Omar Kattan » Google News

The 12 Doodles of Christmas

Omar Kattan (online) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 12:37:38 +0000

In the spirit of Yule, Google's 12 Christmas "Doodles" dating back to 1999 when they were still a wee lil start up. They've become quite elaborate over the years and are now even sporting some pretty nifty interactive musical backgrounds. One thing to note, they've never used religious imagery of Christmas e.g. Nativity, Baby Jesus, etc. (a bit too pc if you ask me!) but they're still very festive nonetheless. Enjoy and Merry Christmas! :) Google Christmas Doodle #1 - 1... Read more..

Google Adds “Answer Highlighting” to Search Results

Omar Kattan (online) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 08:31:27 +0000

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... Read more..

Haiti Earthquake – How Google is Helping

Omar Kattan (online) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:27:13 +0000
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. Read more..

Personalised Search and It’s Impact on SEO

Omar Kattan (online) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:18:39 +0000
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... Read more..

Google Caffeine – The SEO Implications

Omar Kattan (online) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:26:58 +0000
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 Caf... Read more..

Google Announces Longer Description Snippets

Omar Kattan (online) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:01:35 +0000

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... Read more..

Is Google Favouring Brands in SERPS?

Omar Kattan (online) — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 16:04:29 +0000

This debate was first kicked off by Aaron Wall and has been floating around in webamaster forums for a while now.  The debate still lingers on with no absolute answer.
In response to this question, Matt Cutts, Google spokesman says... "Inside of Google, we don't really think about brands, we think about words such as trust, authority, reputation, pagerank, high quality." "If somebody comes to google and types X we wan... Read more..

Google Search Wiki

Omar Kattan (online) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:46:36 +0000

On Thursday, Google officially launched its much anticipated "Search Wiki" application found within its personalised Google search accounts. This move was hardly a surprise especially as Google's been dabbling with the idea of search Wiki as an experiment for some time now.

The idea behind search Wiki is simple.  Google now allows users to custom design their search r... Read more..

Google Alerts Now in RSS

Omar Kattan (online) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 12:34:29 +0000

Do you subscribe to Google alerts? If you do then you'll be happy to know that Google has now begun offering the option to recive them via RSS!. Yes thats right RSS!

Benefits of reciveing Google alerts via rss as opposed to to email include the ability to include them in your favourite reader, or even importing them into a adatabase including your cms for reputation management and collaboration.
Read more..