Posts tagged Google’s
Google’s Top Charts Offer Engaging Visuals for Popular Searches Over Time
May 23rd
Google has added a new visual feature in Google Trends that allows users to explore trending people, places, and things over time, back to 2004. Interactive charts are sharable, allowing users to highlights data that’s interesting to them.
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Google’s Hunger For Structured Markup
May 23rd
Google is keen for structured markup — to put it mildly. In the not-too-distant past, I wrote about Google’s Data Highlighter for event data, a tool which allows webmasters to indicate structured data for events without having to actually mark up the site’s HTML code. It has the…
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Google’s Impressive “Conversational Search” Goes Live On Chrome
May 22nd
The “conversational search” that Google demonstrated at last week’s Google I/O conference is now available to users of its Chrome browser, and it’s a significant leap in how we use search engines. I’m 17 years now into writing about search, and I’ve seen all…
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Google’s Data Highlighter Now Supports Movies, TV, Articles, Products, Local Biz & Apps
May 21st
Google has quietly added support for six additional data types to the data highlighter rich snippet markup tool they introduced back in December. Google initially launched a visual rich snippet markup tool in December to allow less tech-savvy webmasters to markup their event based data. The tool…
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Google’s Search Market Share Drops as Bing Passes 17%
May 21st
Google’s search market share dropped slightly once again (from March’s 67.1 percent to 66.5 percent), with Bing and Yahoo slightly edging up. Microsoft’s Bing saw the biggest increase with a total search market share of 17.3 percent.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Google’s Data Highlighter Supports 6 New Data Types
May 21st
Google has quietly added support for six additional data types to the data highlighter rich snippet markup tool they introduced back in December. Google initially launched a visual rich snippet markup tool in December to allow less tech-savvy webmasters to markup their event based data. The tool…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Google’s Flirtation With Being A Hardware Company Is Over
May 17th
A year ago, I left Google’s annual I/O developers conference convinced it was making a major strategic shift into being a hardware company.
As this year’s I/O wraps up, I’m left questioning that conclusion.
The message Google is putting forward in 2013 is very different: It’s all about what developers can do with the software tools it provides, whether that means broad digital platforms like the Chrome Web browser and the Android mobile operating system, or fungible, ubiquitous services like Google+, YouTube and Google Maps.
A Retreat From Hardware
In 2012, the keynote offered a drumbeat of new hardware: The Nexus 7 tablet! Skydiving Google Glass stuntmen! The confounding, mysterious, ill-fated Nexus Q media device!
The overall effect was to show how Google was pushing the boundaries of industrial design and taking control of the complete user experience, from hardware and software to the services that run on top of them.
Call it a strategic retreat, but we heard almost nothing about hardware this year. The closest Google got was unveiling an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S4 running Google’s preferred version of Android, which it plans to sell directly to consumers online. Contrast that to Google’s past unveilings of Nexus devices, manufactured by partners but branded with the Google logo.
Even Glass, the face-mounted, Internet-connected headset now hitting the market, got sidelined in the keynote. While present at I/O, it wasn’t the emphasis.
Learning A Hard Lesson
Perhaps the disastrous Q—never formally cancelled, merely “postponed”—was the comeuppance Google needed, the failure that brought Larry Page and company to their senses. There’s also the ongoing agonies of Motorola Mobility, the handset manufacturer Google bought last year but continues to hold at arm’s length. That, more than anything, may have taught Google just how hard it is to crack the hardware business.
At recent Google I/O events, the company has handed out hardware to attendees (or units on loan for review to reporters). This year’s giveaway, a Chromebook Pixel, was a little sad: It was hardly new, having been announced in February rather than at this year’s show.
While the Pixel arguably showed off Google’s ChromeOS, a stripped-down operating system focused on apps that run on the built-in Web browser, it’s ultimately just a nicely built laptop—a very familiar category of gadget, hardly the kind of game-changing innovation Google CEO Larry Page talked up at this year’s keynote.
I suspect that Google will retreat further from hardware—perhaps spinning off or selling Motorola, after stripping it of the most essential code and patents it needs for Android.
Google won’t hesitate to build tools that serve its business, like the custom-designed servers and switches that run its giant empire of data centers, or the Trekker backpack cameras it uses to capture the offroad world for Google Maps. And we’ll likely see hardware from the Google[x] skunk works, like self-driving cars and Google Glass, where there’s nothing off-the-shelf for Google to put its cutting-edge software into.
But smartphones? Tablets? Living-room gadgets? Those are no longer the future of Google. Silicon, Page pointed out, is cheap. It’s software where Google will continue to seek its riches.
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Google’s Matt Cutts: Domain Clustering To Change Again; Fewer Results From Same Domain
May 17th
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a new video about a new change coming to Google’s search results related to the diversity of the results being displayed. Matt said that Google is launching “soon” a new change that will make it less likely to see results from…
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Google’s Matt Cutts: Domain Clustering To Change Again; Less Results From Same Domain
May 17th
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a new video about a new change coming to Google’s search results related to the diversity of the results being displayed. Matt said that Google is launching “soon” a new change that will make it less likely to see results from…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Making Sense Of Google’s New Social Stuff: Messaging, Hangouts & Google+
May 16th
With a whirlwind of announcements at its Google I/O developers conference this week, Google’s vast suite of social products is finally starting to look like it was created by a single company and not cobbled together via a series of haphazard acquisitions. Here are the highlights of what’s changed:
Hangouts: Google Messaging, Unmessy At Last
Google is finally doing something to prune its thicket of messaging products. Let’s start with a look at the various chat and messaging products that were due for some much-needed spring cleaning:
- Google Talk. Talk was Google’s Instant Message client. It’s also called Google Chat or “GChat,” by many people who didn’t even know it was called Talk to begin with.
- Google+ Hangouts. Hangouts was Google+’s group video chat service, from the social network’s launch back in 2011.
- Google+ Messenger: A product redundant with Google Talk, Messenger was Google+’s own IM client.
- Google Voice: Google’s cult-hit digital telephony client, Voice allows users to route all their calls to one phone number. Google Voice works for calls and texting both on desktop and on its much-neglected mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Now, Hangouts becomes the messaging mini-umbrella under the social mega-umbrella of Google+. Hangouts, now available across desktop and mobile, will unify Google Talk, Google+ Messenger and the old Hangouts video chat service of yore.
According to a statement from Nikhyl Singhal, Google’s head honcho of real-time communications, Google Voice will be folded into Hangouts too (Yay!), though there’s no word on when.
Google+ Gets A Lot Of Love
Messaging may have been the messiest area of Google’s social services, but Google+ is the big umbrella that covers them all. Amidst the company’s epic 3-hour-plus Google I/O keynote yesterday, Google+ guru Vic Gundotra announced approximately one million updates to Google+, the social network that the company launched two years ago. Okay, he pegged the number at 41… but that’s almost a million.
The updates are extensive. As a regular Google+ user, it’s actually difficult to get a sense for what changed, since the redesign looks and feels right in stride with Google’s recent overall changes in user interfaces that runs from Google+ to Google Glass to Google Now and Android. So here’s a list of some of the most notable of the 41 updates:
- A multi-column layout. This can be toggled off, if you’re still into the Blogger single-column-era.
- Photos and videos get even bigger. Google is really into making media massive – and we would be too if the average person knew how to share properly high-res photos.
- New animations. Things are flipping and sliding all over the place in there.
- A third dimension. You can scroll up and down through your social stream, but Google wants you to be able to scroll in too. Now you can take a deeper dive on a given Google+ post -or is it a Card? I think we’re suppose to call everything Cards now — via related hashtags, which will lead you to more content of interest. It will also take you further down the Google+ rabbit hole, of course.
Lots of treats for photographers. Google+ has a thriving community of awesome photogs, and Google is keen to do right by them. Photos in Google+ now have all sorts of cool bells and whistles. A few I’m particularly stoked about include “auto highlight,” which de-emphasizes duplicate and blurry pics, automatically picking the best shot out of a batch. I’ve yet to test this extensively, but since I have a habit of bracketing (taking multiple shots at different exposures) – even on my phone – choosing the best photo of a set can be a major timesuck. This feature could help there. Another feature, “Auto Awesome,” can stitch together shots in a series to make a playful Photobooth-esque picture or even a Vine-like animated gif.
For a full breakdown of Google’s social updates, hit the company’s official blog post or just cruise around in Google+ for a while. The the social network has been the butt of many a joke over the last few years, and we’re happy to see Google take the time to spruce things up a little.
Photos by Nick Statt for ReadWrite.
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