Mozilla and Yahoo today announced a joint five-year “strategic” partnership that will see the Firefox browser’s default search engine change to Yahoo. Since 2004, Google has been the default search engine for Firefox, but when the agreement came to an end this year, Mozilla said that it decided to make a change.
A San Francisco court recently ruled that Google is free to display its search results as it sees fit. Backed by the First Amendment, the tech juggernaut has been battling for this right for several years and a California judge ruled in its favor last week. This situation started when a website called CoastNews filed a lawsuit against Google claiming that the company intentionally lowered its rankings in web search results.
Europe’s controversial ‘right to be forgotten‘ ruling, giving individuals the right to have sensitive information about them removed from search engines if it is deemed to be ‘out-dated or irrelevant,’ could extend beyond Europe following a recent court ruling.
Google has so far been removing links only from its European sites, for example google.fr in France and google.co.uk in the UK. However, a French court has now ruled that Google is required to remove links globally, and that local subsidiaries can be fined if the company fails to do so, reports the Guardian …
Expand
Expanding
Close
Twitter’s chief financial officer Anthony Noto at its Twitter Analyst Day today reassured analysts that the social network has room for growth in the future, with one of the strategies being to generate more search engine optimization traffic from Google. The strategy is somewhat ironic, given that Twitter had one of the best SEO partnerships with Google until the deal fell apart around three years ago.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Google Trends is a great place to go if you want to know what the web is up to on any given day; it does a great job of showing you trending search terms—and charts that put a ranking on basically everything—from almost any country in the world. Today, the functionality of this website has expanded, with Google announcing that they’ve added a new “Trending on YouTube” section which shows some of the most popular YouTube videos of the day.
Google has been locked in a nasty battle with a group of German publishers for several years, with the troop complaining that the tech company’s web search results were making their online articles available to the public. But after two weeks of restricted access to Google News results, major news publisher Axel Springer has changed its mind.
Spain’s parliament recently approved a set of new intellectual property laws referred to as “the Google tax” that give publishers the right to charge aggregators whenever they display their news content in web search results. This new law is set to go into effect on January 1st, 2015 and doesn’t disclose how much search engines like Google or Bing could be charge for an incident.
Google recently rolled out an update for its web search algorithm that makes it harder for people to find pirated media through torrent sites like Pirate Bay and Isohunt. This new software push comes soon after News Corp. chief executive Robert Thomson issued a letter blasting the search giant, referring to it as a “platform for piracy” and requesting that the EU enforce stricter policies against the company.
As a result of an ongoing legal battle, Google recently changed the way it displays search results for news stories from select European publishers. A syndicate known as VG Media is claiming that Google’s search engine is letting people bypass their sites’ paywalls, and is demanding compensation for lost revenue. In an effort to smooth things over, Google removed text previews and thumbnail images from its search results for select publishers involved in this claim, but it appears that VG Media has had a change of heart.
Google recently updated its web search with information cards for video games. Similar to how Mountain View’s search engine handles TV shows and movies, whenever you find yourself looking for details about a particular video game, the Knowledge Graph will now feed you a panel loaded with information like the title’s developer, release date, supported platforms and even reviews.
Teenagers talk on the phone a lot, but you know what else they do? Talk to their phones. Google published a study today looking at that voice search habits of American smartphone users and to no one’s surprise, teens use the feature more than adults. According to Mountain View’s findings 55 percent of teens ranging from 13 to 18 years old use voice search every day.
Google is in the process of testing a new search result icon that helps people quickly identify websites that aren’t mobile-friendly. A few months back, the search giant started taking action against sites that weren’t properly optimized for smartphones and this new notification icon appears to be part of the company’s focus on mobile web browsing.
Google has updated its transparency report for the controversial ‘right to be forgotten‘ ruling, requiring it to remove links to sensitive information about individuals when it is considered out-dated or irrelevant.
The company revealed that it has now received 144,907 requests to evaluate almost half a million links, and that it has so far removed 41.8% of those. Links to facebook topped the list, with 3,331 URLs removed from search results …
Expand
Expanding
Close
A recent scandal that involved countless private pictures of several high-profile female celebrities being published online was initially linked to Apple’s iCloud, however such claims were never validated and the Cupertino software company has publicly denied such allegations. After taking aim at Apple, some of the outraged celebrities are now targeting Google, threatening to sue the company behind its web search results linking to their leaked photos.
Photo: http://www.corporateofficeheadquarters.com
After receiving a lot of pressure from a group German publishers, Google is changing the way its search engine handles news articles. The company is now removing excerpts and image thumbnails from its web search results for sites like bild.de, bunte.de or hoerzu.de and replacing them with headlines and story links.
Google just announced that it’s expanding its local inventory ads first launched for users in the US last fall to more countries starting today. The ads, which promote items from local nearby retailers to shoppers on Google, are now available in the UK, Germany, Australia, Japan, and France.
Google said today that it will also start showing the ads to desktop users:
We have also expanded support for store-only products and campaigns to desktop devices, enabling retailers to promote stores to the right customers at the right time. For example, you can prioritize showing local products to get shoppers in your doors during the weeks and days leading up to the holidays. As items go out of stock online and last-minute shipping costs increase, retailers who can provide cost-effective, quick in-store purchase options stand out in the crowd
Retailers can get an overview on the program here and users will in the countries above should start to see the local “in store” ads appear in search results.
Google announced today that it’s rolling out what it calls “Structured Snippets” to add more helpful data to Google search results. Google provided the example above showing relevant data for the search term “nikon d7100” pulled from a webpage and displayed right in the search results. Google explained how it works:
The WebTables research team has been working to extract and understand tabular data on the Web with the intent to surface particularly relevant data to users. Our data is already used in the Research Tool found in Google Docs and Slides; Structured Snippets is the latest collaboration between Google Research and the Web Search team employing that data to seamlessly provide the most relevant information to the user. We use machine learning techniques to distinguish data tables on the Web from uninteresting tables, e.g., tables used for formatting web pages. We also have additional algorithms to determine quality and relevance that we use to display up to four highly ranked facts from those data tables.
Google offered another example for the search term “superman” to show what the structured data snippets look like in mobile search results:
All users should start to see the structured data snippets appear under some Google search results on the web on both desktop and mobile.
Google is today rolling out a new version of its web search to make it more obvious how to search for a specific page within a website.
Search for a company or website by name and Google has long displayed a list of popular links within that site. For example, search for Samsung and this is what Google will show you:
If the page you’re after isn’t shown, you can click the ‘More results from’ link to open up a site-specific search – but most people didn’t notice it. In the new version, a site search box will pop up right underneath the main link, with greyed-out text letting you know that will search within the site – as in the YouTube example shown. Type in your keyword(s) and Google will take you right there.
Websites with their own search engines can also include code that tells Google how to access it, in which case the site’s own search facility will be used.
The new page is appearing on google.com today, and is likely to reach other countries soon.
Google’s self-driving cars may have notched up 700,000 accident-free miles without anyone needing to press the big red Stop button, but project director Chris Urmson’s personal deadline to have the cars on sale to the public is still five years away, reports the MIT’s Technology Review.
Most tech-heads know that the cars rely on inch-perfect modelling of the specific streets they will use, the cars unable to drive anywhere else, but the piece revealed that this is just one of the challenges ahead …
Expand
Expanding
Close
Google has officially announced the end of authorship, a feature within search that gave users an idea of who exactly wrote the content behind the link before clicking it. Paired with a headshot, the name of the content creator was for a very long time shown alongside the number of Google+ circles he or she was in as well as a link to read more content by that author. But as of today—while headshots have been gone for a while—this feature is completely finished and links in search are back to being a bit more uniform.
Google today announced that the app promotion ads it first announced back in April are now available globally for search and YouTube. The search option will allow app developers to easily advertise with click-to-install ads in search that appear on both iOS and Android devices. Developers can even start deep linking to a specific pages within apps for users that already have an app installed:
Starting today, you can deep link users directly from Google Search into specific pages of apps they’ve already installed by signing up for the beta here. Customers like LINE, Zoopla and Booking.com are already testing deep-linking with their apps. Here’s how it works: let’s say someone has the Booking.com app installed on their phone and searches for “San Francisco Hotels” on Google.com; now they can go directly to the specific page in the Booking.com app that shows listings for hotels in San Francisco.
Google is also rolling out app promotion ads on YouTube globally starting today: Starting today, you can showcase your app when people are watching their favorite videos using a new enhancement to TrueView ads. With TrueView, advertisers can reach potential customers based on their interests, previously-watched videos and demographics. Start promoting your app on YouTube by simply linking your app’s ID to your TrueView campaigns.
Google has links to resources for the new features and more info here.
People who have asked Google to remove links to news stories under the controversial European ‘right to be forgotten‘ ruling are once again finding the move counter-productive. The BBC News site has posted links to stories removed from Google’s search, bringing back into the spotlight stories that are in some cases more than a decade old.
The BBC posted links to all 12 of the stories removed from Google’s search results. They range from the serious – three men accused of possessing bomb-making equipment in Ireland – to the ridiculous, a dispute over a lost dog …
Expand
Expanding
Close
This neat infographic from visual.ly explains Google’s plans for self driving cars. The diagram details that cars will be have a soft foam front to cushion impact if it hits a pedestrian, a laser sensor with 360 degree view, front windshield made of plastic rather than glass, and much, much, more.
Check out the full graphic from the source right here.
Google says it has been testing changes to its search algorithms that will give secure, encrypted websites — as shown by HTTPS in their URL — ranking preference over those that do not. Google as a company prioritizes security, and as more and more webmasters are adopting HTTPS, the company hopes that this change will push more webmasters to do the same.
