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Google’s bid to make staying current nearly impossible.
As Patrick Altoft recently pointed out, Google has rolled out an astonishing number of search products in the past 90 days. 40 to be exact. Releasing just a handful of new products over the course of a year would be enough for most companies to pat themselves on the back – but what Google is accomplishing here is almost frightening.
As someone who makes a living with Internet marketing it can be pretty intimidating to get a grip on all these new products and features – so, as much for my own edification as yours, I took a deeper dive into these products to see what they do and how these products might change our online experiences.
Google Real Time Search
Now searches on Google can include the latest real time updates from sites like Twitter and FriendFeed. I’m certainly interested in this as an SEO, but have concerns about both spam and a bit of a mixed metaphor.
I don’t associate Google search result pages with the real time web – kind of how I don’t associate mountain bikes with a handgun manufacturer – and I have doubts as to how useful these filtered real time results will prove to be with sites like Twitter just a click away (and probably already open in one of your browser tabs anyway…)
Source: http://bit.ly/8FntjZ
Google Social Search
This feature pulls pubic web content from your social circles into the Google search results. This content is pulled from places like your Google profile (if you’ve adding links to Twitter or other social websites), Google Chat buddies, and Google Reader. Once Google makes the connections on these social services they can algorithmically including this content in search results if it appears that content is relevant to your query. You can also browse social content by selecting “Social” from the Google search options menu.
You won’t see any of this content if you’re not logged into your Google account – and you can remove the social website connection by removing links from your Google profile or blocking your Google Chat contacts from inclusion – so you still have control over your connections and online content.
It’s great to see Google getting more into the social space, and this is one feature I’ll use. When you’re trying to pay attention to hundreds or thousands of websites or blogs it’s really easy to miss something important in an RSS reader. With Social Search I’ll see social content that pertains to an immediate search query – which might even save me the time of digging through my Google Reader’s 1000+ unread items.
Source: http://bit.ly/YFWQQ
Google Browser Size
This is tool to visualize how different browser sizes view a website based on the browser data from the Google homepage. A simple, easy-to-use tool for quickly determining which parts of your website are visible to the widest audience.
Source: http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
Google URL Shortener
Well, we could all user another URL shortener, right? The http://goo.gl/ domain is only available for Google products, but I’m sure they’ll test and release it for general use some time in 2010.
Direct and Visual Answers In Google Suggest
For a number of searches you no longer need to leave the Google homepage! Enter “weather in portland” and you’ll see images and descriptions for the 4 day forecast right in the search box. This seems to be a spinoff of the real time developments, as the data for flight status and package tracking could change at any moment.
Google Suggest - Now with weather!
Anything from weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers, definitions, calculator, currency and unit conversions are available from the Google Suggest homepage.
Source: http://bit.ly/87ykIn
Living Stories
Much to the chagrin of Mr. Murdoch, Google seems intent on innovating in the news aggregation space – and this feature is really rather neat. Google has partnered with the New York Times and Washington Post to aggregate coverage of news stories into an evolving summary complete with various news articles, opinion pieces, and instant access to an event timeline.
Source: http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/
Auto Translated Search
Google’s translation tool has been around forever, and they’ve finally gotten around to integrating that tool into the search options available to everyone from the main Google search interface.
If you’ve got a need for multilingual search queries this product should serve you well.
Source: http://bit.ly/6kb3q1
Google Merchant Center
If you’ve ever submit products to Google Product Search you’ve run a Google Base account, which has always felt like a stand-alone utility for product submission than an actual feature-rich product. That all changed with the Google Merchant Center. Now the layout has been updated to match the updated Google Webmaster Tools – with a nested left navigation housing access to feed diagnostics and settings. You even get a reporting dashboard!
As someone who manages Google Product feeds this is a very welcome update.
Source: http://bit.ly/HMcA8
Google Dictionary
Google power users have probably been aware of the “define:” function Google has provided for years. This command returns definition results for the word following the “define:”. For example “define:cat” would return definitions for the word “cat.”
Google’s dictionary is a little better than the standard define operator because it provides synonyms, related phrases and image results for a given query. You can even “star” words for later reference.
Source: http://www.google.com/dictionary
Google Chrome for Mac & Windows/Linux Extensions
On December 8th Google (finally) gave Mac users a downloadable beta build of their fantastic browser, Chrome. It’s all about speed and simplicity with Chrome, and I like it that way. If you’re got a Mac download the beta and give it a whirl. Chrome has become one of my browser staples these days, and for good reason.
In addition to the Mac beta, Google rolled out extensions for the Windows and Linux Chrome builds. This is exciting – as I like to add functionality to my FireFox browser – but I’m unsure if the extensions offered by Chrome developers will displace any of the FireFox extensions I’ve grown to love.
Source: http://bit.ly/7ux043
Locking SafeSearch
As a parent I’m always interested in tools that simplify monitoring or controlling computer use, and Google has recently provided a function for locking their image search to the “Strict” setting. While this isn’t a panacea for restricting adult content, it’s nice to see Google giving concerned parents another tool to make policing internet use easier.
Source: http://bit.ly/40xKXk
Personalized Search When Logged Out (via Cookie)
When you’re logged in to your Google account and search for something on Google, the results for a given query are affected by your web brewing history. Google actually ranks sites you’ve visited higher than sites you haven’t. This was previously only offered to Google users signed in to their Google accounts, but now this Personalized Search feature has been extended to users who are signed out of their accounts.
The previous 180 days of search activity is used to customize your search results even if you don’t have a Google account. This is pretty major for most people, as many have no idea their search results are at all affected by their previous browsing history.
What can you do about this? Well, if you don’t want to have your search results altered by your history you can just turn it off altogether.
Source: http://bit.ly/71RcmJ
Rel=Canonical Across 2 Domains
Canonicalization deals with web pages that have more than one possible URL. If you, for example, have a web page with products that can be sorted by any number of attributes (like price, size, color, etc), and sorting those products changes the URL (by appending an argument or parameter to it), then Google and other search engines might not know which of these URLs to display for a users query because the content is so similar.
To address this problem Google created what is known as the rel=canonical tag. This tag specifies the root URL for duplicate content – and search engines follow this hint strongly by ranking and displaying the canonical URL for relevant search queries.
Now the rel=canonical standard has been expanded to cross-domain duplicate content. That means if one websites duplicates the content from another website, the content originator can be credited (in search engine terms) for the creation of that content.
Source: http://bit.ly/64Dl7W
Local Place Page Sentiment
Google has moved their local result pages (those relating to a physical location on Google maps) to what are called Place Pages which aggregate and standardize information about a given location. In previous form, this was little more than the actual content from a review site, like Yelp or Superpages.
Now the sentiment of these review is being analyzed, organized by aspect (like price, service, ect.) then rendered within the Place Page.
This is a really nice improvement, and makes it easy to get a quick overview of what makes a place special (or terrible).
Source: http://bit.ly/5LvYFR
Google Music Search
Google notes that “Every day we get millions of search queries about music” – and I guess that was enough to put in some serious development hours. With Google music search, you’ve got some amazing new options for find that song that goes “my baby drove up in a brand new cadillac.”
If you know that name of the song, just Google it and you’ll be prompted to play the song right in the search results:
Maybe you don’t know the name of the song. Just Google the lyrics you can recall & Google will find the song for you:
They’ve even partnered with Pandora, iMeem, and Rhapsody so you can take that song and run with it to discover new music.
Source: http://bit.ly/na5wA
Google Goggles
Now, this is innovation in search! An Android mobile application which enables people to search using pictures instead of words. Just snap a pic of that logo, person, place, artwork, or book and Google will return search results based on that image.
Source: http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/
AdWords Updates
There have been a ton of new features and updates to AdWords and, really, each of these probably deserves its own blog post. I’ve provided a quick synopsis below, but you might consider checking out the official AdWords Blog – InsideAdwords.
Ad Sitelinks
Additional links you can display along side your Adwords text ads. These link to deeper content and can be specified within the AdWords management interface.
Source: http://bit.ly/3V6WHp
Product Extensions
If you’re running a Google Product Search feed within the Google Merchant Center, you can link this account to your AdWords account and display product images in the sponsored search results.
Source: http://bit.ly/5lQHJU
Comparison Ads
While only available to certain advertisers in the mortgage/refinance space, this is a totally new AdWords feature which provides users with an interface to compare multiple offers. If a user requests a quote from your ad they will be provided a unique phone number to call – and you only pay if user calls the phone number or fills out an online form.
Source: http://bit.ly/18Rhw7
Product Listing Ads
Similar to the Product Extensions, this feature enables merchants to list large product inventories and display richer product information within the ads. Still limited to certain retail advertisers at the moment – look for this feature in your account in the future is you’re a retail advertiser.
Source: http://bit.ly/m21Ca
Google Analytics
Annotations
Finally! I don’t know about you, but this is one of the features I’ve been requesting for some time. When this rolls live you can annotate your Google Analytics timeline to describe or explain events and changes in your traffic trend. Now you’ll know that the the drop in traffic last March was due to your server going down – not your actual traffic drying up.
Source: http://bit.ly/6EIznG
Engagement Goals (and more of them)
Gone are the days of creating multiple profiles to track more than 4 goals. Google Analytics now supports up to 20 conversion goals per profile – and you can set goals by Engagement, such as time on site and pages per visit.
Source” http://bit.ly/1BNhUE
Analytics Intelligence
One feature that can make reporting (and locating things to report on) much easier is the new Analytics Intelligence feature. This new section aggregates changes in your account which have some degree of statistical significance. It’s great for finding things that you might otherwise miss. Also, you can set up custom alerts to track changes in things that are most important to your business.
Source: http://bit.ly/22NcWd
Asynchronous Tracking Code
2009 saw Google really push website performance as a major agenda, and the amount of Javascript on a given page is one contributing factor to page load time. The new Asynchronous Tracking Code is designed to load faster than the old tracking snippet and enhance data collection all while eliminating tracking errors from dependencies in Javascript loading.
Source: http://bit.ly/60BcX8
Integration with Feedburner
It’s a wonder they didn’t get to this earlier, as Google owns Feedburner, but you’ll now see campaign attribution for clicks tracked by your AdSense for Feeds or Google Feedburner account. I’m a huge fan of eliminating rework, so it’s great to see some more unification on this front.
Source: http://bit.ly/6FHEWF
Webmaster Tools
Keywords Feature
In managing a website SEO, I’m always trying to understand just how Google sees my websites. This new Keywords Feature in Webmaster Tools is great for taking a peek into the keywords Google associates with the pages of your website. An enterprising SEO might think of a few ways to use this data to further optimize their on-page factors.
Source: http://bit.ly/7iVUak
Site Performance Tools
I’ve always taken in interest in making websites faster, as it’s often one of the easiest ways to improve user experience. With the Webmaster Tools Site Performance test Google now provides a wonderful tool for determining how fast your website is compared to the rest of the web, and how to further improve the performance of your website load times.
Source: http://bit.ly/57tB1z
Man! How is a fella supposed to keep up with all this innovation? Trial and error I suppose. Luckily Google has a very strong blogging presence and all of these features (and many other features) are well documented at the official Google blogs. I’ve listed some of them below if you’re so inclined – happy reading!
View all the Google blogs at the Google Blog Directory.
Posted in Google, Search Engine Marketing