Bing is getting smarter today with the addition of food- and drug-related entities to its library of facts. The new at-a-glance information for these searches will appear in the Snapshot area on the right side of Bing’s search results. In some cases, like the hamburger search shown below, the Snapshot includes a dropdown to further […]
Chinese search giant Baidu has stolen away the head of Google’s “deep learning” project, dubbed “Google Brain.” Andrew Ng is an artificial intelligence expert, Stanford professor and founder of online learning company Coursera. Google Brain is a machine learning initiative to help make computing more efficient and capable by mimicking the distributed processes of the human […]
When it comes to PPC, metrics are everything. We consume ourselves in pouring over numbers and analyzing our accounts down to the smallest detail. However, it turns out we are being misled by the data we rely on the most. We’re too quick to take our figures at face value without thinking about what we’re […]
There seems to be no end to the range of declared “SEO truths” for local mom and pop shops. Search Engine Optimization strategies that work for the big brands differ from those that work for small, local players, so it’s no wonder that so many local marketers end up confused about how to really use SEO […]
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
Google announced new updates to its Google Places bulk location management tool this week, including a new Google+ social feature. From Googler Jade Wang’s announcement in a Google Product Forum: Each location in upgraded and verified accounts will have social features automatically enabled. To use social features on a particular location, like making a post, […]
Flickr has quietly rolled out a change to its search interface that makes it a lot easier to find images that are licensed through Creative Commons. There’s a new “License” dropdown menu that shows at the top of the search results page, as shown above. It brings Creative Commons search filters right to the user, […]
Depending on what you read, a “Right To Be Forgotten” court ruling in the European Union this week means that now anyone can ask for anything to be removed from Google, which will soon collapse under an overwhelming number of requests. In reality, it’s far more limited than it sounds, though the ruling does raise […]
Earlier today, Google published its annual Founders’ Letter. This is a kind of “Google State of the Union” missive that Google has published annually since it went public. Many bloggers picked up on the following remark in the document penned by Google CEO Larry Page: “[I]n many ways, we’re a million miles away from creating […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: With New GDN Ad Format, Text Ads Will Compete In Display Auctions Today, Google unveiled a new ad format on the Google Display Network (GDN) called magazine ads in which text […]
Today, Google unveiled a new ad format on the Google Display Network (GDN) called magazine ads in which text ads are converted to show as “display-like” ads on publisher sites that have opted only to show display ads in their AdSense accounts. The implication for AdWords advertisers is that text ads on the Google Display […]
Google is in the midst of an antitrust, anti-competition investigation in India. Not long ago, the company was fined by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for not cooperating in that investigation: “not providing information and documents required.” Now a separate anti-competition investigation has been opened with the CCI. In that investigation an individual, Vishal Gupta, has […]
The floodgates have opened. According to a Reuters story, following Tuesday’s European Court ruling establishing a Europe-wide “right to be forgotten” (RTF), Google is preparing for an anticipated “flood” of removal requests across the 28 country jurisdiction. The ruling provided a right to individuals to request (and ultimately compel) removal of unflattering or undesired information about […]
Often, I’ll speak to prospective clients who think they’ve been hit by an algorithm update or a penalty. They’ve lost a lot of organic traffic, so they immediately think that a search engine change is to blame. Unfortunately, I’ve also run into many situations where SEOs are using algorithm updates such as Panda or Penguin […]
Much of what marketers have learned about landing page conversion is wrong. Worse, the optimizations promoted across industry blogs, courses and at conferences as game changers are really just best practices every marketer should have implemented already. Tweaking headline and body copy, adjusting line spacing, repositioning buttons, playing with fonts and colors – all of […]
Duane Forrester from Bing posted a new article on the Bing Search Blog named Mark It Up. In the article, Duane explained the upmost importance of marking up your content with schema and meta data. Duane said “it’s worth completing this work to help the engines understand your content more clearly.” Why? Duane explained that […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Study: Gender Bias In Digital Marketing Is Real WordStream, the paid search platform, published an eye-opening study this week on gender bias in the online marketing industry. Using its internal data, […]
WordStream, the paid search platform, published an eye-opening study this week on gender bias in the online marketing industry. Using its internal data, the study concluded that there is, in fact, quantifiable evidence of gender bias: Women are undervalued by 21 percent compared to their male counterparts. In light of anecdotal evidence and Moz’s latest […]
FindTheBest is a structured data directory or discovery tool for comparing products, services and entities in a wide array of categories such as Travel, Health, Education, Finance and Home & Garden among others. It looks very much like a “search engine” but founder Kevin O’Connor argues it’s much more efficient and effective than general search […]
Today, Marin Software announced support for Google AdWords Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) within its advertising management platform. RLSA allows advertisers to retarget their site visitors with search ads on Google.com and other sites in the Google Search Network. Advertisers can adjust bids, ad text and keywords based on visitors’ past behavior on their […]
When it comes to conversion rate optimization (CRO) for B2B sites, A/B testing is a great place to start — but it’s only one tactic in what should be a site-wide strategy. B2C and e-commerce sites are largely focus on improving their product pages to boost transactions. However, as I mentioned in my previous article about […]
Psychologist and researcher Robert Epstein has published research (embedded below) that he contends shows how search rankings “have the potential to profoundly influence voters without them noticing the impact.” He calls this capacity the “Search Engine Manipulation Effect” or “SEME.” The study tested how search rankings affected the perceptions and candidate preferences of “2,000 undecided […]
Now that Shopping Ads and Product Listing Ads (PLAs) are getting more prominent positions on the SERPs (and taking away traffic from search ads); I’ve started to focus on them more with my clients. I found that working with Google Shopping campaigns is a good deal different from working with traditional keywords and text ads; […]
Google announced they have expanded their transit directions to include coverage throughout Great Britain and also add bus lines to the Google Maps transit coverage in Vancouver and Chicago. Google Maps in the UK now supports over 17,000 routes with 2 million departure locations. This is also available on iOS and Android devices as well […]
Yahoo7, the Australian version of Yahoo, has de-indexed Ripoff Report after receiving “significant complaints” about defamatory content showing in its search results. As you see above, a site:ripoffreport.com on Yahoo7 produces no results. A Yahoo7 spokesperson gave us this statement on the decision to de-index that entire domain: Yahoo7 has received significant complaints in regards […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google’s Knowledge Graph Expands Into Google Maps Google is expanding its Knowledge Graph into Google Maps. The company has confirmed to Search Engine Land that some locations in Google Maps will […]
Google is expanding its Knowledge Graph into Google Maps. The company has confirmed to Search Engine Land that some locations in Google Maps will now get a new “Quick Facts” info card, and that the data are from Google’s Knowledge Graph. This new feature began appearing on Monday (May 12). The info card appears in […]
Today, the Bing Ads team announced the launch of live chat support and a new industry insights portal. Live Chat will be available at all hours every day of the week for in its English-language markets. Customers can use Live Chat to ask questions about campaign set up, optimization tactics, billing issues and more. The […]
The Apple-focused website 9to5Mac.com reported today that Google’s iOS Search app has been updated to version 4.0, with new voice search cues and customized alerts from Google Now. With the updates, the app’s new voice search cues offer more conversational-styled search queries. According to the app’s iTunes page, users can have a “smarter” conversation, asking […]
The “right to be forgotten”: a triumph of individual privacy rights or censorship? It’s going to depend on how it plays out in specific circumstances. The Luxembourg-based European Union Court of Justice, Europe’s “top court,” ruled earlier today that Google can be compelled to remove information about individuals from search results as part of a […]
Over the past week or so, there has been a lot of various signals across the search community that Google’s algorithms and rankings were updating; so much so that people were bracing themselves for a major Penguin or Panda-like algorithm announcement from Google. Google never made the announcement, and so I asked Google if anything […]
There are a lot of questions around link building tactics these days, especially when it comes to how companies can actually build links that won’t get them in trouble. In fact, one of the most common questions I hear at conferences and from clients is, “How do you build good links?” The answer, of course, […]
Search for [miami heat] on Google and you may not just see information about scores, schedules, standings and so on, but you may also see a video hosted on YouTube from the NBA with a game recap. Google is now showing video thumbnails in the NBA knowledge graph. The picture above shows how the result […]
Yesterday, Search Engine Land featured a post about the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine now providing access to more than 440 billion archived web pages back to 1996. As I’ve written about before on Search Engine Land and my infoDOCKET blog, the Wayback Machine is an absolutely essential resource for just about every web user. If […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google’s Matt Cutts Regrets Not Acting Faster On Paid Links & Content Farms In Google’s Matt Cutts latest video, he answers a question I personally asked about what he regrets, what […]
In Google’s Matt Cutts latest video, he answers a question I personally asked about what he regrets, what decision he regrets making in the past related to webspam. My question specifically was: Was there a key moment in your spam fighting career where you made a mistake that you regret, related to spam? Matt answered […]
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Google has published their official advice on the Google Webmaster Central blog on how to handle your home page when your web site serves multiple languages and countries. Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, Google Webmaster Trends Analysts, wrote the post together trying to break out the possibilities into three categories: (1) Having one home […]
Bing has launched an app for the Firefox Marketplace. As pointed out by The Next Web, Google doesn’t yet have an official app there. Firefox OS is a mobile operating system “built entirely using open web standards” (HTML5). It’s both an effort to reinvigorate the mobile web and keep Firefox from falling into total mobile irrelevance. […]
The Internet Archive announced that the Wayback Machine, a huge internet archive of web pages dating back to 1996, has surpassed 400 billion pages indexed. In January 2013, a little over a year ago, the Wayback Machine said they had 240 billion URLs indexed and since then, they have added another 160 billion URLs! That […]