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Archive for the 'Search Engines' Category

According to several anonymous sources, Googel is planning to launch an e-newsstand application that will run on Android tablets and smartphones in order to battle Apple’s iTunes sales.

Leading publishers, such as Time Inc and Wall Street Journal, are being approached by the not-only-biggest-Search-Engine executives in order to establish a fruitful cooperation and figure out the most beneficial way of application development. Commissions lower than those of Apple’s (30 percent) are being promised as well as various advanced buyer’s data-gathering features.

When all this is going to happen is unclear, and some doubt that the venture will launch at all – but the initiative is too important to overlook as Google looks to enter another niche.

Our world, especially the online part of it, is all about speed. That’s why Google had become so popular so quickly. The amount of search results shown and the speed at which those result have been accumulated and presented to the user did the trick.

Nowadays, of course, many search engines are almost as quick as Google, the difference in speed of producing the search results measured in milliseconds. However, what the users now want from their SE is convenience and reliability. With several questions asked about Google supposedly “biased” results, the Search Engine giant’s UI had never been an issue. That is, until now. The revised Google Image Search has a problem that can reduce the speed of entering a query.

Normally, when you type the query term in the search box and get the results, you do not use your mouse. Continue typing for “narrowing” the search, or press Shift-Backspace to erase the previous entry and start over. So far so good. However, when you use Google Image Search, the query box seems to lose the mouse focus once the pointer is moved – deliberately, or accidentally.  So, when you decide to alternate your search, you have to use the mouse (one of the worst nightmares of the speedy typer) in order to activate the query box again.

Google have reported they are aware of the problem and the “frustration” and “looking for ways” to solve it.

UK shopping market maybe smaller than the US one, but Google wants to make an impact on it as well, introducing Google Nearby Shops UK. Now, when you query for certain product via UK Google Product Search, you will have the shops selling it appearing map-style below your search, to help you locate the closest item to your location.

Of course, if you are a merchant and want to take advantage of this feature, becoming listed in those results, you need to have your shop’s URL linked to both Google Places and Google Merchant Center.

For both buyers and sellers, this combination of Google Maps and Google Products can be very useful in this Holiday season.

You might have noticed that starting mid-December, Google is labeling certain websites with “this site may be compromised” notice that appears in the search results under the website’s link. According to Google’s Matt Curtis, this is actually done to help webmasters, noting that their website is probably being hacked. The procedure of banning sites from Google search index as noting the owners via Google Webmaster tools has proved “too slow” as not many site owners check their Webmaster Tools notifications on regular basis.

As the hacked website does not usually present an immediate threat to the visitor (if malware is detected, Google Search will show the more aggressive “This site may be harmful to your computer” message), the “this site may be compromised” notice is destined mainly towards owners, who constantly monitor their website appearance in Google search, urging them to pay an immediate attention to the problem.

After Google had announced its intention to acquire the renowned flight data provider ITA (the offer stands, reportedly, at 700 million USD), several serious questions arouse. Wouldn’t it be too much a step towards monopoly? What are the benefits for the customers? Why, the hell, Google is buying ITA at all?

Well, the answer to the last question is pretty obvious. In recent years, Google seems to enter every niche available in the market. Long gone are the times when Google was just a search engine. Google maps, Google news, Google Sketch-up – more and more services are provided by the enterprise and some people are already asking – is Google a Search Engine or your ultimate competitor?

However, the Google ITA offer has now encountered a serious opposition itself. A group of businesses, namely the Fairsearch.org, have gathered together in order to prevent the deal. With ITA serving about two thirds of airline ticketing and satellite websites, the ultimate “danger” – according to the Fairsearch claim – is that Google will eventually start selling tickets directly, while it has a control of data flow towards potential competitors.

Google, of course, claims that the intention is purely to improve the service, making flight data offered by Google more reliable and continuing to redirect the searchers to other websites that offer flight tickets.

With the consequences of this case remain to be seen ,  one thing is clear – more and more businesses (including the giants like Microsoft and Expedia) are concerned with Google taking over.

Bing has introduced a new feature for the Bing Image Search. It is called “Instant Answer” and is, actually, a small bar of “tabs” that appears just below the search term box. Each tab suggests a more “specific” query, being especially helpful in the case of ambiguous search terms.

For example, when you type “heat”as the Bing Image search term, the “Instant Answer” will suggest narrowing your search to “Miami Heat”, “Heat Energy”, “Heat Wave” etc. The term “star” will feature “shortcut tabs” for filtering images of “Patrick Star”, “Star wars”, “Star of David” and more.

This feature resembles the infamous “related searches” suggestions for web search and is useful in saving our time, as we do not need to retype the whole query, using a simple click of the mouse instead.  “Instant Answer” is, however,  currently only available for the US Bing website.

Google has recently announced that Google Instant Mobile is now available “globally”. This means that the tool is released for all countries that have Google Mobile access (there are several dozens of those) and supports almost thirty languages.

The product, similarly to Google Instant Mobile, is integrated into search features for any Android browser (built-in for Android OS 2.2 and up) , and features various algorithms that allow faster dynamic search results.

Although this release was expected (shortly after releasing Google Instant Mobile in English, the company had announced that international support is on its way) – nobody anticipated that this would happen so quickly. The roll-out took Google slightly over one month time – an incredible figure, considering the complexity of the product. Of course, this simply means that Google had been working on globalization of Google Instant Mobile simultaneously with the product itself. That is no wonder – Google had always emphasized the importance of international marketing and global support.

12
Dec
2010

Google Goes… Phone?

Telemarketing was never a part of Google business strategy. The idea was to spread the information, get recognizable and make the clients come to them, asking for services. That’s were the sales managers stepped in, offering a variety of products, bargain deals and impressing the customer.

However, according to latest news, this has recently changed. Several hundreds of telemarketers are employed by the company, their task being to sell Google Boost and Google Tags services to local businesses at several markets in the US.

It seems the Rubicon has been crossed and Google has now “recognized” that some niches and companies should be addressed directly rather than by advertising. The next question, which should be probably answered in few months time, is whether they will expand their own telemarketing group (reportedly currently measuring 300 employees) or try to purchase an established sales force.

After all, with Groupon denying “the 6 billion offer”, Google has some money to spare…

Everybody knows that since the introduction of the new Caffeine index, Google is able to update its site indexing within hours and even minutes. Long gone are the days when we were shown some outdated “caption” of the website content that turned out as no longer present on the page. Different was the case with images, as Google Image Search indexing was still lagging behind. It could take a month or so for the recently added image to appear in Google Image Search results.

It appears Google, in its efforts to produce real time results, is now addressing this “problem”. Several users, who are following Google image indexing closely, have reported a major improvement in this field, stating that the new images are being indexed more fluently, appearing in Google Image Search results with a delay of several days only. This is yet another proof that non-textual content is becoming more and more popular among users, making it essential for proper SEO.

Not too long ago, Wired magazine ran an article by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff entitled “The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet.” In the introduction to that article the authors write, “Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services – think apps – are less about the searching and more about the getting.”

If this is true, finding your way to the top of the search engines won’t be quite so crucial, in terms of business success. The authors note that people may spend their entire day on the Internet and never really search the Web. Specific apps for email, social sites, news and business resources make it unnecessary to type and search.

Anderson and Wolff urge the skeptics among us not to toss this off as “a trivial distinction.” They call the new model “semi-closed platforms” that use the Internet as a transportation device. But there is no basic need for a browser to display pages. The bottom line is it’s “a world Google can’t crawl.”

What does it mean to rank #1 on the major search engines in 2010 and beyond? Is it as important as being the “big dog” a few years ago? Or, as some believe, is it not quite as important as in the past?

Off to the Races?

page speedThe year 2010 may be remembered as the period of time when use of the Web and Internet changed significantly. What change, you may well ask? It seems obvious that if the majority of people are starting to fine-tune their Web use to the point of using only a handful of specific apps, the key factor is going to be speed.

Several industry observers have started to focus on page-load speed as one of two or three major factors for Web site success. For example, professionals in this field are urging Web designers and administrators to offer thumbnails of images so that the visitor doesn’t have to wait for a full-size image to load. Give the viewer the option to select the larger image. It’s a simple step.

In keeping with this trend toward almost-instant gratification, Google has come forward to emphasize page speed as a key factor. After all, for Google to be successful millions of Web users around the world must continue to search. One of the primary “enemies” of the old search pattern is the mobile device.

As cell phones and other devices take on tasks formerly completed only on a powerful desk computer, the need to search will be in decline. Sites will be developed for mobile devices and for the specific applications that work best on the mobile device.

Take the Local

google local searchAs we discuss this major change in Web use we should also consider this thing called the local search. In simple terms, being #1 worldwide will mean less if a viewer limits the search (and use) to fewer sites. For example, businesses of all types may start to limit their marketing to sectors such as Google Places or to Hotpot (interesting name). This last item is a ratings tool as well as a recommendation engine for Google Places. It’s designed to focus on local service, based on visits and recommendations from friends and other users.

Will search-engine optimization maintain its place as a key to Web site success? The answer could be “yes” and “no” together. Relevant, reliable content that is useful on a consistent basis will still put sites near the top of the priority list. One good example for incorporating the speed idea into the mix is using WebP images that will load faster than bulky JPEGs.

Here are some reasons why we should start using WebP:

  • Faster user experience
  • Reduced bandwidth and hosting cost
  • Overall improvement of the World Wide Web

Perhaps one of the most important ideas Webmasters, developers and marketers can take from this discussion comes from Anderson and Wolff, authors of the Wired article. “The fact that it’s easier for companies to make money on these platforms only cements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: The Web is not the culmination of the digital revolution.”

A Few More Thoughts

Listing the key items for WebP use and including the emphasis on making money makes the argument for page speed quite strong. However, WebP won’t be an industry-wide standard immediately. Most people will continue to use JPEG or another popular format in the near future. But designers and administrators should give serious thought to using thumbnails to reduce load time.

As for the idea of making money on the Web, we might go back to the old real estate mantra “location, location, location.” Make sure your Web content is placed properly and the page-to-page connections are efficient. Add the local ingredient to your Web marketing to secure your place in a defined area.

Here’s a sobering thought for the doubters out there. The Wired article points out that a 1997 cover story in that magazine was already urging readers to “kiss your browser goodbye.” The emphasis for the future, according to this theory, was going to be on applications for specific purposes and a Web that was getting closer to “out of control.”

Walled gardens in which users were controlled by the provider certainly didn’t prove to be the success model. Google seemed to have “it!” But now it seems that even this game-changing business model wasn’t the final answer. Stay tuned.