Tag Archives: search

New Google Phone Has Tech Community Licking Chops

The tech industry was abuzz about a new phone from Google over the weekend. After months of speculation, it was discovered that Google does indeed have a new smartphone, and now more details and images have surfaced. The phone is being called the Nexus one (so far, at least), and will run the Android operating system. The hardware comes from HTC. Most details about the phone are only speculative at this point, as the only people that have access to them are Google employees. The company has given a number of its employees the device to mess around with over the holidays. Mario Queiroz, Vice President, Product Management writes on the Google Mobile Blog : At Google, we are constantly experimenting with new products and technologies, and often ask employees to test these products for quick feedback and suggestions for improvements in a process we call dogfooding (from "eating your own dogfood"). Well this holiday season, we are taking dogfooding to a new level. We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it. Queiroz also said that Google cannot share any specific product details, but that hasn't stopped the leaks of photos. Engadget dug the following one up on Google's Picasa Web Albums photo sharing site: Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land has a source , who he says is not a Gooogle Employee, that claims to have held one of the devices and messed around with it. He said that the resolution on the phone is "at least twice as good" as the iPhone. According to the Wall Street Journal , Google designed the entire software experience on the device, which makes it unique from other Android phones. Apparently people will be able to purchase the phone directly from Google, rather than a carrier, and according to Pete Cashmore at Mashable, users will be able to choose their carrier from a menu, once they receive the phone. He says the phone will be "sold online and unlocked," and that Google is partnering with T-Mobile to push the phone. He says Verizon declined. Some rumors suggest that the Nexus One could be released to the public as early as next month. That could just be wishful thinking, but whenever it does come out, it will be quite interesting to see how the public responds. Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged dogfood, google-mobile, holiday season, nexus one, phone, phones, photo sharing, search | Leave a comment

Go to Google to Gain Weight

As you may know, Google's Matt Cutts regularly answers questions submitted by users via videos uploaded to Google's Webmaster Central YouTube Channel . Usually the questions and answers are helpful tips and explanations regarding the workings of Google and how webmasters can better accomplish some goal related to their sites' performance in the search engine. Occasionally, however, Matt will answer different kinds of questions, and sometimes more fun ones. This one falls into that category. Recently, one user submitted the question: What is the most common running gag over there at Google? While one might hope to hear some wild frat-like hazing stories about Google's workforce, Matt doesn't share anything too crazy, but his responses are kind of amusing nonetheless. Matt says that one really common running gag at Google is referred to as the "Google 15". This is in reference to the approximately 15 pounds a lot of Google employees gain within their first few months with the company. "Whenever you join Google," he says, "you realize there's fantastic, great food, and you start to eat it, and it's free, so you don't have to stop eating it." Eventually, he says, they realize that it's free and it will "still be there tomorrow," so they don't have to eat it all at once. He also notes that Google has gyms and other activities that employees can participate in that will help them lose some of the weight. Another gag at Google according to Matt, is that sometimes people talk about a space elevator being built, and nobody's ever really sure if it's a joke or not, because there are a lot of "science geeks" at the company. Related Articles: > Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged Business, cutts, cutts-likes, explanations, gag, goats, google yahoo, humor, science geeks, search, shaving-footage, yahoo | Leave a comment

Kaufman Bros. Analyst Upgrades Yahoo

Just in time for the holidays, a financial expert has given a sort of present to Yahoo. Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged analyst upgrades, facebook, finalize, kessler, price, review and story, search, search performance | Leave a comment

Is Twitter Ready For Mainstream Real-Time Search?

If you are a Twitter user, you have probably experienced errors trying to use the service a time or two. In fact, Twitter being "over capacity" is so common on Twitter that the "Fail Whale", which is displayed in such instances has something of a cult following. People even wear T-shirts sporting the image. Despite said following, you have to wonder how long this is going to go on. Hasn't Twitter had ample time to correct the issue of frequent "fails" by now? Twitter has grown rapidly over the last couple years in terms of users, and has etched its place into pop culture. Still, errors continue to plague the service and its users. To be fair, the problem doesn't usually last long. Often, you can try to access it a minute after an error and carry on just fine...until the next time. The problem is that there's always a next time, and that next time doesn't seem to usually be too far off. Yet users don't seem to really mind this frequent issue. Surely it has annoyed many to no end, but the issue is not something that often makes mainstream headlines - not like when something like Gmail goes down, which is a much more rare occurrence. Perhaps it is the transparency of the issue that Twitter employs. It updates the Twitter Status Blog daily most of the time to alert users of known issues, but nothing they ever do seems to truly correct the problem of frequent disruption. 2010 promises to be a huge year for Twitter. They're opening up the firehose to developers , which means Twitter applications will be able to do a lot more things, and a lot more apps will likely be built as a result. Combine that with the fact that Google is now showing real-time results from Twitter in its own search results for many queries. It's hard to imagine that Twitter won't grow significantly more in usage next year as it is thrust even more in people's faces. Is Twitter really prepared to handle the kind of growth that could be in store for it? Is this frequent disruption going to continue or will the problem get better? Some companies may be worried about their own reputation with Google showing real-time Twitter results on SERPs. If Twitter continues to be frequently "over capacity", how will that bode for Twitter's own reputation with the public (many of who are already skeptical of the service's potential)? Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged frequent, issue, rare occurrence, search, social-media, time doesn, twitter, twitter-status | Leave a comment

What Google’s Real-Time Search Means to SEO, PPC & Reputation Management

It seems that over the course of the entire year, we've been waiting for Google to get real-time search. Now it's here. If you have ever had a hard time finding a direct relationship between social media and search engine marketing, it doesn't get any more direct than this. Real-time search results (from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other sources) right in regular SERPs. Do you like the idea of real-time results in Google SERPs? Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged cool, dave snyder, facebook, hard time, kirkpatrick, president, search, search engine marketing, search users, seo, serps, spring, thoughts, time search, timeliness | Leave a comment

Yahoo Rolling Out Something Kind of Like Real-Time Search

Reports indicate that Yahoo will be rolling out its own version of real-time search results today. Google of course did this earlier in the week, but Yahoo's offering will not exactly be real-time. Google has access to Twitter's firehose (although everybody will have access next year ) because the two companies entered an agreement recently . Yahoo doesn't have access to that, and is just relying on its own algorithms to deliver recent tweets at the bottom of search results. Whereas Google's feature includes tweets, Facebook updates, and a variety of other sources, it looks like Yahoo's Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged algorithms, allows-the-user, around-the-same, bing, no doubt, results, search, search-feature, serps, time, yahoo | Leave a comment

The iPhone Gets a New Google Mobile App

Google announced that the new version of its Google Mobile app for the iPhone was approved and is now available in the App Store. The new version includes a redesigned search results display that shows more results at once. It also opens web pages from the results within the app. "For those less utilitarian and more flamboyant, we've exposed our visual tweaks settings called 'Bells and Whistles' - some of our users had discovered this already in previous versions," says Google software engineer Alastair Tse. "You can style your Google Mobile App in any shade: red, taupe, or even heliotrope. If you're on a faster iPhone, like the iPhone 3GS, you may want to try the live waveform setting which turns on, as the name suggests, a moving waveform when you search by voice." "On the subject of searching by voice, you can now choose your spoken language or accent," adds Tse. "For example, if you're Australian but live in London, you can improve the recognition accuracy by selecting Australian in the Voice Search settings. And now both Mandarin and Japanese are supported languages as well." Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged australian, live, london, million-reasons, mobile web, search, voice, voice amp, waveform, web presence, windows | Leave a comment