Google adds more emphasis on social media

Today we’re doing a little bit more to bring you all the goodness of Google, plus the opinions of the people you care about. As always, we want to help you find the most relevant answers among the billions of interconnected pages on the web. But relevance isn’t just about pages—it’s also about relationships. That’s why we introduced Google Social Search in 2009, and why we’ve made a number of improvements since then. Today we’re taking another step forward—enabling you to get even more information from the people that matter to you, whether they’re publishing on YouTube, Flickr or their own blog or website.

First, social search results will now be mixed throughout your results based on their relevance (in the past they only appeared at the bottom). This means you’ll start seeing more from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below the results they’ve shared or created. So if you’re thinking about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and your colleague Matt has written a blog post about his own experience, then we’ll bump up that post with a note and a picture:

Second, we’ve made Social Search more comprehensive by adding notes for links people have shared on Twitter and other sites. In the past, we’d show you results people created and linked through their Google profiles. Now, if someone you’re connected to has publicly shared a link, we may show that link in your results with a clear annotation (which is visible only to you, and only when you’re signed in). For example, if you’re looking for a video of President Obama on “The Daily Show” and your friend Nundu tweeted the video, that result might show up higher in your results and you’ll see a note with a picture of Nundu:

Third, we’ve given you more control over how you connect accounts, and made connecting accounts more convenient. You can still connect accounts publicly on your Google profile, but now we’ve added a new option to connect accounts privately in your Google Account. (After all, you may not want everyone to know you’re @spongebobsuperfan on Twitter.) In addition, if our algorithms find a public account that might be yours (for example, because the usernames are the same), we may invite you to connect your accounts right on the search results page and in your Google Account settings:

For an overview of Google Social Search and our new features, check out the explanatory video:

As always, you’ll only get social search results when you choose to log in to your Google Account. We’re starting to roll out the updates today on Google.com in English only and you’ll see them appear in the coming week. With these changes, we want to help you find the most relevant information possible, personalized to your interests and the people you care about. To learn more, check out our help center.

Source: Mike Cassidy, Product Management Director, and Matthew Kulick, Product Manager

Google adds the ability to set or change your location when doing a search | google location

Bing And Facebook Personalize Search

Earlier this week, Microsoft and Facebook held a press event to announce a new module coming to Bing. In essence, Bing is now a true social search engine, using your own Facebook social graph to inform and expand your decision-making process. Looking for a new restaurant or a good movie? The new Bing experience will enable you to see your friends’ experiences as part of the searching process.

This, in and of itself, is big news. Search has been an evolving marketplace, but the searchable content has historically been similar from engine to engine. Whether it is Google, Yahoo or now, Bing, the major Web sites — sites like Wikipedia — have always been prominent on every engine. Image and video inclusion as well as that of news feeds may vary by query, but the general data sources have always been whatever could be crawled and indexed. That is certainly not the case, at least for now, with this deal.

But for most marketers, the implications of this have meaning far beyond search. The strength of search has been in its direct-response nature — the ability to search, find, refine and ultimately act in some way. That way has historically been emphasized as purchase, but more and more brands are considering the intent expression as an important part of understanding who people are and what motivates them either into searching or where they go next on their consumer journey.

Contrast that with social media where, what was once a solitary island for friends to connect with friends has been infiltrated by brands wanting some of the benefits of friendship. Twitter and Facebook are leading a charge to convince marketers that the connections made through their social platforms is a crucial piece of the value exchange between consumers and brands.

What started as artists using MySpace to connect with their audience evolved into Twitter as a new-age customer-service vehicle. It became fashionable for brands to have Facebook fan pages and to tweet deals and information out to customers to help them stay informed. Beyond that, location-based services such as Foursquare have gotten into the act and given another layer of connectivity and currency between consumers and brands. Each of these engagements has a consistent value exchange that brands were giving in exchange for very little. Whether a band was trying to hit it big or Comcast was trying to resolve a disgruntled customer, it was the brand doing the heavy lifting. People use Foursquare to check in so their friends know where they are, but they also hope that businesses are willing to exchange that check-in for some discount or freebie.

The announcement of social as defined by Facebook into Bing both changes and amplifies this relationship. If someone is looking for a good restaurant in New York to eat, a query on Bing not only provides what they find to be relevant but also what your friend network has decided worthy of liking. Suddenly all the Yelp reviews in the world seem minimal in a results page if one friend you trust as your groups “foodie” likes a place. It means that every person who visits, interacts or buys from you can be a part of your sales force and marketing efforts. Or they can be that for your competition.

Brands like Zappos, JetBlue and Apple have grown in popularity because of their authenticity. At the ANA conference this week, I saw a tweet from Patrick Harris of Microsoft suggesting that the early themes for advertisers  having success in this climate were “purpose, authenticity, heritage, service through people.” Safe to say the brands I described above adhere to that. But how do small brands with limited resources, and “old” brands, turn the battleship to meet this challenge? The answers aren’t clear, but what is becoming increasingly apparent is that as social and search fuse for consumers, the impetus for change is staring brands in the face. Those that do not provide customers with a sense of belonging, invite them on the journey together, and recognize the importance of “like” and its role going forward, are destined to be dead brands.

Source: MediaPost

SEO Impact from Google Instant

ADOTAS – SEO tool maker Searchmetrics says Google Instant was a logical next step after the search giant began displaying keyword suggestions in a drop down menu as the user is typing. Introduced last week, the service simply begins streaming popular results, attempting the next leap in reading minds. It’s not search as you type, but search before you type, basing completions off of popular searches. Last week, Sarah Novotny claimed big G wants to own your brain!

Of course marketers are less concerned about mind ownership than Instant’s effect on search marketing. On the paid front, impressions start to count if a user clicks on a certain search or pauses for three seconds on a search.

But has Google effectively killed SEO? The company noted on its Analytics blog that users should expect fluctuations in traffic for organic keywords — some drastic — but no, said Google Webspam head Matt Cutts, SEO is still alive and well. Although search results won’t change, users may adjust how they go about searching, he wrote on his blog.

“Search remains search,” Marisa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, told TechCrunch. “The ranking remain stable. For people that have optimized their site to achieve a certain outcome, that’s still the outcome when users run queries. ”

Definitely don’t change your paid search or SEO strategy to include partial queries, Google Analytics team member Alden DeSoto told PCMag.com, noting that paid ads will be served based on predicted queries, not a couple of typed-in letters.

According to Searchmetrics CEO Dr. Horst Joepen, the likely effect of Instant on SEO is more traffic driven to the most popular and most searched sites, keywords or search phrases. And of course, that will simply make the most expensive PPC keywords more so — and more bucks for Google. The long tail is in danger of becoming even shorter as searchers looking for more complicated search phrases will be distracted mid-query.

Lead generator Response Mine further notes that Instant pushes both organic and paid results down the page, thoroughly limiting the number of results above the fold. SEO pros will have to re-evaluate the weight of one keyword position versus the effort required.

“The true impact of Google Instant on SEM and SEO still remains to be seen, but as it stands, this change will fundamentally rock the search community,” Response Mine wrote. “With that said, search is still very much alive. Those that can identify and adjust to these changes will flourish in the next evolution of search.”

Source: Adotas

AOL Extends Google Search Deal: 5 More Years

Yahoo! Organic Search Transition to Microsoft Now Complete

Interesting news about the Yahoo/Microsoft Organic merger….

First let me say, wow, what a week! As I hope everyone saw our post from last week, Yahoo! began transitioning certain back-end functions for Yahoo! Search over to Microsoft’s search platform. Well, I am proud to announce that the transition of organic search between Yahoo! and Microsoft is complete (for more information, check out Microsoft’s blog post).

Yahoo! Web, Image, and Video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now powered by the Microsoft platform in the US and Canada (English), with more markets to come. The speed in which this was completed is a testament to the great work and partnership between a number of Yahoo! and Microsoft employees, the ranks of which are numerous. I’d like to express my sincere appreciation for each person who contributed to this great accomplishment.

With this week’s milestone behind us, Yahoo! will continue to drive technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike. We are focused on creating rich, immersive experiences that foster serendipitous discovery for people across the Yahoo! network. As we shared last week, we are also working hard on finalizing our revenue model for the Yahoo! Search BOSS program going forward, and will be offering other search-related tools for publishers in the months to come.

We continue to achieve our goals and I look forward to the opportunities ahead of us all.

Shashi Seth
Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products

Source: Yahoo