iCrossing: Google’s Share Of Search Almost 77 Percent

Oct 27, 2009 at 8:00am ET by Greg Sterling   

We received some interesting data from search agency iCrossing yesterday. The data show US search market share percentages and distribution quite different than the major traffic metrics firms. The company says its numbers are “based on a large representative sample of Fortune 1000 companies, across all major verticals,” which use its search tracking tools. Accordingly the [...]

---

Google Rolls Out New Custom Search Features, Including Wikipedia Integration

Oct 26, 2009 at 6:30pm ET by Matt McGee   

Google has made a series of announcements today about its Custom Search Engine service, including a new integration with Wikipedia that substantially changes the search experience on that site for users who opt-in. Other Custom Search announcements today include new custom themes and layouts, as well as better support for “rich snippets.” More on those [...]

---

Google Social Search Launches, Gives Results From Your Trusted “Social Circle”

Oct 26, 2009 at 3:38pm ET by Danny Sullivan   

Google Social Search is rolling out, a new service from Google that allows you to easily find material written by people you know and trust. It’s a pretty cool idea, especially in that it’s pretty painless to get started using it. The service will be available through Google Labs Experimental [...]

---

Will A Free Google GPS Sink The Navigation Industry?

Oct 26, 2009 at 1:03pm ET by Greg Sterling   

Lots of companies make a good living from hardware and software GPS navigation systems. In the US carriers such as Verizon and Sprint and personal navigation device (PND) makers such as TomTom, Garmin, Magellan, among others, earn device and subscription revenues from turn-by-turn routing and directions and points of interest directories. There are a number of [...]

---

Video Of Google’s Sergey Brin At Web 2.0

Oct 26, 2009 at 9:31am ET by Barry Schwartz   

Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, made a surprise visit at the Web 2.0 Summit last week. The video of his 18 minute interview with John Battelle is now available on YouTube. Here it is:

In summary, he talked about his thoughts on Twitter’s deal, Google’s Social Search, also a little bit about Bing and even [...]

---

The Myth Of Great Search Engine Results

Oct 23, 2009 at 6:54pm ET by Danny Sullivan   

Too much time is often spent about the new features the various major search engines roll out or the latest deals they cut. Here at Search Engine Land, we can be as guilty of that as anyone. To correct it, I’ll be spending more and more time highlighting poor quality search results [...]

---

Google’s Brin: “A Shame” That Yahoo Out Of Search

Oct 23, 2009 at 9:51am ET by Greg Sterling   

Try as they might Yahoo is having a tough time convincing people that it’s still “in search.” On Yahoo’s earnings call earlier this week CFO Tim Morse, who led the call because CEO Carol Bartz was ill, used her analogy to describe Yahoo’s new way of positioning itself around search: The next revolution isn’t with the [...]

---

Google Social Search Is Coming & More On Google-Twitter

Oct 21, 2009 at 8:02pm ET by Danny Sullivan   

Google’s Marissa Mayer has announced at the Web 2.0 Summit that Google Social Search will be launching in the coming weeks. I’ve seen an early release of it. It’s way cool. Below, what details we have now about this plus some follow up on today’s Google-Twitter search deal that was announced. NOTE: Google Social Search is [...]

---

Up Close With Bing’s Twitter Search Engine

Oct 21, 2009 at 2:40pm ET by Danny Sullivan   

Bing new Bing Twitter Search has gone live today, made possible through a new deal cut with Twitter. Below, a close-up look at features in the new service. Bing Twitter? Bing Facebook? Bing Social Search? “Bing Twitter Search” is my name for the new service. Bing tells me officially, it’s called “Bing Twitter.” That sounds awkward, two [...]

---

Rumor: Here Comes GTunes, Google Music Service

Oct 21, 2009 at 11:30am ET by Greg Sterling   

Google is reportedly about to launch a new music service in partnership with LaLa and iLike (MySpace). — Update, October 28, 2009: This is now live. See our story, Google Music Search 2.0 Launches With Musical “OneBox” for more. — According to TechCrunch, users will access the Google music service through search: Users will be able to stream songs [...]

---

Twitter Not Giving Access To Private Tweets

Oct 20, 2009 at 3:44pm ET by Danny Sullivan   

Is Twitter allowing search engines access to protected tweets or not? Not, Twitter tells me, though the company probably needs to do a bit more to prevent this type of confusion in the future. The LA Times reported yesterday about a “Twitter hole” that it believed allowed Google special access to protected [...]

---

Google Analytics New Features: Intelligence Engine, Custom Alerts & More

Oct 20, 2009 at 2:01pm ET by Daniel Waisberg   

Google has just announced a number of new features for Google Analytics, including more powerful reporting capabilities, greater customization options and a new “intelligence engine” that Google says can help search marketers drive smarter data insights. Here’s a rundown of the new features, and why they’re important. Analytics intelligence Google Analytics new “intelligence engine” comes with default [...]

---

Thoughts On Web Developers, SEO & Reputation Problems

Oct 19, 2009 at 5:46pm ET by Danny Sullivan   

After last week’s “Does SEO = Spam” debate erupted, I had a number of follow-up emails where I explained privately more about why SEO has such a bad reputation in some quarters, as well as what SEO is and isn’t, from my perspective. I wanted to share some of that below. Bad Advice Sucks: From SEOs [...]

---

Moving Ads Closer To “Free” Listing Ups Google’s Earnings

Oct 19, 2009 at 12:52pm ET by Barry Schwartz   

In early August, Google quietly shifted the ads closer to the free listings. We assumed then, Google did this to drive more attention to the ads, and now we can say that we were right. In the question and answer session of last week’s Google earnings report. A transcript reports Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg confirming that [...]

---

Got Bad Incoming Links? Google Says, “Don’t Fret It”

Oct 19, 2009 at 9:27am ET by Barry Schwartz   

The Google Webmaster Central blog has a post on “dealing” with low quality backlinks. In that post, Google basically explains that incoming links is “just one of many” ranking factors. That being the case, Google says if you have bad quality incoming links, “don’t fret” it and focus on things you can control, [...]

---

Google’s Q3: $5.94 billion, 7 Percent YoY Revenue Growth, 14 Percent Paid Click Growth

Oct 15, 2009 at 4:33pm ET by Greg Sterling   

Expectations were high for Google’s Q3 given some of the positive reports coming out about clicks and search volumes from third parties such as Efficient Frontier and comScore. Even though Google performed solidly (almost $6 billion in a still-bad economy) there may be some disappointment on Wall Street (apparently not). Google’s Eric Schmidt said “The [...]

---

Yahoo To Drop Paid Inclusion Program

Oct 15, 2009 at 4:20pm ET by Barry Schwartz   

Yahoo has announced that their paid inclusion program will cease at the end of this year. Partners were informed yesterday (such as here and here), and a Yahoo representative confirmed the move on a panel discussion moderated by Search Engine Land Editor-in-Chief Danny Sullivan at the iProspect/Range Online Media Client Summit today. We’ve also received [...]

---

Google Quietly Drops PageRank From Webmaster Tools

Oct 15, 2009 at 10:22am ET by Barry Schwartz   

My piece this morning, Google Removes PageRank Data From Webmaster Tools from the Search Engine Roundtable has sparked a lot of discussion on Twitter. Google had indeed removed the PageRank statistics from Google Webmaster Tools. I believe it was removed when Google released the Webmaster Tools Labs features earlier this week. PageRank [...]

---

Battle Of The Augmented Reality Apps: Urbanspoon, Layar, Wikitude, WhereMark & More

Oct 15, 2009 at 9:57am ET by Greg Sterling   

There seems to be an explosion of “real-time” search engines on the PC. The space is very new, still fairly open and in my opinion the tools and sites are not yet all that useful. Almost exactly the same can be said of “augmented reality” (AR) in mobile. From almost nothing about six months ago, there’s [...]

---

Sorry, Yahoo, You DO Index The Meta Keywords Tag

Oct 14, 2009 at 2:31pm ET by Danny Sullivan   

Oh, that this weren’t true. Last week, Yahoo made news by disclosing that it had quietly dropped support for the meta keywords tag. As a long time hater of that tag and the insane questions it has produced, I was thrilled! But today, I see conclusively that Yahoo still supports the tag. The test was simple. [...]

---

See More News Briefs »

See More Features »

See More How To »

See All Recent Comments »

Stay on top of all the search news with our daily summary, the SearchCap newsletter. View a sample ›

The Search Engine Land feed keeps you informed as news happens. SEE ALL FEEDS »

Advertise With Us »

Search Engine Land on Facebook