In making the changes to this prime real estate on a search results page, Google is lessening somewhat the visibility of Google+. But it’s still using the space in the upper right of its search results to keep searchers on Google — something well within its rights, but something that may attract criticism in the same way that the Google+ box did.

Let’s look at what’s going on now….

Background: People and Pages On Google+

When Google launched “Search Plus Your World” in January, it made content from Google+ much more visible in the search results.

Part of the Google+ push was a content box called “People and Pages on Google+” that would appear adjacent to the top organic results. It didn’t matter if you were logged in to a Google account, or used Google+ — there was the “People and Pages on Google+” content box in the top right of the search results page. It showed primarily for generic search terms like “music,” “cars” or “Facebook.”

Search results like that — especially the one for “Facebook,” which has been the most popular search term in the U.S. for the past three years — brought on a lot of criticism because Google was promoting Google+ ahead of what were often more relevant social profiles. In the third example, Google was leading searchers to Mark Zuckerberg’s inactive Google+ page rather than to his Facebook profile. Danny Sullivan covered that and several other relevance issues in his article, Real-Life Examples Of How Google’s “Search Plus” Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy.

Now: People and Pages on Google+ Is Gone

Now that the dust is settling on last week’s Google Knowledge Graph launch, we’re no longer able to see the “People and Pages on Google+” content box on any searches. It’s gone, replaced instead by different Knowledge Graph-related content boxes.

That search (from above) for “music” now shows a Knowledge Graph box for “People related to music.”

A search for “cars,” which used to include links to the Google+ pages of brands like Toyota, Nissan, Ferrari and others, now shows a Knowledge Graph box that invites searchers to “See results about” the Pixar movie Cars.

Other searches that previously showed the “People and Pages on Google+” content box, like “Facebook” and “seo,” don’t show anything from the Knowledge Graph. Search Engine Land’s editors did a number of searches yesterday and none displayed the old Google+ “People and Pages” content box.

Google: We’re Blending Content

A Google spokesperson explained that Google is blending different content sources, including Knowledge Graph connections and Google+ profiles, to return the most relevant content on the search results page.

And it’s true that searchers are seeing content from different sources; a search for Google CEO Larry Page, for example, shows this in action. The photo is from (and links to) his Google+ profile, and further down the Knowledge Graph box is a clipped version of his most recent post there.

There’s also text from (and a link to) his Wikipedia page, along with several links related to the Knowledge Graph data. And, even though those links don’t promote Google+ like the old “People and Pages on Google+” did, they do keep people on Google and may lead to some of the same criticisms that Google faced before.

Possible Knowledge Graph Criticisms

To be clear: It’s Google’s search engine and I’m a big believer that they can link to their own properties if they want. But, as with the Search Plus Your World examples from January, if they do so in a way that’s not relevant and/or not user-friendly, they leave themselves open to vocal critics. (And if they do it in a way that appears anti-competitive, those critics may include the U.S. government.)

A search for “seattle mariners” offers an example of what I’m talking about:

In this case, like many others, the Knowledge Box is showing a mix of content — text from Wikipedia, latest post from Google+, and other information. The possible issues are:

• the Mariners’ logo and the light text below it send searchers to the Mariners Google+ page, not to the Mariners’ official site, which would seem to be the most authoritative, relevant and user-friendly link for that spot in the Knowledge Graph box (and the fact that the team logo says “Mariners.com” is likely to mean users will think a click there leads to the official site)
• the links on “Eric Wedge,” “Safeco Field” and the others are links to conduct more Google searches; will users expect to get links to search results there? or will they expect to be linked to the official Safeco Field page? or, since Wedge doesn’t have an official site, will they expect to be linked to his Wikipedia page or his bio on the Mariners website?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. But I do know that, when a Knowledge Graph box about the Seattle Mariners doesn’t contain a single link to Mariners.com, and has several internal Google links instead, critics have an opportunity to continue accusing Google of promoting itself at the expense of relevancy.

The Knowledge Graph box has its pros and cons. The data is, in many cases (but not all) excellent — it’s very cool to be able to scroll through the Mariners’ roster right from inside the Knowledge Graph box, for example. But the fact that all of the links keep searchers on Google, either sending them to Google+ or creating another search, probably won’t quiet the criticism about Google promoting itself too heavily in search results.

Bottom line: The “People and Pages on Google+” content box brought Google a fair amount of flak, but what’s replacing it isn’t necessarily going to change that.

The company says it’s shut down Streetside imagery in Germany after complaints about the way the company was handling blurring requests. Microsoft spokesperson Thomas Baumgartner tells PCWorld that he’s not sure if or when Streetside will be reinstated in Germany.

A Microsoft statement says that the complaints are from “customers,” not from any government data protection-related agencies.

We have learned that there are a limited number of customers in Germany who raised concerns about the way we are pursuing their respective blurring requests. As we take privacy and data protection of our customers very seriously, we decided to take down the StreetSide Beta service in Germany, while evaluating these single cases and working on a solution.

Despite the decision to take Streetside images offline, Microsoft says it will continue its Streetside photography plans in Germany, which currently include taking pictures in about 30 areas during the remainder of 2012.

Microsoft announced its plans to bring Streetside, its road-level photography service, to Germany in April 2011, despite a long list of challenges that Google faced with its Street View service in the country. But with Bing’s miniscule visibility (i.e., market share) in Germany, Microsoft received relatively few objections to the service in its first six months.

* sarcasm

To be clear, this isn’t traditional image search that we’re talking about; that’s still available at bing.com/images. We’re talking about the “Visual Search” tool/interface that Bing launched in 2009 with a unique interface that used Silverlight technology to let searchers view a large set of images and data.

In our article about the launch, we used this screenshot as a sample of the Visual Search interface:

The independent Microsoft/Windows blog, Liveside.net, reported today that the old URL for Visual Search (www.bing.com/visualsearch) no longer works.

A Microsoft spokesperson tells Liveside.net that the company began removing Visual Search galleries last fall — a long time for something to be shut down with virtually no one noticing.

Bing’s announcement today says that anyone can access the new interface at www.bing.com/new, but you should also see a new message atop the Bing home page that invites you to try “the best search, now with people from your social networks.”

Even without clicking the “Check it out” link or first going to www.bing.com/new, I was shown the new, three-column display on a search for “seattle restaurants.”

When Bing announced the new interface last week, it included “Snapshots” — a new version of search results that shows additional information about each listing in the middle panel. A Bing spokesperson tells us that that feature is still about a week away from going live on Bing.com.

If you missed the original announcement last week, the new Bing interface adds various social elements to search results, including a “social sidebar” that pulls in friend and expert information from Facebook and Twitter related to your search query. For more on how it works, see our stories from last week:

• Bing Relaunches, Features New Social Sidebar
• Head-To-Head: Bing’s Social Search Vs. Google’s Search Plus Your World

Bing says the new interface is also available on Bing mobile (m.bing.com) with a layout that’s optimized for smaller screens and touch-based input.

The changes affect both the upload and management processes. Here are the primary bullet points from Google’s blog post:

• Edit one or more of your listings’ data at once
• Search through your listings, filtering by specific information or for listings with errors
• Upload new listings using a data file or by adding them individually within the interface
• Tell us how we can improve this new interface by clicking the “Give Feedback” link

Google has put together two short videos showing the new features — the first video is for new users that aren’t verified to do bulk uploads yet, and the second is for already-verified users.

While that may not surprise much of the SEO industry, it contradicts what some Google employees have previously said, as well as another recent study on Wikipedia’s search visibilty.

Last week, Conductor released updated data about Wikipedia’s search visibility, this time including Bing for comparison to its previous study that focused solely on Wikipedia’s Google visibility.

In the previous study, Wikipedia appeared on page one of Google 46 percent of the time, and on page two for 25 percent of the searches/keywords.

In its updated study, Wikipedia appeared on Bing’s page one for 31 percent of searches, and on page two only five percent of the time. The chart below shows Wikipedia’s visibility on Google (blue) and Bing (green) for all 2,000 combined keywords, as well as for the separate informational and transactional keywords.

(Note: The image above is a replacement provided by Conductor because the original image had a typo.)

At various conferences that I’ve attended, Google’s Matt Cutts has mentioned seeing earlier studies that had Bing showing Wikipedia more often in its search results than Google does. He echoed that sentiment in the comments of his Google+ post about Conductor’s earlier study. A recent Search Engine Watch study also suggested that Bing favors Wikipedia more than Google.

Why the discrepancies? It’s likely due to survey methodology, not to mention the rapidly changing search results landscape. (Search results can differ day-to-day, even hour-to-hour, so a study done one month is likely to differ from another study done a month later.)

In its studies, Conductor compared 2,000 informational and transactional keywords of varying word lengths. Navigational keywords were not included because Conductor found very low Wikipedia visibility for those types of keywords.

Bing Still Loves Wikipedia, Just Differently Than Google

Conductor’s recent study did reveal an interesting trend: Even though Wikipedia appears more often on Google’s page one, when Wikipedia does show up on Bing’s page one, it’s at the top of the results more often.

When Wikipedia is one page one, Conductor found it in the top three results 83 percent of the time on Bing, compared to 65 percent on Google.

Conductor also removed one-word queries from its study and found that, overall, Wikipedia appeared about 10 percent more often on Google’s page one than on Bing’s page one.

As I mentioned above, with search results changing so frequently, no study is likely to end the discussion on Wikipedia’s search visibility. But, if nothing else, all of this data related to search visibility — whether it’s Wikipedia or other major sites like Amazon — makes for good industry discussion.

This list is particularly interesting because of all the upheaval happening this month, what with Panda updates 3.5 and 3.6 occurring in an eight-day span, along with the Penguin update and a Google screwup related to parked domains. Yeah, April was a crazy month for SEO folks.

As always, there’s a lot to digest and the most important items don’t always reveal themselves right away. But here’s a look at the items that caught my eye after a first read-through of Google’s blog post.

Bigger, Tiered Index

Perhaps the biggest news is that Google has increased the size of its base index — the collection of web pages and documents it can show as search results — by 15 percent.

Similarly, Google also says it’s launched a new “index tier.”

Increase base index size by 15%. [project codename "Indexing"] The base search index is our main index for serving search results and every query that comes into Google is matched against this index. This change increases the number of documents served by that index by 15%. *Note: We’re constantly tuning the size of our different indexes and changes may not always appear in these blog posts.

New index tier. [launch codename "cantina", project codename "Indexing"] We keep our index in “tiers” where different documents are indexed at different rates depending on how relevant they are likely to be to users. This month we introduced an additional indexing tier to support continued comprehensiveness in search results.

That sounds almost like Google’s old “supplemental index” system that launched in 2003, and it may be tempting to say the supplemental index has returned, or something along those lines. But, as far as I recall, Google never said the supplemental index was going away; it said they’d stop using the “Supplemental Results” label on search results that came from it.

SEO & Ranking Updates

Google has also announced numerous updates that relate to how documents are ranked, updates that sound like they’re at least related to — if not part of — the larger Panda and Penguin updates that are already well known.

Improvements to how search terms are scored in ranking. [launch codename "Bi02sw41"] One of the most fundamental signals used in search is whether and how your search terms appear on the pages you’re searching. This change improves the way those terms are scored.

Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. [project codename "Spam"] We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.

More authoritative results. We’ve tweaked a signal we use to surface more authoritative content.

More domain diversity. [launch codename "Horde", project codename "Domain Crowding"] Sometimes search returns too many results from the same domain. This change helps surface content from a more diverse set of domains.

If I were to guess, I’d think that the first two items above could be related to “spun” content — one of the practices that Google likely considers to be a hallmark of low-quality content. But that’s just a guess on my part.

The last two items — authoritative results and domain diversity — almost sound contradictory. At least to me. On a Friday afternoon during a long week with international travel.

Sitelinks Updates

There are several changes related to Google’s sitelinks and “megasitelinks” — the additional links that show up below a top-ranking result for some queries.

If you spend time trying to optimize for sitelinks (and if you have an authoritative site, it’s probably a good idea to be doing that), these changes are worth reading closely. Here are those changes, word-for-word from Google’s post:

“Sub-sitelinks” in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename "thanksgiving"] This improvement digs deeper into megasitelinks by showing sub-sitelinks instead of the normal snippet.

Better ranking of expanded sitelinks. [project codename "Megasitelinks"] This change improves the ranking of megasitelinks by providing a minimum score for the sitelink based on a score for the same URL used in general ranking.

Sitelinks data refresh. [launch codename "Saralee-76"] Sitelinks (the links that appear beneath some search results and link deeper into the site) are generated in part by an offline process that analyzes site structure and other data to determine the most relevant links to show users. We’ve recently updated the data through our offline process. These updates happen frequently (on the order of weeks).

Less snippet duplication in expanded sitelinks. [project codename "Megasitelinks"] We’ve adopted a new technique to reduce duplication in the snippets of expanded sitelinks.

The first item seems to be saying that sub-sitelinks may show up instead of a text snippet, which I think means that some search results could have two layers of sitelinks — megasitelinks below the main result, and then sub-sitelinks below one of the megasitelinks. I’ve not seen anything like that yet.

Local-related Changes

There are a couple changes related to local/geo searches and search results.

Improvements to local navigational searches. [launch codename "onebar-l"] For searches that include location terms, e.g. [dunston mint seattle] or [Vaso Azzurro Restaurant 94043], we are more likely to rank the local navigational homepages in the top position, even in cases where the navigational page does not mention the location.

Country identification for webpages. [launch codename "sudoku"] Location is an important signal we use to surface content more relevant to a particular country. For a while we’ve had systems designed to detect when a website, subdomain, or directory is relevant to a set of countries. This change extends the granularity of those systems to the page level for sites that host user generated content, meaning that some pages on a particular site can be considered relevant to France, while others might be considered relevant to Spain.

In the first item, Google seems to be saying that it’s able to able to identify the correct local result for specific navigational searches — such as a search for a specific local restaurant — even if the site/page is poorly optimized for local search.

It’s reminiscent of the “Venice” update earlier this year which involved Google launching ways to better correlate web pages/documents to their locations.

Miscellaneous Updates

In addition to the items I’ve highlighted above, read through Google’s post for these other items that caught my eye:

• A change that should reduce amount of paginated results showing on a search results page.
• Two changes related to snippets, including one which promises to show more text from the beginning of pages.
• Three changes related to freshness — fresh results and freshness signals, and one that ignores fresh content if it’s deemed low quality. (There’s also an Autocomplete change designed to reduce the visibility of low-quality results.)
• A change that Google says will help it show more informative/concise titles in its search results. (For what it’s worth, just about every SEO that I know wishes Google wouldn’t change titles at all.)
• Improvements in how Google uses previous search activity to determine your intent as you continue to search.

That’s a lot to digest and something else may have caught your attention as being important. The comments are open, so let us know what stands out for you as you look through Google’s April search changes.

According to an English-language article from Ynetnews, soldiers and vehicles inside a “secret base” are clearly visible on Street View, which just launched in Israel a couple weeks ago.

Journalist and new media consultant Yossi Dorfman revealed in his blog that a secret Tel Aviv-area base has been fully exposed by Google’s new service. The images allow users to see the guard post at the entrance to the base, several soldiers inside it, and vehicles parked in the base with their license plates clearly visible.

The article goes on to quote a “veteran officer” who saw the images and called it a “first-rate screwup” on the IDF’s part to allow the images to show up online. There’s nothing in the Ynetnews article that places any blame on Google.

In fact, in the Hebrew-language version of the article, an IDF spokesperson is quoted at the end as saying all images on Street View have been reviewed and approved for display, and that there are no military security-related reasons to hide the images in question.

For its part, a Google spokesperson gave us this statement:

“We always strive to cooperate with the relevant authorities in countries in which Street View is operated. We had very constructive discussions with the Israeli security authorities and are pleased that they have approved our plans to bring Street View to Israel. The imagery featured on Street View is no different from what any person can readily see walking down the street or looking at other pictures online. Imagery of this kind is available in a wide variety of formats for cities all around the world.”

Today the company launched the latest of several search features that continue to position Foursquare firmly as a formal local search engine: a fully searchable history page where users can review their entire check-in history, including photos, tips and who else was there.

The history page offers a date-based dropdown, plus filters to narrow results by location, who else was there and business category.

It’s fair to question when or why anyone would want to return to an old check-in, but here’s a piece of anecdotal evidence to show one way this tool is valuable: I was up in Spokane a couple weeks ago and a friend was telling me about a great Mexican restaurant he’d eaten at in my hometown. He couldn’t recall the name, but he did remember checking in on Facebook. After browsing through his Timeline, he came up with the place. And now I’m making plans to try it out myself.

Foursquare’s moves in local search have been interesting to watch. Back in December, the company hired a former Google senior engineer to boost its local search smarts. About a month later, Foursquare launched its Explore search tool on Foursquare.com and effectively became a true local search engine at that point. They’ve added restaurant menus and partnered with Open Table to enable making reservations from Foursquare’s website. For business owners, Foursquare has also launched an express verification tool that gives access to Foursquare’s business tools immediately. (Verification by mail can take several weeks.)

What the final result of all this will be is anyone’s guess. It may just be positioning Foursquare as a more attractive buyout option for a bigger player. But, in the meantime, it’s intriguing to watch the speed and commitment with which the company is moving into local search.

Last month, Foursquare announced that it had 35 million places in its location database, and that its users had checked-in more than two billion times.

According to Bloomberg News, Google told judge Denny Chin that The Authors Guild can’t sue on behalf of the authors because the Guild doesn’t own the copyrights to the books that Google has been scanning since the program was announced in 2004.

Reuters reports that, in response to Google’s claim, Chin said “it would take forever” to resolve individual author’s lawsuits and that it “seems to make sense” to allow the lawsuits to continue as a group. Authors Guild attorney Joanne Zack argued in favor of a class action, saying “it would be a terrible burden on the court if each individual author was forced to litigate.”

The Authors Guild brought its class action suit against Google in 2005, calling Google’s digital book scanning a “massive” copyright infringement. The two sides reached a settlement in 2008 that called for writers to opt-out if they objected to Google scanning their works. Chin rejected that settlement in March 2011, saying the settlement should be opt-in, instead.

Separately today, Google also asked Chin to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the American Society of Media Photographers. That group sued Google in 2010 over the inclusion of copyrighted images that appear in the books Google has been scanning.

Judge Chin indicated that he’ll consider Google’s motions and announce a decision later.