Let’s take a trip back in time. The year is 1994, and two tech giants are going to war over copyright. They are Microsoft and Apple, and they are fighting over a copyright claim by Apple over Microsoft and HP’s use of graphical user interface elements from the Macintosh OS. The resulting court case, Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation, ended with a ruling in Microsoft’s favor, mostly due to a contractual license agreement between the two.

The matter was never fully settled by the case though. Instead, negotiations that took place several years later resulted in the two companies agreeing to make Internet Explorer Mac’s default browser. Microsoft also agreed to keep developing Office for the Mac. Most importantly though, Microsoft invested $150 million into Apple to keep it afloat.

This series of events, which happened while Steve Jobs was being reinstated as the CEO of Apple, set the stage for what is happening today between Microsoft, Apple, and Google. While Microsoft and Apple are still bitter rivals, several recent events have inadvertently brought them closer together in order to fight their common enemy: Google.

The phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” comes to mind. Let’s explore how we got to this tipping point.

Android: Google Enters Apple’s Turf

When Google CEO Eric Schmidt joined Apple’s Board of Directors in 2006, the move made perfect sense. Here’s what Apple said about Eric in its original announcement:

“Eric’s 20 years of experience as an Internet strategist, entrepreneur and technologist give him a well-seasoned perspective which perfectly complements Google’s needs as a young and rapidly growing company with a unique corporate culture.”

At that time, Google wasn’t in mobile, hardware, operating systems, or browsers. Now Google is directly competing with Apple through the Nexus One, Google Chrome, Chrome OS, and even possibly in the tablet computer space.

It all started with Android, though. Back in August 2007, details began to leak about Google building a mobile OS or even a GPhone. It turned out to be Android, the open-source mobile OS that is now the fastest growing smartphone OS on the market.

At first, Android didn’t pose much of a threat, but as more phones utilized the software, the relationship between Google and Apple became very uncomfortable. Eric Schmidt sat out board meetings discussing the iPhone due to conflict of interest, but the relationship only eroded from there.

Watershed Moment: Eric Schmidt Resigns from Apple’s Board

Tensions between the two companies grew worse after Apple rejected Google Voice as an app on the iPhone.

The resulting FCC inquiry, along with an FTC investigation and the announcement of Google Chrome OS were just too much. On August 3rd, 2009, Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple’s Board of Directors.

In retrospect, this was the moment when Apple, Google, and the rest of the world realized that the two companies could no longer be allies. Google’s expanding interest outside of search was pouring over into Apple’s domain on multiple fronts. With the search giant free of its Apple association, it could go all-out on its agenda to bring more people onto the web for longer (read the Google Revenue Equation to learn why).

The culmination of the breaking of the Google-Apple alliance? It was the release of the Nexus One, a direct competitor to Apple’s lucrative iPhone.

Recent Events: Apple and Microsoft Talk Bing

Yesterday we learned that Apple and Microsoft are in talks to make Bing the default search engine for the iPhone. While we’ve heard this rumor before, the talk seems to be heating up. Most of our readers expressed their dismay or shock over the potential deal, some questioning why Apple would ever team up with Microsoft over Google.

Really though, the deal makes perfect sense, given the new competitive landscape. Earlier today, Jim Goldman at CNBC provided some interesting new information on the dynamics of the Apple-Google-Microsoft relationship. According to his source, Steve Jobs hates Eric Schmidt (it wouldn’t surprise us) and Microsoft is offering a bigger cut of iPhone search revenues than Google.

While Microsoft and Apple’s relationship grew cold after the Redmond, WA company bailed Apple Computer out, it never vanished. Moreover, Steve knows that he can work with Microsoft, especially if it helps Microsoft hurt Google.

Android has become the de-facto alternative to the iPhone OS, and the Nexus One is closest thing yet to a smartphone that can stand up to the iPhone’s dominance. While Microsoft and Apple are still in competition over Mac vs. PC, Apple clearly believes that its future isn’t just in computers, but in other Internet devices such as the iPhone and the fabled Apple Tablet. Microsoft poses far less of a threat in these areas than Google does.

It’s time to call it: Google is now Apple’s greatest enemy. Soon Google will be entering its OS turf with Chrome OS. Apple increasingly sees Google as a major competitor over the next few years. While the company Steve built doesn’t particularly like Microsoft, it knows that it has to work with the lesser of two evils in order to succeed.

Say hello to the new dynamic. It’s Apple + Microsoft vs. Google. May the new battle begin.

Tags: apple, bing, business news, Column, Google, google search, iphone, microsoft, Opinion, social media, trending

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The move was generally well received. This was reflected in the comments from WebProNews readers on our past coverage. For example, a commenter going by the handle Stupidscript said, "It’s definitely a good time to start wrapping your head around the notion of ‘providing context’, because the web is heading into its "semantic" period … where each link will be more or less valuable based on its relationships with and context to information found behind other links."

Google’s use of breadcrumbs in search results is the focus of a recently submitted question to the Google Webmaster Central team. The question was, "Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the kind of delimiter matter? Is there any best practice? What character to use is best? > or | or / or???" Google’s Matt Cutts responded:

Matt says you should have a set of delimited links on your site that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy. He also notes, however, that it is still in the "early days" for breadcrumbs.

"Think about the situation with sitelinks," he says. "Whenever we started out with sitelinks, it took a while before…for example, we added the ability in Google Webmaster Tools where you could remove a sitelink that you didn’t like or that you thought was bad. So we started out, and we did a lot of experiments, and we’ve changed the way that sitelinks look several times. And we have different types of sitelinks (within a page, and the standard ones you’re familiar with). So we’ve iterated over time."

In this same way, he says, Google is in the early stage with breadcrumbs and he has seen different experiments with them. For example, there have been prototypes where the breadcrumbs were in the rich snippet gray line, above the regular snippet. "Having it in the URL is kind of nice, but it could still change over time," he says.

He says the best advice he can give is to make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy, and that will give you the best chance of getting breadcrumbs to show up in Google, but Google will continue to work on ways to improve breadcrumbs. He says any new announcements about it will likely be made on the Google Webmaster blog.

While Matt doesn’t exactly lean toward one way or another with regards to which character to use as asked about in the submitted question, all of the examples I have seen highlighted show the ">" used. That includes examples from Google’s original announcement on the inclusion of breadcrumbs. Based on that, if I were going to choose one, I’d go with that.

There are three types of breadcrumbs (as described here): path, location, and attribute. Path breadcrumbs show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page, while location breadcrumbs show where the page is located in the website hierarchy. Attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page. Obviously, location breadcrumbs would be the ones Google is using (although with personalized search becoming more of a factor, who knows in the future?).

Have you seen an increase in clickthrough from breadcrumbs in Google resutls? Discuss here.

Related Articles:

> Google Rolls Out Breadcrumb Display in SERPs

> Google Makes it Easier to Tell Where Results Originate From

> Get More Links in Your Actual Google Results

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BusinessWeek’s Peter Burrows and Cliff Edwards spoke to "two people familiar with the matter," and found out that Google might get bumped from its position as default provider.

The pair reported, "The talks have been under way for weeks, say the people, who asked not to be named because the details have not been made public."

Assuming this is true, it’s likely that the increasing popularity of Android is one of the biggest factors to influence Apple’s decision.  Microsoft, which spent at least $100 million launching Bing and has Google beat by $90 billion in terms of market caps, probably offered Apple more money, too.

Still, even the unnamed sources of this rumor haven’t declared that a new arrangement is far from a sure thing.  So for the time being, we’ll just have to watch, wait, and hope that a deal between Apple and Microsoft wouldn’t be a sign of the apocalypse.

Related Articles:

> Bing Improves Its Autosuggest Feature

> Bing Makes Out Well In Search Spend Report

> Bing Gets A Bunch Of New Search Features

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Google considers understanding human language to be one of the hardest problems in artificial intelligence, and the key to returning the best possible search results. While it is far from perfect now, Google has invested a great deal of time into this (5 years of research to be exact).

To cut to the chase, here are some things pertaining to Google’s handling of synonyms that you should keep in mind:

1. Google contantly monitors its system for handling synonyms with regard to search result relevance.

2. Google says synonyms affect 70% of user searches across over 100 languages.

3. For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improve search results, Google has only found one "truly bad" synonym.

4. Google does not normally fix bad synonyms by hand, but rather makes changes to its algorithms to try and correct the problem. "We hope it will be fixed automatically in some future changes," Baker says.

5. Google has recently made a change to how its synonyms are displayed: in SERP snippets, terms are bolded, just like the actual words you searched for.

6. Google uses "many techniques" to extract synonyms. Its systems analyze perabytes of data to build "an intricate understanding of what words can mean in different contexts"

7. Some words or initials can have tons of different meanings, and Google uses other words in the query to help determine the correct ones. For example, there are over 20 possible meanings for the term "GM" that Google’s system knows something about.

8. Google includes variants on terms (such as singular and plural versions) within its "umbrella of synonyms".

9. Google still makes mistakes with synonyms.

10. You can turn off a synonym in a search by adding a "+" before the term or by putting the words in quotation marks.

Google wants feedback on algorithm mistakes. They’ll take it through the web search help center forum, or through a Twitter hashtag: #googlesyns.

It will be interesting to see how far Google progresses in the area of natural language search, because Baker is absolutely right in that it is a key to providing more relevant results. If they can understand exactly what we want from our language, without us having to tweak it too much, that will be a tremendous stride for search. Instead of us trying to figure out what Google wants us to say, Google would just understand what we say. Luckily people have gotten much better at searching over the years, learning to enter longer, more specific queries.

Related Articles:

> Google Launches Social Search Experiment

> Optimizing for Mixed Media Search Results

> Succeeding In SEO Requires Change

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We know that Apple and Google aren’t on very friendly terms anymore. These two companies once shared top executives – Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on Apple’s board of directors – but after Google started directly competing with Apple, especially with Android and, more recently, the Nexus One, they’ve become bitter rivals.

It doesn’t surprise us, then, that Apple might be in talks with Microsoft to turn Bing into the default search engine on the iPhone.

Personally, I hate the idea. I like Google, I’ve never considered switching to Bing, and I’m quite dependent on both Google Search and various other Google services, such as Gmail and Google Calendar. But would switching to Bing really be a deal breaker for iPhone users? I doubt it – especially since you can change your default search engine for iPhone’s Safari in the settings (currently the choices are Google and Yahoo; Bing is completely absent). If Apple really decides to make the switch, it will be a painful sting for Google – a demonstration of power, if you will – but if you ever wondered why Google had decide to create its own mobile operating system and a mobile phone, well, this here is the reason.

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Microsoft’s Bing search engine has just dropped the beta tag, a month and a half after Bing Maps was released. Not only that, but Bing Maps is now sporting a few additional nifty and useful applications.

Microsoft’s been looking for any edge it could get in its race to beat Google’s dominant search engine. The tech giant launched the revamped service to the press last month, demonstrating its Silverlight interface and array of apps, including a Twitter app that lets you find tweets based on geolocation.

Microsoft now believes that Maps has undergone enough testing to become a full part of the Bing experience. This of course is different from Google, who is known for leaving beta tags on Google apps for years.

Coinciding with the announcement comes two new apps, Destination Maps and Local Events. Destination Maps lets you select a map area so that you can provide friends detailed directions from any direction, while Local Events will pop up the time and locations of nearby shows and community events.

As we’ve said before, the new Bing Maps is very slick, although its directions still have a ways to go before it can match Google’s algorithms.

[Source: Bing]

Tags: bing, Bing Maps, microsoft

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Originally posted at The Digital Home

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In light of recent events, Google has decided to postpone its Nexus One launch in China, which was supposed to happen on Wednesday, agencies report. Although Google has entered talks with the Chinese government to discuss the future of their search business in China, it’s now obvious that, until the situation is resolved, other aspects of Google’s business in China will hurt, too.

Together with the news that China Unicom may be postponing all Android-based phone launches, this really shows how big the fallout from the Google-China dispute really is. It’s not only about Google’s search business in China. Google also stands behind one of the most important mobile platforms of today: Android, and cutting business ties with China would mean the demise of Android in one of the world’s biggest markets.

Google spokeswoman Marsha Wang declined to give a reason for the postponement, or a new date for the Nexus One launch.

Tags: android, china, Google, nexus one

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Having a say in what Google says about you is extremely important these days, especially for professionals such as freelancers, for whom a Google search result of their name is a first impression for potential employers. You definitely want your blog or professional web site to show up before your non-professional social networking profiles. Kirkpatrick discovered a small HTML tag that was missing from his own blog, yet present in Twitter, that could make all the difference:

So the long and short of this story is that if you want to make sure that Google understands your blog to be your primary beacon on the web, then you should add the words rel=”me” to a relevant link on your blog. I’ve added that tag to the link on my sidebar that goes to my feedback page, because that’s a good page for me. It’s as simple as making the link text read a href=”http://marshallk.com/feedback” rel=”me”.

It’s not necessarily a foolproof solution, but it should help (and certainly shouldn’t hurt). If you’ve got any other useful tips to keep your blog or personal site at the top of search engines, let us know in the comments.

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From Silicon Valley to Zhongguancun, Google’s surprise announcement that it may pull out of China has fueled an enormous amount of discussion in recent days, not all of it 100% accurate. Below are some misstatements and misunderstandings we’ve seen:

1. Google failed in China

Google’s China operations contribute a small fraction of the company’s overall revenue – the company doesn’t disclose the amount, but analysts estimate it was a few percent of its total $21.8 billion in 2008 revenue, or several hundred million dollars. But Google has made significant progress in China in recent years, raising its share of the Internet search market to roughly 36% in the fourth quarter of 2009 from 13% when it started its Chinese-language google.cn site in early 2006, according to data from research firm Analysys International.

Many other foreign companies doing business in China would gladly forgo big profits in the short term for comparable market-share growth in China—especially in an industry where China has more users than any other country (384 million according to the latest statistics). Google has also been particularly popular among the highly sought-after demographic of young, educated, white-collar urban professionals. The company’s powerful brand of business and ethics (“don’t be evil) has also earned it a fair amount of good will among Chinese Internet users, many of whom are now mourning its (still uncertain) fate. While rival Baidu still has a much larger 58% share of the search market, its brand has suffered as a result of scandals involving paid results and allegations of censorship of sensitive news stories.

Google doesn’t say if it’s profitable in China, but there’s certainly no reason to assume it’s not. Baidu, its chief rival, reported net profit of about $153 million on revenue of $468 million for 2008, when it said it had 6,387 employees. Google’s revenue would have perhaps half or two thirds that amount, but it likely has a much lower cost base in China than Baidu, since Google is believed to employ well under 1,000 employees in the country, and can use technology developed by its U.S. headquarters.

2. Google.com is not accessible in China

Before Google introduced its China-specific search engine, Google.cn, in 2006, its global site Google.com was subject to periodic blocking in China. But for the last four years, Google.com has been almost always accessible to users in China.

However, the fact that Google.com can be accessed from China doesn’t mean that Internet users can get to forbidden content listed in the site’s search results. Links to sites that are blocked in China will still return error messages or time out when they are clicked. (In contrast, Google’s Chinese search engine, Google.cn, will filter out links to sites that don’t comply with Chinese laws and regulations.)

And of course, given the unpredictability of China’s Web restrictions, there’s no guarantee that Google.com will continue to be available to users inside China, at least not without “scaling the wall.”

3. Google has Gmail servers in China

Some reports have said that the reason Chinese hackers were able to access Gmail accounts is that Google has email servers physically located in China. This is not the case. Google says it has no email servers in the country.

Indeed, Google has said keeping its servers out of China was a deliberate move to help protect user information. When the company announced its plans to launch google.cn in January 2006, executives said one of the safeguards it planned to use to protect user interests was that it wouldn’t host user-generated content like email and blogs on servers in China.

Google had reason to be careful. In 2005, there was widespread outcry among rights activists and the U.S. government after Yahoo turned over user information to the Chinese government, which was used as evidence to sentence journalist Shi Tao to 10 years in prison. Yahoo said that, because its Chinese mail servers were inside China, the company felt compelled to comply with the authorities’ request.

4. Google.cn search results are already uncensored

After Tuesday’s announcement, Web users ran amok on Google.cn, looking up sensitive terms such as “Tiananmen 1989,” “tank man,” and even “sensitive words.” But many have been disappointed with the results, as searches for these terms still turned up the familiar disclaimer that “in accordance with local laws and regulations, a portion of the search results are not displayed.”

Google says that it hasn’t yet started to remove content filters on Google.cn, a process that could take weeks.

How to explain the images of tank man and links to sites about the Dalai Lama found via Google.cn? Many of the searches yielding fruitful results appear to have been conducted in English, a trick that often turns up fuller results on Google.cn than a search for the same term in Chinese. (To see what we mean, compare these Google.cn results for “Dalai Lama” in English and Chinese).

5. Google has identified Chinese dissidents as the targets of cyber attacks

Since Google revealed that it has been the target of cyber attacks, and that it had identified two Gmail accounts that had been compromised, a number of prominent Chinese activists have reported that their Gmail accounts have been hacked, in some cases repeatedly. Google says that these intrusions were not part of the larger, sophisticated attack on its security infrastructure, but likely the result of more pedestrian phishing scams or malware.

6. Google has already shut down its business in China

On Friday, Ministry of Commerce spokesman Yao Jian said that neither MOC nor the Beijing Municipal Commission of Commerce had received any information from Google about a planned withdrawal of its investment. A person close to Google also denied rumors that Google employees in China have ceased to report for work.

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Google and the Chinese government have entered talks to discuss the future of Google’s search engine in China, according to Bloomberg.

Google’s recent threat to pull out of China unless it could serve search results uncensored has made front page news, elicited questions from the U.S., and affected the censorship debate.

Now according to an email response Bloomberg received, Google has been holding talks with Chinese authorities and will hold more “in the coming days.” The progress of the talks or what was discussed wasn’t revealed.

The fact that Google and China are in talks doesn’t surprise us. China is still one of the world’s largest economies and a market that hasn’t even come close to reaching its potential. Yet we’d be surprised if these talks result in a censored Google search engine within China. After the company’s strong stand last week, it’d be an embarassing about face to accept censorship once again.

We’ll keep our ears to ground and try to find out more details about the talks. We want to know what you think though: would Google be wise to stay in China with some restrictions or is it better off pulling out completely? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: censorship, china, Google, Google China

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To give credit where it’s due: Nathania Johnson is the one who got an early look at Efficient Frontier’s report (which is supposed to be released tomorrow).  It’s thanks to her, then, that we know Google’s market share in terms of search advertising spending fell 1.0 percent on a year-over-year basis to 74.5 percent.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s share stayed steady (at 20.4 percent), and Bing’s increased by 1.0 percent (to 5.1 percent).

From Microsoft’s perspective, that represents a move in the right direction, at least.  And it’s interesting, too, that Bing managed to draw revenue away from Google instead of its partner-to-be in Sunnyvale.

As for the future, Johnson wrote, "Bing is expected to grow 30% in 2010, giving them a 6-7% share of paid clicks."  The outlook for the whole industry seems fairly bright, too, given that she stated, "SEM spend will grow 15-20% in 2010."

Related Articles:

> Bing Gets New Health Search Features

> Bing Gets A Bunch Of New Search Features

> Link Building For Bing Rankings: Dos And Don’ts

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Yahoo is also launching a new tool, which it says makes i easier to get started with Yahoo Search Marketing. "We know there are many advertisers who use other search marketing providers such as Google Adwords, so we’ve built a feature allowing easy and efficient conversion of your AdWords campaign data into Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns," says Yahoo VP and general manager of search marketing David Pann.

Users can import files by clicking the "Import Campaigns" button. Yahoo believes this will encourage more advertisers to use Yahoo Search.

"Our sales team has some new tools to help advertisers who work with a Yahoo! account representative, including a web-to-mobile migration tool that makes it easy to move a traditional paid search campaign to our mobile paid search platform," says Pann. "Another tool automatically adds relevant new long-tail keywords to a campaign as our systems show that users are now searching for them. Additionally, we know  that advertisers can add thousands of keywords/terms into their account at any given time, so we built a tool that can group them into ad groups by relevance automatically."

Yahoo is also reminding people of recent updates to its search results, which the company says are more relevant. These include shortcuts for tweets and news links, and Yahoo’s video search refiner.

Related Articles:

> Yahoo (Somewhat) Addresses Future of BOSS

> Carol Bartz Gives Self A B-

> Yahoo, Bing Trade Market Share Again

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Developers have the flexibility to display RiotWise ads in a way that best fits users of their particular application. For example, partners such as Digsby (the popular social messaging client) and ÜberTwitter (the #1 Twitter Client for BlackBerry) are showing ads directly in the real-time stream. Other implementations include more traditional mobile banner placements or the familiar AdSense-style text block.

OneRiot shares advertiser revenue with developers. All developers interested in monetizing their applications with RiotWise should email riotwise@oneriot.com.

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There are really two things to consider;  web site design and how customers are going to find the web site through mobile search.

How do you design for the mobile platform? The good news is that in most cases, you don’t need a separate site, you just need a cascading style sheet (CSS) attached to your website that feeds up specific instructions to a mobile browser. For the most part, mobile browsers are a lot like the web used to be; mainly text and links. Granted, as the iPhone, Google/Android Phones and other more advanced devices come along, the browsing features also advance. Most smart phones like the iPhone view the web as it should be without anything stripped out. But, since everyone doesn’t own a smart phone just yet, it’s worth focusing on the what the mass mobile market has, basic handheld web browsers.

When designing your CSS for handheld web browsers, here are a few things to consider:

1. You have very limited screen real estate. About 2×3 inches or so.
2. All fonts should be in their most basic format. Forget about color and typography.
3. All images should be striped out, unless they are absolutely necessary.
4. Remove all advertising as you already have limited screen space.
5. If you don’t need it, hide it. Remove any Google Friend Connect, Facebook Fan Box or other third party services. Focus on your content.
6. Remove all background colors. Basic black text on a white background is good.
7. Create basic forms, if you choose to keep them. My advice would be to remove them and just showcase the phone number. They are on their cell phone after all.
8. Remove Flash, Java and any plug-in content unless absolutely necessary.
9. All in all, simplify.

If you run a WordPress blog, you can use a WPtouch iPhone Theme plug-in to automatically create a small-screen friendly version of your blog.

If you want to view your site as if you were on a mobile browser, here are a few choices:

• Web Developer extension for Firefox. It allows you to overwrite the web style sheet with the handheld one if a site has one. If not, it’ll just show the site without any CSS styles.
• iPhone simulator called iPhoney. It looks cool, but since the iPhone really doesn’t render a striped down version of a site, it’s more of a toy.
• Opera Mini browser. There is an online version and it’s free. Simply put in a URL and it’ll render a website as if it was on a mobile phone.

From my testing, the Opera Mini browser was a great experience. It has a small screen, shows handheld versions of style sheets and all in all, it does a great job at giving you what a real phone will show. Here is my before having a handheld CSS and after experiences on the Opera Mini browser.

So where does SEO fall into all of this? Is there a separate ranking algorithm for mobile devices? No, not from what I can see.  While smart phone users can type or speak their search queries, the sort order rankings are fairly consistent between a search on a phone and a search on a computer.

Here’s an example with Google search on an iPhone and at Google.com.

The best way to ensure you are found on mobile devices is to make sure your site is in all the local search directories with full and accurate profiles. Places like Google Local and Yahoo local probably receive more traffic from users who want to find business in a certain area. When I’ve used my phone to search the web, I was searching for specific businesses to visit.  Social networking through mobile is also popular and through links, can drive web site traffic. A combination of search and social is the direction where I see the bulk of mobile traffic going.

Mobile search is an area of the Internet that is finally heating up which is supported by predictions made by eMarketer. Some marketers are putting a lot of stock into mobile marketing as cell phones and smart phones become more widespread and offer more capabilities. However, site owners are not always taking those platforms into account. To ensure your site is mobile ready, get listed in local directories and add a handheld CSS file to your site. These two easy items are a great start for optimizing your site for handheld web browsers.

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Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?

Do you rely on links from Facebook and Twitter updates? Discuss here.

Essentially, Matt says Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It’s just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).

While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public, Google can’t crawl it, and it can’t assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it can’t fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank, Matt says. With Twitter, most links are nofollowed anyway.

"At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we’d treat links from WordPress or .edus or.govs or anything like that," says Cutts. "It’s not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it’s not being crawled or it might be nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank."

There you have it. Matt’s response probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to most of you, but it’s always nice to hear information like this straight from Google.

Do you like the way Google handls links from Facebook and Twitter? Would you do it differently? Share your thoughts.

Related Articles:

> Tips for Getting Found in Real-Time Searches

> Google Makes a Second Real-Time Search Announcement

> Yahoo Rolling Out Something Kind of Like Real-Time Search

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"2009 witnessed an explosion of apps and services catering to users of the realtime web," says Tobias Peggs, GM of OneRiot. "RiotWise is the way to monetize those apps in 2010. Our ads make sense to buyers, make sense to users, and transparently deliver revenue to developers across the realtime web ecosystem."

The following image illustrates how the Riotwise ads work:

OneRiot says RiotWise proved "extremely effective" at monetizing mobile apps, desktop clients, social search engines, and other applications in the realtime web space in a now completed pilot phase. "RiotWise ads are contextually relevant in realtime, resulting in high Click Through Rates (CTR)," the company says. "Advertisers include a range of publishers such as entertainment sites, sports networks, and news organizations. Dynamically created ads link to quality content from these publishers that is highly related to a users’ realtime search term or a global trending topic."

According to OneRiot, the ads have been performing at 3-4 times industry standard CTR for ads in real-time web apps, and delivering significant revenue to developers.

Developers can customize the display of the ads to fit their particular application. "For example, partners such as Digsby (the wildly popular social messaging client) and ÜberTwitter (the #1 Twitter Client for BlackBerry) are showing ads directly in the realtime stream," explains OneRiot. "Other implementations include more traditional mobile banner placements or the familiar AdSense-style text block."

OneRiot shares advertiser revenue with developers.

Related Articles:

> Yahoo May Pursue Real-Time Search With OneRiot

> Real-Time Search API Mania

> Real-Time Search Engine Attracts $7 Million Funding

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Every page of Yahoo Finance has a link that says "Finance Search". Users can simply click this to search or browse a list of the day’s popular finance searches.

When a user’s search exactly matches a ticker or quote name, the user will see pricing information and a chart. They will also get news stories from Yahoo and the web. Another section provides a list of companies (pubic and private), ETFs, Mutual Funds, and Indices (from US and worldwide exchanges) generated from matches between the user’s search and content on Yahoo Finance, including company/quote name, ticker, business summary, key execs, analysts, and insiders.

"As an example, you can enter the name of a person (‘Carol Bartz‘) or a topic (‘biodynamic farm‘) to find related companies," explains Yahoo. "In the example of Carol Bartz, she is a key exec and insider at the companies listed. In the example of ‘biodynamic farm,’ biodynamic farm is mentioned in the business summary on the company profile pages."

When a user uses web search results, they will find content from Yahoo Finance and the web. In the default "all results" view, the top three results come from Yahoo Finance and the ones after that are from the web. However, users can choose the option to view only results from Yahoo Finance or only the web.

Related Articles:

> Yahoo Sponsored Search Getting New Features

> Carol Bartz Gives Self A B-

> Yahoo, Bing Trade Market Share Again

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"Typing a query into the search box on a phone can often be slow and difficult," says Google’s Mobile Engineering Team. "For this reason, relevant search suggestions that match your intended query can meaningfully reduce the time and effort it takes to submit a search."

"For example, when users in the Boston metro area begin typing ‘Muse’, suggestions such as ‘museum of science boston’ and ‘museum of fine arts boston’ are provided because people near Boston frequently look for these very popular museums," the team explains. "On the other hand, users in San Francisco who begin their query with ‘Muse’ will see suggestions for museums in the San Francisco area. By using the device’s current or most recent location, Google is able to offer even better, more useful suggestions than ever before."

Users can simply go to Google.com on their phone’s browser and start typing a query to see the suggestions, although they may have to refresh the page first. Users also must have "save recent locations" and "allow use of device location" turned on in the settings.

This feature is just the latest in Google’s frequent upgrades that may have a direct impact on local businesses. This week, Google also made its Place Pages for businesses more useful by letting businesses update them in real-time.
 

Related Articles:

> Google Simplifies Finding Nearby Businesses from Your Phone

> Critical Local Search Factors To Pay Attention To

> Can Search Engine Optimization Survive Google?

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Just last week Google added location-aware results to mobile searches on both the iPhone and Android platforms. Now that geographical awareness comes to Google Suggest, the feature that tries to anticipate your search query based on its relative popularity with other users (which can often lead to some humorous results).

Ostensibly to save you time typing in your search query on mobile devices, the search suggestions are now based on your phone’s current or last known location. Ideally this will improve the relevancy of those suggested results by optimizing them based on where you are.

In order to take advantage of the new feature, you’ll have to turn on “Save recent locations” and “Allow use of device location” under the Settings link on the google.com home page. You may also have to refresh the google.com page on your phone’s browser in order to see the location-optimized suggestions.

It’s another step in Google’s march into local territory. Anyone have predictions on what will be next?

Tags: -local, android, Google, google suggest, iphone, lbs, location, Search

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Yabigo provides the search results from Yahoo, Bing and Google with one simple search, and compares the results side by side.

http://www.yabigo.com

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WebMii scours the internet including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Yahoo! Search, and other search engines and social networks to build a picture of your online identity. You search using your last and first name and specify if you want your search limited to a region like the USA, France, or other countries listed, and then WebMii returns a huge laundry list of search results that provide everything from images to social network profiles.

WebMii doesn’t know which John Smith you are of course, but that’s a strength when you’re trying to get a picture of how you would be perceived through an online search. If you’re unhappy with the results you’ll want to take a peek at previous guides we’ve shared with you like how to manage your online identity and how to manage your Google reputation.

Have a great way to keep tabs on your online identity? Have a funny story about an online doppelganger? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

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General search engines are used for informational queries that cover broad topics (e.g. CRM software) and often return thousands of results, whereas a user originally sought of more organized information or specific websites (e.g. a brand, a set of products). An application buyer will typically want to find a limited number of highly relevant results in defined category where the information is well-organised and consistent, with a view to finding, comparing and efficiently selecting applications that meet a specific need. This is where GetApp.com comes in!

http://www.getapp.com/

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Traditional yard sales in a virtual format, enabling people who don’t have a front yard or garage to create a virtual sale. Sell your items, or list your events for FREE!

Sellers are able to:

• Create virtual tag sales for a small listing fee and post up to 200 items with pictures and prices without paying commissions
• Manage their sales by deleting sold items and adding new ones through the duration of their sale
• Remain anonymous in deciding which potential buyers to communicate with

Buyers are able to:

• Search by location to trade locally if desired
• Search for items using a sophisticated keyword and tag search
• Contact sellers to barter item prices and shipping as needed

http://www.tagsellit.com/

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The Nielsen Company released its U.S. search rankings for December 2009 earlier today. Of the big three — Google, Yahoo and Bing — Google saw an increase in search share, while both Yahoo and Bing faltered.

Comparing December’s data with some of the measurements from past months seems to indicate that Bing’s marketshare surge was just temporary.

Below we’ve included Nielsen’s data from December 2009 and November 2009. As you can see, Google held a 67.3 percent share in U.S. searches for December 2009. That’s up nearly two full percentage points when compared with the November statistics.

Looking at the charts, it’s clear that this growth came directly at the expense of Yahoo and Bing. Both search engines fell nearly a full point from November to December. Google’s high-profile rollout of real-time search results the first week of December might have had an impact.

Now that Yahoo and Microsoft are officially teaming up for search, both companies will need to start working together quickly if they want to recover and build marketshare. The longer the transition takes, the more Google stands to gain.

Tags: bing, Google, search market share, Yahoo

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Do you see Twitter as important to an effective search marketing campaign? Share your thoughts here.

Google and Microsoft almost simultaneously announced deals with Twitter a few months back, that would give the companies access to tweets in real-time to fuel their respective search engines’ real-time results. Microsoft immediately launched their version, but it was separate from the regular Bing search engine. Google waited a while, but eventually started incorporating real-time results right into regular Google SERPs (including not only tweets, but various other sources).

After the Twitter deals were announced, Bing came out and said, "If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower."

Google was not as vocal about how it would rank tweets and other real-time results, but the company has now shed a bit of light on that via an interview with MIT’s Technology Review. David Talbot interviewed Google "Fellow" Amit Singhal, who has led development of real-time search at the company. According to him, Google also ranks tweets by followers to an extent, but it’s not just about how many followers you get. It’s about how reputable those followers are.

Singhal likens the system to the well-known Google system of link popularity. Getting good links from reputable sources helps your content in Google, so having followers with that some kind of authority theoretically helps your tweets rank in Google’s real-time search.

"One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation," Singhal says. "As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well."

But that’s only one factor.

Do you commonly use hashtags in your tweets? If your goal is to rank in Google’s real-time search index, you may want to cut down on that practice, because according to Singhal, that is a big red flag for a lower quality tweet. This seems to be part of Google’s spam control strategy.

Another noteworthy excerpt from the interview:

Another problem: how, if someone is searching for "Obama," to sift through White House press tweets and thousands of others to find the most timely and topical information. Google scans tweets to find the "signal in the noise," he says. Such a "signal" might include a new onslaught of tweets and other blogs that mention "Cambridge police" or "Harry Reid" near mentions of "Obama." By looking out for such signals, Google is able to furnish real-time hits that contain the freshest subject matter even for very common search terms.

Well, we certainly know more about Google’s strategy for tweet ranking now, but there are still plenty of questions about it. What is Google’s stance is on Ghost Tweeting? Are Google’s ranking factors a good reason to create and follow more Twitter lists in hopes for gaining more reputable industry followers?

The factors mentioned aren’t the only ones Google employs. It’s not like Google is going to tell us everything. It also helps to keep in mind that real-time search spans far beyond just tweets. Still, Twitter is clearly a big part of it, and even the significance of tweets themselves will evolve in time.

Google says it hopes to factor in geo-location data (with regards to tweets) into the real-time search results at some point. Google and Twitter engineers frequently collaborate on  real-time search, which Google itself says is evolving.

By the way, it stands to reason that Google’s strategy for ranking tweets probably shares similarities for how it ranks content from other sources drawn from for real-time search.

Is ranking in Google’s real-time search important to your strategy? Discuss here.

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Social media activities run the gamut from Blogging, micro blogging sites such as Twitter, social networking communities such as LinkedIn and Facebook, video and music uploading sites, discussion forums, photo sharing and more. With so many different sites and ways to participate, it can be difficult to keep track of all your efforts.

Participating in social media doesn’t take a lot of money, but it is very time consuming and businesses want to know that all of this investment in time is paying off. Before launching a
campaign, you should have a firm grasp on what it is you’re trying to accomplish. Is it increasing website traffic? Getting more ezine subscribers? Having more people download your free ebook or whitepaper? Or maybe you just want to work on your company’s brand image. Whatever it is, you need to have a plan. As the old saying goes, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there”. Have your game plan intact before getting started in marketing yourself, or your company with social media.

There are many different forms of social media, so it’s impossible to use them all. Pick three or four, and funnel the majority of your efforts there. Even if you won’t be working them all, at the very least you should claim your name or company name on as many social services as possible. You don’t want to find out later that someone has the user name that you want. If you need to see if your chosen user name is available try http://Namechk.com which checks dozens of social media networking and bookmarking sites all at once to see if it’s available. Claim your name now so you won’t end up being sorry later.

So how do you monitor all the buzz? How do you monitor your brand and protect your hard earned reputation? I thought you’d never ask. There isn’t one fool-proof method but there are many services and tools out there that will make it easy to see who’s talking about you online. Some are free and others will make you pull out your wallet.

These “online reputation management” tools, as they’re often referred to, will help you to define keywords or phrases you wish to track and then watch for any mention of your company name, products, or services. It’s important to defend and monitor your online reputation. Similar to High School reputations, protecting your image online is the name of the game, and just as in real life, everyone has one to maintain.

Let’s take a look at some of the measuring and tracking tools at your disposal:

1) http://BackTweets.com : A search engine for Twitter. See who’s tweeting your links and more. Can also sign up for email alerts of new findings.

2) http://Addictomatic.com : A little different than the others, you type in a keyword, topic or phrase and out it goes searching the top blogs, news sites, Google, Technorati, Ask, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Topix and more. You’ll be given a personalized results page to bookmark with everything it finds related to your topic.

3) http://Buzzoo.net : All about Internet buzz, it tracks several different websites to bring you what’s “hot” right now.

4) http://Surchur.com : Search for the latest and greatest on topics that are popular right now. Type in a keyphrase and it searches blogs, social news sites, photo and video sites for your chosen topic.

5) http://Commentful.Blogflux.com : This service watches for comments on blog posts, Digg, Flickr, and others and notifies you of any findings.

6) http://AlertRank.com : A better way to organize and sort Google alerts. Get a daily report emailed to you in a spreadsheet format of what it finds.

7) http://BoardTracker.com : A search engine for forums only. Monitor discussion boards and be notified by email when a thread matching your search terms is discovered. Free to use.

http://www.google.com/alerts : I’ve been using this “secret weapon” for years. Simply type in your name or company name and receive daily emails of results found. They do the work, you receive the links. Free and nice.

9) http://BrandsEye.com : An online reputation management tool with a real-time, concise overview of your online reputation. Multiple levels of services and pricing available. Starting at $1.00.

10) http://Twazzup.com : Another Twitter only search engine.

11) http://SiteMention.com : Type in your url and find out what’s being said about you. The results returned are gathered from Google Blog Search, Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Delicious and many more.

12) http://Brandwatch.net: This service tracks your brands, companies, even the competition. Sign up for free weekly updates on any brand. Their detailed reports break down what sites like you, your most talked about features, weekly summary of all blogs and forum activity. Very similar to the old “press clipping” service.

13) http://Trackur.com : A tool that scans many websites, including blogs, news, image and video sites, forums and notifies you of any mention of your brand, products/services. Easy to use and affordable. Prices vary depending on need, a personal account is only $18.00 a month, corporate account $88.00 a month with other options also available. Try a “personal” account free for 14 days.

14) http://FiltrBox.com : This one searches online news sources, Twitter and others to find out what’s being said about you or your company. Pricing is based on the number of users, but there is a free version that provides “5 filters” and 15 days of what they call “article history”.

15) http://SocialMention.com/alerts : Just like Google Alerts but for social media. Enter your keyword phrase and email address to be notified of any new findings. Searches blogs, microblogs like Twitter, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, videos and more.

16) http://BlogPulse.com : A search engine that searches only for data posted to blogs. Enter your keyword, hit submit and off it goes to gather results.

17) http://BackType.com : Billing itself as a “conversational search engine” they index millions of conversations from social networks, blogs and other social media.

18) http://sm2.techrigy.com : Industry insiders claim this to be the leading social media monitoring solution online. Choice of free or paid version. Free is limited to five searches and 1,000 results. There are three paid professional levels: Gold, Diamond, or Platinum.

19) http://ReputationDefender.com : This paid service finds out everything there is to know about you online, and if negative information is found they try to have it removed. Different types of plans are available such as “My Reputation”, “My Privacy”, starting at only $14.95 a month.

20) http://Topsy.com : Topsy will track your tweets that have been retweeted so you can find out who’s been sending you all that “link love”. Type in your Twitter user name and you’ll be amazed at what you find.

If you’d like to track incoming traffic from your various social media profiles, an easy way to do it using Google Analytics can be found here http://Tinyurl.com/kuc9rL

Just as there are many ways to market your company using social media, as you can see, there’s a multitude of tools and services at your disposal to track and see if all of that hard work is paying off. Smart companies realize the importance of social media in their marketing efforts and are utilizing it on some level. How smart are you?

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Are Your Ears Burning? – 20 Tools for Tracking Social Media Marketing

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Google’s well-known corporate motto of “don’t be evil” has become a bit of a punchline in recent times. No longer the innocent David against the ruthless Goliath (Microsoft), many have taken a more watchful eye towards the search giant, its vast ambitions, and the seemingly infinite amount of data it seeks to collect about us.

This afternoon though, by standing up to censorship in China, Google reclaimed some of the mystique that once made it so special. In the growth market that everyone is after (and Google still trails significantly in), the company is putting principles ahead of profit.

Writing on the Google blog today, the company’s Senior Vice President David Drummond said, “we launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results,” a position that was met with plenty of criticism at the time.

However, now that it’s seen the breadth of Chinese censorship by way of implied state sponsored attacks and surveillance of Google products, the company has been prompted to action, declaring in as straight forward a way as possible that “we have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn.”

Mind you, if Google’s ultimately successful, they do stand to gain plenty –- a search engine operating in a free and open market is more profitable than one in a closed and censored one. But we think it’s unlikely that China will essentially reverse course on some of its fundamental values in a matter of weeks, and as such, Google will likely feel pain to its bottom line in the short-term, especially if competitors like Baidu, Microsoft, and Yahoo don’t take a similar position.

It’s too soon to give Google a standing ovation – we’ll wait and see what kind of agreement, if any, they’re able to strike with the Chinese government before full adulation. But at least for a day or two, we can once again think of Google as a company that stands for more than a never ending quest for market share and profit.

Tags: china, Google, Political

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In a lengthy blog post today, Google announced that it would no longer censor its Chinese search engine, even if it means pulling out of China entirely. This comes in the wake of a wide-ranging attack on its infrastructure targeting Chinese human rights activists.

In the post, Google outlined in rather striking detail a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” that occurred last month, targeting around 20 companies. In its investigation, the search giant found that the attackers’ primary objective was accessing Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. It also found that dozens of other Gmail accounts owned by human rights activists worldwide were compromised, most likely due to phishing scams or malware.

Google wouldn’t say it, but implications are that the Chinese government had something to do with these attacks.

As a result of the attacks, Google has decided to reassess its presence in China. The Chinese government and Google have fought over censorship before, but currently the search engine does block certain results (such as images of the Tiananmen Square massacre).

Now Google’s making it clear that it won’t comply with China’s demands any longer. Here’s the key paragraph from the Google post:

“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

Google has taken a very public stand against censorship, albeit one that is years overdue. How this series of events plays out could not only affect Google and the tech community, but global politics as a whole.

Tags: censorship, china, Google, trending

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Is there a point where adapting to Google’s changes becomes impossible? Share your thoughts.

To a very drastic extent, Google drives how the search engine marketing industry operates. With Google holding such a dominant share of the search market, it’s not hard to figure out why. While some may tell you it’s not the most productive use of your marketing time, businesses who hope to find success in driving people to their website (or even brick and mortar store) often hang on every word Google says and every change Google makes to its search engine and/or search results.

Liz Gannes with the tech blog GigaOm recently spoke with Google Engineering Director David Glazer about Google’s approach to social for 2010. And we come back to that changing search landscape. Social plays a huge role in it, and Glazer acknowledged just that. Gannes reports:

In 2010, Google plans to expose and elicit more of the social network built into the tools that many of us already use — Gmail, Google Talk, etc. If you use Google products, the company already knows who your most important contacts are, what your core interests are, and where your default locations are. Glazer said to expect many product and feature launches that start to connect that information in useful ways.

What does "social" mean to Google? "Who I am, who do I know, what do I do," said Glazer. (emphasis added)

Back in October, Google released its experimental Social Search feature, which Google said would help users "find more relevant public content from their broader social circle."

Relevance of social search has been questioned though. WebProNews recently discussed search trends for 2010 and beyond with comScore‘s "Search Evangelist" Eli Goodman. Believe it or not, social search is counted among these trends, and he mentions such a lack of relevance in social search results.

The real question is: is SEO going to become less relevant? Before you get all worked up, I will acknowledge that SEO is based on adaptation and changing along with the search engines. In fact, that was essentially the topic of a recent WebProNews article. Hear me out.

Right now, search engine optimization as we know it is still very relevant for businesses, but as Google learns more about who people are, they’re going to direct them to what they think is right. Social search and personalized search are very closely related.

Think about Google’s universal search, which aims to deliver results Google thinks you might want. These results draw from a wide variety of different places – Google News, Google’s real-time index, YouTube, etc. Each set of universal results takes more attention away from the regular old organic results. How long until social search (or something like it) becomes a part of this.

And let’s not forget about mobile. Smartphones are taking the world by storm, and Google is doing everything in its power to take over this market (though it still has work to do). Google knows your location if you let it. Then you have Google Latitude. Google knows your friends’ locations if they let it. Then, what happens when Chrome OS (Google’s Operating System) comes out. It may not catch on as much as Google would like, but then again it may. It starts on netbooks, but how long until that grows into something bigger?

Google just keeps on releasing more products. More products means more opportunities for the company to encourage use of other Google products. They also keep acquiring more companies by the way, and that includes the recent acquisition of a mobile advertising agency and an attempted acquisition of Yelp (the failure of which, was quickly compensated for to some extent by Google’s release of the "Near me Now" feature).

As Gannes notes, Google has this month brought on strategists Joseph Smarr and Chris Messina, who she says are "widely known for their advocacy of the open social web." This likely will lead to more social and personalized experiences related to search.

Chris Brogan, one of the posterboys for social media, read the article too, and makes some pretty good points for businesses. Rather, he asks questions. Questions like:

- Does your company know how you are?
- Do they know who you know?
- Do they know what you do?

Questions like these are already important for a business looking to establish its identity (not to mention tell its story), but they could become increasingly important in an era of new SEO strategies.

"People expect a certain level of customer service as table stakes to the game," says Brogan. "In the new, much more wired world, I believe we’re asking for more. I want my airlines to know just how often I fly, which seat I tend to choose, how often I upgrade, and whether I normally check my bag. Think about how helpful they could be if they did something with that information."

Naturally, privacy plays a big role in the scheme of things, and as Brogan notes, that means opt-in. However, I think people generally trust Google (the search engine), at least to the extent that they will continue using it for the foreseeable future. I am well aware that many people do NOT trust Google, but within the broad spectrum of the general public, people trust it. Google’s search market share is evidence of that.

So, moving into the future, as Google makes efforts to tailor the user experience to a more social and more personalized one, where does that leave traditional SEO? Can it survive? It’s always been about adaptation and will continue to be, but is there a breaking point where SEO will be trumped by who users know and where they are? Who they are? Can you optimize for every individual customer? That’s where things could get tricky.

If you have thoughts on the matter, we would love to hear them in the comments.

Related Articles:

> Google Launches Social Search Experiment

> Optimizing for Mixed Media Search Results

> Succeeding In SEO Requires Change

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"Since the strain of influenza that is active (H1N1) is novel, no one knows exactly what will happen next. However, the CDC is warning that one possibility is a second spike of flu activity, which is what occurred in 1957 when another novel strain of influenza spread in the United States," says Google Software Engineer Matt Mohebbi. "We’ve been chatting with public health officials about new ways we can help people understand the spread of flu during this unusual time and today we’re excited to bring city level flu estimates to 121 cities in the United States."

"By tracking the popularity of certain Google search queries, we’re able to estimate the level of flu in near real-time," says Mohebbi. "Google Flu Trends is updated daily and may provide early detection of flu activity, since traditional flu surveillance systems often take days or weeks to collect and release data."

The city-level estimates provided by Google Flu Trends are considered "experimental" because they have not been validated with official data, but Google says that the estimates are made in a similar manner to its national estimates, which have been validated.

A complete list of the cities Google tracks can be found here.

Related Articles:

> Bing Gets New Health Search Features

> More Americans Going Online For Health Information

> Can Google Save Us From Pestilence?

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Users can find instant, specialized information about illnesses, treatments, medical facilities, etc. when entering health-related queries.

"Bing discovers a relevant document in its library of health resources and presents a smart summary related to the query," explains Bing’s Alain Rappaport. "In addition, Bing uncovers key related topics by analyzing an index of medical sources and extracting meaningful data automatically. In this case, the user receives instant guidance through short lists of other conditions related to the query (for example, “obesity”), medications that are important to know about (for example, “insulin”) and US medical centers that are active in the field. Users may select any of these points of interest to continue their search in a new area."

A user can click on a medical facility and find more information about it, like patient ratings and other nearby facilities.

In addition to the new features Bing Health is simply covering a broader range of health and "better living" subjects. Users can find information for queries like "holiday weight gain", "baby milk allergy", etc.

Related Articles:

> Bing Maps Gets an Upgrade

> Bing Gets a Bunch of New Search Features

> How Does Bing Rank Tweets?

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A quick note about Furman’s departure: according to Jessica E. Vascellaro, he’s leaving on his own terms be closer to his family, and has already lined up another job.  So you didn’t miss some major PR fiasco, and this development shouldn’t correspond to any big changes in policy at Google.

Hazelbaker may bring a unique perspective to the table as the search giant has to deal with the government more and more, though.  Her experience in politics is impressive, considering that she was the communications director for John McCain’s presidential campaign.

More recently, she’s served as a spokesperson and media strategist for Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral reelection campaign, too.

Of course, these connections imply that Hazelbaker is a Republican, and it’s no secret that Google leans to the left.  It’d be interesting to know whether the search giant is trying to diversify and appeal to different groups, or if it just hired the best person for the job regardless of political affiliations.

Related Articles:

> Google Arranges To Expand In Pittsburgh

> Important Product Director Moving From Google To Digg

> Google Ranked World’s Most Attractive Employer

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I was recently going through a discovery process with a Fortune 500 executive who was guiding his company’s Web site redesign, and I inquired directly about the search aspects of the project. His response: “Search is not relevant to this process.” Contrary to what he was saying, search was in fact critical to the overall process; he was just clearly unaware of his company’s campaign history and investment in the search channel. In light of this response, seemingly old and worn advice is worth another spin or two around the block, especially if it will help convey the natural search value of a legacy Web presence.

In enterprise marketing, it is not a question of whether your company’s site is going to be redesigned or not, it is simply a question of when. Most companies do some kind of major redesign or tweak every two years, and if they haven’t just relaunched, they are planning for the next one. So the “when” is most often “now,” no matter where you are in the process. The important thing to remember here is that search should be a key consideration at every stage of the process, whether it is selecting a provider, setting requirements, producing comps, coding or site deployment.

So how do you fit natural search into the process? Here are a few ideas to start:

Use site language and messaging that is consistent with the user’s perception of your product or service.
For the most part, search engines are still very literal, and truly effective semantic intelligence still lies far ahead. Position content and language that reflects the way users search, in order to rank for those terms. The path to understanding this language is through linguistic and keyword research, and also by studying and knowing your target. Language and keywords impact and guide information architecture and content strategies, among other aspects.

Read your log files (and/or review analytics reports).
If you want to know what you stand to lose in a site redesign, take a look at what you are currently gaining in terms of traffic, visibility, revenue, and conversions. Are there any particular Holy Grail terms like “travel,” “shopping,” or “banking” that may be giving you a lot of traffic? See a section of a site that is referring a ton of long-tail terms? You will likely find some areas that are worth preserving.

Ensure that RIAs are both crawlable and indexable by search engines.
Rich Internet technologies that are implemented without search engines in mind can instantly render a once-thriving natural search program into total obscurity. Flash and Ajax are key tools in the design and development toolbox, but considerations must be made for search upfront.

Avoid the creation of URL canonicalization issues.
When you change phone numbers, the phone company will leave a recorded message telling the new number to the person who called your old number. This is the effect a 301 permanent redirect has on a search engine — it applies the old URL and backlinks to the new URL; the search engine is happy, and your site is happy. A canonicalization problem occurs when 302 redirects are pointed to permanently moved pages. I have seen instances where clients have gone through four or five redesigns using 302s, and a string of six-to-eight redirects points to a single page, each with its own set of inbound links. This basically makes it difficult for engines to determine the “real URL” to show in results and apply backlinks to. How do you fix it? See the next point.

Set up a redirection plan.
In just about every redesign project, at least some content is removed, and URLs go away. Help the engines and your users by using a 301 redirect to point them to the most similar page on your site, or the site map, home page, or custom 404 page. Spend the time to map out which URLs are going away, and where they should be pointed. And don’t sit on the plan —do it on the day or evening that a site is pushed out of production.

Don’t remove content that supports coveted rankings without assessing risks first.
One mistake I see frequently is when content is removed from a site, with no replacement content to support the valuable rankings and visibility it has previously created. Before axing existing site content, determine how difficult it would be to re-attain the ranking, the ranking’s importance in terms of traffic and revenue, or if it is your CEO’s favorite pet ranking. Then create a plan for bridging new content, or leaving it alone.

Include search as both a business and technical requirement before planning has even started.
If search is not a consideration and priority early on, then it will be 10 times harder and more expensive to try to re-engineer at the end of or after the project.

Ensure that there is a voice for search within the Web site team structure.
Having a search specialist as part of the Web design team (and implementing their recommendations) will do a lot to ensure a healthy transition in the redesign and relaunch process, in addition to the potential for growth. The list above is useless without some subjective strategy behind it. Get experienced search optimization help that is fit to your company’s unique situation, needs and goals, and make it an integral part of the redesign process.

These are just a few considerations to get you started. Feel free to add your own thoughts and considerations for redesign at the Search Insider blog.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Designing Web Sites For Search Visibility

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I was just wondering, does a longer URL registration period have a positive effect on a site’s search engine ranking?

Thanks,

Louisa
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Hi Louisa

Google has confirmed in the past that both domain age and ownership history may impact the way a site is handled by the algorithm, albeit slightly. But what you’re asking is whether registering a domain for a longer period of time makes a difference to the site’s ranking?

I haven’t researched this for other search engines, but I recall that a couple of people have asked this question in the Google Webmaster forum in the past.

Google staff member John Mu responded that the length of a domain’s registration period does NOT impact how Google ranks the site. As he states, many registrars don’t publish expiration details and so if Google can’t adequately determine when a site expires, they can’t compare it to other sites so they don’t include that as a ranking factor. Besides which, a registration period for a domain doesn’t reveal much about a site.

The content on the domain is much more important from a search engine perspective than how many years it has been registered for.

Kalena

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Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Send it to kjordan [ at ] sitepronews [ dot ] com and you might see it featured here.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Reader Rescue : Does a longer domain registration period affect ranking?

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Search interesting Twitter people from all the world. Search your favorite topics, hobbies or business. Add or update any Twitter user. My Twitter Cloud is a Twitter lists based application.

http://www.mytwittercloud.com

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In this post I want to illustrate how to use jQuery getJSON() method to load JSON data using an HTTP GET request. I prepared two examples, easy to understand if you are a jQuery beginner. The first example is a simple Twitter search and the second one is a simple Flickr search.

For a printable reference guide to the jQuery API I suggest you to download my jQuery Visual Cheat Sheet or take a look at the official jQuery documentation.

Using getJSON() to implement a Twitter Search

In this first example I used getJSON() to implement a simple Twitter Search that returns five results for page. Try to add something into input field below (for example, apple) and press the Search button to display search results:

This kind of search is really easy to implement just using some lines of JavaScript code. Add a link to jQuery into the <head> tag of the HTML page:

In the <body> tag add this code:

<input type="text" id="twitterQuery" /><button button id="twitterButton">Search</button>
<div id="results"></div>

<div id="results"> is the <div> that will contain the search results.

Then add this JavaScript code into the <head> tag, after the link to jQuery:

$(document).ready(function(){
var url="http://search.twitter.com/search.json?rpp=5&callback=?&q=";
var query;
  $("#twitterButton").click(function(){
  $("#results").html('');
    query=$("#twitterQuery").val();
    $.getJSON(url+query,function(json){
      $.each(json.results,function(i,tweet){
         $("#results").append('<div class="tweet">
         <img class="imgTweet" width="48" height="48"
         src="'+tweet.profile_image_url+'"/>'+tweet.text+'
         <strong>From:</strong>
         <a href="http://twitter.com'+tweet.from_user+'">@'+tweet.from_user+'</a>
         </div>');
      });
    });
  });
});

The previous code is really simple to understand. The url var contains the string http://search.twitter.com/search.json?rpp=5&callback=?&q= for the Twitter API call. rpp is the number of tweets to return per page (it’s optional). For a full reference guide to the Twitter API take a look at the official documentation. $("#results").append()> appends search results into the layer with id results.

Using getJSON() to implement a Flickr Search

This second example is similar to the previous one. I implemented a simple Flickr search using getJSON(). Try to add something into input field below (for example, wave) and press the Search button to display search results:

This kind of search is really simple to implement. Add a link to jQuery into the <head> tag of the HTML page:

In the <body> tag add this code:

<input type="text" id="flickrQuery" /><button>Search</button>
<div id="results"></div>

Then add this JavaScript code into the <head> tag, after the link to jQuery:

$(document).ready(function(){
var url="http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?
              &tagmode=any&format=json&jsoncallback=?&tags=";
var query;
$("#flickrButton").click(function(){
$("#results").html('');
  query=$("#flickrQuery").val();
      $.getJSON(url+query,
        function(data){
          $.each(data.items, function(i,item){
            $("<img/>").attr("src", item.media.m).appendTo("#results");
            if ( i == 3 ) return false;
          });
       });
    });
});

The code above is really similar to the code you seen in the previous example. The url var contains the string http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?&tagmode=any&format=json&jsoncallback=?&tags= for the Flickr API calls. $("#results").append() appends search results into the layer with id results. The if statement if (i==3) return false; limits the search results to 4. You can change that number as you prefer.

That’s all! Leave your comment if you have suggestions to improve the code.

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SlideFinder catalogs publicly available PowerPoint presentations and indexes them by content. You can search for and download thousands of PowerPoint presentations to help with everything from ideas on how to lay out your next presentation to color schemes.

If you want a more hands on and step-by-step approach to building a better presentation, check out the previously reviewed Microsoft tutorials for sprucing up PowerPoint.

Have your own tips, tricks, or tools for making presentations better? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

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Ashim Chhabra of the Yahoo Search BOSS Team said in a Yahoo Groups post:

Under this agreement, Yahoo! is permitted to continue offering the BOSS web service, with search results that would integrate Yahoo! services and content with algorithmic results provided by Microsoft. As always, our intention is to provide a BOSS offering as long as it makes business and economic sense to do so. We are still examining what the BOSS offering will consist of, with some services powered by Microsoft, unique content that Yahoo! currently provides, and the potential for additional Yahoo! content in the future.

Prior to the announcement of the Yahoo!-Microsoft search agreement, we’d already shared our intention to explore a fee-based structure for BOSS. We continue to explore an appropriate fee structure or other revenue model as we work through the future of BOSS.

There you have it. It doesn’t exactly clarify the future of BOSS, but at least you have some general idea of the company’s thought process. Better than nothing right?

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Sharon Gaudin spoke to Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group, Ezra Gottheil of Technology Business Research, and Dan Olds of the Gabriel Consulting Group.  All three individuals saw potential upsides to Google branching out.  It might do extremely well in the new markets, or at least, manage to sell a few more ads.

Enderle even argued that moving on might be necessary for Google, stating, "Ultimately search isn’t sustainable.  Google search could become irrelevant.  You eventually could have specialized search providers or Google search could become part of something else and just fade into the background."

Anyway, the risk that Google will perform poorly in its new endeavors was viewed as tolerable by the group.  A corporate giant with a market share of around 65 percent and a market cap of about $190 billion can afford a misstep or two, after all.

On the subject of financial performance, here’s one other thing worth noting: Google’s stock is up 0.99 percent at the moment, so its recent mobile- and energy-related announcements haven’t exactly caused investors to run away.

Related Articles:

> Google Could Sell Energy

> Nexus One Sales Of 5-6 Million Units Forecast

> Google Unveils Nexus One "Super Phone"

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