Google Web Search is a feature of Google that allows you to search for pages across the entire web. By default, it also will find matches from related Google search services, all mixed together as part of the “Everything” results that display.

Using Google Web Search is easy — just go to the Google home page and perform a search. However, you might find our guides below provide you some helpful information on how to get more out of your Google searching:

Search Engine Land’s Guide To Google
How To Use Google To Search
Meet The New Google Look & Its Colorful, Useful “Search Options” Column

Further below are recent articles from Search Engine Land related to Google Web Search:

Google’s Impressive “Conversational Search” Goes Live On Chrome

May 22, 2013 at 4:17am ET by Danny Sullivan

The "conversational search" that Google demonstrated at last week's Google I/O conference is now available to users of its Chrome browser, and it's a significant leap in how we use search engines. I'm 17 years now into writing about search, and I've seen all types of things that have promised to revolutionize the space, especially products that trot out words like "natural language" and "semantic search" but fail to deliver. Conversational search has natural language, semantic search and more built into it, and while it's far from perfect, this really is one of those significant change [...]

Google Notifies Sprint Of Spam Penalty; Seeks Advice In Google Help Forums

May 20, 2013 at 9:57am ET by Barry Schwartz

The latest large brand to be hit with a user-generated content spam penalty notification is Sprint, the large US wireless communications company. Similar to Mozilla's penalty and BBC's penalty, Sprint was penalized for user-generated content spam on a portion of their site that was open to anyone to post links and content. Also similar to the BBC and Mozilla, Sprint went to the Google help forums to seek advice because Google's warning message itself doesn't provide detailed information about what's wrong. The employee wrote: I received a message on 5/17/2013 that "Google has detected [...]

Google Drops “Translated Foreign Pages” Search Option Due To Lack Of Use

May 20, 2013 at 9:38am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google has quietly dropped the "Translated Foreign Pages" search filter from the Google search options menu. Google tells us the option was removed due to lack of use, but they say they are still committed to making the Web available to as many people, in as many languages, as possible. The translated foreign pages search option enabled searchers to restrict the search results to specific languages only. So, if you want to search for something in English and then show results for that search result in French, you could have used this search option for that. Dan Russell, Google's Search R [...]

Google’s Matt Cutts: Domain Clustering To Change Again; Fewer Results From Same Domain

May 17, 2013 at 2:46pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a new video about a new change coming to Google's search results related to the diversity of the results being displayed. Matt said that Google is launching "soon" a new change that will make it less likely to see results from the same domain name, if you already have been shown that domain name in previous results three or four times before. Matt explained that once you've seen a cluster of about four results from a specific domain name, the subsequent pages are going to be less likely to show you results from that domain name. To explain [...]

Study: Delaware Least Likely State To Use Google, While Yahoo Is More Popular In Southern & Midwest States

May 16, 2013 at 10:18am ET by Amy Gesenhues

Using data from more than 35 million search queries performed in 2012, SEO company WebpageFX set out to determine search engine market share by state for Google, Bing and Yahoo. According to their study, Google dominates across the country, taking 70 percent or more of search engine market share in nearly all 50 states. Delaware represented the only state where Google won less than 70 percent of searches, with 69.49 percent market share. While Google won more than 80 percent of the market in many states, Hawaii, Oregon, District of Columbia, Massachusetts, and Colorado led in Googl [...]

Google Zaps Another Link Network, ‘Several Thousand’ Link Sellers Hit

May 15, 2013 at 3:45am ET by Matt McGee

What a week it's been where Google and SEO are concerned. The company, via Matt Cutts, has issued several warnings about things to come -- and, late Tuesday night, also revealed that it's just acted against another link network. In a pair of tweets, Cutts -- the head of Google's webspam team -- said that Google has taken action against "several thousand" link sellers that were part of a link network that bought and sold links that pass PageRank. In addition to mattcutts.com/blog/what-to-e… it's safe to assume webspam will continue to tackle link networks that violate our guidelines as we [...]

Google Authority Boost: Google’s Algorithm To Determine Which Site Is A Subject Authority

May 14, 2013 at 9:38am ET by Barry Schwartz

Yesterday, we covered and summarized the ten future Google SEO changes coming to Google's search results by the end of this summer. But today, I wanted to pull out one point where Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said Google is working on an algorithm to give authorities in a particular subject a ranking boost for being that authority. Google has long done this within Google News, but this seems to be the first time it's talking about trying to determine subject authorities within Web search. The portion of the video of when Matt Cutts talks about authority boost starts at 4 min [...]

If That Was A Google Update You Felt, Google’s Not Confirming It

May 10, 2013 at 8:59am ET by Barry Schwartz

Over the past few days, the Webmaster and SEO community have been discussing significant shifts, fluctuations and updates in both the Google rankings and traffic patterns they have seen from Google's organic search. I've asked Google if there was, indeed, an update, and Google would not confirm. Instead, they gave me the boilerplate response, "We have nothing to announce at this time." They of course added, "We make over 500 changes to our algorithms a year, so there will always be fluctuations in our rankings in addition to normal crawling and indexing." This is nothing new; Google often w [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Search Diary | Top News

No, Publishership Isn’t Coming Soon To Google Search To Join Authorship

May 8, 2013 at 9:04am ET by Barry Schwartz

There are expectations in some quarters that publishers will soon be able to have their logos showing up in Google in the way that authors can have their pictures appear. But, Google says there are "no plans" for some type of "publishership" to go live similar to the way it handles authorship. Expectations were raised after Kahena Digital and Standing Dog noted that publishers using rel=publisher can see how their logos would look in Google's Rich Snippets testing tool. However, Google told us generally that this has been working that way in the testing tool for months and that there are [...]

Google Local Results Drops “More Results Near…” To “Improve” Local Search Experience

May 7, 2013 at 9:20am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google has quietly dropped yet another search feature; this one is related to local search results within a search on Google. Google has removed the "more results near..." link on local search results for queries with local intent. For example, if you search for [pizza] on Google.com, Google will show you local businesses selling pizza to consumers, as well as webpages, videos and so forth on pizza. This is part of the universal search initiative from 2007. Since then, when Google showed local listings in the organic search results, Google would show a "more results near..." link under t [...]

Which Finds The First-Ever Website Better, Google Or Bing?

May 1, 2013 at 12:00am ET by Danny Sullivan

For the 20th anniversary of CERN making Web technology available to anyone royalty-free, the European science lab has restored the very first website to its original location. Could today's search engines of Google and Bing, which didn't exist when the site was first posted, find it now? Time for a test. The answer turns out to be tricky. Searching For The Page By URL The easiest test was to see which of them had the page listed by searching for it by its URL, which is: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html It looks like this, by the way: Google found it when I searc [...]

Google Downplays Google+ With Updated Authorship Snippet?

Apr 25, 2013 at 9:37am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google has quietly changed the user interface for how they display the authorship snippet in the search results. The largest difference is that they removed the "more by" link that linked to additional stories written by that author. The other changes include that now clicking on the author's image and name will take you to a similar result set that you would have seen if you clicked on the old "more by" author link. I believe the author image and name use to take you to that author's Google+ page, when available. Now, the only way to get to the Google+ page of the author is to click o [...]

Google: We Removed Instant Previews Over Low Usage From Searchers

Apr 25, 2013 at 9:24am ET by Barry Schwartz

Yesterday we reported that Google changed how you access the cached, similar and share links within the search results by adding a new green down arrow next to the search snippet's URL. We asked, where did the Instant Previews go that launched on November 9, 2010 with a huge amount of excitement from Google. Google even said that the instant previews resulted in searchers being "5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click." Well, that is now gone because searchers apparently did not use the feature. A Google spokesperson told us a blanket statement, "we’re constantly [...]

Semantic & Graph-Based Search: The Future Face Of Search

Apr 25, 2013 at 9:00am ET by Barbara Starr

In a June 2010 Semantic Web Meetup in San Diego, Peter Mika of Yahoo!'s research division gave a presentation entitled, "The future face of Search is Semantic for Facebook, Google and Yahoo!" As the title suggests, the presentation focused on the ever-growing use of semantic markup as a means for helping computers parse and understand content. The talk focused on what was then the current state of the Semantic Web, as well as upcoming formats/technologies in development and the research being done in the field of semantic search. The idea that the Semantic Web would be central to search [...]

Google Adds Green Arrows To View Cache, Similar Pages & To Share Results On Google+

Apr 24, 2013 at 3:06pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google has updated how you access the cached pages, similar results and how you share search results on Google+. Now, when you want to see a cached version of a search result, you need to click on the green down arrow next to the URL in the search results. If you are logged in, you will likely see three options including cached, similar and share. If you are not logged in you will likely see cached and similar but not the share option. Note, the cached option may also not show up for sites. The picture above shows the new options in the Google search results interface. The old way [...]

Google Pulls Related Searches Filter Due To Lack Of Usage

Apr 23, 2013 at 3:32pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google has quietly removed the "related searches" option from the search tools menu within the Google search results page. When Google launched search options in October 2009, the option for "related searches" appeared on the left-hand side under the "standard view." The placement of the "related searches" search option has changed over the years, including the whole search filters being moved to the top in November 2012; but, the ability to find related searches remained. That has ended last week, when Google decided to remove the feature. Google told us that they "weren't seeing enough [...]

Using the X-Default Hreflang Tag For Multinational SEO: Default Language Opportunities

Apr 18, 2013 at 2:00pm ET by Chris Liversidge

Google & Yandex announced the new x-default hreflang tag earlier this month, and in doing so closed the final gap in executing ‘perfect’ SEO platforms for multinational brands. There is, however, the question of what language content to use as your default, and how you can bring a little quantifiable information to play to determine your best, overall, choice.

Google Autocomplete: Your Personal Brand’s First Impression

Apr 18, 2013 at 9:44am ET by Brian Patterson

Pop Quiz: What is the first thing a searcher sees when they type your name into the Google search bar? If your answer was related webpages found in SERPs, you're wrong -- that would be the second thing. The first thing they see are the Autocomplete suggestions that drop down from the search bar. This is your true first impression! There are three basic facts of our Google-centric world: first, like it or not, we each represent the brand of our personal name; second, we are humans, and thus, we all make mistakes; and third, Google searches for individual names are tremendously popular [...]

Google Quick View Badge Field Trial

Apr 16, 2013 at 12:45pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google announced a new Google field trial experiment for a feature they've been quietly testing named Quick View. The Google Quick View badge is found on a select number of sites when a searcher uses Google Mobile search from their smartphone. The feature is currently working for Wikipedia on searches done in English on Google.com. It basically will give you an almost instant view of the Wikipedia page when clicked on. Google says the Quick View will show you the Wikipedia page "immediately." Here is a picture: To see this yourself, you need to sign up for the field trial over [...]

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