Search Engine Optimization News Blog

According to the brand new Google Merchant Blog, Google Base is finally being replaced with the Google Merchant Center. This move has been expected for some time, and Google introduces it saying:

(The new Google Merchant Center) will replace Google Base for those of you submitting Product-type items to Google. If you submit products to Google, Google Merchant Center is now the place to upload your feeds, check on the status of your items, and get information on the performance of your listings.

They go on to assure people that Google base isn’t being completely shut down – yet.

Google Base is still available for other types of structured content, but the Merchant Center provides a better, optimized experience specifically for product listings. The Merchant Center is where we’ll continue adding features and improving the tools for uploading and managing product listings.

This generally is accepted to mean that in time Base will fade out of the picture – Google doesn’t keep things around that are outdated. There is a transition period, though, obviously. For non-product items, Google says:

For any non-product items you’ve submitted to Google Base, those will remain there and you can continue using Google Base to manage those items and settings.

Google is very confident about the new product that it has launched. It is expecting this new product to change the way people would collaborate and communicate online. Google is so confident about it that it is expecting this new product to bring millions of more users to use its web services. The new product that Google is proudly talking about is Google Wave.
Google is now previewing Google Wave that would combine various elements of instance messaging, social networking and email allowing groups of people to collaborate with each other in real time as well. Google Wave would now be previewed to 100,000 developers who have signed up requesting to try Google Wave so that they can give Google feedback on how good it is and good else it can be enhanced.
Google Wave has been developed by a team of engineers led by Mr. Lars Rasmussen and Mr. Jens Rasmussen who were also behind the development of Google Maps. Google Wave would basically have a kind of common inbox where all photos, videos, messages, emails and other voice conversations would all become the data objects allowing a group of people connected in a wave to share and manipulate in real time.
Wave is basically nothing but a series of services that would allow developers to create their own applications that would supplement the services there. This is expected to be a great source of income as this would engage software developers from any part of the world to write their own programs for applications that would be useful for developers. These applications that are developed would run on Wave.
On its official blog, Google has already featured the applications that have been written by Ribbit that is a Mountain View startup that has been purchased by BT. They have written these applications for Google Wave. Information about Google Wave was given in the annual developer conference that took place in spring.
The CEO of Ribbit Mr. Ted Griggs, talking about Google Wave has said that, “If you have an e-mail and an instant message and a voice call that can all be navigated in the same wav. It is no longer e-mail is one container — and SMS (text messaging) is one container — and all these things are silos. Wave is breaking those silos down.”
Users who are running applications developed by Ribbit for Wave would be able to, foe instance, have a conference call that could connect any kind of voice communication irrespective of whether it is a landline phone, a mobile phone, or a voice over internet. The conversation would also be stored as an audio file or can even be assessed as a text document embedded in Wave that would be a transcribed version of the conversation.

Google has officially announced that it is enhancing Hot Trends that would now be listing more than 100 most popular search queries for the past one hour. This would greatly help for users in knowing how effective their search terms are. Some of the keywords that were recently listed in Google’s Hot Trends included search terms like Halloween costume ideas, the bacon of the month club and the new TV show trauma.
Google is offering this information based on the actual search queries. For instance, if a user is searching for a key term that is listed as of the top 100 keywords for that hour, then he or she would be able to see information on how popular that particular search term is, how fast it is rising over time and other information related to the keyword would be listed beneath the search results.
Google spokesperson has written in a blog post as follows, “To coincide with this change, we’ve also reduced the number of trends listed on the Google Hot Trends homepage to 40 from 100. This feature, however, will show up for any query that matches the top 100. We hope this change will make for a simpler user experience, and help you focus better on the top, most interesting content.” This change and introduction of the search feature would really help webmasters in targeting the most popular search terms and this would increase their possibility of getting more popular among the users. Based on this list generated, they would even be able to see the frequency by which the search terms they are using is increasing.
Similar efforts are seen with Facebook. Facebook Inc. has also added real-time search capabilities to its social networking website aiming at making it more strong and appealing. They are basically trying to make it more attractive among the users and also to make it more than its rivals MySpace Inc. and Twitter Inc. Using this new feature Facebook users will now be able to search the latest 30 days News Feed for the links, videos, status updates, photos and more. The company would now be acting as a hub for its users.
The expansion of Hot Trends by Google is also something of this sort. The only difference is that Google is doing it for its users to know about the hot search terms and Facebook is doing it for its users to have all recent updates in hand. In both the case, the companies are trying to increase their abilities also increasing the features that they are offering to their users making it more comfortable for them.

Google has introduced a new feature for its user that would make it much easier for them to do their searches in long web pages. At the moment, the new feature seems to be working fine with Wikipedia but the search engine is confident that theoretically it will work well with most of the sites.
The new feature that we are talking about is part of the snippets feature, the text that would normally appear in the search results page below each link. This text is intended to give the user a clue on what exactly the web page talks about. However, these few lines do not give a complete picture of what the whole page is discussing; especially when the topic discussed is vast. These lines are useful but do not give full details about the page.
Now with snippets, users would be able to see relevant links along with the text that would give the user a brief about what the web page discusses. With the help of these links, the users would directly be able to visit the relevant pages depending on the information he or she is looking for.
Wikipedia is one of the sites that would benefit most from this feature, as it is a very popular website with millions of informational pages. Users who are searching on a particular topic would now be able to view related links from Wikipedia and directly getting into that particular page. The feature, in general, is of great use to users as they would now easily be able to get the right information they are looking for rather than hunting for information. Google in its announcement has given the example of a search term ‘good cholesterol level’. They have said that the new search feature not only gives the users with the link to American Heart Association but it allows users to directly visit pages like ‘Your HDL (good) cholesterol level’ avoiding a windy route.
Google has said that the search engine would automatically generate these options and make it available for the users depending on how well organized the website is the website they are viewing. They have also requested webmasters to have distinct sections of their websites with descriptive titles that would help the search engine in picking up the titles fast and increase the visibility of the website. Though this feature would reduce a click or two when the user is browsing through a website, it would save a lot of time on the whole. Webmasters can make good use of this feature and try to reach the users faster than before. As Google has suggested, they can link the content page and the inner descriptive pages appropriately in order to get the best results, as this would help the search engine in generating the options.

Google and Microsoft keep up their constant and nearly simultaneous release of innovations, proving that competition between the two search engine rivals is healthy as can be.

Microsoft’s latest is a beta version of ‘visual search’, which transforms a search from a text-based to an image-based experience.They sneakily require you to install Silverlight in order to sue this latest feature, but MSN users don’t seem to mind that any more than Google users mind installing every gadget and widget Google comes up with.

Microsoft is promoting their new feature as particularly useful for product searches and other subjects, both of which are easy to categorize, and are likely to already have images associated with them (sports, for example.)

In addition, Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is still gaining ground – according to the results of a survey released last week, conducted by Comscore and indicating Bing is still growing after earning a 9.3% market share, up from 8.9% in July. Google saw a dip by a marginal 0.1% in August to 64.6 per cent, and Yahoo was able to maintain its market share at 19.3%, but things are in limbo with the proposed deal between Microsoft and Yahoo on the skids.

Microsoft mentioned that they expected Bing to grab enough market share to seriously compete with Yahoo by 2010 – this schedule seems accelerated now, with Yahoo struggling to maintain control of their own search technology.