Google Grades Itself On SEO Best Practices
Culminating an internal project that seems to have lasted for several months, Google has published a “Google seo Report Card” showing the results of an internal seo audit on the home pages of 100 different Google Products. The main verdict? Like many companies, Google’s web site is a mixed bag of good seo tactics and [...]
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9% of Mobile Web Page Views are Google Search
Mobile search, like the rest of the mobile web, is really in its infancy. While we are definitely making leaps and bounds all the time, a lot of the future of the mobile web is TBD—including which provider, if any, will dominate mobile search.
Or so we thought. Using browsing info from its popular mobile client, Opera Mini, Opera Software recently found that Google search accounts for 9% of all page views on the mobile web. That’s right, not just 9% of all mobile searches—9% of all web page views.
That’s a lot of searches. Not all desktop behavior has translated well to the mobile web, but a preference for Google for web search might be one of those things we have a hard time shaking. It also helps that Google’s name has become synonymous with searching.
As on the desktop scene, Google is well ahead of the other popular search engines—Yahoo! accounts for 4.3% of page views and Bing serves 0.03% of all page views.
We have to note here that that doesn’t include text/SMS searches (Google has a service for that at 466453 — GOOGLE, as does Yahoo [92466], but other well-known providers include ChaCha [242242] and KGB [542542]).
What do you think? Are Opera users just strong Google users, or is this representative of all mobile web usage?
Opera Says Google Dominating Search On Mobile Web
Opera, the leading independent mobile browser, has been putting out great data on mobile Internet usage for quite some time. Google always ranks as one of the top sites globally. However this month’s “State of the Mobile Web” report is the first time that the company has released search market share data.
It shows Google with [...]
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Wired On Google’s Algorithm
Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web from Wired has an excellent and detailed look at the evolution Google’s search algorithm over the years. It is a pretty long write up, so I wanted to highlight those key points in bullet format for you all.
Key Advances:
Backrub in September 1997
New Algorithm in August 2001
Local Connectivity [...]
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Google to Open Online Software Sales Effort
Google continues to reach into the application side of the web wholeheartedly while dabbling in the device area as well. It is likely that Google is smart enough to see what happened to the PC industry when it was finally realized that “It’s the application, stupid!”. As a result it looks like Google is readying another opportunity to get deeper into the application game while turning the corner from being totally “free” to generating revenue from their efforts. Imagine that. Revenue.
The Wall Street Journal reports
Google Inc. is preparing to launch a store selling online business software that integrates with its Web services, according to people briefed by the company, enlisting software developers in its battle against Microsoft Corp.
These people said the store will sell business software designed by outside developers to integrate and add capabilities to Google Apps, such as enhanced security features or the ability to import contacts. Google Apps provides Web-based email, word-processing and spreadsheet functions.
Google could announce the new store—a revamped version of its Solutions Marketplace site that features third-party programs—as soon as March, they said.
The revenue side of this is that Google would so a revenue share with the developers thus getting a piece of everything sold through this online marketplace. Google is officially shying away from an actual announcement but it makes sense that they would head in this direction. The goal is to take a bite out of Microsoft’s lead in this area for the enterprise. The smallest of the SMB’s of the world can usually get by with free versions of the tools but the enterprise requires more functionality. Google has been making inroads in getting larger customers to use the Google apps platform like the City of Los Angeles and others.
Google says more than two million businesses are using the paid or free version of Google Apps. There are around 500 million users of Microsoft Office, according to Microsoft.
Google is turning to developers to help fill the holes and develop features its online software lacks, such as specialized editing software or tools to access online files offline.
The new store borrows a page from other technology companies including Apple Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc., which have tried to broaden the appeal of devices and software by opening up to outside developers.
While some bemoan the fact that Google is looking to charge for something that they feel should be free I think those days are finally starting to move along. Free doesn’t pay the bills and there is absolutely NO obligation to any company to provide the people as a whole with free services. None. So if anyone barks about the idea of charging for online business software they are missing the point. It takes money to do this stuff.
There is plenty of opportunity for sure. And we can be assured that where there is opportunity there will be Google.
44% Of Google News Readers Only Scan Headlines? Maybe Not!
A new report saying that 44% of Google users fail to click from Google News to newspaper web sites got some buzz this week. However, after a closer look at the report, I don’t see it providing the damning evidence that Google really is a content vampire, as some news publishers have [...]
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Google Premieres Nexus (Big Surprise)
Google declined to go for the fake out as they unveiled the expected Nexus One today at their Android event. First spotted after employees received free phones last month, the Nexus has already created a media frenzy as the “real” Google phone—one that will be sold by Google through their web store (though manufactured, like so many other Android headsets, by HTC).
So today is the formal announcement of the phone, along with the full rundown of the technical specs (available below). Search Engine Land, Read Write Web and many others are liveblogging the event, which features Google, Android and HTC engineers presenting not only the phone but an update on the progress and history of the OS. But we’ve been following Android for over two years now, so we’ll just stick to the Nexus news.
Google has decided that their phone is so smart, it can’t even qualify as a “smartphone”—they call it a “superphone.” (Buzzwords FTW!) And for the low, low price of $529, one can be yours today. (Free engraving!) As per the rumor, the phone is available unlocked with no data plan included; T-mobile is the premiere partner for $80/month, but they’re not available just yet. Verizon and Vodafone are slated to join in spring. In the store you can have two lines of custom engraving added to the back of the phone (for free), and naturally checkout is through Google Checkout.
The phone itself is pretty slick—with a fast enough processor and enough memory to run the “live wallpaper” and other apps in the background, multiple apps simultaneously and get some pretty good-looking graphics (if you’ve seen the Engadget video). However, it’s not the game changer that the iPhone was.
- Processor: 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor
- 3.7″ AMOLED display
- Trackball at bottom which pulses and uses multicolor lights to notify of new calls and messages
- Light and proximity sensors (automatically dim backlight, etc.)
- 11.5mm (<0.5 in) thick and 130g (4.6 oz)
- 5 megapixel flash still and MP4 video camera that syncs to the Internet
- Stereo Bluetooth with 3.5mm headphone jack
- Active noise canceling with second mic to pick up background noise and eliminate it from the main sound transmission
The software also features some cool improvements running Android 2.1 (even over the just-barely-released Droid’s Android 2.0). The coolest feature seems to be the voice entry for all fields on the phone. As with previous Android versions, you can set the background. Apps sit on a 3D roller.
Google also showed off the soon-to-be released Google Earth App, which also responded to voice commands. A few Google-based apps are available for online testing in Google’s webstore, including Gmail, Maps, Voice and more.
Incidentally, Steve Jobs announced that the iTunes App store hit 3B downloads today. I doubt they were hoping to upstage Google with this announcement earlier today, but the timing is still interesting.
What do you think? What would you pay for the newest (first) superphone?
Liveblogging The Google’s Web Search “Evolution” Event
Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, I’ll be liveblogging what Google has dubbed “an inside look at the evolution of Google search.” As it turns out, it’s the unveiling of Google’s new Real Time Search, shown above, as well as search by voice and search by picture improvements for mobile.
Real time search [...]
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Google Offers Newspapers the First 5 Clicks Free to Keep AdSense Scrapers Alive
For this post, I need two volunteers!
Let’s take this announcement from Google:
…we’ve decided to allow publishers to limit the number of accesses under the First Click Free policy to five free accesses per user each day. This change applies to both Google News publishers as well as websites indexed in Google’s Web Search. We hope that this encourages even more publishers to open up more content to users around the world!
And yes, you sir. The Financial Times report on how much news scraping exists on the web:
The study of 101,000 articles published by 157 newspapers found that more than 75,000 sites reused 112,000 almost exact copies without authorisation, and a further 520,000 articles in part…The study found Google accounted for 53 per cent of the advertising being run alongside unlicensed stories…
I will now combine these two articles into an incredible–or incredulous–observation. 
Is it pure coincidence that on the day News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch was in Washington telling the FTC about the need to reform "fair use" laws to prevent the "theft" of its content, Attributor pulls out some heavy numbers in support and Google decides to bend a little?
I think not!
Forget the fact that Bing is rumored to be courting the newspaper industry to dump Google, the search engine plans to lose a significant slice of revenue, if the publishing industry faces any kind of mass reform. Think about it, Google offers to change the "First Click Free" terms in order to save the AdSense revenue it makes from bloggers, and the more nefarious scrapers.
It’s a small sacrifice, right?
You’ve heard of the expression "an irresistible force meets an immovable object," right? News Corp. is about to meet Google head-on!
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Google Explains Importance Of Spam Free Web Sites
Google has written two spam related posts over the Thanksgiving period on the Google Webmaster Central Blog. The first was named hard facts about comment spam and the second was named generic cialis on my website?
The first post explains how having comment spam on your blog or web site can hurt your web sites [...]
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