Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page.
This doesn’t sit well. At all.
The information will enable Google to develop a fuller picture of how people use its growing empire of Web sites. Consumers will have no choice but to accept the changes.
And of course, I await the iPhone commercials…
The policy will take effect March 1 and will also impact Android mobile phone users, who are required to log in to Google accounts when they activate their phones.
Easier said than done?
n other words, the search results that we supposedly value so highly are themselves paid placements, just like Google’s keyword ads. It’s just that in the case of search results, link owners have paid for SEO (search-engine optimization) to get Google’s attention instead of paying for SEM (search engine marketing) to make Google give their links prominence. Either way, though, searches are mostly just producing ads by any other name.
In addition, Google’s famed PageRank algorithm carries less and less weight these days, since fresh news and results inherently don’t have as many inbound links as older content. (If it helps, you can think of PageRank as a kind of paleo-social search—just one that moves way too slowly for the modern Web.)
Via MediaPost:
Google has been testing a new format for its News page. This design gets a little more social by displaying expandable sections with related stories about the subject, highlighting movable modules. It allows searchers to manually click through a sliding photo show with stills that expand when moused over. The News format continues to personalize the search experience by providing an option to sort in one or two columns. It also identifies the articles most cited and shared.
Google also added Quora, Gowalla, Google Buzz, Plixi, Me2day and Twitgoo to the sites it pulls into real-time search in google.com.
Google also acquired mobile-local startup TalkBin, the announcement made on the 5-month-old company’s Web site. The technology allows consumers to give immediate feedback to local businesses, but it’s easy to see how it would transfer to traditional social platforms. TalkBin is part of a large group of startup that received a small amount of capital through Y Combinator.
