Google’s been doing live suggestions for a while now. But did you know you can actually use wild cards on the search line? No asterisk required, but you can simply add one character to a word to find any similar words that are searched for. So looking for “tree”, you could add an ‘a’ to make it “atree”, and Google will potentially show you “apple tree” as a suggestion.
It’s quite powerful and easy to do. To see some screen shots of how this works, check out this post on Search Engine Land.
As companies begin using more and more online marketing, SEO is only going to get more difficult to do well. In some cases, businesses are worried spammers are going to get the organic listings more readily and are starting to look to PPC marketing for their search result answers.
This is something that’s come to notice mainly from Google’s real-time search results that were recently added. This addition favors fresh topical content, over quality results Google’s algorithm can find. This is something that spammers can get into very easily, and this is why more companies are starting to consider PPC and AdWords, where spammers are not able to get into at all.
HighPosition.net has more detail on this story.
I’ve talked about how much it bugs me that so many people still think the keywords meta tag is the “secret trick” for SEO. Well, back in October I put together a video demonstrating a test I did on this tag. I tested Ask.com, Bing, Yahoo, and Google. Does it work? Is it really the secret to SEO? You can see the results of how this turned out below.
I saw it – and it was good. It really was pretty good. They covered quite a bit in an hour, about the development of the company, how it got started, the main people involved. What impressed me was their coverage of some technical details (cloud computing, PageRank) while still keeping it easy to understand.
Naturally, the part I liked quite a bit was their coverage of AdWords. According to CNBC, Google makes 98% of their profit from AdWords, although I’ve heard differently. I don’t know for sure what percentage of their profits comes from AdWords – but right now, they’re averaging over 4 billion dollars a year. They’re doing okay with it.
They did talk briefly about AdWords, talked about how anyone can advertise, and touched on how it operates. They mentioned PageRank and how it affects positioning for ads (and how quality of a site affects it), but that was about it. It was impressive coverage for the limited time they had.
They did also talk about Google Goggles – the funny thing was that they mentioned it probably wasn’t ready to go into production for a while. But they did go live a few days ago – guess it’s in beta. Although that’s a safe bet for anything Google.
Hopefully this publicity from “Inside the Mind of Google” is something that works out for them. I really want to believe that they have truly good intentions, and that all of their machinations are to enhance the lives of their customers. We’ll see what kind of responses come from this extra bit of attention.
Google’s changes lately have been quite thorough. They’ve made changes for AdWords, they’re changing the way the search engine itself operates, and now they’re coming out to take a stand against online scams.
In particular, the schemes for how to “work-at-home” to use Google and make a ton of money are starting to get shut down by Google. Google is starting to file lawsuits against these companies to bring them down.
For most people, these are familiar schemes – you see them in banner ads, with text like “Use Google to make 1000s of Dollars!”. They generally operate by having a kit you send out for and then have you set up for automatic billing once a month (and many people don’t realize there’s automatic billing).
CNN has a bit more detail in this story. I did find it rather amusing that under this story in their sponsored links, one of the ads said “I’m glad I lost my job! Jobless Dad makes $6493/month working online from home. Read how he…”
Just a quick update for the news on Google’s real-time search results. They released a video to show exactly how it works. And it looks pretty good! Like it won’t interfere too much with other results, but will give people updated information on what they want.
Here’s the video:
Okay, this is just cool. I found this a little bit ago, and the concept is pretty solid. I’ve always wanted something similar to this to be able to do searches on certain things that I couldn’t really vocalize into text, and this looks like it might do the trick.
It only appears to work for the Android phone (for now), and who knows how effective it really is – but if it’s all that Google says it’s supposed to be, this will be awesome.
They have a nice video demonstration. Check it out! Google Goggles. (Or if you don’t want to bother clicking, see it below.)
I posted an entry a little while back about how Google keeps track of your searches and personalizes your search results based on what you search on and the pages you click on.
Well, it now appears Google has stepped it up a level and will now personalize your results whether or not you’re logged in. This is something that will have an impact in particular on many SEOs. However, if you do good marketing (and not just the technical side of it), this shouldn’t change things too much. Check out this CNET article for the bulk of the info.
For those of you who don’t want Google to track you, you do have a few options. One is an opt-out option inside of Google that you can go in and activate, the other is to use some kind of plug-in to deactivate cookies. My personal favorite is the Web Developer plug-in by Chris Pederick. But it’s not the end of the world – you still do have options.
Google is in the process of launching their latest search engine update/upgrade. With it comes a real-time update capability. You will actually see relevant information feeding into your search results as you watch.
This is expected to roll out over the next few days, so keep an eye out for differences in the Google results. If you want to see all the information about this update, check out the article Danny Sullivan wrote about it on Search Engine Land.
It’s been mentioned previously that AdWords has been going through some serious changes. Well, it appears that they are also stepping up in their quality check on their advertisers. Google has taken action by banning some of their advertisers that don’t meet up to standards – permanently.
This is quite major news for several advertisers. These bans are hitting hard, and the first major revision on AdWords users and who Google will accept was done yesterday, December 3rd. The Search Engine Roundtable has more information and a good copy of the ban letter that they published today.
