Digital Bytes

Google is 10 years old

Has search changed much from back then? How different are the search results and what did the web pages look like?

Google has released an insight into 2001 search results and what their system looked like.

http://www.google.com/search2001.html

It is great fun to see a more innocent version of the web. We might have a cleaner landscape but there were far fewer indexed pages 10 years ago. 1,326,920,000 pages indexed in 2001 compared to 8,000,000,000 pages indexed in 2008.

Here are a few 2001 search results to make you smile:

Credit Crunch

iPhone

facebook

3 mobile

Initial Thoughts On Google Chrome

After 24 hours of using Chrome, we thought it would be useful to review it against Firefox and IE and to give further insight about the possible future of Google Chrome.

As many other blogs have reported, the speed of a page loading is amazing in comparison to IE or Firefox. This is to do with the currently unique way a page loads. It is this, that currently will increase user market share (although Firefox claim their 3.1 version will beat Chrome in speed upon release).

Other benefits are the fact that the browser seems to occupy more of your screen, having done away with the traditional toolbar running along the top. Additionally the homepage has a most visited webpages overview  on there. This is cosmetically a nice function.

Other areas where Google chrome, will perceive to do well is the 'Incognito' mode a user can use. As the screenshot shows;  no cookies are dropped on their machine. This appeals to the average users paranoia about data collection.

What it means for our clients and advertisers, is yet another barrier to collect conversion data. If the Google browser takes off, this will have a detrimental effect on online campaigns where conversions from click to purchase are counted and media bought on a figure ROI.

Other drawbacks include, no siverlight functionality (Microsoft's version of Flash), no plug-in extensions and many a site is still struggling to display in firefox and Safari, let alone Chrome.

However there does seem a big benefit to an advertiser moving forward. When searching for a brand,  a Chrome user enters their search in the web bar and it auto completes the brand name you are typing, as well as the address. For instance this screen shot on the term 'ITV'.
     

A lot of paid search money is spent on brand terms, as they are high converting terms and therefore there needs to be as many access points to the brand website, on a search results page as possible. Chrome eliminates this need. Therefore a consumer who cannot be bothered to enter the URL to find a brand website, no longer needs to search on a search engine. With less search engine results being displayed, the traffic to the brand website will increase, while brand paid traffic will decrease. A big plus to the search market and advertisers at the detriment of Google adwords!

How long this feature will continue in its current form will be interesting to monitor, as Google could loose millions as a result of their technological advancement. One thing is for sure this browser is still in beta mode and therefore alot of the drawbacks will be fixed. There could be a new browser on the scene.

Google, Knol and SEO

So, after Google's 'Knol' was announced at the end of last year, it finally launched in beta on the 23rd July.  For those of you who haven't heard about it, it's basically Google's version of Wikipedia; with differences including that all contributors to the Knol project must sign in first with a Google account and are supposed to state their real names.  If permission is given, Google will check the veracity of the name information by credit card or phone. Google believes that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.  Another point of differnce is that whilst Wikipedia articles are written collectively under a "neutral point of view" policy, Knol will highlight personal expertise by emphasizing authorship and will contain the personal opinions of the author.

More information and more opinion on more topics must surely be a good thing...however, there has been debate on whether Google search results can remain neutral because of possible conflict of interest - what's to stop Google from ranking Knol results high up on the SEO listings and remain unbiased?  Now that it has launched, these concerns seem to have become reality, and this mashable article highlights the issues quite well...it remains to be seen how the SEO landscape on Google will change once Knol is out of beta and at full capacity.

Source: Wikipedia, mashable

Google finally improves its flash crawling abilities

For too long Google and the other search engines have had difficulty crawling flash sites. When we mean 'crawling the site', the purpose of this is to display a good summary of the site in natural search results. Crawling a site well also means that you achieve your minimum cost per click in paid search; which in turn makes paid search marketers happy.

For those un-intitated to the problem, here's some more information: many retailers have very visual products that require their websites to sell a concept, as well as have the facts that consumers are looking for.  They use their site as an online brochure rather than as an online stock inventory.

A prime example is the 'automotive' vertical. Traditionally, these sites are very flash heavy due to their complex interactive and visual nature.  However, due to this heavy flash nature the engines can not crawl the content of the site well. Yahoo still has this problem. A simple search for 'vw golf', returns the following:

There is no description in the snippet and the ranking of some links can be lower down than they should be. With the quality score being so important in paid search, the word content on the page is very important to maintain low cost per clicks - and as you can see, Yahoo has not found any words.

Now Google has been the first to improve the crawling of these sites:

Let us hope the other engines follow suit.

Which Search Engine?

We are all guilty of being fiercely loyal to our search engine of choice. We might veer off the chosen one every now and again but generally speaking, we do not tend to reset our homepages.

We therefore decided to trial all the three search engines in the market, to understand the pros and cons of each one. The team spent at least a week using the agreed search engine and noted down any obvious differences...

Google Site Links

Part of the Google landscape nowadays for big brands is "sitelinks", as can be seen below:

 

                                                                                                                                       Sitelinks are meant to aid navigation and as you can see, they are a quick way for a user to navigate to the page they want. This can help a brand, minimising drop off along the way.

Currently it is Google that chooses what pages to select from your site as relevant site links, although they hope to change this in the future. For many smaller brands or badly optimised sites, site links are not  even shown by Google.

If there is a sitelink on your natural result,  there is a way to block irrelevant sitelinks in the hope that Google will select another more commercially viable link. For instance with the example of AXA we will be advising that they block the site link 'careers' in the hope that another commercial product will show.

If you have noticed a link that is not ideal on your Google natural result then please feel free to contact us for advice!

Election Fever reaches Google

The latest poll by You Gov (April 14th) suggested a 6 point lead for Boris Johnson over Ken Livingstone, half of the previous poll they published. This was a massive cut in leading points and hard questions were raised at the validity of the You Gov poll. Often we see polls being way off the actual results, and a huge investment goes into the polling industry and getting them right.

However, the search landscape can be a true reflection of the interest of a politician. If we take the latest Google trends data we can see that Boris Johnson is indeed ahead of Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick. And this 'poll' is updated daily and costs considerably less to produce. More importantly it is a true reflection of what people are looking for, not the image they want to project to a pollster. Whether this popularity translates into votes, only 1st May will tell.

Google's new box

Google launched the secondary search box (as per left example) two weeks ago in the UK. The secondary search box is a way of searching within a particular site without having to click through to the actual site. The site's 'deep-links' are listed as text results.

Pitched as ever as a way of making the search experience easier, Google stated at a recent seminar that, 'research had shown this is what the consumer wants. They do not want to leave the comfort of Google and prefer to land on the exact page of the site'.

Certainly as a consumer stumbling across the secondary box for the first time (taking YouTube as an example), this looked like a nice addition. We were, however, disappointed to see that it doesn't link to the results page within the desired site, but instead gives a sea of further search results. Is this really easier for the consumer?

From an advertiser stand-point, this is being viewed by the whole paid search industry with the same degree of cynicism. Picture the scene: HSBC (a random example) is selling current accounts and have invested in TV, radio etc. However after buying into the brand and product, and after arriving at the new search box, a user would be sensible to type 'current account' after remembering the product name.

Below is the result, a garbled text link as the natural search result. More disturbingly a chance for a competitor to poach business and Google to earn some more revenue - which, frankly is a search specialists' nightmare:

However there are also major negatives for Search Engine Optimisers and Webmasters alike. When Google randomly decides what page a consumer lands on of your site, rather than your own system figuring this out, how can that help your business?

Google have already taken a lot of flack from advertisers and have compromised. If there is evidence that volumes/conversions have gone down as a result, then they will disable the function - let's see what happens...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/04/google-offers-secondary-search-boxes/

Blended Search aka Universal Search

Over the past 7 months, you will have seen the search results landscape change. From a traditional web page results page, to incorporated embedded videos images and news results also being displayed.

One thing it has meant is that we no longer can rely on a website to be the one source of consumption for a brand. We now have to consider the likes of YouTube (Google's preferred video provider, and also Google owned) as an additional place for your brand to advertise on. We find TV adverts and virals on Youtube and other streaming sites more and more. Without an element of control by a brand ANY video could be shown in the web search results.

If advertisers think that Universal Search is not having an impact, think again. A study by Iprospect and Jupiter Research has shown that 17% of people clicked on an associated video shown in the Search Results. That's 17% of searches that do not go through the correct marketing channels. Therefore Youtube and Blended Search should be addressed, for example by working with the likes of Youtube etc to buy a dedicated brand channel and adverts linking through to this channel. What also has to be factored in is an element of controlling brand reputation, in write-ups etc and removing unauthorised video posts. Carefully planned advertising on these video sites and policing, means the opportunity to recapture a good share of the 17%.  Come have a chat to us if you want more info on tackling the relatively new marketing problem of tracking consumption!

Google backs 'white space' wi-fi

Google is pressing the US government to allow TV 'white space' to be used for wi-fi.

The unlicensed analogue frequencies currently remain unused, with Google claiming that 'white space' could  be used to bring 'ubiquitous wireless broadband to all Americans'

Previously, TV broadcasters have feared that the use of white space could interfere with the transmission of their programmes.  Goggle have countered the argument by encouraging regulators to adopt overlapping technologies to prevent signals interfering with each other.

Here in the UK, 'white space' is currently used for wireless microphones and cognitive radio.

source: BBC