Feb 8, 2012 at 1:48pm ET by Greg Sterling

Last month, market research tool provider Ask Your Target Market surveyed 400 US adults about their attitudes toward personalized search on Google. The results were reported today in eMarketer's email newsletter. We went back to the source to check out the survey and discovered that the majority of respondents expressed ambivalence or outright dissatisfaction about Google's new more personalized search results. The first question asked was about the primary search engine used by respondents. Primary search engine: Source: AYTM, n=400 (1/12) Then the survey explored respondents [...]

Google: Ability To Block Sites From Search Results Will Return, But When?

Jan 13, 2012 at 8:36am ET by Barry Schwartz

The ability to block web sites from search results disappeared when Google's new Search Plus personalized results format launched this week. Blocking was a feature added with great fanfare last year. Google says it will return, but the timing is uncertain. How Blocking Worked Previously, search results had a "Block All" link that appeared below them: Selecting that option would cause all pages from the site you blocked to be dropped from your future search results. This option no longer appears. Return Of Blocking Will Take "Some Time" We noticed the feature had been dropped e [...]

Google Announces Shutter Of Knol, Gears, Search Timeline & More

Nov 23, 2011 at 10:21am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google has announced the shutting down of several Google services from the Google Search Timeline to their knowledge site, Knol. Here is a list of services Google is closing in the near future or has already closed: Google Bookmarks Lists closing on December 19, 2011, which leaves searchers with no way to recoup their Google starred results. Google Friend Connect is shutting down March 1, 2012 and sending people to Google +. Google Gears will lose all support on December 1, 2011 but Chrome now has offline support. Google Search Timeline is currently not working anymore. Google Wave [...]

Blocking Sites Within Google Goes International

Sep 13, 2011 at 4:54pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google announced that the blocking sites feature introduced in the US based results in March this year, is now available internationally. Google's Johannes Henkel said "starting today, you can now block sites on most Google domains." Here is a picture of blocking Matt Cutts blog in Google France: As discussed before, there is a dashboard to manage sites that you block. So you can add new blocked sites, remove sites you blocked and so on. Google did not specify which international Google properties this does not work on, but they did say it should work on "most Google domai [...]

Google Buys Twitter Sentiment Analyzer fflick To Support “Contextual Discovery”

Jan 25, 2011 at 8:27am ET by Greg Sterling

Google has acquired fflick, according to TechCrunch. The price is reportedly $10 million. Is it a talent acquisition, a tool acquisition or both? It's both. Using Twitter, the fflick service analyzes and organizes comments about movies: overall, most recent, positive, what your friends have said and so on. This is a very interesting service and it's easy to see why Google might want it. Google developed recommendations service HotPot to help improve Local (after the failed attempt to acquire Yelp). And Google has been doing a kind of sentiment analysis of restaurant reviews on Place [...]

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