Google Tests “Quick View” On Mobile Search – 9th Jan 2012 In an attempt to make the mobile search environment even smoother and efficient, Google have been testing a new feature called "Quick View" on smartphone devices on the search results page. This feature lets you load a page from the source web site in a quicker method, enabling the page to load much faster than loading the full page and minimizing download times. – Kevin Ting For more details: http://searchengineland.com/google-quick-view-button-on-mobile-searchresults-143493
Google Cleared of Search Results Bias – 9th Jan 2012 Under the legally binding agreement with the US watchdog, Google will stop "scraping" content from other sites and presenting it as its own in results, and will allow sites and businesses to opt out of featuring in its "vertical" search results such as Google Local and Google Shopping without that resulting in their being pushed down in general search results. – Robert Ashby For more details: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jan/03/google-clearedsearch-bias-investigation
Global Search Engine Development Trend – 8th January 2013 StateofSearch.com has published an article recently summarising some common development trends of 3 Search Engine giant around the world: Google, Baidu and Yandex. Personalisation and Social Search Google introduced Search Plus Your World last January. Since then, we’ve seen an increasing amount of personalisation creep into Google search results and increased importance attached to social search. Major news from Yandex in December was that it was launching personalised search. Unlike Google, this is based purely on your search history and
behaviour, rather than the preferences of friends/connections. Yandex has also given increased importance to social results, starting to display content from social networks in results last February. Baidu partnered with popular Chinese microblog Sina Weibo to integrate posts on trending topics into results. Semantic Search Google’s knowledge graph is 2012’s major development in semantic search. From an international perspective, seeing how Google improves the geotargeting of the Knowledge Graph to ensure its returning relevant results for locale as well as language will be interesting. Baidu has introduced its version ‘box computing’ in 2009. This provides information directly on to the search page, based on queries. Baidu doesn’t automatically select results to display in this format, rather the information needs to be submitted specifically to the search engine. Yandex has also been experimenting with similar techniques, introducing Yandex Facts and Figures which displays basic data for queries whilst the query is being entered. Getting More Local Already well-established, Google Maps has added a range of new features from voice search to cycling navigation functions to user map reviews. Yandex has partnered with Apple to power all maps on their devices. It has been using its technology to offer a very localised service – taxi booking services in Moscow. Baidu is keeping up – focusing on improving mapping on smartphones. Its latest update in 2012 saw a wave of new features – including discount vouchers for local stores and real-time traffic updates. Looking at what the search engines are doing globally is a useful way to gain some high-level insights into global behaviour and trends. Understanding what global search engines are focusing on could inspire new ideas and opportunities for driving your business forward on an international scale. – Blair Liu More Details: http://www.stateofsearch.com/global-search-engine-headlines/ search-bias-investigation
Pirate Search Engine Shuts Down In China – 4th Jan 2012 Whilst Google is far and away the number one search engine worldwide, there are still others out there that try to capitalise off the back of it and this week saw “China’s most notorious search engine” blacklisted by the US after appearing in a report on major copyright offenders. Apart from the fact Gougou.com sounds conspicuously similar to the US search giant and the lettering appears in the same colours, the engine was the channel through which piracy was conducted whether by P2P file sharing, deep linking and cyber blocker services.
The site itself was run by Xunlei whom last year planned to float on the US stock exchange, but the sale didn’t materialise following piracy concerns. Tensions have always been frayed between the US and China over the matter of piracy and the apparent inability or indifference to solve the issue by the latter. However with the advent of wholesale blacklisting of domains and companies that clearly breach copyright laws, The Pirate Bay being a case in point, a clear message is being sent out that measures to prevent this aren’t just empty words. That said, there always seems to be an alternative and a ‘healthy’ community of users who will keep illegal file sharing and general illicit activities going, but it does seem the tide is turning against them. Ultimately, it will come down to the unified enforcement of anti-piracy measures from governments across the globe that determines the availability of pirated material. – Jafar Mahir
Semantic Mark Up for Rich Snippets – 4th Jan 2012 Additional tagging of chosen pieces of website’s content produces rich snippets in search engine results pages which attract more users’ attention and help to increase click through rate. Although semantic mark up (or structured data tags) does not influence ranking positions directly, but ‘rich snippet listings’ stand above the 1st page crowd and are more likely clicked by searchers. CTR increase is 15% on average and might be much higher, depending on the type of website. Listed below are few examples of the most popular types of rich snippet listings achieved by implementing one of the currently supported formats: Microformats, RDF, Micro Data, HTML 5 or Schemas. Local Business Schemas and Geo Tagging Schema.org provides a vast library of tags and the prime one is for describing local businesses to mark up address and contact information on site, although there are additional fields you can include such as hours of operation, payment types accepted, and more. It is possible to geo tag location (or ‘Place’ in Schema.org library) by including geo coordinates with LocalBusiness code. It results in snippets enriched by maps and detailed contact info.
Star Rating and Reviews Tagging published reviews and/or testimonials and rating the page content leads to displaying stars, number of votes and/or reviews and in some cases also the actual text of the review in search results snippet.
Events
For websites dealing with various types of events Schema.org provides a set of tags highlighting for search engines information such as the name of the event, date, venue, URL etc. which is then displayed in search listings.
Videos Using VideoObject tags helps search engine to better interpret video content on the page and show it in results. Consumers apparently like seeing videos of products or of businesses providing services, so this can help with conversions as well.
Recipes Recipes get tons of searches on the net, and for that reason search engines highlight the presentation of their listings in search results. Marking them up for search engines enables to include e.g. cooking time, ingredients and amount of calories in snippet, along with pictures, star rating, number of reviews and other structured data.
Products Implementing tags from the Product category can enable your listings to show price, ratings, and availability of the product in the search results. The Product markup can be particularly effective in combination with breadcrumbs, allowing users to browse the website directly from search results.
– Artur Kozdrowski More details: http://searchengineland.com/13-semantic-markup-tips-for-2013-a-localseo-checklist-143708