fidzu : search engine

Folks at Google get cold-call emails out of the blue just like everybody else. Here's an email that a colleague of mine got recently: I was on your website www.google.com and wanted to shoot you a quick note. I think I can make a few changes (aesthetically and/or SEO - wise) to make your site [...]

18 Jun 2013 10:02pm GMT

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: DuckDuckGo Passes 3 Million Searches, Just 8 Days After Hitting 2 Million Another week, another traffic record in the alternative search engine space. DuckDuckGo...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

18 Jun 2013 9:06pm GMT

Since the PRISM news broke, nearly every day has been a record search day for DuckDuckGo, including Monday, June 17, where it broke 3 million searches for the first time. That is nearly double its pre-PRISM daily search totals.

18 Jun 2013 8:30pm GMT

Facebook will soon begin streamlining its advertising options, and sponsored search results are among those that will be cut starting in July. Some wonder why sponsored results are targeted because advertisers experience good ROI.

18 Jun 2013 7:30pm GMT

Another week, another traffic record in the alternative search engine space. DuckDuckGo (DDG) tweeted this morning about its latest milestone: more than three million direct searches in a single day. As the company's traffic page shows, it happened on Monday when DDG had 3,095,907...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

18 Jun 2013 7:13pm GMT

With the July 22nd mandatory migration to AdWords enhanced campaigns looming, we will be checking in with marketers over the next several weeks to get their perspective on the transition process, hear what they've learned so far and what advice they have to share. I recently spoke with...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

18 Jun 2013 7:10pm GMT

Not surprisingly, Google led the way for search share in May, and grew its U.S. search market share to 66.7 percent. Bing grew to 17.4 percent in May, a significant increase from its 15.4 percent search market share in May 2012.

18 Jun 2013 6:30pm GMT

Google Now's images are beautiful, colorful, cheerful, minimalist and futuristic at the same time. Now you can see the full-size scenes in this Flickr set. They were uploaded by Brent Couchman, who created them.

"Brent Couchman is an independent graphic designer based in sunny San Francisco, California. Originally hailing from the Lone Star State where he developed branding, packaging & illustration for Fossil, Brent moved to the Bay Area to work with Hatch design," mentions his site.

{ via Marques Brownlee and Ade Oshineye. }

18 Jun 2013 1:09pm GMT

Google tests a new interface for the mobile Gmail web app. The toolbar that includes buttons for archiving messages, marking as unread or adding labels now floats above the message and it no longer has a fixed position.

Here's the new interface that's currently tested (stock Android browser):

And here's the regular interface (mobile Chrome):

As you can see, the Gmail mobile site goes back to the roots. Back in 2009, Google added a similar bar to the mobile site: "We made extensive use of other browser functions too: for example, the floaty bar that lets you archive, delete or apply more actions is animated via CSS transformations and controlled in part with touch events (when you scroll the screen, it follows you)."

18 Jun 2013 10:26am GMT

Ten years ago we launched AdSense to help publishers earn money by placing relevant ads on their websites. I can still remember the excitement and anticipation as AdSense went live that first day. Our small team huddled together in a cramped conference room, and right away we saw that publishers were as excited about AdSense as we were.

Fast-forward 10 years, and AdSense has become a core part of Google's advertising business. The AdSense community has grown to include more than 2 million publishers, and last year alone, publishers earned more than $7 billion from AdSense. AdSense is a community that thrives because of all the content creators we are so fortunate to partner with. Their stories inspire us to do our part to make AdSense great.

On this occasion, it's especially inspiring to hear the stories of partners who have been with us since the very beginning-like a retiree in New Zealand who was able to pursue her dream of writing about her garden, a tech support expert in Colorado who can spend more time with his kids, and a theme park reviewer who now sends employees around the world to test and review rides-all thanks to money earned from AdSense.

As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we hope you'll tune into our live Hangout on Air today at 10 a.m. PDT (5 p.m. GMT) on the AdSense Google+ page. I look forward to joining several of our partners to share stories from the early days of AdSense, talk about how we've all grown since then, and discuss the future for publishers and online advertising. And if you want even more 10th anniversary celebration, just visit our AdSense 10th anniversary page at any time.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, SVP, Ads and Commerce

18 Jun 2013 7:01am GMT

If there's a popular Google product that's different from any other Google products and services, it must be Android. Most Google services got the basics right and then started to add features. Before you could use image search, video search, voice search and flight search, Google started with a clean interface and relevant results that loaded quickly. I still remember that Gmail didn't have a delete button or support for drafts when it launched, but it had support for conversations, search, 1GB of free storage and a great spam filter. Back in 2008, Chrome didn't support extensions, it was Windows-only, you couldn't even preview pages before printing them, but it was fast, it had a clutter-free interface and sandboxed tabs.

Android is the odd one out because it didn't focus on the users, it focused on apps and developers. It started with great APIs for developers before building a great interface, it started with voice search before running fast, it started with live wallpapers and widgets before optimizing battery life. It's like releasing a slow and cluttered Chrome with tons of great APIs for developers or launching Google Search with a lot of advanced search operators and natural language understanding, but the results aren't relevant and you need to wait a few seconds until they're displayed.

Customization is important, APIs and third-party apps are important, but getting the basics right is the most important. The first iPhone was great, even if it didn't support third-party apps, 3G, MMS and many other things. It had an impressive user interface and a few well-built apps. Everything else was added later: third-party apps, multitasking, notification center, folders.

Android focused on APIs and third-party apps. HTC had to come up with Sense to sell some Android phones because Google's interface was just a placeholder. Other phone manufacturers created their own interfaces and system apps. A lot of innovative ideas, but not much common ground. The only things that connected all the different devices were the Android APIs. Ice Cream Sandwich changed all that: the Holo theme was mandatory, Android added support for hardware acceleration and apps started to look consistent. Then Jelly Bean and Project Butter addressed lag.

Paul Buchheit, the man behind Gmail, has a great post titled "If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good." He explains how to build new products: "What's the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product -- the rest is noise." That's how Gmail started. "It was fast, stored all of your email (back when 4MB quotas were the norm), and had an innovative interface based on conversations and search. The secondary and tertiary features were minimal or absent. There was no 'rich text' composer. The original address book was implemented in two days and did almost nothing."

Android focused on the wrong things initially, but still won because it was the only significant alternative to iOS, so carriers, phone manufacturers and users embraced it. Now it's hard to go back to the basics and fix them, make apps less powerful, remove APIs and focus on what matters on a mobile device: smooth experience and battery life.

Note: I use both Android and iOS. Android has improved a lot lately (even though Android 4.2 looks like a step backward) and I hope that constructive criticism will make it even better.

18 Jun 2013 12:09am GMT

In Northern California where I live, summer is here, which means family vacations, kids' camps, BBQs and hopefully some relaxation. But it also means back-to-school shopping is just around the corner. So in case you're on the hunt for a laptop in addition to pens, paper, and stylish new outfits, your search just got a whole lot easier. Chromebooks-a fast, simple, secure laptop that won't break the bank-will now be carried in over 3 times more stores than before, or more than 6,600 stores around the world.

In addition to Best Buy and Amazon.com, we're excited to welcome several new retailers to the family. Starting today, Walmart will be making the newest Acer Chromebook, which has a 16GB Solid State Drive (SSD), available in approximately 2,800 stores across the U.S., for just $199. Look for Chromebooks coming to the laptop sections of a Walmart near you this summer.

And beginning this weekend, Staples will bring a mix of Chromebooks from Acer, HP and Samsung to every store in the U.S.-more than 1,500 in total. You can also purchase via Staples online, while businesses can purchase through the Staples Advantage B2B program. In the coming months select Office Depot, OfficeMax, and regional chains Fry's and TigerDirect locations will begin selling Chromebooks.

In the 10 other markets worldwide where Chromebooks are sold, availability in national retailers continues to expand. In addition to Dixons in the UK, now 116 Tesco stores are selling Chromebooks, as well as all Media Markt and Saturn stores in the Netherlands, FNAC stores in France and Elgiganten stores in Sweden. In Australia, all JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman stores will be carrying Chromebooks for their customers as well. We're working hard to bring Chromebooks to even more countries later this year.

Chromebooks make great computers for everyone in the family-and now you shouldn't have to look very far to find one. Happy summer!

Posted by David Shapiro, Director of Chromebook Marketing

17 Jun 2013 7:05pm GMT

Our first AdWords customer was a small business selling live mail-order lobsters. It's been a long time since then, but a majority of our customers are still small businesses, who play a vital role not only for Google, but for the American economy. More than 60 percent of new jobs each year come from small businesses.



This Small Business Week, we want to celebrate you. We're grateful to you for everything you do for us and our communities. Whether you fix people's cars, offer music lessons to aspiring musicians, or make the world's best homemade ice cream-when you do what you love, our lives get better.

As part of the celebration, we'll be highlighting some amazing small businesses across the country, so keep an eye on the Google+ Your Business page. And in the meantime, check out some of the Google tools that are designed to help you take care of business.

Happy Small Business Week.

Posted by Lisa Gevelber, VP Marketing, Americas

17 Jun 2013 3:09pm GMT

We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies [...]

23 May 2013 12:34am GMT

We just recently taped a new round of webmaster videos, and I thought this video deserved a full-fledged blog post. This is my rough estimate (as of early May 2013) of what search engine optimizers (SEOs) and webmasters should expect in the next few months: Bear in mind that this is a very rough estimate, [...]

13 May 2013 4:17pm GMT

The Emperor instructed the gardener to set up the new court's garden. "I want you to plant five trees growing the Crataan fruit," the Emperor said, "Because we asked people what fruit they like best, and most named the Crataan fruit!" The gardener replied, "Emperor, that is excellent thinking! But let me make some suggestions: First, how about we make one of the five trees bear the Muran fruit. Only one out of ten citizens loves it, but those peculiar citizens tend to love multiple times as much!" "Second," the gardener continued, "How about we make one of the five trees bear the Dratean fruit. No one loves it, but that's because no one knows it yet!" "Third," the gardener said, "How about we leave one spot in the garden empty. Who knows what new type of tree we'll discover that we can put there in the fut ...

26 Aug 2011 12:12pm GMT

For those of you who've been wondering whether I had turned to stone, fallen into a bottomless pit, or been climbing the Himalaya... no, none of that is true, even though you probably did notice I'm not actively blogging about Google here anymore*! Just now, a new iPad app I've been working on called Color Sound Machine went live, and this -- and all the other apps and games at Versus Pad** -- are actually what I am doing while not blogoscoping. *I've drafted unpublished posts explaining much more about past, present and future of Blogoscoped, and the history of Google news reporting, but ... oh, for now le ...

15 Aug 2011 4:00pm GMT

One of the earliest specialist services provided by Google was reverse phone number lookup. If you used the "phonebook:" or "rphonebook:" operators together with a 10-digit US phone number, Google would show you the owner of that phone number, unless the number was unlisted. Google no longer provides that service. Not surprisingly, there was no press release marking the closure, but Google employee Daniel Russell has acknowledged the closure of the service in his blog. He hints at the possible pressures leading to the shuttering of the service: "As you can imagine, this was an endless source of hassles for people (who were surprised to see themselves searchable on Google) and for Google (who had to constantly de ...

25 Feb 2011 11:23am GMT