Google > Google: Web Search
May. 8, 2008 at 7:12am by Barry Schwartz
Convertibles & Croatia: Google Thinks They Go Together
Check this out, a search on jennifer convertibles in Google shows for Embassy of the Republic of Croatia to the USA sporting a Jennifer Convertibles stock quote feature. Yes, Google thinks that Convertibles & Croatia are the same thing, in a sense. Both the main Jennifer Convertibles result has a...
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Apr. 11, 2008 at 2:00pm by Danny Sullivan
Google Now Fills Out Forms & Crawls Results
One of the biggest search challenges has long been that the major search engines like Google cannot crawl material that can only be retrieved through the use of forms. Now Google is filling out those form to obtain the information previously hidden, the company has announced....
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Apr. 10, 2008 at 9:54am by Danny Sullivan
"Previous Query" Refinement Coming To Hit Google Results
Yesterday (technically still today my time), I did a keynote interview with Google vice president of search products & user experience Marissa Mayer during our SMX Sydney show. We covered a wide range of topics, including how "Previous Query" refinement will soon come to natural listings on Google, plus how...
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Apr. 2, 2008 at 9:09am by Barry Schwartz
Google Update Dewey - Google Confirms Algorithm Change
Remember a couple days ago I reported on some major shifts in the Google search results? Well, this morning I spotted Google's Matt Cutts requesting feedback on the change at WebmasterWorld. In short, Matt said he did not see "large differences in rankings between these datacenters," but he would like...
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Mar. 31, 2008 at 8:45am by Barry Schwartz
Google Dance Is Back? Plus Google's First Live Chat Recap & Hyperactive Yahoo Slurp
Is the Google Dance back? Well, not really, but I am noticing Google Dance-like behavior from Google based on reading some of the feedback at a WebmasterWorld thread. The Google Dance refers to how years ago, a change to Google's ranking algorithm often began showing up slowly across data centers...
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Mar. 21, 2008 at 9:43am by Barry Schwartz
Google Suggest Becoming A Default Feature?
I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable about how I spotted a WebmasterWorld thread that has three members noticing Google Suggest like features on Google.com. Basically, when these users go to Google.com and begin typing in a query, Google begins to offer search suggestions. Google has implemented this feature as...
See Related Stories In: Google: User Interface, Google: Web Search, Search Features: Query Refinement
Mar. 14, 2008 at 9:30am by Barry Schwartz
The Google Quality Raters Handbook
Brian Ussery has discovered a revised copy of the Google Quality Raters Guidelines, which he archived on his own site. The documents are used by Google Quality Raters to aid them in classifying queries, measuring relevancy, and rating the search results. To do so, the Quality Rater must understand how...
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Mar. 5, 2008 at 7:52pm by Greg Sterling
Google Debuts "Search Within A Site" Search Box Feature
Yesterday Barry blogged about Google testing a search box for site search within general search results. Today the feature is being fully rolled out for selected queries. It's really an extension and elaboration of Google Sitelinks. The Google Blog explains: [O]ver the past few days we have been testing, and...
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Mar. 4, 2008 at 4:29pm by Barry Schwartz
Google Tests Additional Search Box Within Search Results
Tamar tipped me off to people seeing secondary search boxes in the Google search results. I see them myself now. For example, a search on amazon returns this search box directly under the snippet but above the URL; here is a picture:...
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Mar. 4, 2008 at 11:31am by Eric Ward
How Social Media Becomes Link Fertilizer
The title of this article doesn't mean I'm changing my position on social media as link driver. Yes, it's possible, but for the overwhelming majority of web sites, a widespread and costly social linking strategy is a waste of time and money. Go ahead, call me a heretic, but...
See Related Stories In: Google: SEO, Google: Web Search, Link Building, Link Building: Linkbait, Link Week, SEO: Spamming, Search Engines: StumbleUpon, Social Media Marketing
Feb. 13, 2008 at 9:01am by Barry Schwartz
Google Study: 1.3% Google Searches Return At Least One Malicious Result
Web Browsing, Search, And Online Ads Grow More Risky, Google Says from InformationWeek reports on a recent Google Study named All Your iFRAMEs Point to Us that shows 1.3% of Google searches returned at least one malicious result. Niels Provos, a security engineer at Google, lead the study that took...
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Jan. 31, 2008 at 12:13pm by Danny Sullivan
Google's Marissa Mayer On Social Search / Search 4.0
VentureBeat has a nice Q&A with Google's Marissa Mayer on how the search engine is considering using social data to improve its search results -- what I've described as "Search 4.0" as a generational jump in my Search 3.0 article from earlier this year. Some highlights below:...
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Jan. 29, 2008 at 8:12am by Barry Schwartz
Google's Position Six Penalty (Or Bug) A Reality
A week ago we wrote about Google's Mysterious Position Six Penalty. The phenomenon described has now been confirmed by Google's Matt Cutts in one of our Sphinn threads on the topic. It appears from Matt's comments that the drop for pages impacted was an "unintended consequence," as Glengara puts it...
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Jan. 28, 2008 at 2:51pm by Barry Schwartz
Google Experimental Search Adds Info View & Map View
The Google Blog announced they have added some new features to Google Experimental search. Google has added map view and a new info view that allows you to show different results on the page. Let me take you through each new view....
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Jan. 25, 2008 at 2:09pm by Danny Sullivan
Happy First Birthday, Google Bomb Fix!
Short but sweet -- one year ago today, a momentous event that must be recalled. Google bombing was defused. George W. Bush was no longer a miserable failure, and other mass link bombing attempts stopped working. For the most part, the Google bombing fix that Google put into place seems...
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Jan. 23, 2008 at 9:17am by Barry Schwartz
Google's Mysterious Position Six Penalty
One of the most recent Google theories floating through the forums is the "position six penalty." The signs of being hit by a "position six penalty" is when you see your number one or two rankings shift downwards to position number six in Google. Many people first started noticing this...
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Jan. 18, 2008 at 8:36am by Barry Schwartz
Conjunction Junction, Google No Longer Displays Stop Words Malfunction
In the past, searches involving for "stop words" -- prepositions, pronouns, articles, and other small words like "be" or "to" -- would return a warning saying that these words were "a very common word and were not included in your search." Now, searches involving stop words no longer do this....
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Jan. 16, 2008 at 9:12am by Barry Schwartz
Google Writes Google Sitemaps FAQs
The Google Webmaster Central Blog has posted a Sitemaps FAQs blog post. In this blog post, Google responds to some of the most asked questions on the Sitemaps protocol and how Google supports it. Some of the questions include:...
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Dec. 19, 2007 at 2:53pm by Danny Sullivan
Google & Human Quality Reviews: Old News Returns
A quote from Google's director of research Peter Norvig in an article at Technology Review about how human reviewers assess Google's search quality is starting to pick up play on the web and will no doubt grow. Problem is, it's not news. Still, I suppose it's interesting to those who...
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Dec. 19, 2007 at 12:59pm by Barry Schwartz
Google Removes RSS Feeds From Search Results
The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced that Google will no longer include RSS feeds in their search results, with the exception of podcast feeds. The reasoning behind Google dropping RSS feeds from the results is that it is very likely that the RSS feed is a text duplication of an...
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Dec. 19, 2007 at 12:29pm by Vanessa Fox
Google Improves Results For Supplemental Pages
According to a new post on the Google Webmaster Central blog, the supplemental index is no longer, well, supplemental. Google has long had a two-tiered index and webmasters have generally feared the second, supplemental tier. A Forbes article earlier this year called it "Google Hell", as historically, those pages weren't...
