Google Adds Public Data Search Tool To Labs
Google has announced a new tool called Google Public Data Explorer that’s now available in Google Labs. The tool is a follow-up of sorts to last year’s announcement that a limited amount of public data would be used in response to certain Google.com search results.
The Data Explorer tool includes data from the original three sources [...]
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Google Getting Even More Personal–Starred Results
For once, an advance in Google personalized search I actually like. They’re adding the same stars we’re so used to in Google Reader and Gmail to personalized search results. The starred results let you mark favorite sites to show up at the top of future posts—and it doesn’t appear to affect the rankings of the rest of the organic results.
As Google puts it:
With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant. That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl].
The stars are replacing an old feature in personalized search: SearchWiki. Says Google, “In our testing, we learned that people really liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but they didn’t like changing the order of Google’s organic search results.” (Which probably isn’t to say they actually disliked reranking sites, but just that they didn’t do it very much. Seriously, it just wasn’t super useful.)
Any SearchWiki notations you made will be saved in your Google Account. If you want to continue to make notations in SERPs, Google recommends Sidewiki, its browser-based, publicly-edited sidebar wiki for commentary launched back in September. Last we heard, Sidewiki hadn’t really taken off—maybe this is Google’s push to create new, passionate users.
The stars are all set to go and will be rolling out for all signed-in users in the next few days. So far, there’s no indication starred Google Reader items will have any relationship with this effort beyond the passing similarity.
One big drawback for marketers, of course, is that every step forward in personal search may mean we’re less likely to be able to rank a site universally—or even tell if our site is showing up for most signed-in users. Plus, we may have to sign out to get the “neutral” results for reporting (although if you’re starring a client’s competitor in your SERPs, “sumbuddy’s doin it wrong”).
What do you think? Do you like the idea of stars and the simpler interface to mark sites you’d want to see in SERPs again? Or do you worry about personalized search affecting marketing? Would you like to see your Google Reader starred items showing up for relevant searches?
Eye Tracking Study: Users Largely Blind To Real-Time Results In Search
Online marketing firm OneUpWeb recently conducted an eye-tracking study about the impact of integrating real-time data into search results. The study involved 44 people divided into two groups: “consumers” and “information foragers.” The difference between the groups involved the tasks they were given:
The first group was told to search for a product they might buy, [...]
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Google Kills SearchWiki, Replaces It With Starred Results
Google’s SearchWiki, which launched 16 months ago to a mix of fanfare and controversy, is a thing of the past. The ability to re-order, remove, and comment on search results has been replaced by a scaled-down version that Google is simply calling “stars” or “starred results.”
According to today’s announcement, the Stars feature will allow users [...]
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Google Real Time Search Now Shows Updates From Facebook Fan Pages
Google’s Real Time Search has gained a new data source, updates from Facebook fan pages. Google had announced a deal to list this information back in December, and now it’s finally being implemented. Google has tweeted the news.
See our detailed guide, Google Launches Real Time Search Results to understand how Google Real Time Search works, [...]
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Google Adds MySpace To Real-Time Results & Images Site Command Updates
Google confirmed two different discussions taking place in the webmaster and seo community over the past few days.
The first is that MySpace results are now included in Google’s Real Time search results feature. In addition, Google launched real-time search in Russian and Japanese.
The second is that Google has updated their site [...]
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Fortune 500 Spending $1.2 Billion on Paid Search, Because They Can’t Rank Naturally!
Apparently Fortune 500 companies have money to burn on search marketing.
According to a new study from Conductor, only 25% of the Fortune 500’s combined targeted paid keywords–97,555 keywords, totaling a daily spend of $3.4M–ranked in the top 50 natural search results.
Think about that. These companies are collective spending $1.2 billion a year on paid search placement, yet 75% of these important keywords are not ranking organically inside the top 50 search results!
Even more staggering, only 2% of Fortune 500 domains analyzed had any significant number of search terms in the top results–which we presume means first page visibility.
When you break it down by company, only 0.6%, are achieving top 50 keyword placement. Which means that less than 1% of companies control the lion share of the 25% of keywords ranking inside the top 50! Talk about outliers!
Of course, this is one study, one snapshot of data, but it goes to show that in 2010, Fortune 500 companies still don’t have a handle on their seo campaigns. They’d rather pay for their ignorance in search ads instead.
You can grab a copy of the report here.
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Global Vs. Local: How To Let Google Know How To Treat Your Site
As the search engines rapidly move to offer more locally focused search results, those managing large global, single domain sites are facing more and more difficulties in getting them indexed, detected as local, then ranked in the local search results.
This is especially true with Google in English and Spanish speaking countries where it is getting [...]
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Scoring Super Bowl 2010 Advertising: How’s the Search Visibility?
After the 2009 Super Bowl, I monitored how the commercials drove searches and reported back on how well the brands did at ensuring visibility in organic search results. It didn’t go so well. The primary problems were:
Microsites – Microsites aren’t inherently a bad idea, but too many of them can cause brand confusion, external link [...]
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Policy Change: Advertise Pharmaceuticals On Google AdWords
The Google AdWords blog announced they will be making a policy change to allow certain kinds of pharmaceutical ads to be shown on Google search results. The policy change will go into affect towards the end of this month.
Here are some of the conditions:
(1) Only VIPPS and CIPA certified pharmacies will be allowed to [...]
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