Archive for the ‘Search News’ Category
Google Turns 10
Today marks Google’s 10th Birthday.
It has been over 10 years since Larry Page and Sergey Bernstein began Google, a Search Engine aimed at indexing the world’s information and providing fast, efficieint and relative results for web search.
It has been, at least 8 since Google rose to fame as a mainstream search engine, and with that followed fortune, seeing many of it’s employees becoming overnight millionaires, and it’s founders overnight billionaires when the company launched on the Nasdaq.
10 years on today Google is now the biggest search engine in the world, and one of the richest companies in the world.
In it’s first 10 years, Google has brought a lot of new services and features to the internet such as google maps and google books, that are a benefit to the community and help put the world’s information at our fingertips.
Google has done a great deal in it’s first 10 years, and it will be interesting to watch the future of the search company in the next 10 years.
Happy Birthday Google.
Google Chrome
Introducing Google Chrome
A new web browser from Google
Google, the world’s most popular search engine has this week launched a new web browser.
It is called Google Chrome, and it aims to take a slice of the browser market away from Microsoft in the same way that Mozilla has done in recent years with it’s free and open source browser Firefox.
Google Chrome features most of the features you’d expect to see in a web browser, such as tabbed browsing, bookmarks and other mandatory gadgets, but at it’s core, Google Chrome has one thing the others don’t:
“One Box for Everything”
This is what Google Chrome is centered on, and it is basically a URL/Address bar and search box all in one.
Google Chrome
In the past, some of us web-savvy folk have scoffed at less experienced users who type a URL or web address into a search engine’s search box, or entering key words in a search box, yet it seems Google has discovered that the majority of it’s users aren’t
Google Chromes “one box for everything” feature predicts the words you’re typing, and immediately starts presenting URLs of actual websites that you’ve visited in the past, or search results related to your keywords that are indexed in Google, and even presents related pages to those you’re searching for. This new feature alone has the potential to change how users interact with web browsers and search engines.
Google Chrome comes at an interesting time when the Search Giant has threats from new competing search engines such as CUIL, who are offering a different search experience with supposedly more results, as well as Microsoft’s recent update to Internet Explorer which has a new privacy feature dubbed “porn mode”.
Google Chrome’s response to the new Microsoft feature is “incognito mode” which stores cookies and session data in a temporary cache and removes all traces of form data, cookies and pages visited when you’re done using it.
At a time when Microsoft had finally received some new attention and perhaps respect for the feature, Google has stolen it’s spotlight and positioned their browser at a perfect time when many people are ready to download browser updates.
Google certainly seems one of the most capable companies in the world to adapt to change and react to it’s competitors whilst leading the way in innovation, which goes a long way to demonstrating their abilities as a software company.
Changes, Questions, Uncertainty
When they already rule the world in web search, video streaming (youtube), and many other mediums, it begs the question, “when does google stop”?
There has been speculation in recent times that Google was preparing it’s own operating system based on Google, and perhaps google chrome is one step closer to that dream, however given that an operating system is less important in this web 2.0 world where feature rich applications are run on a web via a browser regardless of your platfrom, and the rising interest in SaaS (software as a service), Google is positioning itself to gain yet more of it’s competitors ground.
SearchKing has been often critical of browser plugins such as Adobe Flash being used to stream video on youtube as a hack. Google’s ability to obtain a large portion of the browser market could see the search engine/browser change the trends and introduce new browser plugins in favour of it’s massive content networks eliminating licensing fees and changing the way we interact wiht the web.
This is certainly a very interesting time for the internet and for Google.
What does this mean for Google? It means that it can promote Google Chrome as a superior browser using it’s target audience on it’s search engine. It also means they can use the browser to present results it favours from it’s own networks such as Youtube and Google maps. It certainly creates a much more feature rich experience for the user, but poses certain speculative questions about privacy and other concerns over google approaching a monopoly. The browser certainly will certainly further contribute in bolstering it’s own search network and securing it’s advertising space.
What does the introduction of Google Chrome mean for the for the future of firefox? It will probably die off or emulate many of the features in Google Chrome, or be amalgamated and swallowed up by google.
What does this mean for Microsoft? They need to get creative and innovative, they need to set new trends and benchmarks and stay a few steps ahead of the competition. They will probably set their lawyers out to find ways to pick at the new browser.
What does this mean for SEO? It means that google’s browser has the potential to change the way people search for information and how it is presented, and therefore SEO Specialist had best invest a lot of time researching the new browser and changes in the search engine if they’re able to deliver relevant results to their target audience.
Checkout Google Chrome Beta for Windows today: http://www.google.com/chrome/
Like all things Google, it first comes out in Beta mode, and the new software is available to download now for Windows (sorry mac and linux users).
This article is brought to you by Search King.
Google Trends
A new tool recently launched by Google, which is very useful for Search Engine Optimisation and Advertising is a tool called Search Trends:
This tool allows you to view historical search data related to key word searches performed by internet users dating back to 2004
Search Analysis - Google Trends
Google previously had a site similar to this which displayed only select popular search terms on an annual basis, and this report is referred to as the Google zeitgeist
This new Google Trends tool was released by Google last month and contains much more information, that has presumably been gathering data since 2004, launched now to to provide historical data.
This is a fantastic tool for SEO, as it allows you to perform search engine analysis to see what your target audience is searching for, and gage the popularity of certain key words, phrases or search terms which is indicated by the number of times the phrase has been searched for.
It’s great for narrowing down region-specific search results, by Country and can even State and Territory based results in some cases.
This is the tool that search engines optimisaton specialists have been waiting for. Book mark the site today.
The cost of dead clicks
It’s 3pm on a Tuesday afternoon, the peak period of the week for sales on your website.
Something obscure is happening: Your inbox is empty, and your phones are not ringing. A quick check of your website shows a page could not be displayed error message.
Panic!
Your web host has gone done yet again. The third time this month.
For some businesses, this is an encounter they can afford, but when your business relies so heavily on the Internet for sales leads, not to mention other operational functions of the business, you can’t afford a minute of downtime.
The impact of having your web host go down is not only costing you from leads that are unable to convert, there is an immeasurable non-financial impact of damage to your reputation for having your site down all the time, and let’s not forget the cost of a dead click.
If you have a google adwords or yahoo search marketing account for online advertising, you’re paying each and every time someone clicks on one of your ads.
If you’re running a new campaign or product launch and have allocated a large budget to online marketing, and your website is offline whilst countless number of potential customers are clicking on your link only to find your website is down, you’ve just wasted a lot of money and lost a lot of sales.
Here are a few tips from Search King few tips to minimise the potential for dead clicks:
- Pick a good web hosting company, and avoid cheap hosting plans
- Check the hardware specifications of the hardware you’re hosting on, make sure your hosting provider has redundant internet connections, power supply and most importantly good uptime.
- To ensure maximum uptime, ask your hosting company for an SLA, or service level agreement. This means they’re agreeing to give you a certain level of service (ie 99% uptime), and if they fail to meet this expectation, you can lean on them.
- Make sure your hosting company has upgrade options. If you start small but begin to grow, your server needs to keep pace with your traffic. Make sure if you have disk or bandwidth quotas, that they can be increased
- Keep an eye on your website,
Don’t stick around listening to the same excuses from your hosting company. Downtime costs you money, so vote with your feet and make sure you move to a quality web host.
You may also find that a standard web hosting package just isn’t enough for your very busy website, and this is when it’s time to make a decision on buying or renting your own server, but these are things you should discuss with your hosting company, do your homework, and shop around for the best options (remember, don’t always choose the cheapest!)
This article was brought to you by SearchKing.