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.

As with any major change to the search results pages, this update has been rolled out after extensive tests. Google has been running tests on this project for some time now, and has come to a final decision in this regard.

Ads at the bottom of the SERPs

The decision to include ads at the bottom of the search results pages has been based on the fact that they find the performance of ads at the bottom of the page to be better than the performance of ads that run alongside the search results.

This improved performance is probably due to the fact that users scan a search results page from the top downwards and not from side to side. Hence, when they reach the bottom of the page, they automatically see the ads displayed at the bottom. On the other hand, it is very likely that they might miss the ads that happen to be on the side of the results page, partly because they are not directly in the page scan path and partly due to acquired “banner blindness”.

Organic results at the bottom of the page have been known to typically have higher clickthrough rates than ads in the second-last position. These results will now more than likely get fewer clicks, with such traffic instead flowing to the ads at the bottom of the page.

When ads are displayed at the bottom of the page, it increases the potential advertising space, making it possible to place more ads on page one, rather than when the ads are placed only above and alongside the search results. This too could have a major bearing on the overall performance of ad campaigns, as many users may scan only the first page of results.

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.

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.

Enhanced data from Facebook will now be available on Yahoo!’s search engine results pages by default. This will enable users to add friends, send them messages, or pokes and view their friends in just one click from Yahoo!’s SERPs.

Facebook, however, is not the first provider of enhanced data on Yahoo! SERPs. Other apps available on the results pages by default via SearchMonkey are LinkedIn, Yelp, Yahoo! Local, Citysearch, Zagat and Wikipedia. Users can also integrate other SearchMonkey apps into the page if they wish to do so. For instance they can add StumbleUpon, Delicious and Flickr.

Of course, this move is expected to upset the advocates of user privacy. In order to put their minds to rest, Yahoo! has ensured that users will be able to see the profiles of only those users who have allowed their profiles to be viewed and searched publicly.

Thanks to this integration between the two sites, when a user types in the name of a person, the search result will show the public profile picture of that person along with other associated basic Facebook commands. Facebook too has added semantic mark-up to their public profile page.

If the search query includes “on Facebook” along with the name of the person, the profile will show at the top of the search results rather than lower down.

Rich Ads on Yahoo! Search results pages are being tested by a handful of advertisers since the end of 2008, and so far the results are encouraging. In fact, Yahoo! claims their advertisers have reported a rise of 25% in the click through rates for these ads. Not only that, the brand exposure and conversion rates have also reportedly increased significantly.

This new service allows the advertiser to add video, images, custom links and custom search boxes within their ads. These ads are placed in a separate box than the regular “Sponsored Results” and are labeled as “Promotional Results“, as shown below:

Click on the image to see a live Rich Media ad on Yahoo! search

Advertisers will also now be able to customise the ad to suit their needs. It will also be possible for them to decide the day, time and other demographics, for when the ad should appear, as is seen with TV and radio ads.

Google tested video ads in search results last year, but they have not gone mainstream with the feature. Yahoo! seems to be following in Google’s footsteps, but seems determined to beat them to the punch in delivering a rich media ad solution first.

Ads with the video and images embedded within the search results would certainly increase the impact that the ad has on the user. Yahoo!’s Rich Ads also allow the creation of deep links to the relevant pages and they can also contain boxes to enter data or select from lists of products, allowing customers to search for the product without having to navigate away from the page. Brand logos can also be incorporated into the ads.

While these features help advertisers and agencies to increase brand recognition and advertiser conversion rates, making them attractive to advertisers, it is not doubtful that they will make Yahoo! any dearer to end users. The company is desperately trying to lure advertisers, and could be shooting itself in the foot by alienating end users in the process.

Michael Walrath, Yahoo!’s senior vice president advertising marketplaces group says, “As the economy continues to put pressure on advertising budgets, marketers are looking for increased accountability for every dollar they spend. Yahoo!’s new targeting products significantly improve the ability for search and display advertisers to reach their target audience providing increased efficiency and accountability.”

Don’t they ever learn? Google had it right to start with – forget advertisers – concentrate on getting users and the advertisers will automatically follow.

In the past, individual video results occupied the place of an antire search listing, and were  accompanied by a title, a short, one-line snippet pulled from the YouTube page for that video, the duration and average user ratings for the video, as can be seen alongside. This is still the predominant listing format for most universal search results.

However, some searches seem to now yield a single result with two videos placed side-by-side, as seen in the screenshot below. Both the videos are still pulled from YouTube, and both are accompanied by a short title, but are without any description snippet or ratings information and instead just contain information about the duration of the video.

While both videos in the screenshot above do seem equally relevant to the query, that does not seem to be the sole influencing factor for such a layout of the results, as the two videos in the first example shown above-right are also equally relevant in fact, but are still listed one below the other.

It is not clear at present how Google determines whether videos should be presented in this layout or another. It may be something to do with the currenct nature of the query or it may be that both videos score the exact same relevance points according to the Google algorithm and can therefore be clubbed together, even though they are varied in content and come from different useer accounts.

The series of graphs below explain these findings one by one:

More searchers limit themselves to the 1st page

The percentage of searchers viewing only a few of the results has gone up quite dramatically, emphasizing the need for websites to rank within the top 3 results, or above the fold, rather than just anywhere on the first page.

A much higher percentage of searchers limited themselves to just the 1st page of the search engine results in 2008 than they did in 2002. This could be due to shorter attention spans, but is more likely to be due to the reduction in spam on organic search results and the improved quality of search results through the introduction of features such as universal search.

In all likelihood, the contributing factors are a mix of both. While search results have improved in quality, users have become much more impatient, and move from one page to another very quickly. This is backed up by the second finding in the study – 26% of searchers try a new search query after viewing just the first page of results, up from 14% in 2002.

Fewer searchers look at the 2nd or further pages

Correspondingly, the percentage of searchers looking at the first two pages has fallen:

As has the percentage of searchers looking at the first three pages:

Search marketing professionals need to take note of this finding. There are two important factors to keep in mind:

1. Differentiation has become even more important now
2. Using all means available has also become extremely important.

Marketing professionals can use a variety of assets available to them in the digital library, such as video, audio and images, and put them up on the web site where appropriate. Having multimedia on site would in itself give websites an edge over the competition, in addition to the possibility of showing up in the ‘blended results’ on universal search.

Apart from competing with other organic search results, advertisers will also need to consider using new paid search strategies that are now available, such as video ads in Google search, to improve the users awareness of their brand.

Yahoo! has chosen India to beta test this new search feature as India is a very fast growing market. If user reaction to the feature is positive, they will offer this feature in other countries as well. To start with, Glue pages will cover the travel, sports, health, technology, finance and entertainment verticals – topics that will have a large amount of information and several sources.

Glue pages are expected to improve the over all user experience. Mr. Gopal Krishna, Head of Audience at Yahoo! India says, “this concept integrates the best of info in a visually appealing manner.”

The new search results page format is very similar to the search results found on Ask 3D. However, they differ substantially from the Google universal search results page, in that, here the information is be put up in the form of separate columns. The layout of the columns varies from topic to topic. Even the placement of sponsored links seems to be varied across searches.

….
Comparison of Yahoo! Glue pages and Ask 3D results

Search results will now be inclusive of news, videos, music, images, Wikipedia articles and information from other sources. Users can browse through videos, articles and images on a given topic within the same page without needing to click through to visit multiple pages. The time wasted in the actual search process will now be considerably reduced.

Glue pages seem to be indiscriminately “open” in their choice of sources. Content is drawn from sites such as Last.FM, Wikipedia, HowStuffWorks.com and even YouTube, which is owned by their main competitor, Google!

Users who are not satisfied with the Glue pages can switch to the old format by simply clicking on the “classical search” tab. Yahoo! Has obviously put in some time and effort to offer a lot of good information in user friendly manner on their search results page. It is a shame though, that Ask beat them to the punch by a long time, and the improved layout did nothing to help improve Ask’s marketshare. History is not on Yahoo!’s side in this case, even if they are pinning their hopes on attracting and retaining more searchers through this improved search format.