Social media flourished in 2009 and this year it’s going to become an even bigger player in the way we browse, consume and share information online. Below are my predictions for the biggest trends regarding social media’s development in 2010. (more…)
Many SEO’s believe that content is king. Quality content will always do well online, people will link to it, disseminate it for you, often it can take on a binary life of its own and raise your brand’s awareness with little more effort expended by the creator. And we’ll happily produce it for free as long as it garners us some positive link equity and other such digital marketing perks.
However for newspapers the game is a bit different. For years now the major broadsheets and tabloids have been giving away their content for free. Why spend £1.20 on the paper when you can surf the website without having to pay? This is the quandary I find myself in most days. I’ve compromised by reading articles on the website in the week and purchasing the weekend editions Saturday and Sunday, so I don’t feel like a fully fledged, ice cold cheapskate.
There had been some speculation of Google’s dominating position online, what with Twitter implementing real time search, Microsoft unveiling Bing and buying Yahoo. However, as we should have suspected, Google had an ace up its sleeve.
Google’s search engine developers have been secretly developing a new project – dubbed “Google Caffeine”. Caffeine apparently has a next generation architecture for Google’s web search which aims to push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. Sounds like a huge step for Google but is it all hype? (more…)
Microsoft Corp. registered a 0.4% increase in their search market share in June at the slight expense of Yahoo! not Google, said comScore.
The bigger picture of the worldwide search market now looks like this (figures updated on July 9th):
32% of Bing visitors come from the US, taking BING’s search market share in the US to 8.45% (StatCounter, June 2009), an additional 0.4%, whilst Google remains stable at 65%. However in the UK Bing only represents 2.56% of the search market.
What’s in it for users?
Microsoft presented Bing not as a search engine, but as a decision search engine, offering more contextual, relevant results to help decision making. (more…)
I want to search a certain query in search engines. So which one do I use? Habit drives me towards Google knowing they are the biggest player in the market, but is that REALLY the best search engine to use for my specific query? Will Google give me the most relevant results? Apparently so, according to a new study by Citigroup. Their recent analysis of search relevancy found that Google was better than any of its main competitors in returning relevant results. (more…)
PageRank sculpting is an SEO method of controlling your websites allocation of PageRank throughout your web pages. PageRank sculpting is based on simple logic. Previously all you needed to do was add the rel=”nofollow” tag to a link pointing at a web page that had little use to you in terms of search engine optimisation (such as a shopping basket or a contact us form), then you didn’t dilute any of your PageRank to that page.
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Days after revealing their plans for Google Wave the people at Google have unveiled their latest internet search tool, Google Squared.
The aim of Google Squared is to provide all the answers you need for a search query that may have lots of different answers. On the Google blog using roller coasters as an example they go on to explain what it is essentially about. (more…)
Recently we have had Wolfram Alpha offering a comprehensive “computational” knowledge engine and Google Squared promising a simple way of pulling organised data from websites into a spreadsheet style format.
Now last week we have seen Microsoft’s Live Search engine evolve into what they are now calling their decision engine. Originally code-named Kumo and supported by Microsoft’s hefty marketing muscle, Bing has been launched. (more…)
Google has unveiled its latest attempt to revolutionise the way people will use the internet for communication, Google Wave. Touted as a complete tool for how people communicate and collaborate on the web, Google see Wave as being able to bring email and instant messaging into a single modern day form. (more…)
