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Posted on May 17, 2007
Google gives Firefox no Love.
BY STEPAN MAZUROV
Seems like google forgot to update the firefox start page when they rolled out new top navigation bar. Old start page looked like this:
Now it looks like this:
Not sure if their idea was to go even simpler than it was before, but I'm definately missing the ability to go to image search as well and having a quick link for Addons and Themes.
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Posted on May 17, 2007
Google Two point Oh
BY STEPAN MAZUROV
Earlier today Google unraveled quite a few features on a webcast which had over 500 viewers from all over the world. They are really taking a step towards having one unified search which is great for everyone. Their idea of having Google front page being able to give you results for video, images, news, maps, books and others from one search box is certainly a step in the right direction. Eliminating vertical search brings the user closer to their goal, the information.
Having one search taking care of ranking the relevance of 6 different search engines will certainly lower the rankings and SERPs for most websites and SEO won't be targeting just plain vanilla search, but taking into account video, Google local, images and most certainly news sections of Google. How cool is it to get a Bill Gates Pie video to be a top result for "Bill Gates" query?
A few other features rolled out today:
- New Navigation: Gone the bar right above the search box, it is moved to the top and dubbed "new universal navigation bar" which displays links to relevant Google apps depending on which property you are now.
- Google Experimental: If you ever had a feeling like you aren't part of the google proccess and they are in the blind, you can now help them test new things out. Right now you can give them feedback on a new "Time Line" search, using keyboard shortcuts while you search and Left or Right navigation bar instead of the brand new top navigation bar. Try it here.
- Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR): Not yet implemented, but as an effort to globalize and unifiy all information regadless of the language its written it, google has showcased what their systems are capable of, and its pretty damn impressive.
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Posted on January 25, 2007
Yahoo PPC Soon to Use Ad Quality Score
BY BEN CASTELLI
Yahoo Search Marketing recently announced that starting February 5th, an ad quality score will be combined with the bid amount to determine an ads rank in search results. Their current model ranks ads based solely on bid amount. Yahoo states that their reasoning behind the switch is so "advertisers spend less time in bidding wars and more time creating more relevant and effective ads."
If the idea of a quality score sounds familiar, it is because Google has been using a similar method for quite a while to determine ad rank and minimum bid prices. In fact Yahoo recently updated its entire sponsored search system to be more like Google, so it is not surprising that they are following Google's suit and incorporating a quality score.
I was curious if Yahoo, like Google would periodically visit landing pages, look for relevant content to you keywords and factor that into the quality score? The answer for now is no. I spoke with a Yahoo rep and they stated that the landing page will only be viewed once during the approval process, and the quality score would be determined by the relevancy of ad text to keywords and click through rates compared to your competition. This means it will be important to have all of your keywords broken out into very specific ad groups.
I expect (and hope) Yahoo will eventually change their methodology to periodically visit the landing pages of ads. This is a great way to ensure relevancy for its users and overall keep pace with Google.
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Posted on November 9, 2006
Google Base...
BY BEN CASTELLI
Equals more of your products in the consumers face. Google Base is great service that allows you to submit the products and services that you offer directly to Google. By uploading specific product information to Base, you are more likely to have your products show up in the search results on Google when a user searches on a relevant query. Check out the search results for "striped beach chair":
Best Promotions is coming up at the top of the natural search results because the beach chair is an active item in Google Base. This is cool because Best Promotions is a fairly new website and would not necessarily have visibility on the first page in Google for this search term yet.
Uploading to Base will also give your products and services visibility in Google related sites like Froogle and Google Local. It is important to make sure your items have pictures and good descriptions attached to each item.
The Base interface shows you impressions and clicks for active items although it would be nice to have the ability to run cumulative reports similar to Ad Words. There are 3 ways to submit Google base, upload individual items manually via web form, submit multiple items through a bulk upload or the API. The bulk upload dashboard was recently redesigned for easier use and to show more useful data.
If your products or services are not getting any visibility in Google, consider Base to help them show up in the search results when a user types a specific query that matches what you have to offer.
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Posted on October 27, 2006
Google Alerts Deepening Online Conversation Tracking
BY JAMES CLARK
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is rolling out significant updates across the board this week. The lastest update is to its popular Google Alerts service. Now, Google has added blogs to its Alerts notifications. This is following the announcement of placing blog search results in Google News.
Why is this significant? In our experience talking with organizations about online reputation management, they often respond saying they monitor online conversations using Google Alerts. The previous version of Google Alerts failed in capturing the online conversation due to the lack of blog tracking. Now when anyone signs up for Google Alerts they will have the option of tracking blogs in addition to Google News, groups and the web. Even better, the default is set to the Comprehensive Alert to track all, giving communications professionals the ability to track a deeper thread in the online conversation.
My issue with Google Alerts is that its still an email-based deliver system. Why not put an RSS feed directly on the Google Alerts sign up page?
As Google is rolling out advanced features in many areas of its business, we can only assume there will be a RSS tie in with Google Reader.
Our biggest concern from a usability standpoint is blog spam. We'll be testing this out to see if the quality of the results from blog posts are good or not. There are companies out there like Collective Intellect and Umbria that have entire systems to track the blogosphere and in our opinion their greatest value is eliminating blog spam. Try doing a Technorati search on a specific topic, 90% of the results are irrelevant, maybe popular, but irrelevant. Google Alerts is no way a substitute for a brand monitoring systems like Collective Intellect and Umbria, but it is a first step into understanding the impact.
So it's still up to the Communications Analysts to take the data from search that is relevant, the data from blogs that are popular and craft a strategy to identify and converse with the influencers.
Note to PR Firms: Google Alerts just upped itself a notch to becoming your clipping service - and it's Free.
Others in the Google Alerts conversation:
TechCrunch
Google Blog
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