Category Archives: Google

Google personalisation by default

A few days ago Google made another big change to regular search results. All search results are now personalised by default. From now, we’ll see different results for the same query based on our web history. A lot of people have been getting these results when they’ve been logged into a Google account, but from [...]

Using your behaviour and social connections to identify you

Coca Cola’s recent social media campaign Green Eyed World is rightfully attracting a lot of attention from the marketing community. The campaign uses the Facebook Connect facility to port user data to YouTube. Fans can interact with the show singer star Katie Vogel as well as with each other leaving comments and votes using their [...]

Google related searches influenced by auto queries?

Outdated knowledge or automated queries set-up back in the day

Google brand update – better trust or just semantics and user data?

There’s been a lot of talk about Google favouring brands in search results. For me this is not new, they’ve always tried to do this. They just got better at aligning search results with public opinion as oppose to SEO’d opinion. General search results have always been about ‘trying‘ to rank the brands for commercial [...]

KLM doesn’t like Google Chrome – big mistake

Google layoffs – oh the irony

Previous query refinement rolled out in the US

Google personalised search was ramped up over a year ago and for anyone logged into Google, personalisation based on web and search history is the norm. If you want to opt out of personalisation you can either log out or turn off your history (This is turned on by default when you sign up for [...]

New Google killer Cuil goes public – Why?

Monday is never a good day to be looking into new search engine algorithms, but Cuil seems to be getting a bit of attention. I’ve seen the video interview and demo and have had a chance to have a short play with it during lunch.
First thing to say about it, I hope the reason it [...]

Is the future of search Digg like feedback?

There have been a few different Google trials on user feedback – including up and down buttons on the toolbar, but this latest looks the more similar to Digg than previous attempts.

You can vote up listings you like and leave comments, and vote up or down other peoples comments. All your edits can be [...]

Google position 4 testing – User data

For several weeks now Google results have been in a constant flux – or at least a lot more than usual. Most of the fluctuations have been too erratic to identify any common pattern. But there is something about position 4 reported by several webmaster and SEO forums which I’ve been able to confirm. [...]