Horowitz emphasized the use of Circles to easily segment audiences when communicating brand / product / corporate messages and the Hangout feature, which allows brands to host face-to-face video sessions with customers. Both of these are features that would appeal to large businesses.

The real power of Google+Pages, though, lies in their ability to influence search engine rankings for a brand or product name. This alone is reason enough for all business owners to want to ensure that they do have a presence on the otherwise placid network. This is also Google’s only ace in an otherwise extremely weak deck.

A number of bloggers have labelled the new feature a rush job or a Facebook / Twitter rip-off. What they overlook is the fact that unlike Facebook and Twitter, Google+ can integrate with a number of even more useful services, not least of which is Google Search and YouTube, to change the way brands can reach their target audience.

www.google.com/flights/

This new service has been launched in conjunction with ITA Software, which was acquired by Google in April 2011. It took Google nine months to finalise the deal with ITA, because of in-depth legal scrutiny of the deal as a result of objections from numerous other websites.

Flight Search by Google is a lot faster than similar services provided by any other website so far. The results appear almost instantaneously compared to the typical 5-10 second wait experienced by users on most other travel sites that scour a large database of partner deals.

Instant results on Google Flight Search

Users can browse costs to fly to different destinations without having to perform a dozen searches. Prices and travel times in this flight search facility can be viewed on a graph for easy comparison, and a slider allows users to filter down the search results by price and flight duration.

Flight search results filtered on a graph

Google believes that most flights are chosen based on cost as well as travel time. Thus, they said, “We automatically set the filters to focus on options which are reasonable in both price and duration, and you can always adjust the filters to show even more flights.”

This service is not based on any paid relationships so far. Since it is the airlines that decide how their flights are to be marketed, the booking links will point to the airline websites only.

As of now, this feature is available only for selected destinations within the U.S. There are plans to expand the service in the near future.

The most notable change to have occurred is the fact that people now start conducting movie searches much earlier than in the past. It has been found that on an average, people now start movie searches about five weeks prior to its release. Only a couple of years ago, these searches were conducted just prior to the release of the movie.

Google search results for the last Harry Potter film

Another major change that has been found is the fact that people now search for movies much more than they used to do in the past.

Selina Rennie, who works with the team at Google that carried out this study team says, “Movie-goers searched 1.75 times more per film in 2010 than in 2008. Additionally, searches for film trailers were up by more than 50% in 2010 versus the previous year.”

The increased availability of digital content as well as the growing availability of Internet-connected devices has led to these changes in the way movie searches are conducted.

Big box office hits (grossing more than $100 million) seem to draw disproportionately more searches than mid-tier films (grossing $50 – $100 million). Queries per moviegoer are higher for mid-tier films, indicating a lot of consumer interest but low engagement from the industry, which implies a lot of potential for growth.

YouTube searches and related video referrals are a very important source of video views. Yet, the surprisingly low number of studios advertising on YouTube search as against those advertising on Google search shows yet another opportunity for growth.

It would be highly expedient of studios to be ready with an interesting trailer the moment the audience shows an inclination to see the movie or gather any information about it.

Home entertainment is also an evolving branch of this industry and studios are now contemplating the creation of a new “premium VOD” that would allow users to rent movies within 30 to 60 days of the release of the film.

By using the new +1 Button users can now share links to pages on Google Plus. In other words, if a visitor to a site wants to start a conversation about some content they like, it becomes very easy to do so.

Another improvement released with the new version of the button is the launch of +Snippets. Publishers can customise the name, image and description that appear when content is being shared.

Lastly, Google have added inline annotations, which improve engagement when users see a recommendation from a friend regarding a particular piece of content.

Google +Snippets showing when a user shares a +1

In order to start customising the snippets that show up when users share content on Google Plus, publishers need to add the correct schema.org attributes to the Meta data present on the page. The name, image and description have to be added to the code either in the HTML page body or head.

Inline annotations include the name and profile photo of the persons who have +1′ed the page. When the next user sees the name or image of a person he / she knows he / she is more likely to pay special attention to the content on that page.

Publishers must update the +1 button in order to ensure that all these changes are incorporated onto their site.

The new features are being gradually rolled out. In order to test these new features, users can join Google+ Platform Preview group.

Google Hotel Finder

Hotels in Chicago via Google Hotel Finder

Google’s new service allows users to find hotel rooms available in a given area, along with the price and amenities of each hotel in that area.

Hotel Finder selects the most visited areas of major cities by default and shows hotels within these tourist hotspots. Users can also draw a shape on an interactive map around the area they wish to stay in.

The Hotel Finder service provides a comparative study of the price range of hotels in an area.

Details of each hotel in the area are provided when a user clicks on the listing, along with a collage of images and reviews from Google Places. Users can then shortlist the hotels they are interested in or book a room in the hotel they like via Travelocity, Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com or the hotel itself.

Hotel Finder is currently in the pre-beta experimental stage and is available only for hotels in various American cities. The interface is very similar to other sites and uses sliding scales and quick option selectors to allow users to narrow their choice. The most popular feature of the service is likely to end up being the seamless integration with Google Maps, which makes selecting hotels in a particular region extremely simple.

A blog post on the RKGBlog contained a screenshot of ads being displayed within the organic search results.

The ads have been placed along with the organic (unpaid) listing results. The word “Ad” is placed on the right hand side of the sponsored result. However, it is not very prominent and can easily be missed.

Image courtesy RKG: Bing displaying ads within organic search engine results

In the past, Yahoo! and a handful of second-tier search engines had tried a service called “paid inclusion”, whereby ads were included in the search results, but there were no ranking factors. Yahoo! withdrew the service in 2009, due to its controversial nature.

Popular blogger Danny Sullivan had also voiced disapproval of Google using paid inclusion in their search results.

Currently, Google does include ads within their organic search results, but they are highlighted in a different colour above the organic results, differentiating them from the organic results and making the fact that they’re ads more obvious than the marking that Bing is using.

This format is currently in the testing stage and is shown only to a few users. A Microsoft spokesperson has said, “We’re constantly testing and experimenting on Bing, and with that, we carefully measure user engagement and reaction to these changes. We have nothing further to share at this time.”

If Microsoft does choose to go forward and roll this format out worldwide, it could have serious ramifications. For one, click-through rates on Bing ads are likely to rise. If Google feels the pressure and chooses to do something similar, AdWords advertisers could benefit greatly while the value of SEO could fall.

According to Charles Duncombe, director of the Just Say Please group,  spelling errors are resulting in losses of millions of pounds in terms of revenue generation.

Duncombe, whose company runs travel, mobile phone and clothing websites, says that an analysis of online sales figures shows that even a single spelling mistake can reduce online sales of a product by half.

A simple test conducted on one of the group’s own websites measured the revenue generated per visitor with and without a prominent spelling mistake. They found that the revenue doubled after a spelling mistake was corrected.

It is a widely-held belief that spelling errors could lead to concerns about credibility, in a day and age when online fraud has become rampant. The spellings of words become important on the Internet because the selling itself is done by the written word online.

If we extrapolate Duncombe’s findings across the whole of online retail, then it’s easy to see how millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes.

The Confederation Of British Industry (CBI) has also issued similar statements, warning that often employers have to invest money in improving the literacy of their staff. The CBI’s head of education and skills, James Fothergill says, “Our recent research shows that 42% of employers are not satisfied with the basic reading and writing skills of school and college leavers and almost half have had to invest in remedial training to get their staff’s skills up to scratch.

Among school and university leavers, spelling mistakes and poor grammar are very common. Some people even use “text speak” in their job cover letters and official business communications. One of the reasons for this could be a growing dependence on social sites such as Facebook, where spellings and grammar are not given due importance.

William Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University says that “In these instances, when a consumer might be wary of spam or phishing efforts, a mis-spelt word could be a killer issue.”

While Google had a market share of 90.53% in May 2011, in the U.K. it now has a market share of 92.02% for the month of June 2011. Similarly, a year-on-year comparison shows that Google had a market share of 91.82% in June last year.

In contrast, competitors Yahoo! and Microsoft jointly account for only 5.84% of the market share in search. This is a decrease of 1.49% compared to the share in May 2011 and a decrease of 0.21% compared to June 2010.

However, in spite of this growth, the overall share of search has reduced. In the past, search accounted for 40% of all traffic on the net. It now accounts for 34.29% of all traffic.

This result does not however mean that online search is on the decline. It only indicates that in spite of the fact that the overall number of searches are increasing, the percentage of traffic coming from search has declined because traffic from other sites, notably the social networks, is on the upswing.

A study of the traffic on social networks indicates that after a slight decline during the last three months, Facebook has now recovered and has the largest market share of all social networks at 53.72%. This is a growth of 0.11%.

YouTube, on the other hand, is the fastest growing social network in spite of being at the number two slot. It now accounts for 20.76% of all visits to social networks in the U.K.

In general, social networks are now the second largest source of traffic on the internet accounting for 12.54% of all traffic.

Yahoo! Site Explorer had been launched on 29 September 2005 and had become a popular tool for SEO’s.

Hemant Minocha, Product Manager, Yahoo Site Explorer has recently confirmed that the Site Explorer will be shut down in due course of time. While no date has been finalized as yet, it is likely to occur before the end of the year.

It has been recommended by Yahoo! that Webmasters should join Bing Webmaster Tools and use that in place of the Site Explorer in future.

As of now, the Bing Webmaster Center team has been busy adding new features to their product in order to provide the kind of detailed support that Site Explorer has been providing so far.

A statement from Yahoo! says, “We are working with Microsoft to transition organic results in all markets to the Microsoft Search platform. Site Explorer will shut down once all markets are transitioned. This is expected later this year.

Other existing third party tools such as Majestic SEO, SEOmoz and Ontolo. may very likely benefit from the shutting down of Site Explorer as it is possible that some users of Site Explorer may eventually start using these tools.

schema.org

This initiative will make it possible for publishers to put in structured markup on their web pages in order to help the search engines index their sites better and hence deliver better search results to users.

Schemas are essentially common sets of tags used to denote detailed data to be used to describe the publisher’s product.

Since Bing, Google and Yahoo! have initiated this protocol jointly, it will make it easier for the publisher to provide this data to the main search engines. In other words, Schema.org works as a one stop shop for webmasters to add in the most search engine friendly markup for data contained on their web pages.

Google had already introduced a similar service, called rich snippets, a couple of years ago. This service allowed users to receive non-textual information such as reviews, personal profiles, local business information or details about the product they were searching, in addition to the regular plain text snippet that accompanies each organic search listing.

Now that Google, Bing and Yahoo! have made a combined effort to improve their users’ search experience, it should pay rich dividends to all concerned – the user, the publisher and the search engine as well.

In the past, the major search engines had come together in 2006 to provide a common standard to webmasters for sitemaps.

The +1 button allows users to share stories and articles with their network of friends. In functionality, this is similar to the ‘Like’ button from Facebook and is a significant step towards the concept of social search by Google.

When a user clicks the +1 button the user’s network – as defined by the friends on their Google Account – will be notified about it.

Sites that are interested in making use of this new facility can set it up by visiting Google’s +1 button code generator page. The button can be set up in a choice of four sizes ranging from 15 pixels to 60 pixels. Users have the option to include a counter that can indicate the number of +1s a particular page has received. The feature is currently available in 44 languages.

Generate a +1 button for your site

Although it might be too early to judge, one cannot help wondering how successful this new service will be. As of now, not too many sites have jumped to add this function to their sites.

Some of the popular sites to have already included it are TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land – all search industry and tech veterans.

However, most of the really popular blogs and websites have not yet added this service. Sites such as Business Insider, Perez Hilton and TMZ have all chosen to wait and watch whether users will pick up on this new service or if it will flop like Google’s other ventures into the social space.

Sites such as YouTube, Blogger, Google Product Search and the Android Market are expected to add +1 shortly. These are Google-owned properties, though. Out of the top 10 most popular blogs, only 3 have added the +1 button conspicuously on their pages:

Success of the +1 button will be determined largely by the general public’s adoption of this feature. If Google’s history with social networking is anything to go by, few will be holding their breath for this one!

The Panda update, has affected several sites in the U.S. and now a number of sites have been affected in the U.K. as well. The resulting loss of search ranking has meant lower traffic referrals to those sites.

Data from German SEO tools developer, Sistrix, has revealed that article sites, price comparison sites and business directories, in general, have suffered a setback.

Searchmetrics has released some initial data on the matter. This data is based on the Organic Performance Index, which is calculated according to a keyword’s search volume, position and the statistical value of traffic distribution.

According to Searchmetrics’ report, the 10 biggest losers are:

1. pricedash.com (-99.7%)
2. discountshoppinguk.co.uk (-99.3%)
3. webdevelopersnotes.com (-98.9%)
4. netvouchercodes.co.uk (-98.7%)
5. pocket-lint.com (-98.7%)
6. killerstartups.com (-98.3%)
7. wakoopa.com (-98.1%)
8. aceshowbiz.com (-98.0%)
9. everydaysale.co.uk (-97.8%)
10. electricpig.co.uk (-97.2%)

Ehow.co.uk and ehow.com, which had done well in the U.S. following the Panda update, have suffered a setback in the U.K.

Update: Sistrix have released a follow-up report, which found that ehow was actually quite badly affected in the U.S. too.

Some of the common reasons why these sites have lost ranking are too many links taking you away from the main page, too many broken links, expired vouchers or deals, too many ads and lack of original content.

Among the top sites to have gained in ranking due to the Panda update are:

1. ebay.co.uk (+42.1%)
2. techcrunch.com (+40.7%)
3. national-lottery.co.uk (+39.5%)
4. econsultancy.com (+37.1%)
5. thisismoney.co.uk (30.1%)
6. siteslike.com (+25.4%)
7. mirror.co.uk (24.9%)
8. blogspot.com (22.8%)
9. mashable.com (22.6%)
10. itv.com (22.4%)

Sites that have lost their ranking from the first two pages of Google’s search results could be badly affected by this update. We have seen historically that most users do not click beyond the first page of Google search results. Therefore the casualties of this update could suffer a serious loss of traffic.

These terms are not queries in themselves, but are modifiers to the queries. They are, ‘Who’, ‘What’, ‘Where’, ‘When’, ‘Why’ and ‘How’.

Researchers at comScore found that the use of these modifiers has grown significantly between January 2010 and January 2011.

Number of searches on most popular modifiers in Jan 2010 v Jan 2011

Who – This question is generally asked with an ‘is’ ‘are’, ‘was’, or ‘were’ attached to it. In January 2011, 57 million searches by 21 million searchers in the U.S. searched questions with ‘who’. The most common question with ‘Who’ are, ‘Who is searching for me’, ‘Who is looking for me’, ‘Who is looking at my Facebook profile’ and ‘Who am I’.

What – This question is usually attached with an ‘is’, ‘does’, ‘are’, ‘was’ or ‘were’. 253 million searches by 52 million people were conducted with this modifier in the U.S. in January 2011.

Where – The most common questions here are, ‘Where is’, ‘Where are’, ‘Wheres’, ‘Where’s’ and ‘Where was’. The term ‘where’ had 52 million searches from 29 million searchers in the U.S. in January 2011.

When – This question is asked with an ‘is’, ‘was’, ‘did’ and ‘does’. It is almost as common as ‘where’ with 54.8 million searches by 21 million searchers in the U.S. in January 2011. The most common ‘When’ questions are about upcoming events, holidays and festivals. If publishers can keep track of when these question are likely to be asked, they can reach their target audience easily.

Why – The most common questions here are ‘Why do’, ‘Why is’, ‘Why are’, ‘Why did’ and ‘why does’. This question has 33 million searches from 13 million searchers in January 2011.

How – This is the most common search term modifier by far, with 431 million searches by 71 million searchers. It is attached with a ‘to’, ‘do’, ‘much’, ‘many’ and ‘does’. Of this, ‘How to’ had over 253 million questions in January 2011, up by 35% in 1 year.

Since it has been found that these searches continue to increase, at a rapid pace, publishers and marketers can make good use of these modifiers to find their target audiences and to improve engagement with them.

The tool, called the Personal Blocklist extension, can be downloaded directly from the Chrome Web Store.

Once users download the extension for their Chrome browser, they can decide which sites they want to block from the search results pages they view and can communicate these decisions to Google.

Thus, if a user finds that that the results obtained from a particular site are not up to the mark in terms of quality, or they have just been copied from another site, the user can click on a link added by the extension to block that site from appearing in future search engine results pages.

Blocking sites from SERPs using the Chrome Personal Blocklist extension

When a site is blocked, a signal will automatically be sent to Google regarding this. Google will then study the feedback received in this manner. If they find that certain sites are being blocked repeatedly by individuals, they could eventually decide to block the site from their search results entirely.

A user who blocks some sites will be able to check the list of blocked sites by clicking on the extension icon on the top right hand of the Chrome window. The user can also unblock a blocked site if he wishes to.

This extension is an effort by Google to help reduce spam in their search results. It is specifically aimed at content farms, which are sites that host lots of content that is merely duplicated from other sites or is not of much value in and of itself.

The extension is still in the testing stage and is currently available in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

Doomed For SEO / Spam Misuse

In the past, Google has tried to enable users to indicate which websites were good and which ones were bad in the search results. They did this through Google SideWiki and search results customisations. However, the endeavour was mostly used by SEO specialists and spammers. This new tool is more than likely to meet the same fate.

So, unless Google has figured out a really good way to crowd-source policing of the SERPs without opening themselves up to competitive malpractice, the new extension is likely to fail too.

According to Google, Microsoft has been keeping track of what people are searching for on Google, and then simply copying the top search results of these queries on Google to improve their own search results.

Google claims that they first noticed that something was amiss, last summer, when a search for a misspelt query (torsorophy) returned the same results on Bing as it did on Google. Only, in the case of Google, the spelling was corrected (tarsorrhaphy), but not on Bing.

To cross check this, Google later set up a “sting operation” where they ran some synthetic queries on unusual search terms that wouldn’t normally be queried by any human, and the top position for these queries, was given as a web page which actually had no connection to the search query whatsoever.

A few days later it was found that Bing also showed the same web page as the top result for that query.

Bing copies Google results for the query ‘hiybbprqag’

This seems to indicate, that Bing is not only keeping tabs on what people are searching for on Google, but are also using Google search results to improve their own.

Google engineers speculate that that this is done either through the Bing Toolbar or the Suggested Sites feature of IE 8. Both of these features collect data from users and return it to Microsoft to improve the user’s search experience.

The Google Toolbar and Chrome browser also collect similar information from Google’s users, but Google claims that this information is not used to improve their search results, which is most probably a lie – search suggestions and clicks from the Google toolbar are almost certainly counted and used to improve organic results.

Microsoft on their part have categorically stated that they “do not copy Google results”. They further explain that Microsoft uses over a 1,000 different signals to create their search algorithm. While features such as the Bing Toolbar and Suggested Sites, do help them to decide their search rankings, it is possible that in the case of rare and unusual queries, as those used in Google’s “sting operation” there may be an overlap of results.

Where Microsoft’s explanation fails, though is in the fact that no human user would have been likely to search for those special search queries before Google set them up. How then did Bing derive the Google results without any historical clicks that were tracked to “improve” their user experience?

The accusations have come from a researcher, Ben Edelman, who is an associate professor with the Harvard Business School. He carried out a study titled ‘Measuring Bias In Organic Web Search’. The study was conducted last August along with another Harvard professor, Benjamin Lockwood. A report on the study can be viewed at:

www.benedelman.org/searchbias/

Edelman claims that Google gives much more weight to its own sites and products than is deserved. He also found that Bing search results were more fair and reliable.

For instance, when the term ‘email’ was searched, the results gave Gmail as the top-ranked email site, and similarly, YouTube was the highest ranked site for the search term ‘video’.

Google is already facing enquiries by the European Commission and the Attorney General of Texas, regarding claims of manipulation of search results.

Google has strongly refuted the claims made by Edelman, and said, “Mr. Edelman is a longtime paid consultant for Microsoft, so it’s no surprise that he would construct a highly biased test that his sponsor would pass and that Google would fail,”

A spokesperson for the search engine has added, “Google never artificially favours our own services in our organic web search results, and we perform extensive user testing to ensure that search results are ranked in a way that provides users with the most useful answer.”

A number of other websites and bloggers have also spoken in favour of the authenticity of Google results.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has said, “Statistics can easily be turned to whatever you want them to be. I feel like Edelman is turning his study into the most negative view possible.”

The Huffington Post has also defended Google saying that the study size (32 search terms) is too small a sample. They also add that while favouritism should remain a concern, Google runs on an algorithm, which favours relevant results over irrelevant ones.

One needs to keep in mind the fact that since Google is the market leader with a huge majority, its own sites and products are bound to be more popular than most others and hence deemed more relevant and ranked higher.

While promoting one’s own product is not necessarily a crime, anti-trust commissions in Europe and the U.S.A.  might consider this fair grounds for an investigation if someone complain that Google was abusing its dominant position in search to push its own products.

Microsoft had to separate Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player sufficiently from the Windows operating system, as a result of a similar anti-trust investigation. Could Google face a similar fate?

These new Place Search results will be shown automatically when Google is able to gauge that a local search is being carried out. If that does not happen the user can use the ‘Places’ link in the left hand panel of the search results page.

Place Search groups together search results around a given location. The results are marked with red pins on a map in the right-hand column, where traditionally the 4th-6th sponsored links were placed. The listings are also accompanied by a snippet that can include a 2-line description, the business logo, address, phone number, ratings stars and links to reviews and the official Place Page.

Google Web search with Place listings

Certain search queries deliver a results page that contains a number of Place listings followed by just three organic search results. Others follow the older format of a map with up to 10 local listings followed by the usual 10 organic search results.

The update will show users between 30 to 40 links on a single page, saving time for the user but making the search results page busier and perhaps full of too many options and too many different logos and colours fighting for attention. This is quite a stark contrast to the early days of Google when simplicity was key to success.

Google also rolled out an ad service that will help small and medium sized businesses in particular. The new ad service, called ‘Boost’, allows businesses to place local business ads and show up when users conduct local searches in their specific business category. Place Search and Boost work well in conjunction with each other to help users as well as advertisers.

It has been estimated that over 20% of searches on Google are related to location. It makes sense for Google to pay attention to this corner of its market and to improve services there. What is surprising, though, is that rather than introducing business logos, images and videos in the sponsored links, they’ve chosen to draw attention back to organic search results and even pushed sponsored links below the fold on the right-hand side of the page.

Google decided to concentrate on this aspect of the Web. They aimed to improve the speed of downloading images and reduce the size of image files without significantly affecting the image quality.

It has been estimated that photos and images take up about 65% of the space on web pages, thus slowing down the transfer of information considerably, especially when bandwidth is limited, as in the case of mobile networks.

Engineers at Google worked on ways to compress the JPEG or other lossy images, as these constitute the vast majority of images. The product of their research was introduced this week, in the form of an all new format for images – WebP

Google recently released a developer preview of the new WebP image format, which has been found to reduce the byte size occupied by images and also helps to load them faster.

WebP is a method of compressing photo images. During a study of 900,000 images, WebP was found to compress the images by 39.8%, compared to 9.7-14.6% for JPEG images.

The WebP file consists of VP8 image data and a container based on RIFF. WebP works on the principle of predictive coding to encode a message. Predictive coding only encodes the difference (residual) between the actual values and the predicted values of a block, thus compressing the image more effectively. Google expects that once the developer community starts working with WebP they will be able to produce even better results and further compress the images.

At present the WebP format is not supported on any image viewer or browser. The success of this initiative depends heavily on whether or not browsers will support the format and web designers will be happy to use this new format in upcoming web pages.

Users typically find it much easier to enter the site address directly into their search toolbar, and find the site at the first shot, rather than go about the task in a round and about manner, where they would have to make several attempts and receive many directions before they reach their target site.

Navigational searches are defined as search queries containing a website address. 15% of the total number of searches on the top 5 search engines in the United States were found to be navigational queries.

While it is certainly true, that queries (and hence websites) with the suffix .com are the most popular, other suffixes are also steadily gaining in popularity. In fact, of the approximately 1.9 billion navigational searches conducted across the 5 major search engines in the month of July, 83% of the addresses had the suffix .com. But, this figure is actually down from 85% in July 2009. Other suffixes are growing at a good rate. For instance, the domain extension .edu has gone up by over 80%, .org has increased by 12% and .tv has gone up by almost 85%.

These findings indicate that brands that are interested in reaching a large number of users, and want to corner a larger share of the market for themselves should invest in advertising on keywords containing website addresses, as this investment will certainly prove to be worthwhile in the long run.

When a user types a search query, the new interface starts predicting the query even as it is being typed, and accordingly starts showing search results instantly.

This new interface was developed based on the fact that people type much slower than they read. It has been found that it takes 10 times longer to type than it does to read, so even as a person is typing a query, he can easily look at the page and see the search results as they appear, thus saving the user’s time as he conducts his search.

Based on the search results and suggestions displayed as the query is being typed, users can modify their search queries to get even better results.

Not only are organic search results updated on the fly, but ads that appear alongside the search results also get updated accordingly. As the user continues to type a new letter into the query, the organic results and related ads get instantly modified accordingly.

As a result, users will see unrelated and related ads as they are typing in a query.

Problems for advertisers

Google has clarified that an impression will now be counted when a user stops typing for more than 3 seconds or when the user performs an action such as pressing the Enter key or Search button or clicking on one of the results.

Even so, the number of impressions recorded for Google AdWords ads will change drastically as a result of this new search interface. A user could simply pause while typing a search query or look away from their PC for a bit, and that incompletely entered query would count for ad impressions on campaigns from advertisers who might not even be relevant to the final query the user intends to search for.

Moreover, as impression counts increase and click through rates drop, Google will need to adjust the AdWords algorithms to ensure that Quality Scores don’t drop and drive up costs per click for ads that got inadvertently displayed due to such incomplete query entry.

Google Instant is being made available in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia, to users who have a Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac, or Internet Explorer v8 browser. Users on other domains can also access Google Instant if they are signed in to a Google account.

Read more about Google Instant

The study, conducted by Mari-Carmen Marcos a professor and Cristina González-Caro a PhD student at the university, classifies search queries into 4 categories:

1. Informational – where the user looks for information such as an address or definition of a term
2. Navigational – where the user searches for a website or brand instead of typing its URL in the browser
3. Transactional – when the user wants to conduct a transaction such as booking a ticket
4. Multimedia – where the user searches for a photo or video

58 participants were studied. The subjects were between 18 to 55 years of age. 25 were male and 33 were female.

Heat maps showing user fixations on Google results for Informational v Transactional queries

When searching for information, the users spent 53% of the time on a page looking at snippets, 34% of the time looking at the title and 13% of the time on the URL. These users were found not to be distracted by the presence of images on the search results page.

For navigational search queries, the fixation times were similar to informational queries, with 48% of the time on the page devoted to snippets, 33% to titles and a slightly higher, 15% to the URLs. About 5% of the time was spent on images in these search results.

Most of the attention was centred on the image itself on search results for a multimedia query. 71% of the time on an image search results page was spent looking at the images themselves.

Participants of the study were found to spend much more time looking at sponsored links when the query was of a transactional nature. Nevertheless, the number of looks or fixations on sponsored links was still found to be just 17% versus 82% on the organic results.

Percentage fixations (number and time) on organic v sponsored results

56% of the time on the transactional query’s search results page on the whole was spent looking at snippets, 28% on titles and a surprisingly high 20% on the URL. However, when considering just the sponsored links, the amount of time spent on the title was disproportionately much higher, commanding 43% of the time as against 28% for the snippet and 29% for the URL.

For search marketing professionals this means that a lot more attention should be paid to their ad headlines and display URLs.

Interestingly, that the number of actual fixations was found to be much higher for transactional queries (9.8%) than for informational (2.8% ) or navigational (5%) queries.

Sponsored results placed above the organic search results got a lot more attention (79%) than those in the right hand column (21%), which is not surprising.

Read the full eye-tracking study (Spanish PDF 2.28 MB)

Users who wished to conduct searches for the search term ‘Holy See’ were directed to a site with the domain name ‘www.pedofilo.com’ much to their consternation.

The term ‘pedofilo’ is Italian for Paedophile, as seems to be quite obvious. However reports from Italy have claimed that the actual IP address of the site is not in Italy as may be expected but in Mexico. It is also believed that the site is actually a religious site contrary to expectations.

This action of Google Bombing has taken place soon after news reports alleging several incidents of child abuse by certain people who work for the Church were made public. The Vatican has also prescribed a new set of rules with which these offenders will be taken to task.

The Google Bombing incident was first noticed by at the Vatican itself and they contacted Google about it.

A spokesperson for Google Italy however said, “I cannot confirm if it is an attack because I have not had any more precise information from the US engineers to understand the nature of the problem.”

It would be quite embarrassing for Google to have to admit to this being a case of Google Bombing as they had claimed to have solved that particular problem, quite a while ago.

According to this study, 3-word queries are currently the most successful drivers of traffic from organic search results.

The study was conducted during the one-week period between 13 and 19 June 2010 across a sample of 41 million impressions of search traffic. They found that approximately 10 million or 26% of these impressions were for three-word queries.

The next most popular query length was with two words at 19% followed by four-word queries at 17% and one-word queries at 14%.

Queries with  five words or more had a much lower percentage of traffic.

In the past, one-word queries accounted for a much higher percentage. In 2007, one-word search queries accounted for 24.5% and in 2009 they accounted for 20.4%. Two-word queries accounted for 23.6% in 2009.

The study also considered the effect of word count on ad click rate for paid search results. Quite contrary to the findings for organic search results, they found that the highest click rates were associated with queries of five, six and four words respectively, with five-word queries getting 1.4% of the click share. This means, unsurprisingly, that complex searches are more likely to convert into revenue, rather than searches with one, two or three words.

Users can share shopping search results in order to ask for a friend’s opinion while shopping online. The sharing options are visible only on the product reviews page, which can be reached by clicking on the “User Reviews” link on the Shopping search results.

Social sharing links on Bing Shopping

Sharing is enabled through Facebook and Twitter. Users can share the shopping search results by clicking on the Facebook, Twitter or email link and then typing any questions about the product.

Some question the utility of such a feature. Twitter users might not want all their followers to see their shopping-related queries. They might also not appreciate receiving advice and opinions from several of those followers or other advertisers with automated tweets set to respond to such shopping tweets.

Proponents of social search have always used the argument that the ability to get a friend or trusted person’s opinion before buying something would be invaluable. This new feature by Bing makes that argument a reality.

Neither Google nor Yahoo! currently offer users the option to share shopping search results. Microsoft might have yet another winner on their hands… if only more people would actually use Bing’s shopping search!

Data from the Yahoo! Toolbar across 50 million page views generated in March 2009 was analysed. Rsearchers, Ravi Kumar and Andrew Tomkins found that users now spend only 21.4% of their online time on search activities.

The total time spent searching included 6.2% time spent on Web searches, 1.4% on multimedia searches, 1.4% on databases of items such as those found on eBay and Amazon.

In contrast to this, users spent 50% of their online time browsing and one-third of the time on communication.

5.3% of all pageviews were found to have a referral from Web searches, 1.4% from multimedia searches, 0.6% from database item searches, and 1.5% from other search query types. Thus, each category of search pageviews tends to result in around one follow-on click on average.

Experts at Yahoo! surmise that in the future, search needs to focus on gathering and understanding, and when appropriate, serving structured information.

It was observed that users are now much more dependent on social networks, location-aware smartphone applications and voice or images to find the content that they are interested in.

Last month, Facebook had more site visits than Google in the U.S.A. Search ads, which are the main source of revenue for the search engines, could potentially lose user attention to an extent.

More importantly, search and display advertisers now have a greater choice and must decide on the best way to reach their target audience and the best channel to maximise the return on the money they spend advertising.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! already recognise this change in online user behaviour and have been forging partnerships with social media sites like Twitter and Facebook for over a year now, in addition to building social networks around their own products.

Click the link below to read the full white paper:

A characterisation of online search behavior (144kB PDF)

As of now, the updated service is available only in the U.S.A. on the iPhone and on Android devices.

When a user views the results of a search query, tapping on a button to the left of the search box on the search results page will reveal the new search options menu. When the user selects one of the items in the menu, the search results get refined, just as is done on regular search.

The expanded search options menu will make the paid and organic search results slide to the right side of the screen. The user can still interact with the results by panning right.

New options, such as News and Products, have also been added to the menu.

Google has promised to roll out the updated interface on other devices and in other locations as soon as possible. They will also offer more options soon.

While speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo, Google’s Steve Lee hinted that a new version of Latitude would be available shortly. The updated version will allow users to access information and data about where they have been. Access to this information will be restricted to the user only.

Contrary to initial reports, the geo-location service is doing pretty well, TechCrunch reports. Latitude has 3 million active users. This is especially significant when compared to competitors, Foursquare and My Town, which have 1 million and 2 million users respectively.

In fact, 8 million people that have signed up for Latitude since its inception. It is believed that this year, Latitude grew 30% each month. The current growth of Android and Blackberry is no doubt helping fuel this growth.

Google hopes to have several third party mobile applications working through the Latitude API in the near future.

The service has already been doing well, with over 4 million businesses having connected to it and creating Place Pages. It provides information to users about more than 50 million places worldwide ranging from restaurants and bars to parks and museums.

Google Places will now offer some additional features such as the area in which the service provider operates.

Businesses will also be able to highlight their listings with a little yellow tag on Google.com and Google Maps for just $25 a month. The facility is already available in certain cities like Houston and San Jose and is now being introduced in Austin, Atlanta and Washington D.C. It will also be introduced in Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder and San Francisco shortly.

While it is already possible to upload photos on the site, Google will now offer a free photo shoot of the interiors of the business premises in certain cities.

Google will also provide customised QR codes to businesses through Google Places. Late last year, Google introduced a feature called ‘Favorite Places’, which allowed over 100,000 businesses to feature a window decal saying “We’re a favourite place on Google”, alongside a QR code linking to the Place Page for the business. Google will push another round of this service and will provide window decals to 50,000 more businesses in the U.S.A.

Many have seen these new services from Google to be in direct response to Yelp declining their acquisition offer. Popularising the Google Places service via the businesses and driving more users to interact with and review these listings will definitely give Google the ammunition it needs to stop Yelp’s growth into their territory.

This means that Twitter’s 106 million users carry out on average 6 searches each day, which amounts to about 18 billion searches per month.

If these figures are to be believed, it means that Twitter is way ahead of Bing and Yahoo! who have 9.4 billion and 4.1 billion searches per month respectively. In fact, if these figures were true, Twitter would be second only to Google, which is of course far ahead at 88 billion searches per month.

The search volumes for Google, Yahoo! and Bing are reported by comScore and other respectable rating services. Twitter’s figures, on the other hand, have been reported by Twitter alone.

comScore has never included Twitter in its ranking of the top search properties. Danny Sullivan suggests that one reason for this could be that the actual number of searches happening through Twitter’s own website is much lower than the total search queries they process, as the majority are conducted through APIs, where third parties direct the search query to Twitter and are given the relevant information back.

According to Evan Williams, many Twitter queries are also generated through widgets which are inserted on web pages.

comScore and other ratings services do not take third party queries into account. The argument could also be made that comScore does not take into account queries conducted on third-party websites that use the Google Custom Search or the Yahoo! Search Box. While the former would make a significant differeence, the latter probably makes a negligible difference.

Searches generated through Twitter, on Google and Bing are not part of Twitter’s total search tally, as both Google and Bing pull in the Tweets and index them themselves and also store them in their own databases.

Google has now introduced another feature, to access whatever data is needed from all the Twitter archives.

Since blogs, tweets and online conversations are constantly adding to the search content, it is difficult for users to access information of some time ago.

With this new feature, it will be possible for people to ‘replay’ whatever was being said on Twitter about a particular topic, at a given point of time in the past.

To do so, users should first click on ‘Show Options’ on the search results page. They must then select ‘Updates’. They will first be shown the latest and greatest short-form updates but they will also see a new chart at the top, from which they can select the date, month and year, and they will see all the Tweets on the given topic from that day onwards.

The chart will also show all the spikes and dips of Twitter activity on that subject.

This new feature will allow users to go back in time to study the opinions on the subject at that time.

The feature is just being rolled out in English initially, and will allow people to go back to the Tweets up to February 11 2010. Later of course, it will be possible to go back to the starting of Twitter, way back on March 21 2006.

In effect, people visiting a website with the intention to buy are more likely to do so from a sponsored link than from an organic link, and thus more conversions are expected from sponsored links.

This pattern may vary to some extent, depending on the type of search being conducted.

For instance, searches related to news, sports or entertainment, which are not very likely to end in a purchase transaction may originate from an organic link.

On the other hand, searchers looking to purchase specific items are more likely to be attracted to a paid links, and a conversion is more likely to occur when a price tag or model name are available. According to Nick Drew, a researcher who works for Microsoft Advertising, this is largely down to the searcher’s frame of mind.

Someone looking to buy a product is likely to be drawn towards selling phrases such as “buy now”, “sale”, “discount” and prices, which are usually found on sponsored links, as again general information that can be found on organic results. Such a person would not find an organic result from a site such as Wikipedia very helpful when buying.

Conversely, someone looking for information will most likely be turned off by the salesy language on sponsored links, and will instead focus on the organic search results.

Both comScore and Nielsen’s research has found that in any given category of searches, a paid link is more likely to end in a purchase than an organic link. Hence, it is of great importance for marketers to promote their brands through sponsored ad listings.

The effects of linking to a bad quality site can be disastrous to any website’s organic rankings.

While we’ve made every effort to carefully vet each and every link in each and every comment posted on our site, what we cannot do is continuously monitor the status of the sites these comments link to.

Unfortunately, sites go down, get hacked, turn rogue and change direction all too often. As a result, what was once a good site to link to can turn into a very negative proposition if it gets hacked or turns rogue and starts spamming users or hosting viruses (viri?).

This latter scenario is not just bad for our search rankings but also for any users on our site who happen to click through and visit these rogue sites.

Hence, our decision: from today, all links in comments will include the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

We hope that our genuine readers and commenters will see agree with our reasons and will not be deterred from commenting and interacting with us in the future!

Social search started as an experiment in Google Labs, undertaken to try and make search more social and personalised. Based on the number of sign ups to try this feature, Google has now released it in beta on their regular search results in the USA.

With this new feature, when users query Google, they will receive all the relevant results as usual. Google will additionally search for information on the subject that has been posted by the users’ contacts on their blogs and social networks and add that information as “Results from your social circle” in the search results page.

Users might give more weight to these social results in some cases, as they already know and trust the opinions of the contacts these results were based on.

The social feature has now also been implemented for Google Images. When a user does an image search, Google will include photos from the user’s contacts’ accounts on public sites like Picasa and Flickr. These results will also be shown under the heading “Results from your social circle”.

Two new links are visible alongside every set of social search results – “My Social Circle”, which shows the extended network of the user’s online contacts and how they are connected  and “My Social Content” which lists the user’s public pages that might appear on other people’s social results.

Where Social Search Stops Being Social

The last point mentioned above, though, might be the single biggest shortcoming of social search. Google relies on social information that is public. Unfortunately for them, the largest social network in the world, Facebook is largely closed off to search spiders. Public information on Facebook is sparse, at best.

Since these services are still in beta, Google probably expects to be able to improve upon them further in due course. If social search is to be truly social Google’s improvement efforts might need to focus on obtaining content from Facebook without violating user privacy.

Using Social Search

To start using social search, a user must first create a Google profile, and then add links to his / her other public online social network accounts.

Google has been working on the new method of indexing their search results for a while now, and many SEO professionals are well aware of the upcoming update, code named “Caffeine“. Representatives from Google have maintained that the Caffeine update wouldn’t go live before 2010.

2010 is here, now. The search engine has already been testing Caffeine in one of their data centres since last summer, and it may be rolled out very soon.

In fact, there are some bloggers who claim that they have already noticed faster search results.

As far as most users are concerned, the official launch of Caffeine will not make much difference to the search results, as Caffeine is more of a behind-the-scenes worker. There will be no visual changes in the search results.

Only the overall speed with which the search results are received is expected to change for the better. This factor will be especially useful in searches for photos and videos.

A study of Google Caffeine conducted by an SEO firm found that it will give more importance to news and social media for generic search terms, but specific keywords will show more regular websites on the subject. In general, they found that search rankings are not very likely to change, except for some websites, which may not have updated their content for a very long time. It will, therefore, be beneficial for websites to remain up-to-date and refresh their content regularly once the Caffeine update is launched.

Google base their claim to openness on the fact that they have opened up the source code for the Android mobile operating system, Chrome Web browser and Chrome operating system and a few other products so that the larger developer community can improve on them.

Rosenberg says, “at Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant profitable and competitive ecosystem for businesses.”

While all this discussion about openness is fine, one cannot help but notice the fact that Google’s largest source of income is their search engine, which ranks web pages to create relevant search results for user queries. And nobody really knows how the algorithm for this ranking system works, apart from the few people at Google who are in charge of the algorithm.

Google’s argument against making this algorithm public is, of course, that spammers would misuse this information if it were easily available to all.

This argument seems weak, however, as it has been proved by other open source projects such as the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, that while an open algorithm may seem to help spammers, there would be an army of developers ready to combat the spammers.

If anything, all of Google’s talk about the importance of being open seems to be a cheap dig at Microsoft, and an attempt to make Microsoft seem like the bad guys just before Google launches a full-blown attack on Microsoft Windows by launching their own operating system.

It is believed that they will use Google Maps and Street View in a manner similar to what they are already offering in Australia since a few months ago. Early reports show that the Australian real estate search service is getting a good response. Estate agents list the sites available to them, along with all details for free, and Google provides a picture of the front of the property via Street View.

If Google does launch a similar service in the U.K. they could earn a lot of revenue from the advertising potential that this service would generate.

Spokespersons from various agencies who have heard of this service, have said that this move could be interesting and it is likely to affect other property listing sites, especially if Google offers this service for free.

It is also likely that the newspaper industry may suffer further losses as a result of such a service. The newspaper industry is already suffering from loss of advertising in their real estate classified section, due a combination of a fall in the real estate market and due to similar services being offered on other websites.

Google has so far refrained from making any comment on the subject.

Google Real Estate Search Australia

Update:

This service is now live in the UK, as of 16 June 2010.

The first of these features, called ‘Site Performance’ is available through Google Webmaster Tools. It provides information to website owners about the speed of their site and will also offer some suggestions that can help to make the site load faster.

In the past too, Google has offered advice on how webmasters can help make their pages load faster, through several articles on best practices and via posts on discussion forums.

Through Site Performance, users will be able to find out how fast their pages load, and how their site is faring compared to other sites over a period of time. These performance charts and tables will, however, only be available to sites that have sufficient traffic to collect enough data for such details.

Individual users may, of course see a site at a faster or slower pace than the average depending on their location and network.

The other feature introduced is called ‘Google Public DNS’.

DNS, which is short for Domain Name System, is an essential part of the Web that converts domain names into unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers.

While using the Internet, users often access DNS several times without even being aware of it, as the service is usually automatically handled by the Internet Service Provider. However, when multiple DNS lookups are required together, the service can be slowed down considerably.

Google’s Public DNS hopes to be able to solve this problem and make the surfing experience faster, safer and more reliable for users.

Google’s recent emphasis on speeding up the Internet accompanies hints dropped by Google representative, Matt Cutts, about the importance site speed might play in ranking considerations in the future.

This makes perfect sense, in general, because it is a known fact that faster sites lead to better user retention and activity, thus leading to higher revenues. However, companies that don’t have the money to invest in top-notch infrastructure could lose out against big businesses that have the money to invest in dedicated server stacks and advanced Web architecture.

Principles that Cutts mentioned back in 2006 are more likely to still apply: So long as websites load within an acceptable time frame, which is determined by Google, it is unlikely that the site will be disadvantaged for loading a few milliseconds slower than its competitors.

The first feature, Malware Details, simplifies the tough task of finding out if pages on a site are distributing malware. Webmasters previously had to depend on manual testing, use the Google Safe Browsing API or rely on malware notifications in the Google SERPs to find out if pages on their site had been compromised. Now, this task should be a lot simpler, as Google will provide snippets of code that exist on some of the pages, which they feel could be malicious.

Malware details will not only be helpful to webmasters who wish to eliminate malware from their sites quickly but might also help a number of webmasters, whose sites fell in ranking due to the presence of malicious code on their site, now understand why this happened.

The other feature, Fetch as Googlebot, was previously launched in Google Labs. Webmasters are often curious to know what exactly Googlebot sees when their page is accessed. The text only cache on Google SERPs and the keywords and HTML suggestions tools in Webmaster Central help site owners to understand, to some extent, what information Googlebot sees on the page and what details are extracted during the crawl and indexing phases.

Now, with the Fetch as Googlebot tool, webmasters will be able to get real-time feedback on what the Google search robot sees when it crawls and indexes a page. This information will be especially useful when users update their sites with new technology or find that their pages have been hacked. It might also help some understand why they have not been ranked on specific keywords.

Google Trends already shows users which topics are among the 100 most popular searches on a given day. Google has now incorporated this feature in Google Search, so that users do not need to visit another page to find out what the trending topics of the moment are.

Now, when a user Google’s a particular topic which is among the top 100 in popularity, Google will display a graph at the bottom of the search page to indicate the rate of rise of that topic and other details about it.

Google highlights trending topics within organic SERPs

Google Trends’ Hot Trends feature has also been pruned from its existing top 100 topics to only 40. However, when any of the top 100 topics are searched for it will show up on the homepage.

This move will brings Google a bit closer to imitating Twitter’s popular topics and real-time search functionality. It also allows users to not only know what are the most popular topics at the moment, but will also provide them with additional information about those topics. These Hot Trends will be updated every hour to show how the scenario is changing.

The Hot Topic being searched will not only get a number to indicate its rank in the popularity list but will also be classified with terms such as ‘On Fire’ and Volcanic’ etcetera.

This feature is officially launched only in the U.S. and Japan, but can be seen by some users in the UK at present.

Stopping link juice from flowing out from Digg to dubious sites became a necessity, in some ways, due to the spread of spammy material on the site.

The nofollow attribute will be added to all external links, comments, user profiles and story pages whose popularity happens to be below a particular threshold limit set by Digg.

Digg submissions that cross the required threshold will automatically have the nofollow attribute removed from the link pointing to the articles.

This way, spam-based content on the site should be reduced, while still allowing good quality content to benefit the content owners with search engine friendly links to the publisher’s site.

A number of experts from the SEO industry have been involved in the creation and derision of the rel=”nofollow” search engine robot directive. Digg has had a few run-ins with these professionals and the rebots instruction method in the not-too-distant past when they launched the DiggBar.

SEO professionals are mostly in agreement with Digg on this new system, though. It allows the site to give credit where credit is due and not penalise everyone, like Twitter is doing, because of problems created by spammers.

Google uses a similar policy on Knol: Authors who regularly contribute and are thus well-known and trusted get their links freed of nofollow, while those who are new, need to gain the trust required before the nofollow attribute is removed from their links.

Digg’s Nofollow Criteria

Digg has not officially specified, however, what the threshold of reliability is.

As of now, all profile links are nofollowed, even for extremely popular and trusted Digg users, all newly submitted links are also nofollowed, even if they have been submitted by power users and all sponsored links are nofollowed – which was probably done to keep Google happy.

The only links that have nofollow removed from them at present are those that make it to the homepage, category popular pages or sub category popular pages.

Even the most dugg upcoming or ‘Hot In’ category / sub-category stories have the nofollow attribute on them.

The criteria for getting rel=”nofollow” removed from a link, at present, seems to be simply making it reach the ‘Popular’ list, which is the homepage or the individual category / sub-category main pages.

Some time last month, Yahoo! launched a new homepage layout. Their search team is now concentrating on unifying this homepage with the search results page. They have undertaken a lot of research with eye-tracking studies and usability experiments to achieve this. This new search results page is expected to provide which are personally more relevant to the user.

Yahoo! engineers are currently trying to align the framework of the search results page with the new homepage, in order to provide quick access to various search applications which are available in the left hand column of the three column page. The left hand column also provides direct one-click links to other pages, thus managing to retain the user on the Yahoo! page, which advertisers are bound to like.

One important new feature is a section ‘Show Results From’ which allows users to see results from the sites they are most used to and interested in.

The newly launched note-taking application, Yahoo! Search Pad’ is at the top of the left column to provide easier access to research carried out.

SearchScan and SafeSearch features are also in this column to protect against viruses and spam during the search process. The Search Assistance feature is placed directly below the search box.

New Yahoo! Search results page

Yahoo! is also looking out for new ways for users to explore the organic results through a ‘Related Concepts’ section in the left column. They are essentially trying to find easier ways to display enhanced results from a larger number of sites.

A few random users from the USA have already been selected as test subjects for the new search results page. Feedback from this test will be used to fine-tune the page before the general launch.

In light of Yahoo!’s recent search agreement with Microsoft, it remains to be seen how much Yahoo! itself will benefit from these innovations.

Rel=”nofollow” is an attribute that webmasters can add within the code for external links in order to signal that the link should not be followed by the search engine spiders. Bloggers often use the attribute to disuade comment spam.

The nofollow trend on Twitter started last year when they first indicated to search spiders that links posted under Web, on the right hand side of the Twitter profile, were not to be trusted. They then extended that to links within the Bio as well.

Now, Twitter adds the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all external links, be it links referencing an article or links to third-party Twitter apps that enabled posting the tweet.

Internal links remain untouched, turning Twitter into a walled garden much like Wikipedia, with lots of link juice coming in from other sites but none going out.

As Rae Hoffman pointed out on her blog, all the content on Twitter is created by the profile owners. Twitter is robbing profile owners by disallowing them to reap any benefit from their own work.

Twitter is likely to see some backlash as a result of this decision. Their justification for their decision is that it disuades spammers from abusing the service. However, Twitter is quite good at stopping spammer accounts already. And, moreover, that doesn’t then explain why verified reliable accounts such as @Google and @stephenfry also have their links nofollowed.

The popular micro-blogging service has timed these updates quite well. They are now so big, that minor backlashes and disenssion among SEO, social marketers and developers would hardly affect their growth, which is now self-propelling.

Hubspot conducted the survey across 1,531 of their customers, most of them being small or medium sized business. Of these 1,531 companies 795 of them used blogs, while the remaining 736 did not do so. The results showed that the companies that used blogs definitely had better search marketing results than those that did not.

While the companies that used blogs received 55% more visitors or traffic to there sites, they also received 97% more inbound links and an astounding 434% more indexed pages.

In most cases, the more visitors a business receives, the more sales they are eventually likely to make.

Link building, which is usually considered to be the most difficult part of search engine optimisation, is also made much easier through the use of blogs. The fact that 97% more links can be obtained through the use of blogs is significant enough to justify blogging for any business.

It is also very important to have as many indexed pages as possible, as that will increase the chances of a site being ranked higher, and thus appear on the first page of Google’s search results. This means that in all, maintaining a blog makes the likelihood of clients finding a business through search much higher.

However, recently some changes seem to have been made in this arrangement, whereby, the links are directed to Digg, instead of going to the publisher site, even if the users are not signed in on Digg.

As a result, thousands of users are pushing traffic to Digg, instead of to the original site that they wanted to link to, without even being aware of it.

Initially those who experienced this change wondered if this was an intentional change, or an error on the part of Digg. It has now been confirmed, via an email from Digg Support to Mashable, that this is an intentional change, and is “working as planned”.

This change will also be applicable to Digg URL’s that were created previously.

Digg has made these changes without informing their users. As a result, thousands of Digg users have no knowledge of the fact that they are diverting their followers to Digg instead of the intended site, which seems quite unethical, and is very likely to upset the publishers who happen to be Digg’s main source of content and traffic.

Digg founder, Kevin Rose has pleaded ignorance of these changes as he was on vacation for two weeks, and he says he will look into the matter.

These real estate seekers can now make use of Google Maps to solve various problems before actually making the deal. They can first use Google Street View to get a detailed idea of what the neighbourhood is like, and to decide whether or not it would be suitable for their requirements.

Next, home buyers / renters can get directions on how to get to the locality. They can also make use of Google Transit to find out the routes they would be required to use once they move into that locality.

Now, when users want to look for some information about real estate, they can enter a query on Google Maps, say, ‘homes for sale’ in a particular city or a specific area of the city, and Google Maps will provide all the results on a map with a box at the side which will give details of each property available on the listing.

As a further improvement, they will not only highlight the 10 best properties with pins on the map but will also put small circles on all the other listings in the given locality. By clicking on each individual marker or circle, further details about that property will be displayed.

Based on feedback received from users, Google will now provide the address of the property first, followed by the number of bedrooms and bathrooms instead of the other way around, as they used to do earlier.

Users can now see all the properties available to them, at a glance on the web in the comfort of their own home or office, before narrowing down their choices, and then actually visiting just one or two properties before finalizing the deal.

Real estate listings can be posted one at a time via a form on Google, through data feeds or by tying in estate agency databases with the Maps system via a Google Base API. Listings for the same property from multiple agencies get grouped together

At present this service is only available in the U.S. and Australia and New Zealand.

• Google Maps US real estate search
• Australia real estate search
• New Zealand real estate search

Google Suggest is a drop down menu that provides a list of query suggestions when a user starts typing in a query. The feature was added to the search engine’s home page last August and is now being updated.

To begin with, links are being added to Google Suggest. If a search query appears to be navigational, that site will appear in the drop down menu itself, thus saving the users time when he conducts the search operation.

Another new feature is the addition of Sponsored Links or ads among the search suggestions. Such related ads will now appear directly in the search suggestion box. The ads will be marked ‘Sponsored Link’ and will be on a coloured background to differentiate them.

Thirdly, when a user who is on a particular results page starts another search, he will receive certain search suggestions which will be related to the previous search which he has carried out.

The last feature to be added to Google Suggest is a personalization of suggestions. This means that when a user signs in to his Google account and if his computer has ‘Web History’ on the ‘Enabled’ mode, search suggestions will be sent to him by Google, based on his past searches. Google has found that users who are signed in often repeat their searches. In fact the figure for repeat searches is as high as 25%. Users have however been provided with an option labeled ‘Remove’ which they can use if they do not want a past search to show up in future.

The final change being made on Google Suggest is the deletion of the number of searches that have been conducted for a given query, as Google feels that this data has been of no use to their users.

Marissa Mayer Google’s VP of Search and User Experience said that Google Search Options is an attempt to organize universal search results – including news, blogs, images and videos.

This options panel appears on the left hand side of the search results page. Apart from the content drilling which was possible on Google Search, this panel allows users to sort the results by their time frame. i.e. whether they have just been received, or came in the previous day, previous week etc.

Google has also introduced the Wonder Wheel, where the search topic is placed in a light blue circle and related words surround it. The results appear to the right of the wonder wheel, and the wonder wheel also contains similar Timeline features.

Although the new options panel looks very plain and simple, as it is blue letters on a white background, a lot of thought process has obviously gone into its designing to enable users to have clarity and ease of use so that they can save time and still find exactly what they are looking for.

Google undertook a lot of eye-tracking and usability studies to ensure that each term is located in such a way that the user finds it easily and feels totally at home with this new panel right from the start.

mobile.accuracast.com

Given the recent growth in mobile Internet usage, a number of businesses are now looking to tap into this growth. This new sub-domain allows business owners and marketing professionals to order simple, straight-forward, sleek mobile websites that suit their requirements.

tools.accuracast.com

Our four main tools – the Search Ranking tool, PPC Cost Estimator tool, Monthly Ranking Report and International Search tool – all now have a new home in this sub-domain.

AccuraCast France

The French section of our site has now been moved to its own dedicated .fr domain, and has a slightly different design from the English website. Warning: The website is written only in French (of course!)

AccuraCast India

India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Middle East will now be served from our Indian office. The Indian site is markedly different from the UK and French sites, and so are the service bundles we offer in the sub-continent. Please note that the service bundles offered on this site are not available to European and North American customers.

AccuraCast Mobile

Unlike the mobile sub-domain, AccuraCast Mobile is a lone-standing mobile site that provides a quick introduction to our business and our services, in a mobile-friendly format. This is just a (relatively) static, information site targeting our mobile audience. It is also one of the best ways to view the Search Daily News headlines from your mobile phone.

SEO-London.info

Perhaps the least obviously related site, SEO-London.info was launched last year to cater to small businesses and start-ups. The site provides bare-bones SEO and PPC services for companies with extremely limited budgets – sort of like a no-frills SEO / PPC agency.

As always, I welcome any comments and feedback from our regular readers, clients and visitors to the site. You can either drop a note in the comment box below, or tweet me directly @AccuraCast on Twitter.

Best wishes,
Farhad Divecha

Now, when a user clicks on an image, the top bar, which used to look very similar to the Google Image Search preview bar, will instead show a sleek interface on a grey background.

The new preview bar provides a much larger preview of the original image, in addition to smaller thumbnails of 7 other image search results and 5 thumbnails linking to other popular related searches, as shown below.

The old image search page only provided a thumbnail-sized image, accompanied by the name and details regarding the size of the image, in the preview pane.

A search box with search assistance is included in the new preview page, to enable users to quickly search for more images without having to go back to the search results page.

While the addition of the search box is the same as on Google’s updated image search, the image type and colour recognition functionality now provided by Google is not present on Yahoo! Image Search. The latter, however, has a nifty “Recent Images” feature that shows up on certain search terms, and does not include ads with image search results.

These changes certainly make the preview page look good and will likely prompt more searches via the presence of the search box on the preview page, it might, once again, not be quite enough for Yahoo! to score over Google in anything other than SERP aesthetics.

Where it comes to quality of image search results, when tested over a numbers of random, widely varying search queries, Yahoo! does seem to be slightly better than Google at bringing up relevant results. Though Google finds more in terms of quantity, many of Google’s image results are not relevant.

Adobe SEO Technology Center

Sites built with Adobe Flash technology have remained largely invisible on search engine results until mid-2008, when Google and Yahoo! announced the ability to crawl and index text within Flash files after Adobe agreed to cooperate with the search engines.

The technology centre will help developers to build Flash applications that will be more search friendly in the future. The site describes difficulties that SEOs face and explains simple ways to deal with them.

So far, the SEO Technology Center has five articles: search optimization techniques for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), an SEO checklist, information about enhanced search indexing of SWF content, and guides to the Adobe Flash Player version checking protocol, detecting Flash Player versions and embedding SWF files.

Adobe has also informed that at present it would be more practical to offer HTML representation of content while the work on improving Flash technology is still in progress. Webmasters can use additional text, build static (HTML) version of their site or include content in a <noscript> tag.

It is hoped that the creation of this SEO Technology Center for Flash will help small and medium businesses in particular, as they often do not have highly specialised personnel to deal with these problems. However, the damage may already have been done, and Flash technology, as we know it, will probably never recover to be considered an equally viable alternative to HTML for website SEO.

On the 2nd of March 2009, Microsoft’s Search executive, Satya Nadella sent an email to all Microsoft employees, asking them to try out and then send in their feedback on the new test site, Kumo.com.

According to his mail, almost 40% of search queries go unanswered. With a view to improve the search experience and help users accomplish their tasks, Microsoft has undertaken this internal study.

The major difference between Kumo and other search engines will be the way the results query is narrowed down. An explorer pane on the left side of the search results page will give access to various tools, to help users with their tasks. There will also be features like single session history, and hover previews. On the right hand side related text ads will appear. The results in the center of the page will be organized in a way that saves time.

Even thought the test is being conducted internally at present, Live Search issued a statement last week, explaining that they are testing the revamped search engine and will hopefully be able to release it to the general public soon. They have also said that they are still considering whether to rebrand Live Search as Kumo or not.

Zack Stern at PC World speculates that Kumo might be the first major commercially available search engine that can conduct visual searches, that is, it would be able to identify and deliver pictures of certain people or objects or places based on what it “sees”.

It is widely accepted, probably even by the folk at Microsoft, that a mere rebrand will not solve their search-related stories. Their statement on the Live Search Blog indicates that this might be yet another branding exercise. However, that still begs the question why they would bother… haven’t they learnt anything from their last (MSN to Live Search) rebranding exercise?