On a search for ‘Holiday in Paris’ I got this map box filled entirely with links to various Holiday Inn local listings.
Somehow managed to miss this when Danny Sullivan mentioned it a few days ago. But the rumour is Google is going to start personalising results based on the previous query. This is something that’s been going on in paid for many months, but I think the implications are much greater for natural search.
With personalised [...]
According to a Google representative in the UK, they plan to allow an option in your webmaster tools which will give you control over the secondary search box.
This has been debated to death ever since it appeared with little consensus. So, an opt out seems to be the best option
If you haven’t seen it then it looks like this
At first glance seems like another useful addition by Google. Except on closer inspection this is not a search box for products or holidays in this case provided by Virgin, but a search box for other pages on the site. Same as the one in the [...]
February 17, 2008 – 11:40 pm
On Thursday Google started testing video ads on some search results pages.
Marissa Mayer explained this was in response to the impact of blended results. When video, news and images are included in regular results, the eye scans to the images first and ignores the ads.
“With universal search, something is getting shaken up a bit [...]
January 9, 2008 – 12:34 am
OK it’s been a couple of days since the launch of the social search engine and my earlier disappointment has been replaced by a sense of – well – apathy. I’m no longer angry at the crappy results or the fact that their crawler had managed to completely miss by site.
For any commercial searches (You [...]
January 6, 2008 – 5:03 pm
2007 has witnessed the most significant advances in online communication and connectedness. This was the year when marketers started to embrace and felt a little threatened by social networks. IT wasn’t really about technology – but the coming to fruition of many of the ideas and desires to connect.
But during this year, one thing [...]
January 6, 2008 – 3:50 pm
Wasn’t sure if I wanted to get involved with this argument, but there are a couple of interesting factors worth watching.
Over the holidays, the unofficial Google blog, made a bold statement – Google ‘artificially’ promotes recent blog posts.
Not sure about ‘artificially’ as that would mean there’s a regular algorithm governed by some universal natural [...]
December 7, 2007 – 9:46 pm
Just a few years ago, Google used to treat a subdomain as a completely different site to the main domain. Then things got a little blurred. Some factors like trust could be inherited by the subdomain but some folk thought the folders had a slight edge.
Subdomain certainly had other advantages – you could have [...]
December 3, 2007 – 12:46 am
I’m seeing a cleanup on adwords listings for link sellers. On some phrases like ‘buy links’ and ‘text links’ there’re no more ads. Though still plenty for ‘links’. If this is here to stay then about time.
Now all Google has to do is to stop bought links from working and we should see them out [...]