Tag Archives: search

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Google Becomes More Social And It’s Hurting Your Business …JeffBulla’s blog


Posted: 01 Mar 2011 01:47 PM PST

 Google Becomes More Social And It’s Hurting Your Business  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JeffbullassBlog/~3/ntwQ5-nKbC8/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Conversations in bars and dinner parties about who is right or wrong are often solved by the smart phone being drawn from the pocket or handbag with a Tweet subsequent mobile search on “Lord Google” with the question being answered from Wikipedia or another website with authority. Problem solved… using a blunt mobile instrument without a fight breaking out at the bar or the tipping of wine into someone’s lap.

The online search industry is embedded in our daily lives with up to 90% of all buying decisions starting with an online search and 89% of all clicks through to a website occurring from websites that appear on the first page of Google.

Google has been with us for over 10 years now (the company started in 1998) and has just announced a continuing evolution of its search algorithms to maintain its relevancy and that includes more integration with social media that has been occurring since 2009, though you may not have noticed. Google has also added other tweaks such as increasing visibility and ranking for content that is more recent and this puts fresh unique content right in the frame and blogs are essential for companies to maintain regular published online content.

If you haven’t taken close notice of Google’s search page recently beyond just looking at your results, just take a look down the left side when you do a Google search and you will notice this refined search banner that has 5 social network elements.

5 Major Social Media Elements In Google Search

Images (which includes social media channels such as Flickr)

Videos (which includes a well known social network YouTube”)

Realtime (this is the feed from Twitter.another social media channel you may have heard of but conveniently renamed by Google)

Discussions (this highlights social channels including forums)

Blogs (another social web platform)

Google’s Latest Announcement

Google has included some significant changes in its latest announcement including

Increasing the priority and prominence of search results from platforms such as Twitter, Flickr and Quora (a new social network kid on the block)

Blending results throughout the page instead of only at the bottom

Adding friends social media interactions into search results

This is done by an annotation system that lets you know when a friend has shared a specific link or search result. If your friend writes a blog about how to create honey, that result will have an annotation that your friend has “shared this,” either via Google or through one of Google’s three major social integrations.

This will produce a massive increase in social results appearance in search with friends results turning up in if they have tweeted a reference to that particular search term. You can also connect your Google account to social networks like Twitter if you choose either publicly or privately as you may not want to reveal that you are a @spongebobsuperfan on Twitter.

Google On How It Works On YouTube

Click here to view the embedded video.

What Are The Implications For Business?

The implication for business from the latest announcement and the continuing refinements is that if you want to increase your chances of appearing high in a Google search, that just pursuing a SEO link strategy is not going to be as successful as in the past.

It is now a necessity and a priority to be participating on the major social media channels or you are reducing your brands chances of “being found online” high up on search results.

If you are not active on social media because you think it’s all hype then you may be damaging your business because Google is making social search a priority and your potential customers will find it increasingly hard to find you when they do their next online search and you can’t be found.

The reality is that social media integration into search is here to stay and you need to learn the rules of the new social web or you will reduce your organisations visibility and no one wants to be invisible unless you are a super hero or a dinosaur.

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Google -Official blog
More transparency and control over location 

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 11:10 AM PDT

We’ve always focused on offering people the most relevant results. Location is one important factor we’ve used for many years to customize the information that you find. For example, if you’re searching for great restaurants, you probably want to find ones near you, so we use location information to show you places nearby. 

Today we’re moving your location setting to the left-hand panel of the results page to make it easier for you to see and control your preferences. With this new display you’re still getting the same locally relevant results as before, but now it’s much easier for you to see your location setting and make changes to it.

Your location setting is now always visible on the left side of the search results page.

We do our best to automatically detect the most useful location, but we don’t always get it right—so in some cases you’ll want to change the setting. At other times, you may want to change your location to explore information relevant to another area. For example, let’s say you’re at work in Mountain View and you’re making plans to see a movie in San Francisco (a common occurrence here at Google). You can change your location to “San Francisco” and search for [showtimes] to find movie listings in San Francisco or search for [restaurants] to find places to eat before the show. Similarly, if you’re planning a trip to Hawaii, you can change the location to “Honolulu” and start exploring the [weather], [hotels] and of course the [beaches]. The location you set can be as specific as a particular zip code or as general as an entire country, but more specific settings generally lead to better search results.

Click “Change location” to specify your location preference.

You used to be able to see and control your location settings, but it was a little clunky. To see your settings, you could click “View customizations” on the results page and to modify them you could click “Change location” next to a variety of search results, such as maps and movie listings. As time has gone by, more and more locally relevant information has come online, whether it’s local business listings or a blog from your hometown. Meanwhile, Google has become much better at presenting this locally relevant content—so it felt like the right time to make this setting easier to find.

The new interface is rolling out now and will be available in more than 40 languages soon. We’re not changing anything about how we use location information to improve search, so it doesn’t change our existing privacy policies. To learn more about our new interface and how we use location in search, check out our help center.

Posted by Mack Lu, Associate Product Manager
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Official Google Blog
The new Google Search Appliance—a bridge to the cloud 

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 07:00 AM PDT

(Cross-posted from the Enterprise Blog) 

In the last year, businesses have started using cloud-based applications from Google and other technology providers at an accelerated rate. While many organizations still have information that resides in on-premise systems, more and more important business information today is living in the cloud, in collaborative tools like Google Apps—now used by more than 3 million businesses—and services like Twitter. Starting today, Cloud Connect for the Google Search Appliance lets workers search across both on-premise and cloud-based content from a single search box, delivering more comprehensive results and improving productivity. We’ve also added a few other handy features that make it easier to collaborate and find information faster.

Cloud Connect for the Google Search Appliance
Cloud Connect displays relevant, personalized results from Google Docs and Google Sites alongside results from more traditional repositories, like file shares and content management systems. Easier access to collaborative documents, spreadsheets, presentations and sites with Cloud Connect speeds up how quickly coworkers can complete projects. Cloud Connect also lets users search content from Twitter, as well as blogs and industry websites via Google Site Search.

For organizations such as Delta Hotels and Avago that have already deployed both Google Apps and the Google Search Appliance, the Cloud Connect feature brings “universal search” to a new level, with more accessible business systems and content now spanning from cloud to ground.


People Search
This new version also helps foster faster collaboration between employees with the addition of People Search, which makes it easy to find experts and contact coworkers who are related to a search query, right from the search results page. For example, a search for “field marketing” would return a list of field marketing team members alongside other relevant content. Organizations can index personnel information like department, interests, expertise and location, and there’s an LDAP connector to help get People Search up and running quickly. 

Dynamic Navigation and more
Our new Dynamic Navigation feature allows users to drill down into search results based on search modifiers for their queries, and Active-Active Mirroring improves reliability by spreading search traffic across multiple boxes. Dynamic Navigation was a top user request and we’re glad to be able to add it. In addition, the Search Appliance now supports Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 content without the need for additional connectors.

As you move your business to the cloud, the Google Search Appliance’s new features can be an important bridge between on-premise and cloud-based systems, while enhancing employee collaboration. You can learn more about this latest release at www.google.com/gsa.

Posted by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Enterprise Search
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Google


Official Google Blog

 

–Posted: 16 Oct 2010 11:37 AM PDT–

**This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

Search is always evolving, and we’re excited to share the latest this week—from Google Auto complete to our fun homepage doodles—as well as a glimpse at what the U.S. is searching for. Here’s this week’s round up of updates:

A birthday surprise
Because doodles are such a fun part of the search experience, we thought we’d share a fun little way Google will help celebrate your birthday. When you include your date of birth on your Google profile, you may notice a special treat on the Google homepage on your birthday (be sure to sign in). Click on the doodle for another birthday surprise!

Renaming Google Suggest
We first launched Google Suggest in 2004 in Labs to help people enter their searches faster. Suggest has been a very popular feature, and some people have been asking what happened to it. Never fear, it hasn’t gone anywhere—we just renamed it to “Google Autocomplete.” As part of our launch of Google Instant, we thought “Autocomplete” fit better with the new functionality—automatic queries and automatic results.

Google Instant in new countries across Asia
We’ve been rapidly expanding Google Instant around the globe. Last week we launched Instant in Australia, India, Korea, New Zealand and Singapore. Now that it’s been a few weeks since our initial release, we’ve been finding that people are really learning how to get the most out of Instant. For example, in just two weeks, we saw an increase in the fraction of searches performed without hitting enter or clicking search. This is a very demanding launch for our infrastructure and we’re expanding around the globe as soon as we can.

Eurostat data in search
We’ve also rolled out some improvements our public data search features. We’ve been working closely with Eurostat to surface some really useful and interesting data about unemployment rates, government debt, minimum wage and broadband penetration across Europe. Try searching for [arbeitslosenstatistik deutschland], [smic france] or [deuda publica españa] to see examples of this data visualisation in action. The data is available across 34 languages. We’ve also internationalized data from the World Bank. You can learn more on our European policy blog.

The week in searches
Curious to know what Google Searches skyrocketed in the U.S. this week? Check out the Google Beat, where you’ll find an inside look into what people are clicking on Google. This week, we cover everything from Columbus Day to Brett Favre and the buzz around “Cigar Guy.”

We hope you find these updates useful. Stay tuned for more next week.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director, Search Product Management