If you happened to do certain abortion-related searches in the past few days, you might’ve been surprised to see the late Truman Capote getting Google+ Authorship credit for an article from The New York Times. What makes it odd, of course, is that Capote died in 1984. He wrote numerous classics that showed up on […]
There’s no escaping it: It looks and acts a lot like Google’s Knowledge Graph. But Bing calls it “Snapshot” — that middle column in between its main search results and the social sidebar on the far right. And today, Snapshot expands to begin showing facts and related information for both people and landmarks. So, on […]
Remember in August Google launched a new algorithm we coined the Pirate Update? It basically looked at the number of valid DMCA takedown requests processed and used that data to downgrade the rankings of sites that were found to be abusive in this area. Since then, it appears some people have been abusing the algorithm. […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Mobile Search Beyond Google: In App Search Tools A couple months back, I covered the rise of a new generation of Windows Phones, and how they will slowly bring more mobile […]
Google is celebrating the life of French sculpter Auguste Rodin on his 172nd birthday today. The sculpture Google is using to remember his life is one of his most famous sculptures named The Thinker. The Thinker was finished in 1902, but not presented publicly until 1904. It is currently located at Musée Rodin, Paris but […]
When is personalized search not personalized search? A recently discovered shift on how Google may alter your search results based on what you — and others in aggregate — previously have searched for may have you wondering how to answer that question. To understand the latest development, I think it’s helpful to go back and […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Priceline To Buy Travel Search Engine Kayak For $1.8 Billion Priceline is a public company that owns several other travel brands, including Booking.com, Agoda.com, Cheaptickets.com, Rentalcars.com and a few other travel […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Advertising To Increase Transparency With “Quality Impact” How valuable would it be to work on improving your paid search keywords’ Quality Score? And which keywords should you focus on first? […]
It’s almost unanimous: 94 percent of U.S. teachers say their students equate “research” with using Google or other search engines — more so than Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias. But teachers are less sure that their students are effective searchers, and they’re more skeptical than most adults about the accuracy and trustworthiness of information that’s […]
Google is running a special logo today to honor Bob Ross, painter, art instructor and host of “The Joy Of Painting,” which aired for over a decade in the US and Canada. Ross’s show ran from 1983 through 1994, when he stopped to fight lymphoma, which he later died from in 1995, at age 52. […]
Google has a special logo on their home page for Niels Bohr’s 127th birthday. Niels Bohr is known as one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century. To pay tribute to his contributions, Google has a scientific Google Doodle for him. Some of his contributions include Copenhagen interpretation, Complementarity, Bohr model, Sommerfeld–Bohr theory, […]
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 August & September Updates: Panda, Knowledge Graph, Page Quality & SafeSearch Google has announced details on the search algorithm and quality changes made over the past two months – August […]
Go to Google and search for [google.co.uk], Google’s UK home page. Google will return a knowledge graph result for Preston Lodge High School. What does Preston Lodge High School and Google UK have to do with each other? I am not sure. Searching Google for [google.com] does not return the same high school. In fact, […]
Klout has become the latest social service to be integrated into the new Bing Social Sidebar that was launched earlier this year. Bing says that Klout scores will now appear next to people surfaced in the sidebar, plus Klout’s data will be used to help determine some of the people who show. From Bing’s post: […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: The E-commerce Product Video That Increases Revenue Per Visit Which video recipe will make your cash register ring more often and more loudly? It was the end of a 12-hour video […]
Wikipedia announced they have decided to give away their search data to the public for free. Yea, they would just give away search data to anyone would wanted to download it. Shortly after they announced this, they decided to “temporarily taken down this data to make additional improvements to the anonymization protocol related to the […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Back To The Future: Google Announces A Meta Keywords Tag Just For News Articles Grab your flux capacitor and fire up the Delorean, folks. We’re going back to the future: Meta […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Emma Watson: Most Dangerous Celebrity Search Object, McAfee Says Hey Emma Watson fans: Be really careful about clicking on those search results. McAfee, the security technology company, says Watson is 2012′s […]
Six Degrees Of Bacon is a popular game where people try to guess how actors are connected to Kevin Bacon through movies they’ve been in. Now Google is making it easy with a new “bacon number” search. Measuring Bacon Numbers To get the “bacon number” of any actor, simply start your search with “bacon number” […]
Google has a special global Google logo, Doodle, for Clara Schumann. Clara Schumann was born 193 years ago today in Germany and is well known for her work as a composer and as a Pianists. In fact, Wikipedia writes she is known as the most “distinguished pianists of the Romantic era.” In her long career, […]
It looks as if Google is testing a move away from showing the traditional 10 listings to only displaying seven, and it also appears that it’s even easier than ever for one site to dominates all those results. 7 Blue Links We started getting reports last week about the 7-results change last week. Here’s an […]
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 June-July Updates: Site Clustering, Sitelinks Changes & Focus On Page Quality It’s back. And it’s bigger than ever. I’m talking about Google’s monthly announcement of search quality/algorithm changes — an […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Report: Google Strikes Antitrust Deal With EU, Avoids Legal Battle According to a report in the Financial Times, Google and the EU have agreed in principle to the “outlines of a […]
Today’s Google doodle-logo celebrates aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart‘s 115th birthday. According to Wikipedia, “Earhart was the first woman to receive the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross, awarded for becoming the first aviatrix to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences and was instrumental in the […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Firefox 14 Now Encrypts Google Searches, But Search Terms Still Will “Leak” Out Firefox 14 has officially launched today, which means all Google searches are encrypted by default. However, due to […]
Firefox 14 has officially launched today, which means all Google searches are encrypted by default. However, due to a Google loophole, the encryption will not prevent things you search for from “leaking” out to Google’s advertisers nor potentially showing up as search suggestions or in data reported to web sites through Google Webmaster Central. The Firefox […]
No sooner did I hit “publish” on my earlier post, Google’s “Voice Assistant” Not Quite Siri-Smart But Most People Won’t Notice, than people on Twitter started responding that I was out of my mind. A couple of people cited a Piper Jaffray study, published yesterday, comparing the accuracy and breadth of Siri “search results” vs. […]
Google’s knowledge graph which launched a little over a month ago is reportedly often wrong. Conductor ran a study showing that for trending terms, the knowledge Google is providing via their knowledge graph is wrong about 20% of the time. By trending, Conductor looked at the top 50 ‘people’ in Google Trends and Google Insights […]
Google is dramatically cutting prices for the heaviest developer-users of of its Maps API to keep them from defecting to other platforms. The company has slashed prices “from US $4 per 1,000 map loads to 50¢ per 1,000 map loads.” Since the new fees policy was instituted last Fall, there have been several high profile […]
The small, local businesses in a particular industry on this island all vied for top slot in Google’s rankings, since the top dog could command a substantially higher yearly profit as a result. The competitors’ products weren’t all that different, and their potential customers didn’t have the expertise to tell the difference, either. Their relative […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Is For Doing Things It Tells You Not To Do “Bing Is For Doing” is the catchphrase being used in new ads for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. But in a […]
Bing’s search results are getting a bit more interactive with the integration of machine-generated videos from Qwiki. The companies have just announced that some search results — currently those where a Wikipedia page appears — will offer searchers a chance to see and hear a Qwiki video about the search topic. The integration shows up […]
Bing’s search results are getting a bit more informational thanks to a new partnership with Encyclopedia Britannica. They’re calling it “Britannica Online Encyclopedia Answers,” and it adds extra information about a search result right within the search results page. As the screenshots below show, it looks quite a bit like Google’s recently-launched Knowledge Graph feature, […]
Searches are up in the two weeks since Google launched Knowledge Graph, its database of facts that adds context to a variety of search results. Although the company didn’t share specific numbers, Google Fellow Amit Singhal told the Wall Street Journal that “people are interacting with it [the Knowledge Graph] more” and “doing more [search] […]
Google’s Knowledge Graph has claimed its first “victim,” if you will: The content box that showed “People and Pages On Google+” is gone. In its place? A variety of Knowledge Graph-related content that will show up differently depending on the search query. In making the changes to this prime real estate on a search results […]
Hinted at for months, Google formally launched its “Knowledge Graph” today. The new technology is being used to provide popular facts about people, places and things alongside Google’s traditional results. It also allows Google to move toward a new way of searching not for pages that match query terms but for “entities” or concepts that […]
Kara Swisher at AllThingsD is reporting that embattled Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson is going to step down for “personal reasons.” Swisher has one or more “moles” inside the company and consistently gets inside information — which generally turns out to be correct. Thompson’s “personal reasons,” as we all know, are: misrepresenting that he had a […]
Last November, Google tested a new “Sources” section in its search results, in the third column where ads normally appear. It seems the testing is underway again, showing extended information about actors, films, musicians, people and more. It also seems likely everyone may see this extended information soon, and that it’s the “search refresh” the […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Wikipedia Appears On Google’s Page One 46 Percent Of The Time, Compared to 31 Percent On Bing [STUDY] A new study suggests that Wikipedia gets better visibility on Google than it […]
A new study suggests that Wikipedia gets better visibility on Google than it does on Bing. While that may not surprise much of the SEO industry, it contradicts what some Google employees have previously said, as well as another recent study on Wikipedia’s search visibilty. Last week, Conductor released updated data about Wikipedia’s search visibility, […]