Travel Searches, Local & More Searches Turning Case-Sensitive in Google SERPs
Some of us at Netconcepts have been noticing that keyword rankings in Google search engine results pages (”SERPs”) have been turning case-sensitive for some queries lately. Search Engine Roundtable highlighted that the case sensitivity issue had been reported for queries seen in the UK, but we’ve been seeing it for queries committed from the US as well.
For instance, search for something like “fossil watches” and compare with “Fossil Watches”, and you’ll see that a few of the listings in the SERPs trade ranking positions:
Popularity: 22% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 04/15/2008 | Permalink | 
Email
| 
Print
Possible Related Posts
Trackback | Comments (11) | Comments RSS |
Filed under: Google, Local Search, Local Search Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Searchingcase sensitive, case sensitivity, Google, Keyword-Rankings, search engine results pages, SEO, SERPs
Google Maps Now Allows Custom Categories For Businesses
Search Engine Roundtable notes that the Google Local Business Center is allowing businesses to enter their own, custom categories. While this new functionality has been around for a few weeks now, it is an important one and addresses a major need that both Mike Blumenthal and I have highlighted previously — I recently spoke about this issue again at the SMX West session on Local Search & Blended Results. Previously, businesses could only select business categories from an unusually short list of categories. Exacerbating the issue, some businesses achieved other category associations outside of Google’s sharply limited taxonomy when their listings found in other yellow pages providers such as Superpages were absorbed into Google Maps, including the more comprehensive categories found in those other content sources.
Under the new functionality, businesses may type in custom business categories, and the interface also provides helpful potential term using the Google Suggestion Tool:
Free-form categories is a slightly unique way to address the need of businesses. Yellow pages companies have traditionally offered businesses the option of categorization under many thousands of unique categories — on the order of twelve thousand to fifteen thousand categories in some cases. However, YP companies have also carefully considered and turned down requests for additions of completely new categories in some cases, mainly due to how yellow pages are constructed — if there are too few businesses in a category it won’t make monetary sense to add it into a directory. And, if the category name is too esoteric, consumers won’t search for it anyway.
With Google’s local search operating more closely as a straight keyword search tool, businesses could associate categories with themselves that are as specific as they desire without affecting usability or cost.
In other, related news, Google has announced that YouTube videos are now integrated with Google Maps, allowing businesses to add video info to their listings.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 04/15/2008 | Permalink | Email
| Print
Possible Related Posts
Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Google, Local Search, Maps, Online Directories, Searching, Yellow Pages
Fantastic Linkbait: Google doesn’t need to find Chuck Norris for you!
This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while - I saw this mentioned on John Battelle’s blog. Type “find Chuck Norris” into Google’s search form, and then hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button, and you’ll get this:
The result is a Google search results page with no listings and the message at the top states:
“Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you.”
But wait! This result page is actually a hoax, only pretending to be from Google! It’s actually produced by Arran Scholsberg. Arran is a student at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and is a web designer and photographer.
Popularity: 41% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 01/28/2008 | Permalink | Email
| Print
Possible Related Posts
Trackback | Comments (4) | Comments RSS |
Filed under: Google, Link Building, Marketing, Searching, TricksChuck Norris facts, Google, hoaxes, linkbait
Zvents Launches Federated Local Search
Zvents announced today their launch of a new, blended search results page for local content. Now, when you do searches on their site, they’ll bring back results for various businesses, events, performances, movies, store sales and more in your local area. Here’s a screengrab of the newly-blended results page:
You can see little icons to the right side of the listings which indicate what type of listing each result represents.
Google’s move to Universal Search in the past year and their recent move to expand out the local one-box results from a few listings to ten would indicate that user-testing is showing blended results to be a very popular item among search engine users. Zvents move to provide blended results makes them a very strong contender as a provider for local search and content technology. As Greg Sterling mentions, Zvents is a provider for syndicated content for third parties like newspapers, and they’re clearly positioning themselves as a potential backend for other local content sites wanting to have functionality similar to Google’s.
From trying out Zvents’ new functionality,
Popularity: 34% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 01/28/2008 | Permalink | Email
| Print
Possible Related Posts
Trackback | Comments (1) | Comments RSS |
Filed under: Design, Local Search, Searchingblended results, federated search, Local Search, Universal-Search, zvents
Build Your Own Local Search Engine
Quite a few bloggers out there have clued-in to how using Eurekster’s Swickis on their blogs can be a cool feature enhancement, providing custom thematic search engines for their users. If you have a blog that focuses on particular subject matter, inclusion of useful links and other features like these custom search engines can help to build loyalty and return visits. But, for webmasters who build local guides for small communities, Swickis are also an ideal way to rapidly provide robust, location-specific search functionality.
Over time, I’ve looked at a lot of small community guides, and many of the people who create them are masters of finding free widgets to provide functionality for things like weather forecasts, news headlines, and local events. But, many of these sites are missing even simple search functionality to help users find the local info on their site as well as elsewhere on the internet. (more…)
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 10/31/2007 | Permalink | Email
| Print
Possible Related Posts
Trackback | Comments (1) | Comments RSS |
Filed under: Blog Optimization, Dynamic Sites, Local Search, Searching, ToolsCustom-Search-Engines, Eurekster, search-engines, Search-Widgets, Swickis
SES Session on Universal & Blended Vertical Search
I’m busy attending this year’s Search Engine Strategies Conference (SES) in San Jose, but I thought it’d be worthwhile to pause for half a minute in the flurry of sessions and networking to mention a couple of interesting things I heard from Google in yesterday’s session on Universal and Blended Vertical Search.
Popularity: 9% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 08/21/2007 | Permalink | Email
| Print
Possible Related Posts
Trackback | Comments (1) | Comments RSS |
Filed under: Best Practices, Google, SearchingDavid-Bailey, Google, Google-Universal-Search, search-engine-strategies, SES-Conference, Universal-Search, Vertical-Search
New Breed of People Search Engine Launches: Spock.com
A little startup called Spock.com has moved into public beta today for their official public launch - previously they were only available to a handful of invite-only beta-testers. Spock is to white pages what Google Maps was to yellow pages - Spock is a sort of people search engine that pulls data from many different sites together to automatically form personal profiles of individuals. The service also allows one to search for people who match up with certain criteria like celebrities, kidnapped children, billionaires, sudoku fans, “journalists killed in Iraq”, “Baptist women who love to travel”, etc.
Spock is one of a new breed of people search engines which pulls data in from a variety of online sources including MySpace, LinkedIn, My Yahoo!, Wikipedia, company websites, blogs, and other sources to compose these composite profiles which include photos, descriptions, links to people related to the person in question, and tag lists of common keywords. Check out this search I did for “Danny Sullivan”:
And, here’s the profile Spock generated for the search engine marketing “Danny Sullivan”:
This automatic generation of profiles from other data sources, similar to a meta search engine, is not all that new, of course - ZabaSearch has been touted for doing similar stuff to compose info on people out of various public records, sort of like a poor man’s background search. And, ZoomInfo has worked to build a directory of searchable business profiles of individuals. IceRocket also used to have a metasearch engine that pulled in data from a handful of various singles/personals sites.
What makes Spock a bit different is how they’re actively composing these profiles from sources that really haven’t been associated with one another previously, and making them publicly available, for “free” (eventually paid for by ad revenue, of course). While the general public likely hasn’t been aware of it, the CIA or NSA has actually also been working on a similar sort of search engine system which automatically composes secret dossiers of information on individuals from a multitude of sources including credit card information, criminal databases, as well as many of the same online sources used by these web services like ZabaSearch, ZoomInfo, and Spock.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 08/08/2007 | Permalink | Email
| Print
Possible Related Posts
Trackback | Comments (2) | Comments RSS |
Filed under: General, Research and Development, Searchingpeople-search, privacy, privacy-concerns, spock, white-pages
Where’s the Google search result?
I had a client ask me the other day where his traffic was coming from, since he couldn’t find his listing in the top few pages of search results for a keyword that was showing up in his analytics reports. The analytics system had reported that he’d received a number of visits from users who’d searched for “Keyword X” in Google and had clicked through to his site. Problem is, when he went and searched for “Keyword X”, he didn’t see any of his pages listed in the first dozen or so pages of results in Google, and he figured it’d be unlikely that a number of users would click very many pages deep anyway.
So, how did this traffic happen?
This isn’t the only time I’ve seen something like this happen. Probably a number of people have had the experience of calling up a partner or colleague to talk about something they see in the Google search results, only to find that the person at the other end of the phone sees a very different thing when they commit the same search in Google. The listing could be shown 9 places down from the top of the page instead of 2 places down, or it isn’t showing up at all for them while it’s showing plain as day for you.
Unfortunately, this is going to become a more and more common experience for webmasters. Google’s diversity of search products and results sets are becoming more and more differentiated for different users, and as this happens, people searching for the very same keyword are going to be seeing completely different search results. Read on for more details.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 07/09/2007 | Permalink | Email
| Print
Possible Related Posts
Trackback | Comments (2) | Comments RSS |
Filed under: Analytics, Google, Searching, Tracking and ReportingGoogle-Search-Results, Google-SERPs, Keyword-Search-Results, Personalization, Web-Analytics
New Research Could Improve Google Image Search
New research recently published out of University of California - San Diego could allow Google’s Image Search to easily begin using elements from “true image search” — that is, the ability for software to detect and identify elements appearing within the image itself rather than just relying upon external text metadata to associate keywords with the images. Read on for more details.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 04/05/2007 | Permalink | Email
| Print
Possible Related Posts
Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS |
Filed under: Google, Image Optimization, Research and Development, SearchingGoogle, Google-Image-Labeler, Google-Image-Search, image-search, Supervised-Multiclass-Labeling
Google Book Search: Not a Threat to Publishing
It’s not surprising that large chunks of the book publishing industry have gotten up in arms ever since Google announced its intentions to scan the world’s books and make them available online for free. After all, the publishing industry is not really known for adopting modern practices all that quickly. Book publishing is a grand old industry, and top publishing houses seem more invested in preserving the status quo than in adapting for the changing world.
But, when the publishing industry got up in arms against Google’s plans to facilitate the searching of books, their knee-jerk reaction against the new paradigm caused them to miss the fact that Google’s basic proposal really isn’t all that revolutionary. There’s another institution that has taken published books and made them available to the public. For Free. For thousands of years. Libraries!
Popularity: 7% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 10/08/2006 | Permalink | Email
| Print