Google has recently completed its first two day developers’ conference in San Francisco. The Google I/O conference – which I feel will now become an annual event in the search engines event diary – was a showcase of new tools and new services. During the two days, over 2500 developers from around the world passed through the I/O conferences doors. Some people have dubbed the Google I/O show as a conference by and for hackers, I personally have dubbed the show - Google Wonderland!! This is because Google has created a kind of Disneyland for developers to have fun and spend their hours indulging in what they love best ….building and learning about code.

At the I/O conference Google shed some light on their new technologies such as Google App Engine - for building and hosting Web applications, and OpenSocial - the Google backed interface for social networking. OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social networking applications. Applications implementing the Google OpenSocial APIs will be interoperable with any social networking system that supports them. At the conference the search engine giant discuss version 0.8 of the OpenSocial API specification.

Featured in version 0.8 of OpenSocial is the addition of the RESTful API. This new feature allows more software types to interact with the servers running social networking applications. This opens up the market to the likes of programs running on Windows or mobile phone access. The purpose of this new feature in OpenSocial is to allow developers to build applications that can access a social networking website and help update feeds.

Googles OpenSocial has been backed by MySpace and Yahoo, however to-date Facebook, one of the largest players in the social networking market, has not supported OpenSocial. Maybe the one reason for this is the fact that the social networking company itself has its own application development program. But I’m sure Facebook will watch the evolution of OpenSocial and evaluate whether to implement OpenSocial in the future. Also in the social networking realm, MySpace announced at the I/O conference that they where going to start to use Google’s Gears to help make their social networking website easier to use.

Gears is a beta software which enables offline access to services that normally are only available online. It installs a database engine, based on SQLite, on the client system to cache the data locally. This then allows pages enabled with Google Gears to use data from the local cache rather than from the online service. Once Myspace users install Gears they will be able to quickly search their mailboxes for specific terms or sort messages. Google created Gears to help everyone to get involved with upgrading the web platform.

The most interesting information that came out of the I/O conference for me working in the search engine marketing arena was Google’s vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayers’ speech relating to Googles A/B testing. This form of testing is based on various tests Google performs to increase searcher activity and responsiveness. From her presentation I found out that the more search results per page in Google, the less people actually search? The reason for this, apparently, comes down to speed! Google’s research showed that the more results that where shown on a screen resulted in longer download times to view the results, therefore put the user off. In their test Google showed that if one search page displayed 30 results than this would result in a 20% decline in searches when compared to 10 results per page.

Google also changed the pale blue background of adverts shown in Google Adwords to yellow and found that this increased clicks and surprisingly, increased searches. How bizarre! I wonder if this works with calls to action on webpage’s…I may have to test that one!

In my experience when a searcher doesn’t find what they require on the first page of a search engine than they are more likely to change their search keyword as opposed to looking on the second or third results pages. This is one of the main reasons why search engine optimisation is so important and why companies need to get themselves on the first pages of the search engines. So if this is the case - that searchers look for alternative keywords - than surely if Google put the search results that are placed on page two and three, on the first page, than maybe searchers would find what they where looking for faster rather than having to change their search query? But hey that’s only my two cents worth! Maybe the reason Google only shows ten results per page on its search engine is because it increases search volume?

On a lighter note I bet the song “Google Wonderland” is now running through your head and driving you mad!!!