It’s not often you have a vote that might create a new, independent nation. But that’s what’s happening today with Scotland. It’s such a big event that you’d think Google and Bing would be doing something special to provide election results. That’s not the case. Both search engines have long done special presentations for U.S. elections or […]
As Google continues to provide quick answers and Knowledge Graph data directly at the top of the search results, publisher concerns continue to rise. Publishers are worried that searchers will have less of a need and desire to click through from Google’s search results page to the publisher’s page, leaving the publishers with very little […]
Who says rivals can’t work together? If you search on Google for “iPhone 6” or “Apple Watch,” you’ll discover new information boxes about each product that Google created with the help of Apple. Here’s how it looks for search on iPhone 6: And for the iPhone 6 Plus: And for the Apple Watch: These boxes, commonly called […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Industry Survey: 37% Of SEOs Saw Less Than $30,000 In Revenue Turnover Since Last Year According to an industry survey by local search firm BrightLocal, a majority of SEOs experienced less […]
Google is now showing snippets of knowledge, facts or answers, directly in the snippet portion of the search results. Alex Chitu noticed this saying “Google now shows a list of facts next to some Wikipedia results.” These are “Knowledge Graph data extracted from Wikipedia is now placed below the snippets,” Alex explains. Here are some […]
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 Quick Answer Fail: NSFW Advice On “How To Eat Sushi” Google continues to expand the number of quick answers it offers in its results, as well as the size of […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: “Right To Be Forgotten” To Blame For Removal Of 50 Wikipedia Links From EU Search Results According to a release today from the Wikimedia Foundation, 50 links to its Wikipedia site […]
According to a release today from the Wikimedia Foundation, 50 links to its Wikipedia site have been removed from Google search results in Europe on account of the recent Right to Be Forgotten legislation. From the release: As of July 18, Google has received more than 91,000 removal requests involving more than 328,000 links; of […]
The House of Lords in the UK has little power in government or policy making except at the margins. Similarly, the British upper house’s recent condemnation of the European Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF) will have little practical impact in the UK or across Europe. Still it’s a dissenting voice from within a European government. […]
As Google’s Hummingbird algorithm continues to shape the answers within Google’s search results, webmasters, SEOs and searchers ask themselves, why is Google showing this knowledge graph or that quick answer. Often webmasters find themselves at a loss because Google takes their content and puts it at the top of the search results. While searchers ask, […]
Today is the 20th anniversary of the robots.txt directive being available for webmasters to block search engines from crawling their pages. The robots.txt was created by Martijn Koster in 1994 while he was working at Nexor after having issues with crawlers hitting his sites too hard. All major search engines back then, including WebCrawler, Lycos […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: eBay’s “Paid Search Is Ineffective” Study Gains Buzz And Skeptics, Again By claiming that paid search is largely “ineffective,” eBay has attracted a lot of attention and buzz with media outlets […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Will Google & Bing Penalize Microsoft Over Their Sponsored Post Campaign For Internet Explorer? This morning, news broke that Microsoft Internet Explorer is getting help from SocialChorus to build more awareness […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Is The Mobile Migration Of Graph Search Upon Us? New Facebook Test Uncovers Mobile Web Integration We’ve been saying that it is just a matter of time for Facebook’s Graph Search […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Russian Search Engine Yandex Now 100% “Not Provided,” Blocks Referrer Data Yandex announced (in Russian) today that they have now went 100% secure, encrypting all search queries, resulting in a huge […]
When you think about the job the search engines have to do it’s pretty daunting. Given a collection of mostly wildly unstructured data from an endless number of sources, Bing, Google and the others have to somehow make sense of all that information and then give it back to us on demand in a way […]
Bing has gained another win with Apple, becoming integrated into a new version of Spotlight in Apple’s forthcoming Mac OS X “Yosemite” operating system and in the coming iOS 8 mobile operating system. Spotlight will also tap into a wide-range of search resources similar to how Siri works on iOS. During Apple’s WWDC keynote today, […]
Google has taken a big step forward in complying with the European Union’s new “Right To Be Forgotten” that was established after a court ruling earlier this month. The company has created a new form allowing those in the EU to request takedown of URLs they dislike. Removals will only happen for EU-versions of Google, […]
Back in January, Google formally rolled out popups with Knowledge Graph information about certain sites in the organic search results. Now it appears these popups are being tested in ads. Ariana Wolf, a search strategist at 90octane, provided screenshots of the Knowledge Graph popups appearing on ads for a couple of real estate focused searches […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Is eBay A Big Loser In Google’s Panda 4.0 Update? — Winners & Losers Data Yesterday, Google began rolling out their Panda 4.0 update designed to punch low-quality content. That’s generated […]
Steve Coast founded OpenStreetMap (OSM) in the UK in 2004. It’s 10 years old this year. He was inspired by the Wikipedia model and compelled by a lack of available map and location data in the UK at that time. Coast now works for GPS navigation company Telenav, which owns location-based mobile ad network Thinknear. Not long ago […]
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 Search Results Snippet Overlay Descriptions May Use DMOZ Description About a year ago, Google introduced a new feature in the search results that give you quick overlays on the search […]
About a year ago, Google introduced a new feature in the search results that give you quick overlays on the search result so that you can learn more about the site you are about to click on before you click on it. Early on, the results of the data in the snippet came from Wikipedia […]
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 […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Sell Bing? Makes No Sense, Says Microsoft’s Bill Gates — It’s A “Core Business” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was interviewed on Fox Business News yesterday. Among other things, he was asked […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: BrightEdge Uses SEO Patents As “Sword,” Sues Searchmetrics Oh no they didn’t: BrightEdge has sued rival Searchmetrics using multiple SEO patents, which were granted last year. The concern being expressed by […]
Perhaps it’s SEO’s “Oreo moment,” a tweet relating to search engine optimization that’s gained nearly as much attention as Oreo’s famous Super Bowl blackout tweet. But the subject was a perfect storm of goodness — a real-life example of Google doing the type of thing in search it seems to be telling others not to […]
If Ray Kurzweil is right, computers will be smarter than humans 15 years from now. It’s called “technological singularity” and a big part of his job at Google is making sure that vision becomes reality. Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist that became Google’s Director of Engineering in late 2012, recently told the Guardian that his […]
Satori, Bing’s knowledge index, is expanding with the addition of timeline-style facts about important individuals. The new “Timeline” section is now showing up in the right-side search results for famous people such as Abraham Lincoln and Isaac Asimov (shown above), along with athletes (Serena and Venus Williams), artists (Vincent Van Gogh), business people (Bill Gates, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: “When Do The Olympics Opening Ceremonies Start?” Whatever You Do, Don’t Ask Yahoo Who knew a simple question would be so hard to answer? Yesterday I searched across all three engines […]
Last week Telenav acquired Skobbler for roughly $24 million in cash and stock. Skobbler is based in Berlin, Germany and is to OpenStreetMap (OSM) what Red Hat is to Linux according to Ryan Peterson of Telenav. For those not aware, OSM is the Wikipedia of digital mapping. It relies on a global force of over 1.5 […]
Google has announced the formal rollout of a test that some searchers have been seeing for a few days now — a test that associates a Knowledge Graph popup with certain web pages in desktop search results. The popup adds more information about certain search results, which sounds like it should be good for searchers. […]
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 Alerts Get A Shiny New Redesign Google flipped the switch this morning on a new design for its Google Alerts emails. The change brings Google Alerts closer in line with […]
In addition to a range of other announcements at CES yesterday, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer introduced a new news app, Yahoo News Digest. It was built under the supervision of Summly founder Nick D’Aloisio. Summly was acquired by Yahoo in March of 2013 for an estimated $30 million. Summly itself was quickly shut down 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: How To Understand And Optimize AdWords Search Partners Data Here at Hanapin, we have a monthly training day. We shut down the office and all the account managers spend the morning […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: AdWords Bid Management And Account Structure Mistakes To Avoid On my one-year anniversary of working as an AdWords practitioner instead of a Googler, Brad Geddes interviewed me about Quality Score for […]
Google has penalized Rap Genius for link schemes this morning. If you go to Google and search for [rap genius], rapgenius.com will not be found on the first page. Instead you will find links to their Twitter account, Facebook page, Wikipedia profile and stories like this about them being penalized by Google. But you won’t […]
It’s Christmas Eve, time for all good boys and girls to be expecting Santa Claus to be bringing them gifts. But where is jolly old St. Nick on his journey? Once again, there are two major services tracking him: NORAD and Google. Below, our annual review of the tracking sites and methods of using them […]
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 Latest Transparency Report Shows Rise In Content Removal Requests From Russia & Turkey Google announced today it has released its eighth Transparency Report since 2010 when the search engine began […]
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video today on the topic of “stitching content.” Stitching content is the practice of taking snippets of content from other websites and pasting them on your own site, with citations. Matt Cutts basically said it is not a good technique that will lead to rankings in […]