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 [...]

Related Topics: Google: Personalized Search | Google: Search Customization | Google: SEO | Google: Web History & Search History | Google: Web Search

Google is now showing the Google +1 counts for logged out users. When the Google +1 feature launched in March, searchers were only able to see who in their Google network +1'ed a search result. Now, if you search while logged out, Google will show you the total +1 count for some search results. This may help Google promote the Google +1 feature and encourage additional users to try it. Search Engine Watch spotted the change earlier. Google has since confirmed to us that it is new and showing to all signed-out users. "We're now showing aggregate +1 annotations for signed-out users in sear [...]

Related Topics: Google: +1 | Google: Social Search | Google: Web History & Search History | Google: Web Search | Top News

While Google.com can store your search history, Google Maps is now storing and offering what you might call "map history" under a new tab called "My Places." It's a convenient way to access the different types of activity you might've had inside Google Maps: My Maps you've made Business listings you've starred Businesses you've rated/reviewed It's just those three options for now, but there's room for more. I'd love Google to add a sort of address book in there where I could store the street addresses that I look up most often (for getting directions, etc.). Yahoo has had an [...]

Related Topics: Google: Maps & Local | Google: Web History & Search History | Top News

New research designed to analyze Google's personalized search results and make the process the search engine uses more transparent has generated interesting and controversial findings. The study examined a number of commonly held notions about personalization, including the idea that personalization is subtle, that it can often surface more long-tail results, and that personalization is based exclusively on a person's past search and web browsing behavior. Among the key conclusions: Despite personalized results, for most people search quality has been declining, results are less personal, refl [...]

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Here at Search Engine Land we regularly hear from people who have created "radical," innovative," "next generation" search technology, promising to "fix" the "broken" search we all allegedly pitifully struggle with today. In virtually every instance that I can remember, these promises over-hype and under-deliver, rarely offering something that becomes part of my regular search arsenal. But the bizarrely-named DuckDuckGo is different, for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it's actually a very good search engine—and it truly can do useful things. Second, the creator of DuckDuckGo has [...]

Related Topics: DuckDuckGo | Features: Analysis | Google: Web History & Search History | Legal: Privacy | Top News