Omar Kattan

Archive for the ‘Google News’ Category

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. 

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.

Google recently announced it’s top secret project codenamed “Caffeine”.  This project seems to have been a few years in the making and meant to capitalise on the growing interest in “real time search” and the “semantic web”.

I have yet to see any major changes in Google’s search results due to Caffeine but maybe this is because it has yet to be launched in the UK.

The test bed for Caffeine is the US market.  Actually, in Google’s official announcement, they provided a link to the DC hosting the “new and improved” search results.

What are the implication of Caffeine to webmaster around the world?  More specifically, how will Google’s new algorithm impact SEO efforts.  Here are my thoughts:

1) Now more than ever, Brand presence in social media has become increasingly important as Google Caffeine will place more efforts on social media noise among other factors.

2) Google Caffeine boasts a larger and more comprehensive  index of results.  This means that webmasters need to ensure (now more than ever) that their websites are as accessible and spider friendly as possible.  Load time of web pages in now becoming increasingly important in ranking results.  Don’t skimp on your hosting!

3) The semantic web is fast closing in on us.  Google Caffeine has an improved element of semantics in it’s algorythm.  What does this mean?  Well if you’re writing a page about dogs and “man’s best friend”  for example is not included, this could hinder your ranking efforts.  Web copy needs to take this into account.

4) Following on from point 3 above, information architecture is playing an increasingly important role in rankings.  The idea behind information architecture is to build a website where the information contained within is structured and marked-up in such a way as to portray a sense of authority to search engines.  This factor in itself has always played an important role in search rankings however Caffeine’s launch will make this even more of a critical ranking factor!

We are yet to see the full implications of Caffeine but one thing’s for certain, the days of traditional SEO methods are numbered!

In a move hardly surprising to SEOs Google has officially announced two new “improvements” in its search results;  “longer search result  descriptions” (snippets)  and “an expanded list of useful related searches”.

Longer Description Snippet  

If you conduct a search for wolverine movie review you’ll notice that the description snippet under the blue title tag contains two lines and cuts off at around 150 characters. 

If you amend the search to include Hugh Jackman, you’ll notice that the description snippet has increased to 3 lines to provide users with more info from the page within the snippet.

Expanded related searches

The example Google gives for this is a search for the keyword principles of physics. The related links at the bottom of the results include angular momentum and big bang, all semantically related to the keyword physics.

These improvements by Google are meant to provide users with a better search experience in finding what their looking for but how will that affect click through rates? 

The general consensus is that it would decrease them as users will eventually be able to find what they’re looking for without actually going to the site!