Posts Tagged ‘google’

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Google and Personalized Search

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

This month Google announced that they would be designing everyone’s search results based on their search history even when users are not signed into Google, even though personalized results are nothing new in Google’s design of SERPs (search engine results pages). Google has been customizing peoples SERPs  for quite a while already, but until now it only happened when you searched while signed into your Google account. Today, signed in or not, everybody gets personal results.

Whether you’re signed in or not, all the searches you run on Google are stored in your browser cookies. This data is referred to as your ‘Web History’ and Google uses it to customize your search results. If you’re not signed in, your Web History is stored for 180 days, then old data is replaced with new searches. If you’re signed in, there’s no time limit and you can manage your Web History.

So the searches you run and sites you visit will affect your future search experience. The sites you visit more often will be pushed higher in the search results on related queries.

As an example if you search for ‘website design’ and visit www.webdesign.com, next time when you search for ‘website design’ you may see www.webdesign.com in top 10 results even if it doesn’t rank there in the general impersonalized search. You can tell that your search results have been personalized by the ‘View customization’ link in the upper right hand corner. 

The personalized search results can differ significantly from the general SERPs. I ran a couple of tests searching for related keywords and clicking the same site each time. The results can be drastic – imagine a site page that is ranked for web design at number 30, it might be pushed to a ranking of 5 even if your signed out of Google.

To check a site’s rankings use a rank checker to get a list of impersonalized rankings.

Meta Descriptions have also changed recently

Your Meta description is a crucial factor that determines the CTR (click-through-rate) of your site in search results. The more compelling your description is, the more searchers will click it. When they click through to your site from search results this is recorded in their Web History. Next time they search for a product or service related to your site, it may appear high up in their personalized search results.

 Since everybody now gets personalized results, the scope of the effect your Meta descriptions have on your rankings can get really huge. That’s another reason why you should invest some time into testing and optimizing your Meta descriptions.

Google doesn’t always show the Meta description you provide. Sometimes it just compiles a random text snippet from your page that contains the keywords used in the query. But you can easily locate the keywords where your Meta description shows up by searching for them on Google.

There’s been a lot of criticism coming down on Google’s new design for introducing personal search to everybody. Some people are worried about privacy issues. Others don’t like it because this will help keep the small guy out of the game. And this makes SEO success harder to measure for search engine optimization firms.

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Google changes their design and adds options for publishers

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

A bit of History

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.

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Google’s Project 10 to the 100th

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Google is promising to shed light on its “Project 10 to the 100th” competition–announced last year as part of its 10th anniversary celebration–within this month.

Project 10 to the 100th is an attempt to solicit ideas that will change the world, focusing on the notion that “new studies are reinforcing the simple wisdom that beyond a certain very basic level of material wealth, the only thing that increases individual happiness over time is helping other people,” Google said when announcing the project last year. Five projects will be selected to receive a total of $10 million in funding, but choosing those five projects has taken Google much longer than originally anticipated. The announcement of the finalists has already been delayed twice, most recently in March.

“We received over 150,000 ideas from users which far surpassed our expectations,” said Jamie Wood, a Google spokesman. “We’ve never managed a project like this and it’s taken much more time than we imagined to judge and sort through the ideas.”

Wood promised that “within a month” Google would announce the next phase of the competition. That will likely involve the release of 100 proposals for the public to vote on and choose 20 finalists, from which a Google board will choose the five lucky winners.

Source: news.cnet.com

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Google plans an operating system (OS)

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

Google already has a mobile OS called ANDROID, and I am sure everyone is familiar with it — but now Google is developing an operating system (OS) for personal computers [ said to be called Google Chrome OS ], in a direct market challenge to the leader Microsoft and Windows OS.

The Google Chrome OS could be on sale by the middle of 2010. With speed, simplicity and security being the main objectives of it’s OS and running on an open source license [ we love open source - for designers and web developers ].

The Google OS is said to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you on to the web in a few seconds. Google’s intent is to redesign the security architecture, so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. “It should just work,” says Google.

The OS is designed for the web world ! Google is very serious about making the web into a foundation not just for static pages but for active applications [ cloud computing ], and services that reside on the web own such as Google Docs and G-mail.

To sum it all up – we’re very excited ! Google is dropping an OS that seems to work together with cloud computing, active web applications as well as web designed pages. This is definitely part of our future, however how it all plays out we don’t know for sure – but we’re glad Google is working on it and according to Google more than 1.75 million companies use Google apps already !

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