Remember that first Google Glass video? It was published a little more than a year ago and gave the world its first glimpse at what Google had in mind for Glass. Even though Google described it as "an early concept video," you can clearly see that local search and navigation was a key aspect of Google's concept. The first two minutes of the 2:30 video practically center on local stuff: search, information, businesses and navigation. And, that's smart because since Glass is a mobile device, local search and navigation is bound to be an even more common use case than the more traditional G [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search | Features: Analysis | Google | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Project Glass Eyeglasses | Search Features: Natural Language | Top News

According to a just-published Bloomberg report, Google is preparing a bid for Waze. Earlier this month, rumors indicating Facebook was in late-stage acquisition talks with Waze for roughly $1 billion appeared online. Other parties (Apple, Microsoft) may now also be interested in the social mapping service. According to the Bloomberg report: Waze is fielding expressions of interest from multiple parties and is seeking more than $1 billion, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. The Palo Alto, California-based startup might also remain independ [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Google | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Mobile | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Top News

Google's fourth Penguin update -- what the company is calling Penguin 2.0 -- hit last night, and less than 24 hours later we're already getting a first chance to look at what sites might be considered "losers" in terms of search visibility. In a nutshell, the list includes: porn sites, game sites and big brands like Dish.com, the Salvation Army, CheapOair and Educational Testing Service (yes, ETS, the company that makes a lot of those standardized tests you probably took as a child). The SEO software company, SearchMetrics, has just shared its initial look at what sites have been affecte [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Featured | Google | Google: Penguin Update | Google: SEO | Top News

Bing announced they have added a new visual way to consume news on Bing News. Now, for searches on notable people, Bing will return an image carousel at the top. Plus, you will also see on the right-hand side of the page related people to the person you searched for. Here is an example of the image carousel on Bing News: This looks very similar to Google's knowledge graph carousel which launched in August of last year. Bing News also added the ability to see news results for queries that have no fresh news. If Bing News cannot find fresh content within the past two weeks, Bing [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Microsoft: Bing News Search | Top News

Google's next generation Penguin update is now live, and webmasters and SEOs are carefully assessing how this update has impacted their websites. Google is assessing things as well -- how this has impacted the search results, search quality and searcher satisfaction. Google's head of search spam tweeted, asking that if you still see spammy websites coming up in the Google search results, to let Google know. Matt posted an online Google doc form over here where you can specify the URL of the spam site, the search query you saw it for and any additional comments. Here's a special spam rep [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Penguin Update | Google: SEO | Top News

The fourth release of Google's spam-fighting "Penguin Update" is now live. But, Penguin 4 has a twist. It contains Penguin 2.0 technology under the hood, which Google says is a new generation of tech that should better stop spam. Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Web spam team, announced the new Penguin 2.0 update during This Week in Google (Episode #199). He referenced the earlier video of himself talking about the next generation Penguin update, and said this is being rolled out "within the next few hours." Webmasters and SEOs: expect major changes to the search results. Matt specifical [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Featured | Features: Analysis | Google: Penguin Update | Google: SEO | Top News

Over the past day or so, we've been seeing reports that some of us can replicate ourselves, where the site command (i.e., site:www.domain.com) in Google was limited to only showing 30 results. The rumors were that with the recent domain clustering change Google pushed out this week has severely impacted the site command. Those rumors are true. Google's Matt Cutts told us that this is a "temporary side effect of the domain clustering change," they pushed out yesterday. Matt, the head of Google's search spam said, "we expect that site: will be back to showing lots of results by sometime ne [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: SEO | Top News

The High Court of England and Wales ended a five year legal battle between Marks & Spencer and Interflora yesterday.  The court ruled in favor of flower delivery network Interflora, concluding that retailer Marks & Spencer breached trademark infringement laws by bidding on the keyword "Interflora" in its Google AdWords campaigns. In the European Union, Google allows bidding on trademarked keywords except when the ads are deemed to be misleading and "confusing as to the origin of the advertised goods and service." Yesterday's ruling finds Spencer & Marks in breach of that exc [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Features: Analysis | Google: AdWords | Legal | Legal: Trademarks | Top News

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 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Featured | Features: Analysis | Google: Conversational Search | Google: Gmail Search Field Trial | Google: Google Now | Google: Google Search App | Google: Voice Search | Google: Web Search | Top News

Microsoft announced the launch of The Bing Ads Traffic Quality Resource Center today, a website designed to give advertisers and publishers visibility into the traffic quality protection systems of the Yahoo! Bing Network. The site includes sections that cover terminology, network protection methods, an overview of where ads on the Yahoo! Bing network will appear, as well as best practice resources for advertisers and publishers. Google has a similar service, the Ad Traffic Quality Resource, that launched in 2007. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Featured | Microsoft: Bing Ads | Top News

Google has quietly added support for six additional data types to the data highlighter rich snippet markup tool they introduced back in December. Google initially launched a visual rich snippet markup tool in December to allow less tech-savvy webmasters to markup their event based data. The tool only worked with event data and nothing else. Google has updated their help page showing the six new data types, in addition to the events data type. They include: Articles Movies TV Episodes Products (link currently broken) Local Businesses Software Applications Google will like [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: SEO | Top News

There are seven voice commands built into this first "Explorers" edition of Google Glass. Two of those six are search-related: "google..." and "get directions to...." The others are "take a photo," "record a video," "send a message to," "make a call to" and "start a Hangout with." There's also the predictive search aspect of Google Now, where the device automatically shows me the kind of information Google thinks I'm looking for. So, the chances are pretty strong that a good amount of Google Glass activity is going to involve searching. Or "googling" as Glass suggests. Yep. Even though G [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search | Featured | Features: Analysis | Google | Google: Knowledge Graph | Google: Project Glass Eyeglasses | Search Features: Natural Language | Top News

If you needed another reason to get your location extensions set up in AdWords, Google has announced its testing new ads in the new Google Maps. AdWords search ads set with location extensions can appear directly below the search box and on the map itself. Ads without location extensions can appear below the search box only and not on the map. The screenshot below shows a Rent-a-champ Cars ad below the search box and an "ad", or sponsored listing, on the map, indicated by a red icon with a white square in it. Google announced the new version of Google Maps at the company's annua [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | Google: AdWords: Enhanced Campaigns | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Mobile | Top News

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 [...]

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

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 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | SEO: Host Crowding & Clustering | Top News

Yandex has presented what it claims is a new concept in search engine results pages to a Russian audience at an online industry conference in Moscow. They’ve nicknamed the new concept “Islands,” but are describing it functionally as “Interactive Snippets” and the next step on from rich snippets. To be launched in a few weeks in Turkey, followed by Russia, the new interactive snippets enable webmasters and publishers to coordinate their own on-SERPS interactions with users which are fully controlled by their own sites. [caption id="attachment_159950" align="aligncenter" width="5 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search | Search Engines: Yandex | Top News

According to a report from IDG News, a "toned down" version of an earlier, more restrictive "ancillary copyright" law has been published in Germany and will go into effect in August. The ”ancillary copyright” rule was proposed in August of 2012. In its initial form it would have required Google and others that indexed or aggregated news to pay for links or excerpts from those news items -- essentially a "link tax." The law was pushed by German magazine and newspaper publishers that see the Internet and Google, in particular, as the cause of many of their subscription, readership and [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search | Google: Critics | Google: Legal | Google: Outside US | Legal: Copyright | Legal: Regulation | Top News

Coming out of Google I/O at Moscone Center in San Francisco yesterday, I did a double-take. Was that Microsoft pitching its "Bing It On" challenge against Google directly across the street. Yep. "Put the science back in computer science: test your Google bias inside," read a big banner, over the entrance to the Metreon Mall, which is across from Moscone. Inside, there's a "Bing In On" kiosk: One side is just an invitation to take the challenge; you actually do the challenge on one of the other sides: The kiosk simply takes you to the Bing It On site, where you're invited to [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Features: Analysis | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Marketing | Top News

Want to have your company logo appear in Google search results, similar to the way authors get to have their pictures displayed? Keep waiting. New "organization markup" support that Google has announced won't do that, but it might be useful for putting your logo in Google Knowledge Graph boxes. Author Images Many are familiar with authorship images that appear next to some stories, such as this example: That's where I did a search for "google bing," and one of my own articles came up in the top results. My picture appears next to the article because I've gone through the steps to identify [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | Top News

At the Google Developer conference keynote this morning in San Francisco, one of the clear highlights was the introduction of a redesigned Google Maps experience for the PC and mobile. The New Google Maps are available now with an invitation. Already the leading digital and mobile mapping service, the various feature and UI improvements put more distance between Mountain View and its competitors. While Microsoft, Nokia and Apple offer some or even many of the same mapping capabilities, no one offers "the complete package" that Google does. The new Google Maps offer a redesigned UI, though it [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Features: Analysis | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Mobile | Top News