Google Search For iPad Updated With New Features

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Posted on 21st November 2011 by Mission E-Commerce in Google

Google announced they have updated their Google Search App for the iPad with a whole set of new features. You can download the app on iTunes for free. The new features include: Google Instant Enables Results As You Type Web Page Loading On Slide-In Pane Image Search Adds Image Carousel Visual…



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.



Viewpoint: Why Google+ Pages Isn’t Good for Business

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Posted on 16th November 2011 by Mission E-Commerce in Google

BY Mikal E. Belicove

When Google launched its latest social networking utility, Google+, in June, and then announced in July that the service had already enrolled 10 million users, I reported that Google+ wasn’t ready for business. Now, four months later, Google has announced the release of Google+ Pages — a way for businesses, brands and organizations to officially use Google+ to connect with consumers — and I’m back to share that Google+ still isn’t ready for businesses.

If there’s one thing Facebook has taught us about the care and feeding of word-of-mouth marketing, it’s that to properly manage a business-related profile on a social utility, the utility has to be easy to use. Moreover, it has to offer a compelling and scalable set of features. Google appears to have missed that memo, as have the droves of experts touting Google+ Pages as the next big thing for marketers and business communicators.

In addition to requiring a Gmail address to set up and access the Google+ platform (seriously, who needs yet another email address to manage?), Google+ Pages falls short in a number of other areas, including:

Page administration: Google doesn’t allow multiple administrators to manage a Page, meaning only one person can manage a business or brand on Google+ (the only workaround for this is to open yet another Gmail account and give that account’s login information to anyone who needs to administer the Page).

Cross-platform integration: In what can only be described as a huge error of omission, Google+ Pages doesn’t integrate with Google’s blogging (Blogger), analytics (Google Analytics) or video sharing (YouTube) platforms. While it stands to reason that future integration of these platforms is on Google’s engineering roadmap, the company remains tightlipped about any such future plans. For users looking for functionality now, these omissions are inexcusable.

Traffic, or lack there of: Google+ doesn’t have the traffic marketers are looking for. When Google+ Pages was announced on Nov. 7, traffic to the plus.google.com domain spiked but has dropped every day since, according to data gathered through Compete.com. In fact, as of this writing, Google+’s reach is .05 percent of total U.S. Internet users online. By comparison, Facebook’s reach is 63 percent.

No promotions or offers: This will likely be the straw that breaks the camel’s back: Google+ Pages contest and promotion policies state you can’t use Google+ Pages for contests, offers, coupons or other promotions (Google’s workaround for this? Display a link on your Google+ Page to a separate site where your promotion is hosted).

Lots of people, agencies, consultants and authors will tell you Google+ Pages is the next big thing in social networking for businesses. Don’t be confused by the rhetoric. What they mean is Google+ is their next big thing, their way to attempt to establish themselves as experts and try to command more of your attention. Compare Google+’s usability and features against Facebook’s and the choice for your business or brand should be clear.

Google is notorious for launching products with skeleton features and adding functionality as an afterthought. But social network users — in this case, those responsible for managing business-aligned marketing and communication strategy and budgets — have a basic set of expectations, which Google+ continues to ignore.

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Google+ Lets In the Corporations

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Posted on 9th November 2011 by Mission E-Commerce in Google

By QUENTIN HARDY

Google is opening its social network, Google+, to companies, organizations and brands. With the move, it hopes to create novel kinds of relationships between people and products, while making inroads against Facebook’s own popular corporate pages, partly by using Google search to promote pages.

Companies initially established themselves on Google+ when the service was introduced in late June, but they were kicked off the site as Google tried to build the social network for individuals. Google+ now has over 40 million users, far fewer than the 800 million people using Facebook, but still substantial. Now, apparently, Google hopes to improve the utility and time spent on Google+.

“This is the biggest launch in the 120 days since we started,” said Bradley Horowitz, vice president for products at Google+. “I expect brands will notice this and will build marketing plans around it.”

According to a Google blog post announcing the change, the addition of corporate entities on Google+ “means we can now hang out live with the local bike shop, or discuss our wardrobe with a favorite clothing line, or follow a band on tour.”

It also means that companies can try to develop direct relationships with customers, by seeking their endorsement with a “+1,” Google’s version of Facebook’s “like” button, or by entering a consumer’s Google+ “circle,” a self-managed collection of relationships. Being in a circle would give companies direct access to feedback  or let them engage in video chats with customers.

Companies will also be able to offer consumers different ways to get to their Google+ pages, either through a “badge” on their corporate sites that offer connections to the Google+ page, an invitation to connect to that page, or both the button and the connection link, along with a gallery of people who have given something a “+1.”

Mr. Horowitz predicted that the badge, along with other widgets, would become more popular over time, the way Facebook’s “like” button now populates much of the Internet.

“Over time, I expect ‘+Pepsi’ to emerge on every can, on TV spots and on the Web site and become a cult phenomenon,” Mr. Horowitz said. “Over a couple of quarters, brands will learn to utilize this.”

In addition, the companies on Google+ will be able to see  analytics that help them identify people by things like age, geography or how frequently they visit the Google+ page.

Relationships with Facebook have proved to be valuable marketing and awareness tools for companies with pages on that social network. Ninety-six of the top 100 brands have Facebook pages. The fast-food purveyor McDonald’s, for example, has over 11 million “likes” and 1.6 million visits to its page. Overall, about 100 million online stories, pictures and other things are “liked” by Facebook users daily.

While Facebook enjoys a huge lead over Google+, Google hopes to gain an edge over Facebook with a feature in its popular search engine, “Direct Connect.” Using this feature, Google+ members can search for the Google+ pages of movies, bands or companies, then add these things to their collection of relationships on Google+. The system, which requires the corporate entity to register itself with Google+, is also intended to prevent the creation of counterfeit corporate pages.

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Why Google’s Secure Search Utility Is Ridiculed By The Analytics And SEO Community

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Posted on 2nd November 2011 by Mission E-Commerce in Google

By Preetam Kaushik

Google has been at the forefront of creating search engine technologies, taking upon itself to constantly refine and better its online search methodologies. An example of this is the ‘Search in Delphion-for Google’s Patent search’ developed by Google which is used for specialized search functions only and is subjected to an ongoing process of further improvement. Google has aggressively endorsed its vision of collecting, retrieving and presenting information in the most accessible and useful manner, keeping a browser’s overall experience and safety of personal data as the top priorities. However, it seems that Google’s endeavors in the recent past might not be as popular in the Google Analytics and SEO community though they might please browsers across the world.
Understanding the Situation: Why is Google Safe Search being criticized?
Google’s endeavor to constantly improve the quality and accuracy of searches is also linked to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Yes, this has helped Google emerge as the market leader in search engine technology, often dictating terms and setting the benchmarks for other search engine brands. However, in the recent past some doubts have arisen about Google’s perspective in terms of making its search engine functionalities being actually “useful”. For instance, ‘Google Safe Search’ has not been received positively by the global SEO community and by webmasters handling Google Analytics. This is primarily because Google’s Safe Search makes a browser’s searches more secretive, making it hard for online marketing experts to decode how and when their website is being browsed. While Google opines that Safe Search aims to guard a Google user’s online confidentiality, many Google Analytics experts believe that this is just a masked effort by Google to further raise its revenue share.
Google Safe Search versus SEO Analysts: What is the Fuss About?
Google Safe Search was launched on October 18, 2011, asking browsers to sign into their Google account and moving to a more personalized browsing experience. While an average web user might not understand the dynamics of this browsing option, for webmasters this is a major roadblock towards identifying the behavior of visitors to their websites. This is best understood by understanding how organic search results or un-paid search results function on Google. Here, a browser visiting a website after being directed from the list of sites displayed on Google’s search-results page is tracked in the form of an individual query. Such data is then complied and used to analyze the overall manner in which a website can engaged and sustain a browser’s attention.
Please note that when using Google Secure Search, Google doesn’t use the keyword value in the traditional manner, i.e. from the referring URL. Thus, if you are performing a search on Google Secure Site, the keywords you searched for are not recorded as a part of the referrer information. The referrer information is like a string of keywords that is used by the analytics community to determine which of the keywords have been the most profitable for bringing more visitors from Google to the client’s site.
Until recently, webmasters used such data to edit their site’s structure or navigational features—however, in Google’s Safe Search mode, such data is highly compromised. Google Webmaster tools present another a limitation wherein the history of a search term is retained and displayed for 30 days only and information about the internal pages of a site that was browsed is quite restricted.
Google’s Explanations Has Few Takers
Google has defended itself insisting that it is dedicated towards making the browser experience more secure. The search engine giant has gone on to explain this via an example wherein it quoted that WiFi network users were at extreme risk of being exploited by online tracking mechanisms such as Firesheep that targets Firefox users and extracts browser data without presenting any notification. This essentially means that users on a particular WiFi network are at an increased risk of having their personal data being hijacked. Thus, Google justifies its Safe Search, insisting that this feature enables users on all types of connections to guard their confidential data.
However, these sentiments have not been received well by search marketers who insist that Google is indirectly trying to push more websites towards subscribing for paid searches since inorganic or paid searches are outside the realm of limitations imposed by Safe Search. This perspective is plausible since a major chunk of Google’s revenue is sourced from its paid search advertising platform, Google AdWords.
This argument is further fuelled by the fact that browser-related information is still available in the most comprehensive (like before) manner to paid websites even though organic search results sites with a higher Page Rank continue to suffer. Page Rank of a website too is determined by Google’s complex series of parameters and thus, it seems that websites are at the mercy of Google for being highlighted on the search results page as long as they don’t upgrade towards using Google AdWords.
“Solutions” to Neutralize Google Safe Search Are Already Emerging!
For SEO analysts this is a major handicap as unearthing search trends and the keywords has become even more challenging with Google Safe Search. Yes, the unpaid sites still receive a kind of aggregated information that contains the top 1,000 search queries responsible for bringing traffic to the site over the last, 30 days, i.e. through Google Webmaster Tools.  However, this data is abysmally limited as compared to the kind of detailed information that was accessible earlier. Some vendors, like Keystonesolutions, have come forth with their own codes that facilitate to track browser behavior even if the user has come through organic search results displayed on Google Secure Search pages.
However, there is much more to follow in this highly-debatable niche since Google is likely to challenge the use of such codes that are bound to eat into the company’s advertising revenue prospects. There is likelihood that Google can set-up its own tracking mechanisms for such codes and even penalize sites using them.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-googles-secure-search-utility-is-ridiculed-by-the-analytics-and-seo-community-2011-11#ixzz1caNvG1ca