Omar Kattan

Author Archive

Google have kicked off the new year with a major improvement, they’re applying the research behind Google Squared to add a new “answer-highlighting” feature to search results.

According to Google, “most information on the web is unstructured. For example, blogs integrate paragraphs of text, videos and images in ways that don’t follow simple rules. Product review sites each have their own formats, rating scales and categories. Unstructured data is difficult for a computer to interpret, which means that humans still have to do a fair amount of work to process and understand information on the web.”

Google Squared is one of Google’s early efforts to automatically identify and extract structured data from across the Internet. Google’s been making progress, and today the research behind Google Squared is, for the first time, attempting to provide the user with better search results with their new feature called “answer highlighting.”

According to Google, answer highlighting helps users get to information more quickly by seeking out and bolding the likely answer to their question right in the search results. The feature is meant for searches with factual answers such as when did Tony Blair become prime minister,  If the pages returned for these queries contain a simple answer, the search snippet will more often include the relevant text and bold it for easy reference.

The following example highlights this new feature in the past, the search for [empire state height], the result used to look like this:

With today’s changes, the answer —1250 ft, or 381 m — is highlighted right in the search result:

This is a major development on Google’s part and goes to show the level of effort being placed on maintaining its lead as the search leader especially with Bing’s push to become the “decision engine”

What will this mean to site owners?  the news is not good I’m afraid.  If search users are able to find the answers to their questions on the Google results pages (SERPS) then there will be no need to click through to the final destination.

Let’s wait and see.

In response to the Haitian earthquake, a team of Googlers worked with the U.S. Department of State to create an online People Finder gadget so that people can submit information about missing persons and to search the database.

The Gadget can be found on their Haiti earthquake response website as well as  the State Department website.

Google is also helping families  by offering free calls to Haiti for the next two weeks via Google Voice.

In order to help mission workers and anyone interested in viewing updated imagery in Google Earth, they’ve also included GeoEye’s shots from Wednesday in the Historical Imagery feature.

Google has also made the Haiti Map Maker data publicly available for download for non-commercial use and attribution.

Google’s YouTube property is also helping by offering continous news and user generated content.   Oxfam and the American Red Cross are even responding to donations by uploading videos that show viewers exactly where their contributions are making a difference.

My thoughts and prayers are with all the Hatian people and their friends and families around the world and well done Google for all your efforts in aiding the Hatian people in their time of need. 

It’s official, according to Hitwise, Facebook was the number 1 visited site in the US this Christmas. 

The news comes as no surprise as Facebook has enjoyed tremendous growth in 2009 with more and more people joining the social networking site.  

A good chunk of the growth came  from 40 to 50 year olds who -despite privacy concerns- are joining Facebook in hoards to stay in touch with family and long lost friends.

This is a tremendous accomplishment for Facebook as last year it was at the bottom of the top 10 most searched for terms. This year it displaced MySpace as the number one most searched for phrase.   Here’s a comparison of the top 10 searches in 2008 and 2009:

This news is bound to give Google a wakeup call and will make 2010 an interesting year for acquisitions and product development. 

Earlier in the year Google launched Google Wave, an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration.   Could this be the Google’s challenge to Facebook?  Will Microsoft increase it’s stake in Facebook or even buy them out in 2010?  How will sites like Twitter fair in 2010? 

Regardless of what happens, one thing’s for sure, Facebook is here to stay.  Well Done Mr. Zuckerburg!

With the anticipated launch of Google ’s Caffeine in the New Year and the focus on real time  and personalised search, 2010 is promising to be a nail biting  time for webmasters.  Here are a few tips to maintain your rankings in 2010:

1) Website load time.  In 2010 website load time will be a critical factor in determining which sites rank at the top of Google’s search results.  Ensure your site loads quickly and that it does not have any broken links.  Use tools such as  this and check against the top sites ranking for your keyword.  Ensure that your site’s loadtime is better than theirs.

2) Brank visibility.  2010 will also take into account your brand’s visibility on the net.  Make sure you optimise your social media assets such as your Twitter profile, your Facbook page , Flickr , LinkedIn and YouTube.

3) Real Time search.  Google and Bing recently paid 15 and 10 million dollars to index Twitter.  This was done primarily due to the fact that real time search will be an important factor in 2010.  Ensure that you produce enough content that can keep your social profiles active.

4) Universal Search.  Universal results or bleneded results will become even more prominent in 2010.  We’ve already started seeing the effect of Universal results in 2009 but 2010 promises to be the year when these results will become more of the norm.  Ensure you invest in multimedia content such as images, videos and news.

5) Personalised Search.  Google recently announced that it has switched it’s default search results to “personalised”.  With this being the case, ensure that your site is optimised to rank for the various keywords in your consumers buying cycle.  Also ensure that your site is user friendly in order to decrease bounce rates.  Google will be keeping an eye on bounce/click through rates in 2010.

In addition to the above, make sure that you follow all the basic SEO best practice techniques as recommended by the main search engines.

Happy Holidays!

So Google recently announced that it has defaulted it’s search results to “personalised”.  What does this mean in terms of the future of SEO?  I’ll try to explain.

Before I do, let me explain how Google’s new personalised results work. 

Google personalised results have always been available however previously, these results could only be viewed when a user was logged into a Google account.   Google has now defaulted to an opt out  if you don’t want personalised personalised results, ie they will serve personalised results unless you opt out by clicking on “Web History” in the top right hand corner of the results pages and opting out.

How do personalised results work?  Basically, Google stores a cookie on your computer and tracks your search behaviour including which sites you visit for up to 180 days.  Now, when you search for a certain keyword, Google queries your past search history and comes back with sites that match your past searches.

Here’s Google’s official video announcement

YouTube Direkt

For instance if you’re searching for “golf” in the past Google could either serve you a site related to Golf the car or Golf the sport.  Now, with personalised search, Google knows if you’re a sports fan or a car enthusiast and would serve you results based on your preference.

Now that you’re clearer on what personalised search is (I hope), how will these results affect SEO?

To put it mildly, the rules of the game have changed!  In the past, SEOs were able to follow basic SEO best practices such as code optimisation, keyword usage, site architecture and link building and have a very good chance of ranking for target terms.  This is still the case today however another factor has been pushed into the mix, personalisation.

This means that by following SEO best practices, you might rank for your target keywords but this is not guaranteed to be the case on every computer.  Some computers with Google web history enabled and a Google cookie residing in the hard drive might get results based on the user’s web history,  This web history as mentioned above is based on some of the sites they’ve visited before.

So while the rules of the SEO game have changed, SEOs can still achieve results by taking into account a user’s journey when purchasing a product or service (for instance) and ensure that a client’s site appears for searches at various parts of the journey.  

As an example, if a user is interested in purchasing a car and your client is Golf,  you will need to ensure that your client’s sites is visible not only for buying stages of the purchase cycle, but also during the research stage.  If Google registers that you’ve clicked on the Golf site early on in the process, then there is a good chance that the Golf site will outrank any other site in this niche.

I hope the above explains personalised search and what SEOs can do to ensure they do not lose out from this fundamental change in Google’s algorithm.