Google Mobile Workshop

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend a Google Mobile Workshop and they confirmed what everyone has been saying
“2011 is the year for mobile”

Finlay from Google talked at New Year Search Club in January this year where he mentioned mobile would really take off and it definitely has.

Google Mobile Search

Mobile search queries have increased considerably from last year. Here are a few interesting stats:

Travel queries on mobile have risen from
4% (2010) to 11% (2011)

Retail queries
4% (2010) to 13% (2011)

Tech queries
5% (2010) to 10% (2011)

Entertainment
7% (2010) to 18% (2011)

Do you use your mobile while out shopping? Apparently 45 % of us do and 15% use it to compare prices.
The study carried out by Google, also found that with mobile, people always have them with them and are searching while at home and on the go. 74% of people use them at the same time as consuming other media.

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Google Plus – Facebook’s new rival

Last month, Google launched Google+ which is pretty much their attempt to jump onto the social media bandwagon. Before we jump into the stats from Hitwise, lets have a quick recap of What is Google+?

Google vs Facebook

Google+ brings all your contacts in one place, and lets you organise them into different groups. You can have a group for your work friends, school friends and so on. Google+ is made of five key areas:

* Circles — your friends hub. Instead of grouping everyone together as your “friend,” you can create different circles for the different types of people in your life like colleagues, relatives, tennis partners. It is very easy to make new groups and add contacts – drag and drop.
* Hangouts — this is where you can send a broadcast to your friends that you are online and want to chat face to face. You have everyone “hanging out” together – only virtually though. It is like a massive three, four way skype chat.
* Sparks — Designate your interests in Sparks, and Google+ will collect articles, videos, and photos of the things you love from around the web to read when you’re free (like an RSS reader). You can share these items with specific circles of friends instead of all of your friends.
* Instant Upload — With Instant Upload, your mobile photos and videos are automatically uploaded to the web. (So no worrying about backing up your media, you can have it stored online in your own cloud)
* Huddle — A group messaging system, Huddle allows you to chat with a number of friends on the go via your mobile phone.

So do you think Google+ will take off? Only time will tell. Hitwise have come up with the following interesting stats, so it looks like people are using it. I doubt they will give up on Facebook, so the battle between to the two search giants will continue.

- Google+ received more than 1.79M total visits the week ending July 23, 2011. That is a decrease of 3% vs. the previous week (July 16th). The site received 1.86M total visits the previous week
- The average time spent on the site was down as well by 10% from 5minutes and 50seconds to 5minutes and 15seconds
- Among the top 50 Upstream sites, 59% of Upstream traffic to Google+ last week came from other Google properties. Google.com accounted for 37% of Upstream traffic to the site. Gmail accounted 15.59%, a 9% increase from previous week
- 40% of Upstream traffic to Google+ last week came from Search Engines (8% increase). Email provided the 2nd largest amount of Upstream traffic accounting for 19%.
- 59% of visits to Google+ are from Males.
- Among age demos, 33% of visits are from users age 25-34 for the 4 weeks ending July 23rd.

I have yet to really engage with Google+. At the beginning, only those with invitations could use Google+ but now everyone has an invite.

What is Google Social Search?

Google announced a product update last Thursday, May 19th – called Social Search.

Google first launched it in 2009 on google.com only. It was supposed to be, as they say “an experimental feature designed to help you find more relevant information from your friends and the people you care about.” We know Google, they keep developing their products and they introduced Google Plus 1 earlier this year. Now, Google are bringing Social Search to more users around the world.

Social search results in other languages and on other domains are mixed throughout the Google results page based on their relevance. If you are looking for a particular product, it will highlight blog posts, twitter feeds that you are connected to .

Click on the link which is a video showing how social search works.

Google Social Search

So what do these updates mean for those in online marketing? It means you need to make sure you are covering all bases. You have to be present on blogs, in forums, on twitter, have an active facebook page (although Google cannot work out Facebook’s algorithm that mean. Social Search will be rolling out globally in 19 languages and should be available in the coming week, with more languages on the way. You cannot ignore social anymore. It is here to stay, Google have also said they will be rolling out the + 1 feature soon.

Google is constantly updating its range of products and even launched its first blog dedicated to search last Wednesday. http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/ I know I will be checking this one out on a regular basis. Google certainly invest heavily in R&D and it has paid off. They are now the number one search engine in the west.

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The Panda is coming to the UK

What is the Panda update?

It is the major algorithm update to Google search with the aim to improve the quality of the search engine results. It started in the US at the end of February but has now rolled out across the UK. Many sites have seen their rankings drop which means they will be getting a lot less traffic following on from the update.

The Google Panda update hits the UK

(source of photo: http://terry.henfleet.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Google-Big-Panda-Update2.jpg)

The panda update has received a lot of criticism. The product comparison sites, reviews and voucher sites came off badly from the Panda update. Ciao’s UK site lost 94% of its SEO visibility after the update went live in the UK earlier this week. Ciao is the shopping comparison site owned by Microsoft and Ciao along with other Microsoft sites including Foundem and ejustice.fr complained to the EU that Google was abusing its dominant position by lowering the ranking of unpaid search results of competitor services in November.
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What is the Google Plus One

Unless you have all been living offline for the past two weeks, then you would have seen Google’s new product – the +1.

What is Google +1?

It was announced on 30th March, posted on the Google blog by product manager, Rob Spiro. Google basically is jumping on the social media bandwagon and many reference the +1 as similar to the Facebook like button. To recommend something, users will click the +1 on a webpage or ad. The +1s will start appearing in Google’s search results.

Google +1

So I bet you are all asking whether this will affect the natural search listings. The answer is yes. If you have two websites all with the same page rank, optimised pages, lots of link building and one site has more +1s than the other, then that site will rank higher. This means you still have to optimise your pages, this update reinforces how important seo is.

Here is a little bit of blurb for the search engine giants Google:

“So how do we know which +1’s to show you? Like social search, we use many signals to identify the most useful recommendations, including things like the people you are already connected to through Google (your chat buddies and contacts, for example). Soon we may also incorporate other signals, such as your connections on sites like Twitter, to ensure your recommendations are as relevant as possible. If you want to know who you’re connected to, and how, visit the “Social Circle and Content” section of the Google Dashboard.

To get started +1’ing the stuff you like, you’ll need to create a Google profile—or if you already have one, upgrade it. You can use your profile to see all of your +1’s in one place, and delete those you no longer want to recommend. To see +1’s in your Google search results you’ll need to be logged into your Google Account.”

When will it appear?
Google will slowly be rolling out +1’s, starting in English on Google.com. You can also see what it looks like before the launch be going to Google’s experimental search site. Initially, +1’s will appear alongside search results and ads, but in the weeks ahead they’ll appear in many more places (including other Google products and sites across the web). If you’re an advertiser and want to learn more about how the +1 button works on search ads and websites, visit our AdWords blog.

Google did say at the beginning of the year and at Search London – New Year Search Club that 2011 was the year for social, so keep a look out on the updates coming out this year.

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Birthday number 5

London Girl Geek dinner celebrated their fifth birthday on Wednesday and what an event it was.

Hosted at the lovely Google UK headquarters with sponsors from Dinastia Vivanco, Green & Blacks and Juniper Networks, there were a lot of girl geeks.

It kicked off around 6:30 and then we were welcomed by Sarah Gordon from Google who gave a presentation about the growth of the smartphone market. It is amazing how much the mobile phone has changed over the past decade and sometimes I wonder what the market will be like in the next ten years.

This was one of the best networking events I have attended. Maybe because there were so many women in the same room all into “geeky things” and the fact that it was at Google and there were interesting talks about mobile and by Sue Black who discussed how social media helped her raise the profile of Bletchley Park. It was a great event and I am so pleased I got to attend, there were over 300 people that applied for a ticket, but only 80 people got to go.

Happy 5th Birthday Girl Geek Dinners

There was a raffle at the event and there were a lot of cool prizes to be won. Sadly I did not win, but all the money raised through the raffle went to charity. London Girl Geek dinners is working on getting charitable status, so if you would like to help, get in touch with them. It would be fantastic if they could get charitable status as they raise a lot of money already.

I look forward to the next Girl Geek Dinners, I was amazed at how much they have grown over the past five years, from just 33 members in 2005 to over 27,000 now. They have girl geek dinners all round the world including Europe, Canada and Australia. You will never be far from a girl geek.

Caffeine Update – What does this mean?

I wrote a post about caffeine and when it was coming back in February. We were supposed to have seen it last December but Google added a new post on their blog this week – that Google caffeine had gone live.

What is Caffeine?

According to Google “it is a new web indexing system. Caffeine provides 50% fresher results for web searches compared to the old index”. Which means, the user can find information much sooner after it has been published than before.

A few more facts about Caffeine as quoted by Google:

What did the old algorithm look like before?

Google doesn’t really give too much away about how their algorithm works, but here is a diagram outlining the index before and after Caffeine.

Google's old index vs Caffeine

Why did Google build Caffeine?
To keep up to date with universal search, real time updates. People want to find the latest information as soon as it is published. The old index had different layers which were refreshed at different speeds.

How will it affect natural search?
Google indexes newer content more frequently which means fresher content will be indexed on Google quicker and appear higher in the search results.
It also means that content on sites will be indexed quicker as there is no index cycle – where website owners had to wait in a queue for Google to index their site.

What changes do website owners need to do?

Make sure you have fresh content on your website and everytime you build a new page, make sure it is optimised for seo.
Caffeine just emphasises how important it is for websites to not rely on just one traffic referral method. For example some sites may just rely on traffic via search engines, others may rely on back links. Instead, they need to use an overall online marketing strategy which includes online pr, social media, seo and ppc. There is a lot of competition in the search market and therefore sites need to make sure there is a lot of buzz about their brand.

Google Caffeine is live, you probably will not have noticed too many changes as the updates have been silently filtering through these past few months and now Google are saying the final version of Caffeine is complete.

I will post any new updates about Caffeine on this blog, so come back for more news.

facebook is Google’s biggest competitor

In the news last week, I read a very interesting article in the Times about how facebook is the biggest rival to Google.

According to Hitwise, for the week ending March 13th, facebook got more traffic than Google in America. Who would have thought this social neworking site set up by Mark Zuckerberg would have achieved this milestone.

Facebook now has more than 400million active users which makes it the third most populous “country” behind India and China. In the UK, it has more than 23million users, or a third of the population. The speed at which facebook is growing is staggering. Visits to facebook has increased 185% in the last year and Google’s number of visits has increased by 9%

There is a threat to Google, called “discovery” which is the finding of products/services on facebook that has been recommended by friends. More people will go onto facebook and search for products and reviews from their friends and peers instead of searching on Google. However, this information within facebook cannot be seen by Google as customers have to sign in to their account.

Social media is changing the search landscape. More people will be using social networking sites to find out news and information. Even Google wanted to get onto the social media band wagon with “buzz” but it failed to have made any headway in that area. People spend a lot of time on social media sites. According to Nielsen, facebook is the third most visited site with 2.5billion hits in February 2010 which is close to Yahoo’s 2.7 billion and Google’s 3billion. So Google better watch out, it doesn’t want to lose its position as the number 1 search engine.

Google Caffeine – When is it coming?

Well according to Google, it may not happen for months. But Matt Cutts said it would happen after the holidays. Maybe he was talking about after Easter?

Waiting for the caffeine to kick in

Last August Google first announced Caffeine. And they also set up a developer sandbox for user feedback
www2.sandbox.google.com but now it seems as though they don’t want people to know which IP points to the Caffeine data centre.

There has been talk of caffeine since August 2009. For those of you unaware of caffeine, it is an upgraded and new version of the Google search engine.

Matt Cutts described caffeine as:
“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

So after all the hype what is going on?
Google seems to be doing a lot of tests, perhaps they have found more issues than they are happy with before they want to announce caffeine is live.

According to Search Engine Land they get emails from people saying they think Caffeine is live. But Google says Caffeine isn’t live on Google.com — it’s still only at one data center, not much seems to have changed from last November when Matt Cutts said Caffeine was available at this IP address: 209.85.225.103.

Maybe Google have seen how many faults they have had with Google Buzz and are really trying not to let out a new product without fully testing it. If they wait any longer I am sure the other search engines will be releasing their own version of caffeine, they may call it coffee.

Photo is from flickr

Google Buzz

On Wednesday, Google announced their new social media product “Google Buzz”

Google Buzz

According to the guardian, Buzz has been rolled out to all of Gmail’s 150 million users worldwide, though not yet to those using Gmail inside organisations, where it is expected to arrive next month.

When it was being tested internally, it was called Taco Town, and proved popular for sharing high-definition videos, said Hugo Barra, a product manager. “Google is really good at sorting information,” he said. “That’s what we intend to do with social information as well.” Some critics say this is Google’s attempt at twitter and it is not really offering anything new and exciting. However, if Buzz were to be used by all Gmail users, then it would have more users than MySpace. Facebook is currently the number 1 social networking site with 400 million users.

But what about mobiles? Well it does not work on all mobile phones yet, just the iPhone and the Google Nexus. I am sure Google is working on making sure Buzz is available on more handsets.

So how will Google compete in an already saturated market place? Apparently, Google already tried to build social networking systems before. In 2004, it launched a Facebook like site called Orkut and successful in Brazil. Google bought Jaiku in 2007, a Twitter-like system but was abandoned by the company in January 2009.

According to techradar , Yahoo and Microsoft already offered similar services. Yahoo launched http://buzz.yahoo.com/ two years ago. And Microsoft say their Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.

It seems like Google have copied the name from Yahoo and the idea from facebook and twitter without offering anything new. It will be interesting to see if Google can make Buzz work.