Google has just added search suggestions to Image Search and it doesn’t seem to be the same as for the web version. They are trying to make suggestions relevant, but there are always issues, unfortunately, especially that they are based on users behavior. You might find adult or irrelevant suggestions, but if you want to get rid of them at all, go to preferences and check “Do not provide query suggestions in the search box.”
Google changed the Favicon again, after they already changed it in June, last year. The new favicon is very colorful and I really don’t like it.
What do you think about it ?
Google Favicon
I am a relatively active Twitter user and my native language is Romanian, because I live in Romania, but I also have a lot of foreing followers. The problem is that I talk to my romanian followers in Romanian and with the other in English. I’m not sure if the Romanian ones are very disturbed, because most of them can speak English, but I’m sure the others are when I’m Twitting in Romanian.
So the idea is Twitter should allow me to group my followers, so I can Twit in english to a public group, that everyone can see and in Romanian for my followers from Romanian.
I’m sure this would be useful for a lot of users and not only for language, but for example a singer would like to Twit his fans about his upcoming concerts and his friends about the club or party he’s going to go tonight. There can be a lot of examples, just use your imagination.
I would really love this feature to be added. What do you think ?
Google has just made public it’s voting-based SearchWiki so now you can upvote, comment, or remove any result from the SERP. For the moment it only seems to affect the voting user’s rankings and not the whole SERP, so you don’t have to worry.
In the future there are many chances Google will use this voting system in it’s algorithm to rank websites, but it surely won’t base on this too much, because it’s much easier to game than using older techniques.
We shall see in the future what they have in mind, it might be a totally mess and take it out, but nothing’s sure.
Here’s a snapshot:
Technology News
Today me and almost everyone I asked noticed changes in SERPs on a lot of keywords and the strange thing is that the positions have changed for almost all websites in the query and the quality, trusted ones went down with up to hundreds of positions, while new websites, with no inbound links jumped to the first positions.
I talked a lot about this today with a lot of people and we didn’t manage to get to a conclusion, because if the SERP remains like this, Google’s relevancy ends today. There are many querys where all quality websites went down and new, spam, and irrelevant websites took their place.
Considering the conditions and ways Google updated it’s SERPs today, I will have to call this the “Google Shaker”, because it seems like Google introduced the SERP in a shaker and shaked it.
“Google Shaker” seems to happen much more in local searches more than on Google.com. Until now I have seen many people complaining that Google.ro, Google.ru, and Google.co.uk is totally screwed up.
I thought all day at this and researched especially on Google.ro, being the country I live in and it might be a mistake, a Halloween joke or a test, because the SERPs definitely can’t remain this way. Other way, Google’s relevancy is gone, at least in those countries and a lot of CEOs will run mad, along with us, the SEOs, because our clients will be more than angry.
I would love to get your feedback on this and maybe we can find an explanation and a solution. Did Google really changed the algorithm in such a drastic way ?
A new version of wordpress, the script this blog is running on, is preparing to be released. The 2.7 Wireframes version comes with a lot of new features, that allow you to change your admin interface structure, fixes some bugs, but I’m sure that like any new version that comes out, it has many other new bugs.
I will not install it yet, but wait for 2.7.1 or so, that should be more bugg-free.
Google has just started testing ads in the Image Search, but this was an expected movement, because the image search is very expensive to upkeep, for sure. Currently, it must be in a beta phase, because the ads rarely appear and I don’t see a menu in my Adwords that allows me to place that ads.
I’m sure affiliate marketers can’t wait to try them, even if the image ads conversion is lower than the text ads. Though, the advantage is that the ad also includes text, below an image. Fortunately, the image has an yellow background and above it is the text “sponsored image” so the users won’t click them by mistake. But I’m not that sure they won’t, especially they didn’t expect them to be there.
Once launched, we shall see the advertisers experiences on conversions, but I’m confident they won’t be combarable with the text ads in search.
Take a look at the ads
StumbleUpon has just released a new toolbar-free version, but until now it’s only available to certain users, including me. So, if you don’t see it, don’t panic, probably they are currently testing it and it will soon be available for everyone.
The new version features a star rating for websites and a button you can place on your website where users can vote you directly. The button also shows how many votes the page has. Take a look at it:
Finally, they seem to have understood that people don’t like to spend time and are lazy, so they lost a lot by requiering them to install the toolbar. Now the toolbar is in a web version and it makes things easier, even if it’s not so feature-full as the install version. Check it out here, it might work for you too.
The website layout has also changed a lot and it offers everyone to vote a website directly from the review page, also it shows websites relevant to it.
The profile page has also changed, but not very much.
In conclusion, they seem to have done a great thing with it and the membership will definitely grow at a much faster rate that it was until now.
What do you think about it ? Do you see it already ?
It has been a busy summer for me. Firstly I had the exams after I finished highschool, then I had to go to apply to the universities in Bucharest, the capital. Then I was living in Pitesti.
Fortunately everything went excellent and I passed them all and got admitted to the university. After that I though I deserve a vacation and went to Greece ( Thassos ) for a week. After that, I had another problem: to rent an apartment in Bucharest, it was really hard to find the one I liked.
When everything seemed alright, I figured out that my very low internet activity inflicted in my profits and I ws almost broke, so I had to work a lot to get the traffic back and take care of the websites.
Now I’m back in business and I have more free time, so fortunately I will be able to update this blog more often. If you want to get noticed of my future articles, don’t hesitate to subscribe via RSS or email.
Two ex Google engineers, Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, along with a third person, Russel Power, have released a new search engine. Cuil started with 120 billion indexed pages and they stated that their new search engine has the biggest index of them all. Probably they haven’t read Google’s last post, where they say to have indexed more than 1 trillion pages, which is almost 8 times more than that.
From the tests I was able to make until it got down, it doesn’t seem very relevant and there are a lot of searches it returns no results, while other search engines do.
Cuil is a wannabe semantic search engine, understanding the meaning of words, but it’s not very good at it. Until now, I didn’t find anything I could like at it, better than Google. What I am satisfied of is the simple design.
Recent Comments