Digital Bytes

Google is 10 years old

2008-10-03T18:11:50+01:00

Has search changed much from back then? How different are the search results and what did the web pages look like?

Google has released an insight into 2001 search results and what their system looked like.

http://www.google.com/search2001.html

It is great fun to see a more innocent version of the web. We might have a cleaner landscape but there were far fewer indexed pages 10 years ago. 1,326,920,000 pages indexed in 2001 compared to 8,000,000,000 pages indexed in 2008.

Here are a few 2001 search results to make you smile:

Credit Crunch

iPhone

facebook

3 mobile

put

Initial Thoughts On Google Chrome

2008-09-09T10:59:03+01:00

After 24 hours of using Chrome, we thought it would be useful to review it against Firefox and IE and to give further insight about the possible future of Google Chrome.

As many other blogs have reported, the speed of a page loading is amazing in comparison to IE or Firefox. This is to do with the currently unique way a page loads. It is this, that currently will increase user market share (although Firefox claim their 3.1 version will beat Chrome in speed upon release).

Other benefits are the fact that the browser seems to occupy more of your screen, having done away with the traditional toolbar running along the top. Additionally the homepage has a most visited webpages overview on there. This is cosmetically a nice function.

Other areas where Google chrome, will perceive to do well is the 'Incognito' mode a user can use. As the screenshot shows; no cookies are dropped on their machine. This appeals to the average users paranoia about data collection.

What it means for our clients and advertisers, is yet another barrier to collect conversion data. If the Google browser takes off, this will have a detrimental effect on online campaigns where conversions from click to purchase are counted and media bought on a figure ROI.

Other drawbacks include, no siverlight functionality (Microsoft's version of Flash), no plug-in extensions and many a site is still struggling to display in firefox and Safari, let alone Chrome.

However there does seem a big benefit to an advertiser moving forward. When searching for a brand, a Chrome user enters their search in the web bar and it auto completes the brand name you are typing, as well as the address. For instance this screen shot on the term 'ITV'.

A lot of paid search money is spent on brand terms, as they are high converting terms and therefore there needs to be as many access points to the brand website, on a search results page as possible. Chrome eliminates this need. Therefore a consumer who cannot be bothered to enter the URL to find a brand website, no longer needs to search on a search engine. With less search engine results being displayed, the traffic to the brand website will increase, while brand paid traffic will decrease. A big plus to the search market and advertisers at the detriment of Google adwords!

How long this feature will continue in its current form will be interesting to monitor, as Google could loose millions as a result of their technological advancement. One thing is for sure this browser is still in beta mode and therefore alot of the drawbacks will be fixed. There could be a new browser on the scene.

IOC allowing Olympic highlights on YouTube

2008-08-07T10:26:52+01:00

Source: Techdigest

Believe it or not, and after lots of hype - good and bad - the Olympics starts tomorrow...and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced that it will be showing news and sports highlights from the Beijing Olympics in countries where no broadcaster has exclusive rights. The Video on Demand service will be available on a YouTube channel.

That means some 75 countries, including India and Nigeria, will be able to watch the best bits of the Games, as determined by the IOC. The channel will be "geo-blocked" so that those of us in countries where a TV broadcaster is already showing coverage of the Games won't be able to access the YouTube footage.

Since the BBC will be near-exhaustively covering the Games, official YouTube clips won't be available in the UK..but it means that for the first time in Olympic history they will have complete global online coverage - so now you know where to go to catch up on all the Olympic news if you're out of the country for any reason!

Click here to read the whole article

Tween research

2008-08-06T14:55:38+01:00

Source: Chiefmarketer.com

We don't often come across research on tweens (10-14 year olds) but DoubleClick Performics have just released their findings on tweens' online search and purchase behaviors across 10 different product categories. Main learnings were:

Tweens consume information through many channels, but the Internet leads: When asked how much time they spent with various media types, 83% said they spend at least an hour per day online, and 68% reported at least an hour per day watching TV. Radio, magazines and newspapers came in much lower with 29%, 10% and five percent indicating they spent an hour per day with these channels.
Nearly half of respondents go online many times per day (more than three), and 87% usually spend at least a half hour each time. Looking closer at this time spent online, the survey found:
· 72% have a profile on at least one social networking site
· 54% have a MySpace profile
· 35% have a Facebook profile
· 45% have some other social networking profile
· 64% visit social networking sites at least once per day
· 34% spend four or more hours per week on social networking sites
Tweens reported varying levels of involvement across product categories, but apparel was the most popular: On average, tweens shopped for apparel 8.2 times over the past six months.
Other popular product categories for tweens included electronics (4.5 times) and home furnishings (4.4 times).

Click here to find out more

Web speeds to increase 10 fold?

2008-08-04T17:16:17+01:00

Source: BBC Click

Most of you would have noticed your online consumption change over the last few years, from it being purely text based to more video based with the rise of YouTube and on demand services. This is leading to more and more pressure on bandwiths and with more people going online and consuming more content, the internet can't really carry on as it currently stands. Well, good news is on its way as researchers have come up with a way to solve all this, click here to find out how this is all going to be possible and how wireless and mobile internet could also look like in the future.

Google, Knol and SEO

2008-08-04T16:32:13+01:00

So, after Google's 'Knol' was announced at the end of last year, it finally launched in beta on the 23rd July. For those of you who haven't heard about it, it's basically Google's version of Wikipedia; with differences including that all contributors to the Knol project must sign in first with a Google account and are supposed to state their real names. If permission is given, Google will check the veracity of the name information by credit card or phone. Google believes that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. Another point of differnce is that whilst Wikipedia articles are written collectively under a "neutral point of view" policy, Knol will highlight personal expertise by emphasizing authorship and will contain the personal opinions of the author.

More information and more opinion on more topics must surely be a good thing...however, there has been debate on whether Google search results can remain neutral because of possible conflict of interest - what's to stop Google from ranking Knol results high up on the SEO listings and remain unbiased? Now that it has launched, these concerns seem to have become reality, and this mashable article highlights the issues quite well...it remains to be seen how the SEO landscape on Google will change once Knol is out of beta and at full capacity.

Source: Wikipedia, mashable

Google finally improves its flash crawling abilities

2008-07-28T12:42:01+01:00

For too long Google and the other search engines have had difficulty crawling flash sites. When we mean 'crawling the site', the purpose of this is to display a good summary of the site in natural search results. Crawling a site well also means that you achieve your minimum cost per click in paid search; which in turn makes paid search marketers happy.

For those un-intitated to the problem, here's some more information: many retailers have very visual products that require their websites to sell a concept, as well as have the facts that consumers are looking for. They use their site as an online brochure rather than as an online stock inventory.

A prime example is the 'automotive' vertical. Traditionally, these sites are very flash heavy due to their complex interactive and visual nature. However, due to this heavy flash nature the engines can not crawl the content of the site well. Yahoo still has this problem. A simple search for 'vw golf', returns the following:

There is no description in the snippet and the ranking of some links can be lower down than they should be. With the quality score being so important in paid search, the word content on the page is very important to maintain low cost per clicks - and as you can see, Yahoo has not found any words.

Now Google has been the first to improve the crawling of these sites:

Let us hope the other engines follow suit.

Google Launches Affiliate Network

2008-07-28T11:52:09+01:00

http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/index.html

This has been on the agenda for years and, for the moment, will not impact the market too significantly. Previous attempts have been launched (Google checkout, froogle), which caused an initial stir but didn't materialise into the 'ValueClick killer' (http://www.revenews.com/samharrelson/google-launches-affiliate-network/)

Obviously, the acquisition of DoubleClick who own affiliate network 'Performics' (Top 3 network in the US) has enabled Google to now distribute a ready-made product and to a certain extent not own the servicing, which is where issues can lie.

Here's some more info but please get in touch if you need any more information and we'd be happy discuss.

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/06/we-are-retiring-pay-per-action-beta.html

Which Search Engine?

2008-06-19T10:36:36+01:00

We are all guilty of being fiercely loyal to our search engine of choice. We might veer off the chosen one every now and again but generally speaking, we do not tend to reset our homepages.

We therefore decided to trial all the three search engines in the market, to understand the pros and cons of each one. The team spent at least a week using the agreed search engine and noted down any obvious differences...

Live.com

Live.com is the rebranded MSN search engine.
It boasts the largest image collection of any search engine and promises some exciting new features in the future such as a new video preview tool that shows highlights of a long video, in case for instance with a TV show, where the opening credits can be similar.

Benefits
We found the image search good and had a great functionality, like the ability to place images on a clipboard.
The natural search results for products tended to be good as well, as there seemed to be less unwarranted SEO committed by firms than the other two main search engines.

Drawbacks
The search engine spider does not crawl often enough, meaning topical results were not included. They are looking at ways to improve this.
Images and Videos are held on separate tags. This is fine if a user is looking for an image or video but not if they are not aware of a video being available. A good example where “universal” search results would be good is when looking for help on a Microsoft programme like ‘Excel’. It would be nice to know that there is a Youtube tutorial available that guides you through the solution to your problem (which Google shows).

Yahoo.co.uk

Yahoo, has not made any changes recently to its search engine capabilities. However it is the portal element it has concentrated on.

Benefits
As most of the Interaction team were used to Google. Yahoo was a refreshing change. The information on the home page was constantly updated and gave insights into news stories and offers that we would have not looked for. We came out of this trial feeling that we had learnt a lot more about the world!

Drawbacks
Again the spider does not crawl the web often enough.
Image and video search is lacking all together.

Google.co.uk

Google with nearly 90% UK market share does not need much introduction. However with its focus on “universal search” and I-Google option it continues to push the capabilities of a search engine.

Benefits:
I-Google is fantastic as it turns the search engine into a portal that the user customises.
Universal Search is also great for presenting image, text and video results.
The webcrawler brings up topical results within 48 hours. A fantastic advantage over the competitors.

Drawbacks:
As the most popular search engine, Google is victim of its own success. The search results can be artificially unreliable due to “black-hat” SEO.

Affiliate Window answers retailers' Facebook wishes

2008-06-13T09:41:50+01:00

Although affiliate applications for social network sites are nothing new, to date, they have struggled to really monetise themselves. However Affiliate Window have become the first UK network to create an application to be used on a potentially viral scale. Users will be able to create a 'wishlist' and share with friends from the 4 million products available.

The unique aspect comes from the payment model, which is paid in two parts:"The Reward is split into two equal parts," the company tells users. "The first part is payable to the friend who recommends the application and the second part is payable to the friend who recommends the item.

Click here to read the full article