Google New Local Ad Category Invades The “7 Pack”

It doesn’t in any way affect a local business ranking in the so-called “7 pack” or on the subsequent Google Maps page. However Google is introducing a new local business ad (”enhanced listings“) that allows a business to stand out with an “enhanced” presence on the map or in the map-related listings on the SERP. [...]

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Google Bows to Government’s Censorship Orders—in Australia?

Google has been criticized for censoring search results, even it was the only way they could get into certain countries, such as China. But as they’re abandoning that approach in China, are they picking it up elsewhere? Search Google Australia for [aboriginal and encyclopedia], and you’ll find an interesting message at the end of the page.

The page at ChillingEffects.org explains that Google removed a listing from this SERP after a complaint was filed about the site under the Australian Anti Discrimination Act.

I believe the fact that Google has posted this notice (note that “chilling effect” refers to actions, especially legal ones, that would have a deterrent effect on a free press) shows that they’re reluctant to comply with the ruling, but feel compelled to legally—which might well be the case. The Sydney Morning Herald explains the process behind this move:

Google has agreed to take down links to a website that promotes racist views of indigenous Australians.

Aboriginal man Steve Hodder-Watt recently discovered the US-based site by searching “Aboriginal and Encyclopedia” in the search engine.

He tried to modify the entry on Encyclopedia Dramatica, a satirical and extremely racist version of Wikipedia, but was blocked from doing so.

Mr Hodder-Watt then undertook legal action, that resulted in Google acknowledging its legal responsibility to remove the offensive site.

Okay, I think that especially in light of today’s holiday in the US (Martin Luther King Day), we all acknowledge that racism is bad. Racist jokes and racial epithets (both of which the page in question uses) are the lowest form of humor, if they even qualify. But considering that the Encyclopedia Dramatica claims to be a satire, is this really the right move for the Australian government, and for Google?

Google Blogoscoped takes a look at some of the other, far milder entries on the ED:

Spain is described to be “Devoid of any culture whatsoever”. Another country’s citizens are called “the human scum of the world”, and so on. Encyclopedia Dramatica also has an article titled “White People”, which starts with “It is widely known that white people are the inferior race.” It goes on to mention that “One good thing about the white race is their ability to blindly follow their leaders in perfect lockstep, however ridiculous the instructions might sound.”

Note that, despite some reporting to the contrary, Google has not removed links to the Encyclopedia Dramatica or removed the site from its index. Incidentally, both of Google Blogoscope’s examples are still in SERPs. (And the Aborigine page is still in the index, according to the Inquisitr.)

The article on the ED has been updated to include a note about this fervor—claiming that Google reduced its PageRank to 0. (My browser and PRChecker.info say it has a PR of 2—but does anyone care?) They’ve also added ad hominem attacks against the individual who filed the complaint.

What do you think? Should Google delist that result? Or should they stand up to Australia, just like they did with China (and how many enemies can they afford)?

Yahoo Moving in on Twitter

Yahoo (moves toward the little blue bird, the center of attention at the party): Well, hello there, baby. You sure are popular here.

Twitter (BIG SMILE): Yep! And I have #friends @overthere and @overthere and—

Yahoo (slips an arm around the bird): How would you like to come back to my place for a little . . . integration?

Twitter: Whoa, buddy—this is why I carry an API at all times!

Back in July, Twitter was popping up everywhere: first a deal with Bing, then a deal with Google. Not to be left out, Yahoo made a real-time foray with OneRiot, but apparently they still had their eyes on the life of the party: Twitter.

Last month, Yahoo News integrated Twitter into its results for breaking news via a tabbed shortcut:

Apparently this went well, because now more of these Tweet results will be directly integrated into the SERPs—and they just might be doing this right:

However, Yahoo won’t be adding Twitter to all its results. According to the Yahoo Search blog,

So how does this work? We continuously keep track of queries searched on Yahoo!, and when there is a spike in interest in a topic, our search algorithm selects relevant tweets to show on the search results page, either as a part of the Yahoo! News shortcut or in a Twitter section, like in the examples above. The age of the tweets will vary – some will be a minute old, while others may be hours old. Our goal is to feature interesting Twitter content that is relevant to your query and complements the other results you find on the search page.

And if they do that, that might be just the way to integrate Twitter into SERPs: filtered for relevance, used only for topics generating a lot of discussion, and sequestered in a section of the SERP.

What do you think? Is this too little, too late for Yahoo? Or is this more than you want to see of Twitter in your SERPs?

Google Testing Permanent Sidebar

Search Engine Land talks to Marissa Mayer about Google testing a new search interface among a select few users. The new interface uses a left-hand pane to display search options—but instead of being off by default, with a link to turn on the pane, the new search options will be on permanently, and Google will lose the top blue bar over its results.

Other options, including results from other Google properties (Images, News, Maps, Books) will join the left-hand panel. Search Engine Land has screenshots of the news options test:

Meanwhile, as a refresher, here’s the present Search Options (first tested a year ago, added to the SERP in May):

In the new screenshot, sitelinks are also homogenized—rather than appearing inconsistently (at any position, indented or on a single line, or possibly not at all), they appear in this test on the first two results as a single line.

So the new layout is pretty cool—it standardizes many things that weren’t, it puts many popular options all together, and it predicts what category of results you want (images, video, etc., though that may or not work out for you). But is it just me (no, because Matt McGee said this, too) or does this look a little familiar?

Mayer suggests that not only is a three-column layout becoming a default in search engine results pages, but it’s also a “universal truth.” (Kind of like using the magical 28 words on the home page?)

In other news: Mayer says the fading homepage has slowed users down.

Google Addressing Site Hierarchies in SERPs

While Google made the announce of their new inclusion of site hierarchy to help searchers understand the context of a search result more clearly on Tuesday, it also stated that this will be seen globally over the next few days. Well, that brings us to today right? So keep an eye out for the latest update that Google has put into play to try to make their flagship offering, their search engine, better. After all there may come a day when some ‘competitors’ may need to join forces and actually challenge Google search supremacy (oh that’s right that’s already happening).

Google’s blog tells us

Google usually shows a green web address, or URL, at the bottom of each search result to let you know where you’re headed. Today we’re rolling out an improvement that replaces the URL in some search results with a hierarchy showing the precise location of the page on the website. The new display provides valuable context and new navigation options.

As most know, oftentimes the URL of search result that would give an indication to those who would think this way that the page they are looking for is part of a larger scheme. Since many URL’s are too long and get cut off on the SERP’s then that benefit is lost.

Google’s answer is to provide a breadcrumb presentation of a site’s hierarchy is it is available for the result. The look of the result (in which each individual word is a link to a different destination) is like this

The information in these new hierarchies come from analyzing destination web pages. For example, if you visit the ProductWiki Spidersapien page, you’ll see a series of similar links at the top, “Home> Toys & Games> Robots.” These are standard navigational tools used throughout the web called “breadcrumbs,” which webmasters frequently show on their sites to help users navigate. By analyzing site breadcrumbs, we’ve been able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future.

Whenever anything like this is rolled out I always try to think about this kind of improvement as it relates to the vast majority of Internet users and search engine users. I suspect we over estimate their level of sophistication quite regularly. While this is interesting I don’t even really feel compelled to go to another page within the hierarchy because there is just a little information about the direct result I am looking for and it’s not even the same page so why would I go elsewhere right out of the gate?

Personally, I like to keep things simple. Is this a true improvement or just something else to talk about? Google’s take is that they are impressed with what this does.

When we design the way results appear on google.com, our goal is to get you to the information you’re looking for as quickly as possible. Sometimes that means improving how we represent websites, and other times that means giving you new ways to explore content. We’re always happy when we can introduce a feature, like site hierarchies, that does both!

Maybe my persoanl need for simplicity in an increasingly unsimple world is missing something? How do you see it?

Bada Bing! Bing Adds New Video and SERP Features

Microsoft has announced several new features for its rebranded search engine—I mean, “decision engine”—Bing, including the rollout of Bing Videos, a partnership with Wolfram Alpha and a new hover preview feature.

Bing Videos

Yesterday, Bing announced a new video site that will take over the old Microsoft Video (yeah, I’d never heard of it, either). In addition to MSN videos, Bing Video will feature content from Hulu, ABC and YouTube.

While it’s unlikely that Bing Videos will challenge YouTube in a major way, I think it’s a good idea for them to launch their own site, if their goal is merely to increase time on site, and make Bing even more of a go-to resource.

Partnership with Wolfram Alpha

A searchable database of information, Wolfram Alpha announced APIs this summer in the wake of rumors of a deal with Bing. The APIs seemed quell the gossip—but now the two really are teaming up.

The partnership is limited to the area of diet and nutrition (I’m guessing as a test run for a possible wider deal in the future). Bing says this partnership will help its users make decisions about their food choices. When you search for a food on Bing, nutrition information from Wolfram Alpha will appear in a tab on the SERP.

This will also include tools like a BMI calculator.

Advanced Hover Preview Feature

Bing is also bringing and advanced hover preview feature to their SERPs. The press release states that this feature adds:

• An actual snapshot of the Web site in question
• A link to the customer service number (where appropriate)
• Deep links, the most-often-clicked links on the site
• A search-within-this-site box that allows you to scour the site to find what you’re looking for.
• Facebook page previews, from which you can view a person’s picture, see who is in their Facebook network and send them a message or friend request.

Conveniently, this preview only shows up when you mouse over a plus-sign on the right side of the screen, rather than every time you mouseover a link (like Snap Preview, which I find so obnoxious). Microsoft made a video so you can see it in action if it’s not on your SERPs yet (warning, it autoplays):

Interestingly, this does showcase some feature that have long been a part of Google’s SERPs, including deep links to the most popular pages of a site and a search box to use the site’s internal search.

What do you think? Which of these features will you be most likely to use?

Sweet! Tweet Delete Complete

Have you ever put together that questionable 140 character outburst or ‘observation’ and then experienced ‘tweeter’s remorse’ when you sent the poorly designed nugget of wisdom? It’s like that e-mail you didn’t want to hit send on (those really suck though because in most cases you have no recourse other than to start putting together an apology / explanation immediately). At least with Twitter you have always had the opportunity to ‘delete the tweet’ but Twitter had an annoying little habit of keeping that nasty little bugger in their search index. That was at least until recently. TechCrunch reported

Now, when you delete a tweet, it will instantaneously be removed from Twitter’s search index as well. We’ve tested it out this morning, and it is in fact the case. Even better, those tweets are also removed from the search API. We’ve tested several third party apps, and none contain the tweets that I deleted.

This is good news for users from a privacy perspective, as deleted tweets showing up in searches have been troublesome in the past. In one extreme example, a series of tweets that were sent the night two people died in a sweat lodge, but then were deleted, resurfaced on Twitter search.

So for all of folks out there with a quick ‘Twitter finger’ or your return / send mechanism has a ‘hair Twitter’ (you know, like a hair trigger, get it?) there is hope.

Apparently, this improvement just happened to coincide with the big announcements that bing and Google would be getting Twitter’s feeds for indexing in their engines. The timing is good though since having those bad tweets removed from Twitter is nice but not having them show up in every SERP from now until the second coming is even better.

Now don’t get too excited because all those tweets that you have deleted are likely to reside somewhere just waiting to surface in some odd way to embarrass you. So don’t ‘Drink and tweet’ or ‘Tweet responsibly’ and this won’t be an issue.

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Now See PDF’s PDQ in Google Results

Traditionally, PDF’s and search engines have not gotten along as well as most would like. While being indexed is not the problem it once was there have been difficulties in the rendering of those PDF’s from the SERP’s (search engine results pages).

Google today has moved closer to true harmony between the PDF and engine environment by introducing the Quick View link that is now applied to an increasing percentage of the PDF’s now indexed by Google. The official Google blog tells us

Today, we’ve added new links to “Quick View” PDFs in your browser with the formatting intact. The new links are based on the same technology that’s available in Google Docs and Gmail, as well as to webmasters through the Google Docs viewer. We’ve been rolling this technology out to the search results page since July, and as of today we’ve added “Quick View” links to more than 50% of the PDFs in our index. The new links appear at the end of the second line of the result, right underneath the title.

As a result you can now view the PDF in the browser while keeping all the formatting in tact. No longer is there a need to download the PDF to get all of the formatting or viewing the PDF in HTML which sacrificed all of the formatting for the most part.

This is pretty cool and a good move toward making some of the barriers that have existed between certain techniques and the search engines (can you say Flash?) less of an issue. Isn’t it nice to have less issues?

Google Adds New Search Options

A year ago, we first started seeing Google adding Search Options to their SERPs to refine results by time or to change how those results were listed on the SERP. In May, Search Options became official, adding the ability to filter by medium (image, video, etc.) and view the results as a WonderWheel or timeline.

Now we get even more options with our search. You can filter your results now by:

• Past hour
• Specific date range
• Shopping info—whether you want to see more or less
• Pages you’ve visited (or not)
• Sources, including blogs, books and news

While all these features are very cool and could be useful for specific searches, I think it’s best that Google continues to hide the Search Options by default. Most Google users would probably be confused or overwhelmed by the choices there—and most of the Options apply to only a specific type of search anyway. Even I rarely have a need for the search options, looking at the whole of my search history. Keeping the options accessible on the blue bar above the results is handy, and the curious can click.

What do you think? Do you use the Search Options? Will you use the new ones? Do you think it’s best to have them hidden by default?

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Yahoo: Pay No Attention to the 10 Year Search Deal: Look at What’s New on Delicious!

Not to be all Wizard-of-Oz on us, but Yahoo really doesn’t want us to pay attention to the man behind the curtain (Steve Ballmer). No, they want to focus us on their new SERP and their new Delicious search tools and fresh bookmarks.

Don’t you worry—don’t think for one moment that I, the paragon of journalistic integrity, could be distracted so easily from decrying Yahoo’s abdication of control over its search—ooh, shiny emailing and tweeting tools!

So Delicious does have some cool new stuff to show off—and maybe it’s not just a distraction ploy. Maybe it’s a ploy to remind us that Yahoo can still do cool new stuff.

Anyway, Delicious has a new search tool to help its users find bookmarks (theirs and others’) more easily. Yahoo says “with advanced timeline and tag filtering controls so that you can search within a given date range or filter the results by tag. We’ve also enhanced the search results page to display rich content including YouTube videos with inline playback, Flickr images, and Yelp local data when applicable.”

Delicious has also added a feature to highlight new and popular bookmarks—but not on the Delicious site. The Fresh Bookmarks tab on the homepage features up-and-coming bookmarks (gee, no other social site has ever done that )—the bookmarks that are most popular on Twitter (as opposed to the most popular bookmarks on Delicious, which are under the Popular Bookmarks tab).

On this new feature yesterday, the Delicious blog quotes Wired, who touted the predecessor app, TweetNews, as possibly “the best mashup we’ve ever seen.” Hopefully the Delicious version gets the same positive reception.

Finally, Delicious also added more social features to the add bookmark page. You can add recipients in the Send field—and get the option to email or even tweet bookmarks.

Delicious looks to be doing a good job of adapting to the most popular social site with the media today, instead of decrying Twitter as a poor man’s competitor.

What do you think? Will these new features be enough to keep Delicious users happy—and relying on Delicious? Or does this just push more users toward Twitter?

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