Posted by Angela | 0 Comments
The New Face of Google
Google hosted a press conference yesterday in San Francisco to reveal any progress with their search engine. The spotlight was on Google Image Search’s future and how to better harness the site’s 1 billion daily pageviews.
The site’s image search began with 250 million images indexed back in 2001. Now, the site has 10 billion images to choose from. So, Google faced the obstacle of giving a mini makeover to a well established image search engine. They announced plans to refresh the look of Google Image Search and launch a new search ad option.
The new layout of Google image search shows search results side by side, without any text. When you hover your mouse over the image or click the image, then you will see the dimensions, a description, source data and a link. Under all the citing information, there is a “Similar” link. Click this and Google will bring up tons of similar image search results. The page scroll has also changed slightly, close to an infinite scroll but one where you do reach the bottom eventually. I can’t help but notice that the setup looks very similar to Bing’s image search.
This led Google to incorporating a new ad campaign on the image search results’ page. Just like ads on the normal Web search results’ page, the sponsored ads will be along the top of the screen in a yellow-shaded box with related search results.
After nine years, Google is significantly changing its look and feel. Sure the layout may be more like Bing, but the ads will increase Google’s revenue. The changes are already launched, so go check them out here.
Read MorePosted by Angela | 0 Comments
Google’s Struggle with Censorship
Google has been in a heated battle with the Chinese government since January this year when there were various security breaches targeting Gmail accounts. After Google sorted all the attacks out, they decided they didn’t want to be a contributor to government censorship. So a few months later, in June, Google decided to “stick it to the man” and forward the Chinese Google site, Google.cn, to the uncensored Honk Kong Google site, Google.com.hk.
You can imagine the Chinese government did not take this insult well. Threats went back and forth between Google and the Chinese government arguing over who is right and who is wrong. So Google took it down a notch. Instead of keeping the automatic redirect to the Honk Kong site, Google put a link on the Google.cn page to the Hong Kong site. This kind of takes the blame off Google directly and gives the Chinese people the option to click on and choose an uncensored version.
The Chinese government still were not fond of this solution. And when Google resubmitted their ICP (Internet Content Provider) license renewal application, they prepared themselves to be rejected altogether. At least they weren’t compromising their morals by keeping Google.cn only able to access limited, censored search topics like music and translations.
Google was supposed to know whether they would be keeping Google.cn by June 30th (which was the ICP renewal date). And yet we have all been waiting and waiting to hear from the Chinese government if Google.cn will remain accessible. Finally, today Reuters reported that the Chinese did in fact approve the ICP for Google.cn!
The acceptance is great news for Google seeing as China is the world’s largest Internet market and, with the government’s censorship, a market with little search engine competition.
Read MorePosted by Jeremy Scott | 0 Comments
The Best Online Reputation Management Tool Is Rese...
Surely we’ve all read the cautionary tales about Facebook and MySpace, where someone embarrasses themselves or even loses a job because of something in appropriate they wrote or posted on their profile. It’s a pretty good rule of digital life to simply not post anything online that you’re not prepared to have the entire world see.
But even following that rule is far from any sort of guarantee that your reputation won’t be damaged. In fact, if you have an ex-customer (or ex-girlfriend for that matter) who wishes to make you look bad, there are now a variety of web services that will allow them to do just that… usually anonymously.
One popular web service for consumers to complain about mistreatment is called the Rip Off Report. It’s billed as a place to tell stories about how you were wronged as a customer–report your having been ripped off. One huge thing to be aware of with this site: they never take down reports. Their terms of service state that users can only publish true stories, and they use this as legal defense against charges of libel. So if you’re a business, and someone rips on your company on Rip Off Report–you’re mostly out of luck. You can file a rebuttal against the original complaint, but that’s all… the complaint itself, no matter how inaccurate, will never come down.
Another site with growing buzz is Yelp, a place for customers to review businesses they frequent a lot. It has come under fire lately for charges that Yelp is some kind of extortion ring–where businesses are asked to pay for premium services to have negative reviews removed.
Now there’s a new service launching in a matter of days that allows people to review other people… anonymously.
It’s going to be harder and harder to maintain an impeccable online reputation. Simply annoying your neighbor could result in an insult being posted about you online that lasts forever. And you’ll have little that you can do to repair it.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that all businesses and individuals are facing this same scary future. And sooner or later, we’ll all have enough anonymous complaints leveled against us online that it’s simply not as big a deal as it is now.
But there are some things that you can do actively to help protect your reputation (at least partially):
- Monitor your reputation. If you don’t know what’s being said, you can’t react to it or respond in any way. Set up Google Alerts for your business name or your own personal name. Search for your company in Google News or Blog search. In other words, be proactive. You can’t fix what you don’t know about. You can’t respond, until you know there’s something out there that warrants a response.
- Get the positive word out. Again, be proactive. Publish customer testimonials on your website–change them out with new ones frequently. Get your business on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and more–flood the web with positive or neutral mentions of your company and it becomes that much harder for negative comments to ever be found in the first place.
- Beware cold calls. I read this article yesterday, and it scared me a little. While I have no knowledge of the situation outside of what I can read, it sounds like there may be companies out there selling “reputation management services” that are actually a scam. As the author of that article states: trustworthy reputation management companies don’t need to cold call. So be careful what you believe when someone calls you out of the blue offering to fix your online reputation–it’s entirely possible they were the ones that posted the criticism in the first place.
- Be an honest business person. I know it’s going to sound trite and over-simplified, but the single best way to avoid having negative things written about your business online is to never make your customers angry. Sure, there’s always going to be that one person who simply will not allow themselves to be happy–there are some chronic complainers out there in the world, and it can be hard to change the mind of a person like that. But through careful client selection, and a dedication to superior service… the majority of small businesses will be able to navigate the waters of online reputation management without hitting any icebergs.
Posted by Jeremy Scott | 0 Comments
Videos Inside Google Ads
This is a huge development. Huge.
Google is quietly testing some videos inside their Sponsored Listings (commonly referred to as Google Ads). The search advertising system, called Adwords, has long been text-only. However, in a bid to get Hollywood movie studios on board with search ads, Google has created a way for videos to be added.
Try this… Google the word “extract” (or just click here). You should see a Sponsored Listing with the title “Extract Movie Trailer.” It might look like the screenshot below:
Click the “+” below the text portion of the ad, and you’ll see a video player expand and start playing the trailer automatically. Sweet!!
Video is far more engaging to users than text, that’s been fairly well proven, and it can greatly increase your chances of converting that user into a customer.
Currently the program is an invite-only affair, meaning you can’t have videos in your own ads just yet. But there’s no doubt whatsoever that this will eventually roll out to everyone. And I promise you that it’s the wave of the future in search engine advertising. There will soon come a day when nearly every Adwords ad contains a video, and those that do not will be entirely ineffective.
This is a game-changer, and the Adwords world may never be the same.
Read MorePosted by Jeremy Scott | 0 Comments
Twitter’s New Mistake: Don’t Let Them See You Watc...
Twitter, in all its technically un-savvy ways, has just now realized that they should be tracking their users’ clicks.
It may sound a little creepy, but tracking clicks is a great way for a popular sight (like Twitter) to see where most of their traffic is coming from and where they are lacking in successful advertising. Their only mistake was allowing this “click tracking” to be seen. People do not want to know when you’re watching them! It freaks them out!
Twitter was redirecting links to a click tracking service that would allow them to keep stats on all these clicks. The redirection URL looked something like, “http://twitter.com/link_click_count…” Then Twitter had a little break in functionality (surprise, surprise) and when it came back up, the redirects were nowhere to be seen. Tracking clicks would definitely be a smart move on Twitter’s part, but then again shouldn’t they be able to go a week without having a temporary shut down?
Read MorePosted by Jeremy Scott | 0 Comments
Kids Search The Web Like Adults Do
OnlineFamily.Norton is a free service from Symantec that parents can use to track what their kids are doing online.
Over the past several months, they’ve been gathering data on 3.5 Million web searches by kids, and now they’ve released the top 100 search phrases from that data. It’s important to note that this study only tracked the actions of kids whose families were using the OnlineFamily.Norton software. There is no “margin of error” given and they aren’t suggesting this is a scientific representation of the entire country… they’re merely reporting the data gathered on their users.
Turns out kids search the web much the same way adults do–yes, even searching for “sex”. In fact, the words “sex” and “porn” are both in the top ten. That’s obviously not a good thing, but it’s also not terribly surprising.
Kids also search the web for other websites–something adults do as well that continues to baffle me. In the top ten are search phrases such as “youtube,” “myspace,” “google,” and “facebook.” Do we need to have some remedial training for Americans on the difference between the web address field and the search box in a toolbar?
You can see the entire list of the top 100 childrens’ web searches here.
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