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Google displaying product review snippets in product knowledge cards

 

Search for a product on Google and you might see a Knowledge Graph card to the right of the result links containing details on the product as well as links to sites selling it and the full Google Shopping reviews page. You may now also see snippets of what people are saying regarding certain aspects of a product.

First spotted by Search Engine Land, Google seems to be pulling quotes from the product reviews that it aggregates from other websites and placing them inside Search product cards. The company gets most of these reviews from the product pages of websites selling the item – Rakuten.com Shopping and B&H Photo are two places the reviews for the above speakers come from, for example.

As Search Engine Land notes, you can click through to see all the reviews for a product, but on the full reviews page the only link provided against each review simply goes to the product page hosting the review – it doesn’t take you to that exact review on the host site.

Google is constantly adjusting its Knowledge Graph cards, most recently removing Google+ posts from the cards for popular businesses.

Google’s share of US search market at lowest level since 2008 as Mozilla/Yahoo partnership bites

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Google’s share of the US search market has fallen to its lowest level since at least 2008 following the deal in which Mozilla switched the default Firefox search engine from Google to Yahoo in November. Yahoo saw its share increase from 8.6% to 10.4% in the one month since the deal was signed.

The figure was revealed by StatCounter, who said that Firefox users represented just over 12% of US Internet users as of last month … 
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Google working on the next generation of conversational search: the virtual PA

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Photo: chromespot.com

When Google announced (and later began rolling out) conversational search back in May, the company saw that as only the start. The company’s plans for the feature take us all the way into the realms of a true virtual personal assistant.

If you haven’t yet tried conversational search in Chrome, the feature as it stands is useful but basic. Speak a search like “How old is Barack Obama?” and Chrome will speak the answer. With a person, you could then ask a series of follow-up questions like “How tall is he?”, “Who is his wife?” and “How old is she?” and they would know who you were referring to in each question. That’s the functionality Google is rolling out, remembering who or what you just asked about and interpreting pronouns appropriately.

But Google’s long-term plans are far more ambitious. In an interview with TechFlash, Google Research Fellow Jeff Dean talked to Jon Xavier about his team’s work on machine learning and neural nets to expand Google’s abilities in conversational search … 
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Google wishes TV chef Julia Child a Happy 100th Birthday with doodle

Google is celebrating Julia Child’s 100th birthday today.

The American chef, author, and television personality died at the age of 91 on August 13, 2004, as first noted by SearchEngineLand, but she is notable for seamlessly bringing the art of French cuisine to the American home with her first —and massive—cookbook, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”, and later through her television programs, such as “The French Chef”, which began airing in 1963.

Child is now a part of American and worldwide culture, as she is the subject of many films and parodies in television and radio skits, and she is very well known for her striking height and memorable voice, personality and appearance.

Click here to Google search “Julia Child”. 


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Google demotes Chrome homepage after pay-for-post campaign violations; Website’s PageRank lowered for 60 days

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Google searches for “browser” no longer reveal the Google Chrome homepage, because the globally popular search engine decided to apply a penalty against the browser’s website after coming under fire for its sponsored post campaign.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company actively fights paid links and junk content under its Webmaster guidelines. However, earlier this week, SEO Book’s Aaron Wall noticed a Google search for “This post is sponsored by Google” displays over 400 websites written by Google marketing campaigns.

Bloggers were found posting low-quality content related to Google Chrome to promote Google content, and at least one of the posts had a hyperlink to the Chrome download page. Hyperlinks can help a website rise in Google search results through Google’s PageRank algorithm.

According to The New York Times, Google penalized JC Penney, Forbes and Overstock last year due to paid links and similar guidline violation issues. Search Engine Land suggested that Google should penalize its own Google Chrome download page to be fair.

Well, that is exactly how Google responded.


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Google launches Travel search, with help from its ITA acquisition

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Google has launched Travel search which will debute across select cities today. The new search is the first product to emerge from ITA, a company Google acquired in April. The new Travel search uses similar methods that you’re used to in traditional Google search. As you can see, a simple search like “flights from New York to San Francisco” returns results under the “flights” category.

With the flights category, flights that pertain to your search will be displayed — where you can see the airline and then purchase tickets. Users are then guided to the airline’s website to actually book the flight.

More screenshots after the break: (via Search Engine Land)


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