On December 04, 2009 Google announced that they will design and customize your search results based on your past search activity even if you are not signed in your Google account. What it means is, the search results you see on your computer may differ slightly from what someone else might see on their computer. Google is now keeping track of your search history from the last 180 days on your browser’s cookies and produce the search results based on your search behavior. You can learn more about this feature on Google’s official blog
This is an important piece of information for all web designers, web developers, website owners and SEO professionals who monitor their website rankings on Google. You will see a difference in search rankings dependent on what computer you are searching on. In order to see the global search results, you can simply turn off this feature from Web History which is shown on top right corner of Google.com. This will tell Google that you do not wish to customize the search results based on search activities performed on that computer.
This Summer a friend pointed down and asked me “…Do you know the name of that flower?” and I replied “No, I don’t…” we looked at each other and then looked down at our hand-held devices, an iPhone and a BlackBerry. Both have internet capabilities, but what can we do? Search the Encyclopedia Of Life (which exists by the way and is a tremendous ongoing project that is creating the first ever complete encyclopedia and index of every organism that exists on this planet)
Then the idea of a “visual search” came into our minds, what if we could take a picture with our phone and search for the name that way… This has to be something that Google is working on we assumed.
A month ago I was watching Inside The mind of Google that was on CNBC. And there it was – Google was working on Visual Search.
It’s quite amazing… A picture is worth a thousand words ( as any good web designer would say) No need to type your search anymore. Just take a picture. Find out what businesses are nearby. Just point your phone at a store.
Google says that this is just the beginning – and that it’s not quite perfect yet, it works well for some things, but not for all. And it looks like they are not yet recognizing items from the Encyclopedia of Life quite yet, as it works for landmarks, Books, Places, and Wine to name a few.
Last Month Rupert Murdoch, in an attempt to keep his subscription-based model for content working, threatened to use legal methods to prevent Google and other search engine “news aggregators” from taking his newspapers’ material. To add to this – large news publishers were reportedly being courted by Microsoft to de-list their news content from Google’s index.
An interesting aspect of this issue is of course the fact that Mr. Murdoch who started the attack against Google happens to be co-owner of Microsoft Bing.
So, this has caused some change with the way Google handles Subscription-based news articles. However Google claims this was actually in the works well before Murdoch’s crusade against Google.
Here are the changes
There are two changes that Google hopes will quell the discontent of media outlets. The first one is a change to its “First Click Free” program, which allows users to visit an article for free, but directs them to a sign-up page if they browse to another page. For example, if you visited a Wall Street Journal article from Google News, you’d get the full article for free, but would have to pay for other articles. The problem is that many people now abuse this feature to get all of their WSJ articles for free. The new change will limit you to five pages per day before you must register, regardless of how you get to the website. Media outlets can opt into this program if they so desire.
The second change is actually a change to how Google’s web crawlers index pages. Publishers now have the option to tell Google’s spiders to only crawl and index the “preview pages.” This refers to pages that display the first few paragraphs of an article on subscription sites like WSJ.com in order to entice them to pay for a subscription. If a publisher chooses to have spiders crawl their articles in this manner, they will be labeled with “subscription” within Google News.
This compromise seems to make a lot of sense. Publishers who are worried that Google is exploiting them, now in turn gain more control over what is displayed on Google and Google News. Google in return doesn’t lose publisher content.
We have to wait and see if these changes in the design will be enough to appease Murdoch and company. These changes seem pretty fair.
