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:

George Bush “Miserable Failure” Google Bomb Back, This Time In Knowledge Graph

Jun 12, 2013 at 12:20pm ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google Bomb is back! Searching for [miserable failure] in Google now returns George W. Bush's knowledge graph in the search results. The Google Bomb first became popular back in 2004 when Google and some other search engines ranked George W. Bush as the number one result for a search on [miserable failure]. In 2007, Google killed the Google bomb from showing up. But why did it rank in the first place? Google ranks pages based on anchor text of links, among other factors, and many sites bombed Google by linking to George Bush's webpage with the anchor text [miserable failure]. In [...]

Google’s Cutts Talks Structured Data Beta, Mobile Site Speed Need, Penalty Notices To Get Example Links & More

Jun 12, 2013 at 8:42am ET by Barry Schwartz

Last night at SMX Advanced, Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts was on stage to answer questions about Google search and webmaster topics with Danny Sullivan. We covered the session in live blog format and pulled out several key points. Of all my years watching Matt Cutts talk, I believe it has been over ten years now, I have never seen Matt reveal so much new information and announce so many new things in a single hour at a conference. Here are the highlights from last night, with links to those individual stories: Google Payday Loan Algorithm: Google Search Algorithm Update To [...]

Google Payday Loan Algorithm: Google Search Algorithm Update To Target Spammy Queries

Jun 11, 2013 at 8:03pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google has officially launched a new search update to target "spammy queries" such as [payday loan], pornographic and other heavily spammed queries. Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, announced this on Twitter saying "We just started a new ranking update today for some spammy queries." He pointed to the video he published where he talked about upcoming Google SEO changes. Our summary then was: While queries that tend to be spammy in nature, such as [pay day loans] or some pornographic related queries, were somewhat less likely to be a target for Google’s search spam team – Ma [...]

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

SMX Advanced: You&A Conversation With Matt Cutts (Pandas, Penguins & Payday Loan Spam)

Jun 11, 2013 at 7:38pm ET by Matt McGee

Day one of our SMX Advanced show is almost over, but there's one last session still to come: the traditional "You&A with Matt Cutts" keynote session. Search Engine Land's founding editor, Danny Sullivan, will be sitting down for a lengthy chat with Matt Cutts, the head of Google's webspam team. The session is due to begin at 5:00 pm, and I'll be liveblogging it right here as fast as I can. Given all the recent Google-related news -- Penguin updates, Panda updates, actions taken against link networks and more -- it should be a lively discussion. See you at about 5:00 pm PT! We'l [...]

Google Testing “In-Depth Articles” Search Results, A New Rich Snippet?

Jun 7, 2013 at 9:02am ET by Barry Schwartz

Dr. Peter Meyers, the Marketing Scientist at Moz (formerly SEOmoz), tipped us off to a new Google search interface test. It appears Google is testing showing "in-depth articles" in the search results for local queries. In the screenshot below, Pete triggered these results by searching for [mexican restaurants]. The local results and maps came up, and also restaurant reviews from Reason, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Below is a screen shot (here is a full size screenshot): We've reached out to Google for a comment on this finding but have not yet heard back. Google is [...]

Google Tests Larger Video Thumbnails In Tablet Search Results

Jun 3, 2013 at 9:44am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google Operating System blog has screen shots of Google showing larger thumbnail images for videos that come up in the search results. The larger video thumbnails show up for the first video result on tablet devices. I personally tried to replicate this on my devices, including Chrome and mobile Safari on an iPad and some Android devices, and I only saw the smaller thumbnails. As you can see, the video thumbnail is larger, the +1 button was added, and the snippet (description) in the search results was removed. Google is constantly testing search results user interfaces, so thi [...]

Google Search Rolling Out Nutrition Information On More Than 1,000 Foods

May 30, 2013 at 12:56pm ET by Amy Gesenhues

Building on their Knowledge Graph technology, Google search is rolling out nutrition information on more than 1,000 fruits, vegetables, meats and meals. Users will be able to search on everything from simple one-word terms like apple or carrot to more complex dishes such as burritos or chow mein to find relevant nutrition information. According to Google's announcement, Google voice search users will hear answers to specific questions, like "How much protein is in a banana?" or "How many calories are in an avocado?" as well as receive relevant nutrition information in search results, and [...]

Video: Google’s Matt Cutts On Advertorials & Webmaster Guidelines

May 29, 2013 at 2:54pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a new video today on YouTube clarifying Google's stance on Advertorials and "native advertising." Advertorials are editorial-like content that is published because an advertiser has paid the publication to publish the story or the content. Recently, we covered a story on how a major U.K. floral company was penalized for using advertorials as a way to boost their Google search rankings in an artificial way. Google's Cutts wanted to make it clear that it is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines for webmasters and advertisers to use advertori [...]

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 [...]

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