Jul 28, 2011 at 2:16pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Searchmetrics has conducted a data analysis on what type of content appears most often in Google Universal Search results, as well as which sites are most visible in them. Video and image content wins, as does content hosted on Google's own properties. Universal Search Loves Video, Images The most revealing data from the study, which the company provided to us and which may appear on its site soon, is that having a video is one of the best ways of showing up in the top results at Google. The chart below shows up videos are by far the most found results in Google, with image content a di [...]

Official: Google Removes Auto-Background Feature

Jun 10, 2010 at 1:46pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Confused about why Google was showing a picture on its home page today. Apparently, plenty of people were, some to the point of being upset. In reaction, Google's dropped the feature. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, confirmed the change via an update to the official Google blog post that originally announced the new feature: Last week, we launched the ability to set an image of users’ choosing as the background for the Google homepage. Today, we ran a special “doodle” that showcased this functionality by featuring a series of imag [...]

Related Topics: Google: Logos | Google: Universal Search | Top News

Meet The New Google Look & Its Colorful, Useful “Search Options” Column

May 5, 2010 at 12:00pm ET by Danny Sullivan

After months of testing, Google is releasing a new look-and-feel for its search results today, a three column design that provides a permanent menu of search options and tools to help searchers refine their queries. Google also gains a freshly-updated logo along the way. The new user interface -- UI for the tech crowd -- places search options into a column on the left-hand side of the search results page. Search results themselves appear in the middle, in a wider column. Ads appear in the right column, though some ads continue to appear in the middle column above editorial picks: [...]

Google Showing Shopping Results Without Explicit Search Intent?

Apr 7, 2010 at 9:20am ET by Barry Schwartz

The tnooz blog reported that after searching for [hotels] off the Google home page, he was shown hotel room prices directly in the search results. Here is a screen capture: Now, we know Google was testing hotel prices in Google Maps via AdWords but these are prices directly in the organic results. How is this possible? If you look closely, you will see that the search results come from a shopping search filter that was set to on. Tnooz blog said that Google automatically set the user to the shopping search results, without the user requesting for this to be specifically on. Th [...]

Related Topics: Google: Universal Search | Google: Web Search | Top News

Google Adds Universal Results To Suggest & Quick Scroll In Chrome

Dec 11, 2009 at 1:57pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google announced they added universal search results directly in Google Suggest and a "quick scroll" feature as a Chrome extension. Here is a picture of weather results, a form on Universal Search, directly in the Google Search box: I personally do not see it yet, but I am sure it will show up soon. The Quick Scroll Chrome extension will help you locate the keywords on the page you clicked on from the Google search results page. Here is a picture of how that looks: [...]

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