll soon be able to search across Facebook for items to buy from other users.

    Do you use Facebook to sell items currently? Is this something you may do in the future? Let us know in the comments.

    This could not only place Facebook in competition with sites like eBay and Craigslist, but also increase Facebook’s functionality in the search space.

    Buying and Selling on Facebook

    TheNextWeb reports that Facebook is testing a page for “All For Sale Posts,” which lets you view items for sale across Groups. It looks like you can view items by category or search across all public for-sale groups. In other words, you could go to this page, and just search for items like you would on eBay, Amazon or anything else. Here’s what it looks like:

    According to TheNextWeb, the feature will be rolling out globally in the coming weeks.

    It expands on another feature the social network recently launched. In February, it added new buy/sell features to Groups.

    “Now, For Sale Group members can choose the ‘Sell’ feature when creating a post,” a Facebook spokesperson said in an email. “Members can add a description to what they’re selling, including a price and set a pick-up/delivery location. Sellers can also mark posts as ‘Available’ or ‘Sold’ and easily view their catalog of previous items sold.”

    In a blog post, Facebook shared a couple of examples of users who regularly use Facebook’s For Sale Groups:

    Lisa Duncan-Thayer from Florida created Made By Mama Buy/Sell/Trade to sell her crochet work and give other local artisans a place to sell their handmade items. Now with more than 4,500 members in or near Pinellas County, Florida, the group has helped many women turn their hobbies into businesses.

    Professional guitarist Kadu Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro created a Facebook Group to help musicians in Brazil buy and sell instruments. In nearly three years, the group has grown to more than 34,000 members. Not only has the group enabled Kadu to personally buy, sell and trade musical instruments, it’s raised his profile and awareness for his band, Swell.

    At the time, Facebook said these featrues would roll out across iOS, Android, and the Web over the coming months. It’s unclear if that roll-out has completed. There’s an interest form here for Group admins who wish to utilize the features.

    For Sale Groups are only one way in which Facebook is becoming better for selling products. The company recently acquired shopping search engine TheFind, which should mean better personalization for its new product ads. Facebook has also been testing a buy button, and has given advertisers call-to-action buttons, which include a “shop now” option.

    Searching on Facebook

    The ability to search for products to buy also represents the latest in a series of improvements Facebook has been making in the search department.

    Facebook is testing another feature that has been drawing some attention this week. It’s a new way to add a link to an update from the mobile app. Using it brings up the ability to search for articles by keyword.

    This all follows the announcement late last year that you can now search for posts on Facebook based on keywords, which was lacking from the social network for a long time.

    Here’s what CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said about the company’s search efforts on an earnings call:

    So we’re pretty early in this whole thing and there’s so much unique content that people share in Facebook that I think that that is the clear, unique opportunity to go for first, right? I mean there’s – if you think about the overall web, there’s a lot of public content that’s out there that any web search engine can go index and provide. But a lot of what we can get at are recommendations on products and travel and restaurants and things that your friends have shared, they haven’t shared publicly, and knowing different correlations, or interesting things about what your friends are interested in, and that’s the type of stuff, those are questions that we can answer that no one else can answer, and that’s probably going to be what we continue to focus on doing first. And I think what you’re seeing is that as we enable more use cases and as we just get a lot of the basics right around performance and bringing the mobile features into parity and beyond what we’ve been able to do on desktop, the volume is growing quickly.

    I think on a recent earnings call we just announced that we passed 1 billion searches total so now being more than 1 billion on mobile shows some progress that I’m pretty proud of for the search team.

    Little by little, Facebook is making it easier to find things in a useful way across its enormous network of user data.

    Do you think Facebook will grow as a platform for people to sell things? How about as a place for people to search more generally? Let us know what you think.

    Images via Twitter, Facebook

  • Rick Santorum Still Has a ‘Frothy’ Search Problem

    It looks like there’s a good chance that former Senator Rick Santorum is going to jump into the fray.

    He appeared on Fox News Wednesday to discuss his plans with Greta Van Susteren, which at this point is only an announcement to make an announcement. RickSantorum.com asks you to “save your seat for a special announcement on May 27. The site is currently paid for by “Rick Santorum Presidential Testing the Waters”.

    Let’s just say there a decent shot Santorum runs for the Republican nomination.

    And if he does, it’s important to note that he still has a bit of a search problem – albeit a much smaller one than he’s had in the past.

    – – – – – – – – – – –

    First, a little background.

    Years ago, Santorum drew the ire of popular blogger Dan Savage by making some unsavory comments regarding the gay community. During an interview where he stated the position that consenting adults have no expectation of privacy, Santorum equated homosexuality to bigamy and incest. He also made some comments relating homosexuality to bestiality, although he has maintained that the were taken out of context.

    Either way, Savage and some other activists were less than pleased. They launched a campaign to redefine the definition of the word “Santorum.” Through SEO tactics and link-trading, they were able to push a website called SpreadingSantorum.com to the very top of the Google search results for “Rick Santorum.”

    Over at SpreadingSantourm.com, you’ll find a brown splatter graphic behind a definition that reads “santorum (n): 1. The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex.”

    Probably not what a Presidential hopeful wants showing up when people search his name.

    In 2012, the last time Santorum ran a GOP primary race, SpreadingSantorum.com was the very 1st results fetched for searched of “Santorum” and the third result when you searched “Rick Santorum” on Google. It wasn’t just a Google problem either, as both Bing and Yahoo showed similar results.

    Rick Santorum isn’t unaware of his “online reputation” issue. In 2011, he contacted Google and tried to convince the company to remove the result.

    “I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it,” Santorum said. “If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country. To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle but I suspect that’s not true.”

    Google’s response was basically sorry, no dice. “[Google] does not remove content from out search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content and violations of out webmaster guidelines.”

    And Santorum remained frothy.

    – – – – – – – – – – –

    Flash forward to 2015, and Santorum’s problems have been mitigated but not erased.

    A Google search for “Rick Santorum” shows no result for SpreadingSantorum on the first page. SpreadingSantorum doesn’t even show up on a search for just “Santorum”.

    But the ghosts of the past are still present.

    The top result (for a logged-out user) for “Santorum” is the Wikipedia page explaining the neologism campaign:

    Scroll down a bit and a 2010 Mother Jones article called “Rick Santorum’s Anal Sex Problem” is the 5th result below the news box.

    On Bing, the Wikipedia page for the Santorum neologism is the first result below the news box and image box.

    But it’s over on Yahoo where Santorum still has a big problem. Here’s what you see when you search “Rick Santorum”:

    SpreadingSantorum.com – preview definition and all – is the second result, directly below the one for his official site.

    Santorum also has a small domain problem. He’s locked up RickSantorum.com, which is lucky for him. But here’s where Santorum.com redirects:

    Of course, Santorum is far from the only candidate to have to domain problem. Ted Cruz didn’t lock up TedCruz.com, and now he’s getting trolled. Carly Fiorina didn’t lock up CarlyFiorina.org, and now she’s getting trolled. Rand Paul had to waste over $100,000 to secure RandPaul.com.

    – – – – – – – – – – –

    If Rick Santorum does indeed announce intentions to seek his party’s 2016 nomination, people will once again be searching his name

    If he’s lucky, they’ll use Google.

  • Is This How Google Is Going To Use Tweets?

    Is This How Google Is Going To Use Tweets?

    It looks like Google’s new Twitter integration might be starting to take effect, with one possible format seen in the wild on Android.

    Are you looking forward to Google utilizing Twitter more? Discuss.

    Earlier this year, it came to light that Google and Twitter struck a new deal that would see Google indexing tweets in real time and that tweets would become more visible in Google’s search results as soon as they’re posted. During Twitter’s earnings conference call last week, CEO Dick Costolo said that the new integration would roll out in May. That was as specific as he got. It looks like some users may already be seeing some of that integration.

    Read: Google’s Twitter Update Is About To Hit: Here’s What Businesses Should Be Thinking About

    Search Engine Land has a screenshot of what appears to be an eight-minute old tweet from Gary Valenciano about the Mayweather/Pacquiao fight, which was apparently surfaced through a related search. It appears under a CNN result and its accompanying “more news for mayweather pacquiao” option. The Twitter result comes with a “feedback” link, indicating that the feature is a work in progress. There’s also a screenshot with a tweet fro Steve Benfrey in results for Carly Fiorina.

    Barry Schwartz, who was tipped with the screenshot by Razorfish’s Dan Martin, writes, “He told me he sees it happening on and off on his Android device for many trending topics right now, such as [maythe4thbewithyou], [Carly Fiorina], [Jimmy Greaves] and other searches. I personally cannot replicate this on any of my devices, but it would not surprise me if Google is now testing this and may roll it out any day.”

    Trying these searches on my own Android device, I’m not seeing the style shown in the screenshot. I did get this for “maythe4thbewithyou,” but that appears to be more app indexing related:

    As you may know, Google also recently turned app indexing into a ranking signal (and even expanded that signal further a couple weeks ago).

    Read: Google Does More With Recently Added Ranking Signal

    The above screenshot actually illustrates how that particular update might also help Twitter, who made the Google deal to drive more traffic to its service, which has been struggling to grow its user base fast enough to please investors. Even if Google doesn’t show sufficient real time tweets as a result of its Twitter integration, it may still point users to fresh Twitter content by way of the Twitter app.

    It’s unclear if anyone is seeing the new Twitter integration on non-Android devices, and to what extent the feature is being seen by users at all.

    Asked about the integration, a Google spokesperson told WebProNews, “As mentioned in Twitter’s earnings call back in January, we’ve partnered to bring their real-time content to Google Search. We’ve started some small experiments in mobile search, but we don’t have more to announce at this point.”

    They didn’t elaborate beyond that. Is this the extent of what the deal is going to bring to the table, or is this just one of multiple possible integrations? My guess is the latter.

    Beyond integrations directly into the search results, it’s possible that Google will also be getting more data from the tweets when it comes to ranking the content that they point to.

    We recently looked at some findings from Stone Temple Consulting, which analyzed Twitter’s past use of tweets, and found links in tweets having a significant impact.

    “Google still loves links. 26% of the tweets with an inbound link from sites other than Twitter got indexed. That is nearly 4 times as much as the overall average rate of indexation,” said Eric Enge in the report, adding that link quantity correlates highly with a tweet getting indexed.

    They found that out of 21 accounts and 91 tweets with with over 100 inbound links, 46% were indexed. The number goes down the less inbound links there are. Those with less than ten links only saw a 7% index rate.

    We later had a discussion with Enge, who said, “As you may know, there are many sites out there that simply replicate lots of tweets on their sites. I am not sure what value they serve, or if any people actually visit such sites. But, some of the links tweets get come from such sites, and my bet is that Google ignores those.”

    “However, there are other sites that may reference tweets within a blog post or article, and link in a clean traditional web link based fashion to the URL for the tweet itself…it is these links that I believe that Google is placing a high value on.”

    It’s also possible that having access to Twitter’s firehose will enable Google to better rank fresh articles based on the Twitter activity they get. They’ll at least be able to look at that as a more significant signal with the real time element coming into play.

    Google completed the roll-out of its big mobile-friendly algorithm update late last week. At the time, the company indicated that it wasn’t finished indexing everything. Google also recently indicated that its doorway page update had completed its roll out.

    Do you see the Twitter integration as a positive for Google results? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    Note: This article has been updated from its original form.

  • Google’s Search Ad Revenue Growth Is Getting Uglier

    Google’s Search Ad Revenue Growth Is Getting Uglier

    It doesn’t look like things are improving for Google’s core search advertising business. There have been major concerns about it for a while now, and while Google’s latest earnings report doesn’t look too shabby on the surface, its growth rate is on a steady downward trajectory.

    BI Intelligence released this chart illustrating the decline in year-over-year growth over the course of three years.

    It doesn’t look good.

    Google did manage to post 12% year-over-year revenue growth at $17.3 billion for the quarter, while missing expectations.

    “Excluding the net impact of foreign currency headwinds, revenue grew a healthy 17% year on year,” said outgoing CFO Patrick Pichette. “We continue to see great momentum in our mobile advertising business and opportunities with brand advertisers.”

    Aggregate paid clicks were up 1% quarter-over-quarter and 13% year-over-year. Paid clicks on Google sites were up 25% year-over-year, while paid clicks on network sites were up 12%.

    Average cost-per-click increased 7% year-over-year and 5% quarter-over-quarter. On Google sites it was up 13% year-over-year and 3% quarter-over-quarter. On network sites it was up 2% year-over-year and 11% quarter-over-quarter.

    Desktop search revenues accounted for 38% of the U.S. digital ad sales in 2014, according to a recent IAB report.

    Image via Google

  • Yelp Shares Findings On Consumer Reservations

    Yelp Shares Findings On Consumer Reservations

    Yelp is sharing some findings from a national survey it commissioned from Nielsen to “get intel on how consumers across the country are making reservations.”

    This comes as the company is rolling out Yelp Now, a recently announced search tool for reservations and ordering. The feature enables users to filter search results to show businesses with available reservations based on date, time, party size, and the type of food they want or restaurants that deliver.

    Yelp Now will eventually expand to include businesses beyond restaurants including spas, hotels, plumbers, and dentists.

    The roll-out began earlier this month in select U.S. cities on desktop and iOS. It allows users to reserve tables at restaurants that use Yelp SeatMe and Yelp Reservations. For delivery, users can access those using Yelp’s Eat24, ChowNow, Delivery.com, or EatStreet.

    “Our goal is to make Yelp the best place for consumers to discover and transact with great local businesses, and to help business owners connect with the millions of people who use Yelp every day,” says Yelp’s Brad Menezes. “Whether you’re the couch potato ordering food at midnight or the die-hard foodie planning a dinner at the hottest new restaurant, we’ve got you covered!”

    Here are some findings from the Nielsen study:

  • Nearly 4 in 10 (39%) Americans researched or checked reviews of a restaurant before their last dining experience
  • Nearly a third of Americans (28%) researched or checked reviews of a restaurant before they placed an order for takeout or delivery
    15% of Americans made a reservation last time they dined out. In Atlanta and DC, men made reservations three times more often than women.
  • Of people who made a reservation last time they dined out…

    – 42% did so online or using an app

    – More men than women went online or used an app to make that reservation (47% vs. 37%)

    – 75% of people who made a reservation last time they dined out did so within 2 days of their dining experience.

    – More men than women made a same day reservation (46% vs. 33%)

    • Yelp also provided some New York-specific stats. 18% of New Yorkers made a reservation last time they dined out.

    The company says, “In the NYC Metro, more women than men made a reservation last time they dined out (20% vs. 16%) Of those in the NYC Metro who made a reservation last time they dined out: 41% did so online or using an app; More women than men made the reservation online or using an app (42% vs. 40%); 46% did so the same day as their dining experience; 100% of men did so within 2 days of their dining experience vs. 62% of women.”

    Yelp will announce its Q1 earnings on Wednesday, and will likely discuss Yelp Now and its reservations business further in the ensuing conference call.

    Images via Yelp

  • Zuck Discusses Facebook Search On Earnings Call

    Zuck Discusses Facebook Search On Earnings Call

    Facebook reported its Q1 earnings on Wednesday, and while it wasn’t talked about a great deal, the subject of Facebook’s efforts in search did come up during the ensuing conference call.

    In his prepared remarks, CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that Facebook is now seeing over a billion mobile searchers per day.

    The mobile search number is noteworthy for a couple of reasons. For one, Facebook only updated is mobile search functionality to reflect its efforts in desktop search in Q4. The company announced in December that it was giving users the ability to surface posts based on keywords in search, and that this would be available for desktop as well as iOS and Android.

    The second reason the amount of searches happening on mobile is significant is that this is a largely untapped opportunity for Facebook to increase its ad revenue in the long term. The more searches that happen on Facebook, the bigger opportunity this will be for the company and its advertisers.

    Zuckerberg also mentioned search as one of three ways it’s “continuing to build a new generation of Internet services that are more useful, intuitive, and immersive (with the other two ways being artificial intelligence and virtual reality platform Oculus). He said Facebook will have more to share about all of these over the coming months. That’s pretty much all he had to say about search until the audience Q&A portion of the call.

    Asked more about Facebook’s search efforts during the Q&A, Zuck said (via SeekingAlpha’s transcript of the call):

    So we’re pretty early in this whole thing and there’s so much unique content that people share in Facebook that I think that that is the clear, unique opportunity to go for first, right? I mean there’s – if you think about the overall web, there’s a lot of public content that’s out there that any web search engine can go index and provide. But a lot of what we can get at are recommendations on products and travel and restaurants and things that your friends have shared, they haven’t shared publicly, and knowing different correlations, or interesting things about what your friends are interested in, and that’s the type of stuff, those are questions that we can answer that no one else can answer, and that’s probably going to be what we continue to focus on doing first. And I think what you’re seeing is that as we enable more use cases and as we just get a lot of the basics right around performance and bringing the mobile features into parity and beyond what we’ve been able to do on desktop, the volume is growing quickly.

    I think on a recent earnings call we just announced that we passed 1 billion searches total so now being more than 1 billion on mobile shows some progress that I’m pretty proud of for the search team.

    Personalized search is no doubt an area where Facebook should be able to compete with other services. Yahoo is working on something to that effect, and apparently thinking it can make a big impact with ages-old Yahoo Mail messages. I think Facebook’s ridiculous amount of personal data has a lot more potential to make such an impact. Yahoo has been talking a lot about the value distribution partnerships. It may want to look at Facebook for some opportunities.

    One analyst asked Facebook if it Facebook expects to leverage its 2 million advertiser relationships against third-party search queries: “For example, when a user searches on, say, Yahoo! or maybe some Apple device, Facebook might tap in to advertisers to provide relevant sponsored results.”

    COO Sheryl Sandberg simply stated that the company has no plans to work with marketers in such a way.

    On the company’s previous earnings call, Zuckerberg noted that its recent search changes at resulted in indexing a trillion posts. And that was a quarter ago.

    You can read more about what Zuckerberg has said about search in the past here.

    Images via Facebook

  • This Isn’t Really How Yahoo Expects To Compete In Search Is It?

    Yahoo held a conference call on Tuesday to discuss its Q1 earnings. Over the course of the call, CEO Marissa Mayer said a lot about search in her prepared remarks before talking about the subject even more in the Q&A session.

    It turns out that she was apparently alluding to an actual product the company is building, which would aim to compete with things like Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana. If Yahoo wants to compete in mobile search, which it obviously does, it would certainly make sense for the company to have its own take on this type of search/virtual assistant product.

    Some words from Mayer (via SeekingAlpha’s transcript of the call):

    I really think that there are two types of products that are emerging. The classic web search, call it deep reference web search which is classic Google search, Bing search, and there’s a new class of products that’s really arising with Cortana, Siri, Google Now. And those products are really heavily differentiated both from each other as well as from the historic legacy products and so that’s really where we see an opportunity to play, in something that’s mobile and as it moves to, for example, the watch and on to television screens and video, we think that there’s a really interesting place to play there to help people make better sense of the content they already have access to, content in their mail, using more context to actually provide higher quality results.

    I’ve given examples, things like, for example, searching for JFK producing essentially my boarding pass and the gate number on a search results page en route to the airport, rather than just producing the John F. Kennedy Wikipedia page. I’ve used an example like that on previous calls, so that’s really where we see a big opportunity. And the profile for searching people’s personal information, pulling in context, searching entities and making search more action oriented is a very different problem than crawling a trillion or more URLs and perfectly ordering millions of results.

    We think that’s something that’s potentially more relevant to users of technology as we move forward. And that’s really where we’re excited to invest and that’s why we’ve worked on things like Aviate, like Search My World and we’ve been making investments there and we’d like to do more with that and that’s what I’m referring to, the classic web search has a different cost profile than that future oriented mobile search that’s more personal.

    When Mayer says they’d like to “do more with that,” she seems to be referring to a product Yahoo is building that it expects to have at least preliminarily built in Q2. That is according to a new report from Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson, who recently had a book about Mayer published. He writes:

    According to this source, the product’s code-named is Index. It’s going to be a smartphone app. Mayer has set a company-wide goal to have a pilot version of Index built sometime during the second quarter. Advertising engineers are already involved in the project, so it’s likely the product will be ad-supported. The product’s development is being led by executives named Jeff Bonforte and Peter Monaco.

    According to the report, Yahoo is betting on being able to compete with Google because of the length of time people have been using Yahoo, and Yahoo Mail in particular. The thinking is that Gmail has only been around for ten years, and that Yahoo Mail has been around for much longer, and that that older information is of great value. At least that’s what I’m taking away from Carlson’s report.

    With all due respect, Mayer knows a whole lot more about search, email, and Yahoo users than I ever will, but this concept seems pretty misguided to me. Is there really that much value to users in being able to more easily recall content from 15 years ago?

    From Carlson’s report:

    “Gmail users have only had their accounts for 10 years,” says our source. “Yahoo has many 20 year old accounts. Back then people used to email themselves a lot — store things. To surface that kind of data usefully is exciting.”

    Our source imagined a user who has been talking about a particular baseball team with his friends for the past decade or so. By scanning that user’s inbox, Yahoo will know to keep that user abreast of everything going on with that baseball team.

    Wow, I hope they’ve got something better up their sleeve than that. Certainly Yahoo must get into this kind of search if it hopes to compete, but I’m afraid that I don’t see people’s fifteen to twenty-year-old Yahoo Mail messages being a game changer.

    Of course this is just one random source’s presumably random example of what they’re trying to do, but if you’re going to spill the beans to the media, you should probably come up with something better than that, unless that really is the height of what we’re talking about here.

    “We do deeply believe in the search,” Mayer said on the call. “It’s deep in Yahoo!’s DNA from the very start of the company. That said, we are particularly interested in search in the mobile sector, what happens when you involve context. What happens when you involve personal information, from things like e-mail, and so that’s really where we’ve been putting a lot of our innovation on the user search experience side.”

    Well, at least they’ve got Firefox. According to Mayer that partnership is profitable so far, and they’re even higher on that deal now than they were when they made it. In other words, it’s working out better than they even expected.

    Mayer has expressed great interest in getting a similar deal with Apple to make Yahoo the default search experience in that browser, but somehow the name Safari didn’t come up a single time on the conference call this time around.

    Now that would help Yahoo compete much more significantly with Google (and especially its partner Microsoft) in the search space. It wouldn’t only put Yahoo in a very popular space, but it would knock Google out of one, assuming that the vast majority didn’t immediately switch back over to Google.

    New research is out from StatConter saying that Safari accounted for over half (55%) of U.S. mobile and tablet Internet usage in March.

    “This emphasises the potential prize in the rapidly growing mobile space for Yahoo, Bing or others if Apple decides to end its default search deal with Google,” said CEO Aodhan Cullen.

    “While Safari is the major player in the US for mobile and tablet, it is ranked number four on the desktop with just 10.5% of internet usage share. From a desktop perspective, this makes it less significant than the recent Yahoo deal with Firefox,” Cullen added.

    StatCounter also analyzed search engine preferences of Safari users. Unsurprisingly, Google dominates at 83% in the U.S. and 87.9% worldwide. Yahoo is at 4.7% for the U.S. and 2.5% worldwide.

    Even still, a Safari deal with Apple, who has already been doing a great deal to distance itself from Google, could give Yahoo a significant boost. Never underestimate the power of users who simply don’t care enough to make the switch. As long as Yahoo could provide a service that doesn’t turn them off, it would likely gain some significant ground.

    But again, Safari didn’t even come up in the conversation on the conference call, and some have been pretty skeptical of the company’s ability to even compete for the deal with Google likely wanting to renew and Microsoft also reportedly showing interest. And with the newly reworked deal between Microsoft and Yahoo announced late last week, it seems like those companies might be getting along much better now. Maybe Yahoo is backing off a little on that. Or maybe participating analysts just didn’t ask the right questions.

    Images via Wikimedia Commons, StatCounter

  • Yahoo Sheds Light On Search Performance, Future

    Yahoo reported is Q1 financial results on Tuesday with revenues of $1.04 billion, down from $1.08 billion from the same period last year. The company missed on the bottom line and on net revenue, but the search business has clearly received a major injection of new life thanks to the company’s partnership with Mozilla.

    The company reported an increase in search volume in Q1, with searches reaching a five-year high, citing the partnership as “key to this volume increase.”

    Gross search revenue was $956 million, up 20% year-over-year, while GAAP search revenue was $532 million, also up 20%. The company said search revenue from the Mozilla traffic is being recognized on a gross basis as a result of the terms of the agreement, and increased GAAP revenue and as well as TAC. Search revenue ex-TAC was $432 million, down 3% year-over-year.

    Paid Clicks increased 21% year-over-year, and price-per-click increased 3%.

    CEO Marissa Mayer said, “Yahoo is amidst a multi-year transformation to return an iconic company to greatness. This quarter, we saw encouraging revenue growth of 8%, with display revenue growing a modest 2% and search growing 20% on a GAAP basis. Our mobile GAAP revenue reached $234 million in Q1, growing 61% year-over-year. We anticipated that we would grow GAAP revenue ahead of revenue ex-TAC and EBITDA, and that’s precisely what we saw this quarter. For the next phase of the transformation, we will focus on accelerating our GAAP revenue growth while managing our margins and costs.”

    On the company’s earnings conference call, Mayer said (via SeekingAlpha’s transcript), “Mozilla is not only a high-quality deal for us, it is a profitable deal for us. For volume and long-term health of the partnership, introducing Mozilla users to and retaining them on Yahoo! Search is key, and we surpassed all expectations for new users and retention. We knew this was a landmark deal for both companies. From today’s vantage point, we would enter the partnership even more readily.”

    Yahoo has been aggressively trying to get people using Firefox. Not only has the company been displaying a download link on its home page and the home pages of some of its other popular web properties, it is even now sending Yahoo Mail users emails suggesting that they download it.

    That’s a particularly interesting strategy considering that they recommend doing so for safety reasons, and mention nothing whatsoever about search or or their partnership with Mozilla.

    Earlier this week, Yahoo filed a regulatory document with the SEC outlining recently announced changes to its long-standing search agreement with Microsoft. It includes a termination clause, which would allow either company to bail on the deal after October 1.

    Mayer said this about the amended partnership in her prepared remarks on the conference call:

    The amended agreement has a five-year remaining term and is distinctly similar to the prior arrangement, except that it reduces our exclusivity commitments on PC to 51%, addresses the traffic acquisition cost we pay Microsoft on a gross basis rather than a net basis, and lets Yahoo! call on Microsoft for search only, ads only, or both together, paying a fixed cost rather than a revenue share for items that we discard without display.

    I’d like to thank Satya and his team for the very constructive time and attention they dedicated to designing our go-forward partnership. We were very pleased with the renewed relationship, which improves the search experience for users, creates value for advertisers, and establishes ongoing stability for partners. We anticipate it will take several quarters to operationalize the new amendment…

    She also mentioned how Yahoo is extending its search capabilities to any app developer as part of the mobile developer suite it launched at a recent developer conference. She said that in the first five weeks after the event, Yahoo Search in Apps has been launched in partner apps that have reached over 60 million users. She said the company will continue to invest in the developer ecosystem to improve quality and monetization of partner apps.

    Naturally, Mayer was asked several questions about search during the Q&A portion of the call. On the company’s approach, she said they’re particularly interested in mobile and evolving context. They’re also looking harder at involving personal information like email, which the company sees as a place where it can innovate in search.

    Regarding that slight loss on search ex-TAC, she said this wasn’t due to the profitable Mozilla partnership, but more attributable “acute things” the company saw in Q1, such as “the search revenue guarantee being wrapped”.

    Also regarding the Mozilla partnership, Mayer noted that it’s only in effect in the U.S. and that there are “some international opportunities in the deal but none of those are in place at the moment.”

    Somehow, a potential Safari deal was never explicitly mentioned during the call despite Mayer’s enthusiasm about such a prospect on the company’s previous earnings call. She did, however, talk about potential distribution deals more generally, emphasizing the importance of maintaining volume, which she said is an indication of how Yahoo users value search, and that it’s “actually meeting their needs.”

    Partnerships are a way to maintain that volume, she noted, and the exclusivity piece of desktop search being reduced in the Microsoft deal gives Yahoo the ability to “innovate more” and the potential to “work with other partners”.

    “We could introduce our own features but it also creates a very competitive atmosphere where we all work each day to earn that traffic and the percentage that gets directed to various partners, including Bing, and so overall we really like that dynamic,” she said.

    You can find the full earnings report here.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Yahoo Could Still Drop Microsoft Soon

    Yahoo Could Still Drop Microsoft Soon

    Last week, Yahoo and Microsoft announced that they have reworked the terms of their search partnership after extending a deadline for coming to new terms. This followed speculation that Yahoo could put an end to the companies’ relationship, as CEO Marissa Mayer’s alleged unhappiness with the deal has been widely reported in the past.

    The companies decided to stay together, but under terms that are largely better for Yahoo, which gets increased flexibility to enhance its own search experience on any platform. The partnership is non-exclusive for both desktop and mobile. Yahoo will continue to serve Bing ads and search results for “most” (51%) of its desktop search traffic, it said, and can do whatever it wants on mobile.

    Additionally, they made some changes to ad sales. Microsoft will be the exclusive salesforce for ads delivered by its own Bing Ads platform, and Yahoo will continue to be the exclusive salesforce for its Yahoo Gemini ads platform.

    This week, Yahoo filed a regulatory document with the SEC (via Reuters), and it lays out the exact changes to the agreement, and it includes a termination clause that would allow Yahoo to bail on Microsoft on or after October 1 if it chooses.

    Here are the changes to the agreement as described in the document:

    Services and Exclusivity

    Previously under the Search Agreement, Microsoft was the exclusive algorithmic and paid search services provider to Yahoo on personal computers for Yahoo’s online properties and services (“Yahoo Properties”) and for search services provided by Yahoo to its distribution network of third party entities who integrate Yahoo’s advertising offerings into their Websites and other offerings (“Affiliate sites”). Microsoft was the non-exclusive provider on mobile devices. Pursuant to the Amendment, Microsoft will provide such services on a non-exclusive basis for Yahoo Properties and Affiliate sites on personal computers. Commencing on May 1, 2015, Yahoo agrees to request paid search results from Microsoft for 51% of its search queries originating from personal computers accessing Yahoo Properties and its Affiliate sites (the “Volume Commitment”) and will display only Microsoft’s paid search results on such search result pages.

    Additionally, Yahoo will now have the ability in response to queries on both personal computers and mobile to request algorithmic listings only, paid listings only or both algorithmic and paid listings from Microsoft. To the extent Yahoo requests algorithmic listings only or requests paid listings but elects not to display such paid listings, Yahoo will pay Microsoft serving costs but not a revenue share. In other cases and with respect to the Volume Commitment, Yahoo will pay Microsoft a revenue share.

    Previously under the Search Agreement, Yahoo had sales exclusivity for Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s premium advertisers. Pursuant to the Amendment, this sales exclusivity will terminate on July 1, 2015. Yahoo and Microsoft will develop a plan to transition premium advertisers for Microsoft’s paid search services to Microsoft commencing on July 1, 2015 and to be completed by January 31, 2016.

    Revenue Share

    Yahoo is entitled to receive a percentage of the revenue (the “Revenue Share Rate”) generated from Microsoft’s services on Yahoo Properties and on Affiliate sites after deduction of the Affiliate sites’ share of revenue and certain Microsoft costs. Under the Search Agreement the Revenue Share Rate was 88% for the first five years and then increased to 90% on February 23, 2015. Pursuant to the Amendment, the Revenue Share Rate will be 93%, but will now apply before deduction of the Affiliate sites’ share of revenue.

    Term and Termination

    The term of the Search Agreement remains 10 years from its commencement date, February 23, 2010, subject to earlier termination as provided in the Search Agreement. Pursuant to the Amendment, on or after October 1, 2015, either Yahoo or Microsoft may terminate the Search Agreement by delivering a written notice of termination to the other party. The Search Agreement will remain in effect for four months from the date of the termination notice to provide for a transition period, however, Yahoo’s Volume Commitment will not apply in the third and fourth months of this transition period.

    So there you have it. If Yahoo, or Microsoft for that matter, doesn’t like how the deal is going under the terms, they’ll be able to call it off sooner rather than later. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Bing Copies Pinterest’s Approach To Image Search

    Bing Copies Pinterest’s Approach To Image Search

    Last week, Bing announced a redesigned image search experience across both desktop and mobile. The changes, it says, will result in more traffic to websites. In fact, it suggested that site will not only get more traffic, but higher quality, targeted traffic.

    While this hasn’t fully rolled out yet, Bing has been giving guidance to webmasters to help them take advantage of this traffic. This involves including markup like Schema.org, OpenGraph, etc. More on all of that here.

    On Friday, Bing made another Image Search announcement. This one is all about users being able to type less and find images more quickly on mobile devices. The update is for both iOS and Android.

    “We know you love to discover images on your mobile devices. Our goal for Bing’s image search is to help you be inspired, learn more, and quickly find great images on any device,” says Bing in a blog post.

    “The best news about Bing’s new image search? No typing required to discover more,” it says. “Typing on mobile phones is hard. Typos are common and are a pain to fix on small screens. This is particularly painful for image searchers, who tend to refine and expand their searches a lot. How do we make searching easier without typing? We’re happy to take on that challenge.”

    Here’s a video looking at what they’ve done.

    Look familiar? That’s probably because it’s nearly identical to Pinterest’s Guided Search:

    Bing:

    Pinterest:

    As Bing puts it, search terms are “bubbled” in the search box into “intelligent groups,” and you can “pivot your search around each entity” by tapping the bubbles. You can use the “smart suggestion bubbles” to refine your search.

    So, yeah, it’s exactly like Pinterest’s Guided Search. And that’s fine, because Pinterest’s Guided Search was a major improvement to search on that service.

    “As we build a discovery engine, searching is a key way for Pinners to find and save ideas Pinned by others,” a spokesperson for Pinterest told WebProNews in January. “Searches derived from clicking on guides is one of the major sources of our search traffic, with guide clicking up 3x over the last 6 months.”

    Bing is no doubt hoping for such an increase in image search traffic.

    Pinterest must really be on to something with its search improvements if Bing is emulating them. Bing has historically followed more of a Google path on feature additions, while certainly taking on some of its own approaches. It’s pretty interesting, however, that Bing is favoring Pinterest’s style for such a staple of the search experience as opposed to the Google style.

    Of course Google Image Search does operate in a similar fashion, but includes thumbnail images for its version of “guides” and provides a much more limited amount of suggestions.

    Bing doesn’t mention Pinterest as an inspiration for the feature, but it was as major component of the redesign announced last week. Where available, Bing Image Search will show Pinterest collections with the image, among other things, including where to buy products. Bing has actually been utilizing Pinterst boards in image search since 2013, but the redesign improves the integration. It did say that the Pinterest feature would be expanded to include sites beyond Pinterest.

    Images via Bing, Pinterest

  • Google Does More With Recently Added Ranking Signal

    Google Does More With Recently Added Ranking Signal

    Google announced on Thursday that it has indexed 30 billion links within apps, and that it will now show Android users apps in search results even if the user hasn’t already installed them. This is the latest move by the search engine to further integrate the app ecosystem into search and improve mobile results.

    Are you taking advantage of Google’s app indexing? If so, have you noticed a boost in your rankings? Let us know in the comments.

    “You’ve invested time and effort into making your app an awesome experience, and we want to help people find the great content you’ve created,” said product manager Lawrence Chang in a blog post. “App Indexing has already been helping people engage with your Android app after they’ve installed it — we now have 30 billion links within apps indexed. Starting this week, people searching on Google can also discover your app if they haven’t installed it yet. If you’ve implemented App Indexing, when indexed content from your app is relevant to a search done on Google on Android devices, people may start to see app install buttons for your app in search results. Tapping these buttons will take them to the Google Play store where they can install your app, then continue straight on to the right content within it.”

    “With the addition of these install links, we are starting to use App Indexing as a ranking signal for all users on Android, regardless of whether they have your app installed or not,” he adds. “We hope that Search will now help you acquire new users, as well as re-engage your existing ones.”

    Google announced in February that it had already begun using app indexing as a ranking signal for signed in users who had the apps installed on their devices. They must have liked the results since they’re expanding it into include apps that the user doesn’t have installed.

    This comes at an interesting time as the European Commission just announced that it has opened an investigation into Google’s Android business. Complainants will no doubt point to this as a sign that Google is using its dominant search position to get people to focus more on Android as a development platform. Increased search visibility certainly seems like a pretty major plus.

    The Commission said the investigation would “focus on whether Google has breached EU antitrust rules by hindering the development and market access of rival mobile operating systems, applications and services to the detriment of consumers and developers of innovative services and products.”

    “Smartphones, tablets and similar devices play an increasing role in many people’s daily lives and I want to make sure the markets in this area can flourish without anticompetitive constraints imposed by any company,” said EU Commissioner in charge of competition policy Margrethe Vestager.

    Google first began testing app indexing in the fall of 2013. Googlebot began indexing content in Android apps, and gave webmasters the ability to let Google know which app they’d like Google to index through their existing sitemaps file and through Webmaster tools.

    At the time, app indexing had no effect on ranking. At first, Google only indexed a select few apps, including Allthecooks, AllTrails, Beautylish, Etsy, Expedia, Flixster, Healthtap, IMDB, Moviefone, Newegg, OpenTable, and Trulia. Last April, Google announced that it had enabled it for over 24 more applications, including: 500px, AOL, BigOven, Bleacher Report, Booking.com, Eventbrite, Glassdoor, Goodreads, Huffington Post, Merriam-Webster, Pinterest, Realtor.com, Seeking Alpha, TalkAndroid, TheFreeDictionary, The Journal, TripAdvisor, Tumblr, Urbanspoon, Wattpad, YP, Zagat, Zappos and Zillow.

    They also made it available globally in English. The following month, they made it available in more languages. At Google I/O last year, they announced a slew of additional apps, and opened app indexing up to all Android developers. If you have an Android app, you can participate.

    Also at Google I/O, the company held a session called “The Future of Apps and Search,” which discussed bringing search and apps together to give users a better experience. In light of the ranking news, you might want to give that a watch:

    Google tells those who wish to get started with app indexing to go here or to learn about other ways developers can integrate with search here.

    To get started, visit g.co/AppIndexing and to learn more about the other ways you can integrate with Google Search, visit g.co/DeveloperSearch.”

    In other mobile ranking signal news, Google is going to start using mobile-friendliness as a factor on April 21.

    Do you expect to get more traffic from Google as a result of new mobile-related ranking signals? Discuss.

    Images via Google

  • Google’s ‘Transparency’ Under Fire Again

    Google’s ‘Transparency’ Under Fire Again

    Google’s transparency is being called into question again in light of mixed messages it’s been sending webmasters about its two most famous algorithm updates – Panda and Penguin – both of which can have a devastating impact on businesses unfortunate enough to be hit by them.

    Are you content with Google’s level of transparency about its search updates? Let us know in the comments.

    Google tends to portray itself in a transparent light, but in recent years, it has made moves related to its search algorithm that are actually less transparent than in the past. It’s their product, and they reserve the right to rank sites how they see fit, and nobody is saying they have to divulge that secret recipe (okay, some people are probably saying that), but they’ve gone back and forth on some things that are only frustrating to those trying to keep up with how Google works in the rapidly changing search environment. It is, after all, how many people discover content they’re looking for, and businesses are trying to survive by getting that content to people. It’s only logical that they try to cater to Google’s algorithms.

    The latest subject at hand was brought to light by Search Engine Land founding editor Danny Sullivan, who documents Google’s “flip-flopping” on messaging about Panda and Penguin.

    “Google has suggested that having to wait months between Panda and Penguin updates would be a thing of the past, since these were supposed to be happening on an ongoing basis now,” he writes. “But the company flip-flopped about this last week. Both still work on a periodic basis, with months elapsing between updates.”

    This matters because businesses and websites impacted by these updates have to wait until Google runs them again before they can hope to get their search rankings back after making changes to try to get back in Google’s good graces.

    In December, Google said this about Penguin: “That last big update is still rolling out — though really there won’t be a particularly distinct end-point to the activity, since Penguin is shifting to more continuous updates. The idea is to keep optimizing as we go now.”

    Search Engine Land reported that Google also “gave a similar statement about Panda, that it was constantly being updated” in March. Sullivan moderated the panel where it said that, and said, “There was no confusion in my mind that Google was saying Panda was operating in real-time mode.”

    He tried to clarify with Google, which gave him a statement: “Most of our ranking algorithms, including Panda, have many moving parts. In the case of Panda, some parts are running real-time, so results may be affected at any time. However, the underlying data for Panda hasn’t been refreshed for some time. We are constantly working on improving our algorithms and we expect to refresh the data in the coming months.”

    He tried to clarify more, but Google wouldn’t say anything else.

    We learned last week that Google hasn’t updated Panda for about six months, as Search Engine Roundtable – a site that really shouldn’t have been hit by Panda – was apparently hit by the update, and has been unable to recover as a result of the lack of update.

    Google confirmed in a Webmaster Hangout that neither Panda nor Penguin are updating regularly. Actually, Google’s John Mueller said “I think” they’re not. As Sullivan notes, this just adds to the “uncertainty,” which is hardly in the interest of transparency.

    Google would likely argue that it’s being transparent by actually having webmaster hangouts and answering questions, and in some ways it is, but when it gives such vague answers about such important things it’s hardly transparent. What’s the point of doing the hangout if the guy conducting it doesn’t know for sure what’s going on. Matt Cutts is of course on leave.

    Sullivan calls, just as many others have, for Google to just let webmastes know in Webmaster Tools when they’ve been hit by Panda or Penguin like they do when they’re hit by manual penalties, but Google doesn’t seem to want to go for that. I guess that would be too transparent.

    SEO Book’s Aaron Wall has been laying into the company on Twitter:

    Update: Schwartz is calling attention to a Google+ thread, which features an exchange between Rae Hoffman and Mueller, which Muller admits that the way Google has handled things “sucks”.

    Google does regularly update its “Transparency Report,” which looks at government requests for user information, but these updates are of little comfort to the small business who lost its means of getting in front of consumers on the Internet as the result of an algorithm update. Often the sites impacted by updates deserve it, but what about that ones that don’t?

    It’s not just about Panda and Penguin though. Those are the big ones, but Google makes changes to its algorithm every single day. Websites are vulnerable to this, and have little information to go on when Google suddenly drops their rankings. For a while there, Google was providing monthly lists of changes it made.

    Google described the lists as an attempt to “push the envelope when it comes to transparency.” Google started off delivering the lists one a month as promised. Eventually, they started coming out much more slowly. For a while, they came out every other month, with multiple lists at a time. Then, they just stopped coming.

    Google dismissed this as people being bored by them, though that did not appear to be the case judging from the reactions of people after that comment. Anyway, I thought it was about transparency rather than excitement.

    Maybe people are bored with Panda and Penguin updates too. Either way, Google sending mixed messages to webmaters is nothing new.

    With even Google admitting that the way it has handled things sucks, do you agree? Discuss.

  • Bing Wants Your Site To Be Mobile-Friendly Too

    Bing Wants Your Site To Be Mobile-Friendly Too

    Let’s be honest, if you weren’t planning on making your site mobile-friendly for Google, you probably aren’t going to for Bing, but if you do make your site mobile-friendly, which is obviously good for users in addition to search engines, you might find that you do get some better rankings in Bing as an added bonus. You should also find that Bing tells users your site is indeed mobile-friendly when they happen a across it in search results.

    As you’re probably aware, Google is about to implement an algorithm change that makes the mobile-friendliness of a website a signal in its rankings. If your site is mobile-friendly by Google’s standards, you might get a boost in rankings. If it’s not, you might get a big drop in rankings. It’s just one of many signals Google takes into account, but it’s an important one. Google clearly wants to give its users a good experience, and more and more of those users are on mobile devices more frequently than before. The signal is supposed to launch on April 21, which is coming right up.

    Microsoft announced mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal back in November, but it is now labeling results as “mobile-friendly” just like Google started doing last year as it prepared to get sites ready for the algorithmic adjustment (h/t: Search Engine Roundtable).

    “Traditionally, Bing wasn’t heavily relying on specific device and platform signals to provide web results to the user. You would get similar results on your PC, Mac, or smartphone for most of your searches,” said Bing principal program manager Mir Rosenberg in a blog post in November. “However, we live in a mobile-first, cloud-first world and we need to think about our users’ search experience on mobile devices differently. As a result, we’ve been really intensifying how we look at web results across these mobile devices. We have a long and exciting journey ahead of us, but as a very first step in this long-term investment, we started probing web pages for “mobile friendliness” and ranking web pages accordingly on our users’ mobile phones.”

    They showed this example to give you an idea of how search results would change as a result of the mobile-friendly signal:

    “In this example, we know which pages are mobile-friendly so automatically rank them higher with the new update, whereas previously the searcher would have had a much bigger change of landing on a non-mobile friendly page or possibly had to wait for a redirect to a mobile-friendly page,” wrote Rosenberg. “As always, there are many ranking factors at play — and mobile raking has its fair share of Secret Squirrel stuff — but here are some of the things that we do to improve mobile relevance: We identify and classify mobile and device-friendly web pages and websites; We analyze web documents from a mobile point-of-view by looking at content compatibility, content readability [and] mobile functionality (to weed out “junk”, that is pages that are 404 on mobile or Flash only etc.); Return more mobile-friendly URLs to the mobile SERP; Ranking the results pages based on all of the above.”

    There’s a good chance you missed Bing’s news in November, because Bing just doesn’t command the attention that Google does since its share of the search market is so much smaller. Still, there are a lot of people that do use it, and it does also power Yahoo Search (at least for the time being). At this point in time, by the way, Yahoo does not display a mobile-friendly label in search results.

    Now that Google has lit a fire under webmasters’ butts, it’s good to know that improvements made to sites for Google should also help these same sites in Bing.

    If your site isn’t mobile-friendly yet, and you haven’t gotten started looking into how to improve it, you can start here for a look at what Google specifically tells webmasters to do. The article will point you to all the necessary links for Google’s own documentation.

    You might also want to watch this Q&A session Google released on the subject. It’s an hour long, so you know there’s a great deal to consider.

    Google also recently named some specific things to avoid for a mobile-friendly site. These include: blocked JavaScript, CSS and image files; unplayable content; faulty redirects; mobile-only 404s; app download interstitials; irrelevant cross-links; and slow mobile pages.

    On that last note, Moz just put out a really good article that will help you address the speed factor.

    While we’re on the topic of getting traffic from Bing, the search engine also announced some changes to image search, which it says will improve your traffic.

    Images via Bing

  • Is Yahoo About To Drop Bing?

    Well, here’s another juicy layer to add to the speculation about whether or not Yahoo and Microsoft will soon end their search alliance. Yahoo has reportedly been building its own mobile search engine that it’s currently testing, and that experience removes the “Powered by Bing” stamp that has been attached to Yahoo’s search results since the alliance took effect.

    Should Yahoo drop Bing? Tell us what you think.

    Buisness Insider’s Nicholas Carlson, who had a book about Marissa Mayer and her “fight to save Yahoo,” published earlier this year, got his hands on the test experience, and found that the results don’t say powered by Bing. He reports:

    A couple weeks ago, a person who claims to have been working in Yahoo’s search division until recently told us that, under Mayer, Yahoo built its own mobile search engine. This source that Yahoo was testing it with 15% of its mobile users. We’ve been unable to corroborate all of those details, but — thanks to instructions from that source — we were able to able to load the new version of Yahoo’s mobile search engine.

    While he does acknowledge that none of this proves Yahoo is going to break up with Microsoft and launch its own search engine, and that the results from the test seem to match Bing’s results, he asks why the search results pages have done away with the Bing branding.

    It’s a good question, made all the more interesting by other recent reports. The question of whether or not the two companies will continue their partnership already remains up in the air. They have a decision to reach this month after extending a deadline to reach an agreement by 60 days after February 23. There has already been plenty of speculation since that round of the news cycle, when Reuters reported:

    It was not immediately clear if the extension signaled progress or lack of consensus between Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The announcement to extend the talks comes a few days after Nadella’s mother passed away in Hyderabad, India, according to a report in The Economic Times.

    Microsoft has had nothing to say about any of this.

    Yahoo said over a week ago, “We value our partnership with Microsoft and continue discussions about plans for the future. We have nothing further to announce at this time.”

    Carlson’s report has a fresher statement from Yahoo, which says, “Search is an important part of Yahoo’s business and we’re always experimenting and looking to improve the experience for our users. We have nothing to announce at this time.”

    Let further speculation commence.

    You have to note that the search alliance was formed when both companies were being run by different people, and that Mayer has reportedly blasted the deal both in public around the office.

    Last year, Kara Swisher (a frequent reporter of Yahoo goings on) reported that Mayer was making a “big push to return the company to the search business”. The report said she was trying to “move Yahoo squarely into competition with both Google and Microsoft in an attempt to regain control over one of its key revenue streams.”

    “To do so, she has ordered up two under-the-radar initiatives that could potentially move the company into algorithmic search, as well as search advertising, again,” Swisher wrote.

    There’s been talk in the media about Google and Yahoo potentially partnering as well. The two have partnered on contextual ads, and Google executive chairman has reportedly said in the past that the company would “love to be a search partner for Yahoo“.

    Google and Yahoo did try to partner before Yahoo and Microsoft partnered, but it never happened due to the threat of regulatory action. Google has since settled an FTC antitrust investigation.

    Carlson takes the angle that Mayer is wanting to go to war with Google, which would also make sense given their battle for Firefox users. In November, Yahoo and Mozilla entered a partnership that made Yahoo the default search experience on Firefox, replacing Google, which had held the spot for the past decade. The deal showed some great early results for Yahoo in terms of search market share.

    In March, StatCounter released data indicating Yahoo was largely able to hang on to the initial gains it made in the search market, but that growth has pretty much come to a stop. The numbers for February were as follows: Google 74.9%, Bing 2.5%, and Yahoo 10.7%. That’s U.S. search share. Yahoo’s slowed growth hasn’t kept Google from more aggressively trying to get Firefox users to switch back to its search experience. It’s even been showing large ad-like messages to users on unrelated search results pages, begging them to switch to Google.

    It also sounds like all three will be competing for a similar spot in Apple’s Safari browser, as Google’s deal with Apple nears its expiration. On an earnings call, Mayer showed a great deal of enthusiasm for the prospect of Yahoo getting that.

    Would you like to see Yahoo go off on its own? Let us know in the comments.

  • Getting To Know The New Twitter Search

    Getting To Know The New Twitter Search

    Earlier this week, while searching on Twitter, I was presented with a revamped search interface, but only for a minute or two (luckily, it was long enough to get a couple screen grabs). Then it went away.

    Even while I was able to access this version of Twitter Search, it wasn’t working properly. None of the filters worked. They all just pointed to the old style results for “everything”.

    I searched Twitter to see if anyone else was talking about this, and a few others had mentioned seeing it. I asked Twitter about it, and was told, “I can confirm that we are experimenting with a new search experience.”

    Whether this will roll out to all users remains to be seen, but I have gotten the experience back, and now it works, and appears to be sticking around, at least for the time being. With that, let’s take a closer look.

    There doesn’t appear to be anything that’s really changed in terms of functionality. It’s pretty much just how search options are presented.

    When you search for something, you’re presented with filters for Top (default), Live, Accounts, Photos, Videos, and More Options. I’ll use the query “SEO” for an example. Here’s a look at the top results:

    For comparison, here’s what the old default experience looks like:

    Though there is a separate option for “live,” the top section adds results pretty quickly too, though this probably depends on the query.

    The live option is basically what used to be “all”. It’s just the latest results in real time.

    The accounts tab replaces what used to be “people” and more closely resembles other pages Twitter has that present you with accounts, such as the “Following” and “Followers” pages. Really, “accounts” is a much better description, as many of them are for brands and other things.

    For comparison, here’s the old “People” results:

    It’s worth noting that Twitter Search is smart enough to include Matt Cutts in the top results despite him not having “SEO” anywhere in his bio or Twitter handle.

    Here’s what the photo results look like with the new interface:

    Notice that you’re not presented with view options like on the old version. It just gives you the list view. I think I actually prefer the old presentation of this one, which defaulted to grid view, and gave you the option to view it in list view.

    The new interface feels more like you’re just looking at more tweets (granted they are photo tweets), whereas the old one puts more focus on the actual photos from the tweets. Since you’re searching for photos, I feel like the one that emphasizes the photos themselves works better, but I suppose that’s just a personal preference.

    The video search in the new interface is pretty much just like the old one. There aren’t any view choices, which is interesting because the old version let you choose between all and Vine. There’s no Vine option on the new one.

    Twitter of course recently launched native video, so perhaps they’re placing less emphasis on Vine for that reason.

    Under “More Options,” you get the following additional choices: News, From everyone, From people you know, From everywhere, Near you, Save this search, Embed search, and Advanced search. All of these options were previously available. They were just laid out differently. Personally, I think the new interface is a vast improvement in that regard, as it draws your attention to all of these options, which can really make Twitter’s search tool more useful.

    Here, I’ve highlighted where these options are located on the old version:

    And that’s pretty much it. The Advanced Search remains identical to the old version.

    Any of this may change by the time the new interface rolls out, if it even does roll out. Remember, Twitter just said it was experimenting.

    Interestingly, while I’m getting the new interface in Chrome, I’m not getting in Safari or Firefox. In Chrome, however, I’m seeing it for multiple accounts.

    Someone on Twitter had seen it in Safari, but not Chrome. I should also point out that I’ve not seen any change at all on the mobile app (Android).

    Overall, I think the new interface is an improvement over the existing one, and I hope they go in this direction. There are a few changes I would make, as noted, but in general, it feels like a step toward emphasizing search (which is really one of Twitter’s best features) and making its usefulness more obvious.

    Images via Twitter

  • Blekko Shuts Down, Becomes Part Of IBM Watson

    Back in 2010, an alternative search engine called Blekko emerged. It came from Rich Skrenta, co-founder & former CEO of Topix and NewHoo (which went on to become The Open Directory Project or DMOZ). It aimed to crowd source search by using the public to refine its algorithms and make search results more relevant and less spammy.

    IBM has acquired its technology and team for Watson.

    If you go to Blekko.com now, you’ll just see this:

    IBM says the acquisition will provide Watson with more content to offer in its products and services. From the announcement:

    Blekko brings advanced Web-crawling, categorization and intelligent filtering technology. Its technology crawls the Web continually and gathers information from the most highly relevant and most credible Web pages. It uses classification techniques to create thousands of topical categories, making that data more useful and insightful.

    These capabilities complement the recent acquisition of AlchemyAPI as well existing technologies available on the Watson Developer Cloud. The combination of these technologies will further assist our clients in applying cognitive computing toward making more informed, evidence-based decisions.

    A metaphor to understand how this works is to think about the information on the Internet and other sources as a vast underground oil field. Blekko’s technologies are like oil exploration and production teams that locate the high-quality oil, drill, and deliver it to the refinery. AlchemyAPI’s technologies, together with Watson’s existing capabilities, are like the refineries that refine the oil into a multitude of finished products, such as gasoline, heating oil or jet fuel. IBM and its partners then distribute insights to the points of impact, the way tanker trucks deliver fuel to gas stations or depots.

    In its early days, Blekko showed signs of gaining some traction. Skrenta was appearing on search panels at conferences alongside Google’s Matt Cutts, and the company was making interesting partnerships and raising funding.

    In fact, Cutts even encouraged people to check Blekko out at one point:

    In 2012, Blekko launched a suite of SEO tools, and a few months later, it launched a new search app for tablets called Izik (which is apparently out of commission now as well).

    We’ve reached out to Skrenta for additional comment on the acquisition and the closure of the Blekko service, and will update accordingly.