GOOG
In-depth analysis and expert insight into Google’s products and services.Google Updates SEOmoz analyzes how Google handles local results. In most cases, Google puts Places results ahead of local organic results, but generally behind at least a few national results. This is something worth tracking over time, though; Google has shifted their local-versus-national and Google-owned-versus-web leanings several times in the past. Google is truncating results…
Pinterest has been growing absurdly fast (despite a laid-back work culture. It’s gotten to the point that marketers are doing a find/replace on their old “How to use Twitter” blog posts.
So it’s inevitably time for some sort of weak backlash. This time, the problem is their revenue model. They have one: they’re modifying links to…
Bing Hates Santorum, Too
Danny Sullivan notes that Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” is a “Bing problem,” too. The standard argument here is that the “Spreading Santorum” site is obviously and explicitly an attempt to manipulate search engines. The whole point of such campaigns is to create links and online activity that make the manipulated…
Google Updates Google is using third-party sites for rich snippets. This is an important precedent: it’s one of the few cases where Google gives up brand-blessed real estate for non-brand sites. There are some rumblings that Google’s privacy policies may violate HIPAA, but Google appears to fall outside the purview of that law. Google released a…
A hardy band of Google competitors—engineers at Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace—have built “Don’t be Evil,” a tool that basically recreates the Search+ experience with social media sites other than Google+. This concretely illustrates one of the lurking problems with Google’s search and social integration: it’s really bad for the search experience. There are a…
Google Updates Danny Sullivan has much more information on the “Don’t be Evil” tool. He actually makes a pretty good case for the bookmarklet as a genuinely useful piece of software: if it weren’t for the life-or-death struggle search and social companies, this kind of thing would be an obvious feature to add. Google may be
Google Updates Google’s Q4 earnings disappointed investors—they had higher ad clicks and lower costs per click (for the first time in a while). It’s hard to understand exactly what happened here, but John Ebbert at Ad Exchanger has an interesting theory: Google may be funneling traffic to PPC advertisers whose cookies can be used by…
A group of large media conglomerates banded together to lobby against a bill pushed by another large group of media conglomerates. In a victory for democracy, one of these enormous self-interested groups got exactly what it wanted from Congress.
That’s not great news.
At best, it’s the status quo: whenever two large interest groups collide,…
When Google announced Search, plus Your World, they made a dramatic decision: they’re embracing the paradigm of a web of people, rather than a web of verbs. And it’s a dangerous move.
There are two broad strategies for improving search engines: making them more aware of intents, or making them more aware of preferences. Most…
Why Infographics Still Work
This horrible Mashable article reveals why infographics are still such a powerful marketing tool. The author of the article clearly has no idea what any of this means (for example, at one point she seems to think that the amount of money Facebook is raising from the IPO is also somehow an…
Recent Research
Digital Due Diligence Weekly