Tuesday, September 01st, 2009
Author: Creative SEO
Google Suggest is a simple yet powerful service which suggests a list of popular keywords, when inputting characters for a keyword search, within a search input box. As more characters are added the suggested search terms are refined to offer more relevant list of keywords based on the additional characters. This is not new technology and is currently being used as part of the Google Toolbar. What is new is the introduction of the service within the Google News website.
Google have adjusted the algorithm to feature only news related keywords and terms. The new feature is available in multiple Google News Languages including; English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.
Google’s immense popularity has resulted in Google News having an industry leading presence in the News Industry. In a shock move to promote “Citizen” Reporters, Google owned YouTube launches a YouTube Reporters’ Centre encouraging members of the public to become active Journalists. What impact will this have on the Newspaper and News Industry and is this the beginning of the end for traditional journalism?
Google News aggregates news stories from all over the world, stories are published within minutes making Google News an extremely powerful channel for news and communication. One of Google News’ unique properties is that news stories can be from leading news agencies or public blogs. Google actively promotes important news content from any source and does not discriminate from user to user. As long as the story is unique and important Google will actively promote, index and list.
YouTube have created the YouTube Reporters’ Centre for one unique reason, to actively help and promote the reporting of news from around the world by members of the public. The centre offers help and advice including videos from internationally renowned journalists including CBS’ Katie Couric, New York Times’ Nick Kristof and legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward.
The concept of real news stories from real members of the public from all around the world does have its appeal. The potential network alone would be huge and the actual stories would not be governed by political spin or government censorship. If this technology was to grow in popularity the potential political waves could be huge. Members of the public from all over the world could provide news stories based on real life experiences, but there is a problem. News agencies have always taken a potentially impartial view of a News story, effectively reporting both sides without bias or judgement. Will public based news stories be opinion based and potentially not offer an impartial overview of the story itself?
News agencies have nothing to fear from this new technology, if “Citizen” based reporting was to increase in popularity news agencies could only benefit from the growth. Although the role of the news agency would change, more time would be spent aggregating news stories and piecing together different reports from individual reporters on the same news topic. Effectively editing “Citizen” based news to provide a more appealing and relevant story to the news agency users.
Citizen based reporting offers an exciting opportunity for the news industry to evolve and grow with the increased popularity of the internet. What the future holds has yet to be written, but with Google’s immense power and exposure “Citizen” based reporting is sure to grow in popularity.
Google has launched two new products, as part of the Google Labs concept, both still experimental and in testing. The first feature is known as “Similar Image” and the Second is a new Timeline to the current Google News Database.
Similar image is a unique system which allows the user to search for images which are similar in photographic composition based on the image itself and not the title or text of the image. It allows the user to sort through image results more efficiently by simply clicking on the “Similar Image” link. This allows the user to be displayed more contextually relevant images which are based on the picture composition itself and not on the title and description. Effectively the technology is able to visualise the image subject, understanding the context and composition.
“Image search is an inherently hard problem to solve because it is a visual problem and explains why people say an image is worth a thousand words because it is so difficult to describe,” said Ms Malpani.
This new technology could potentially have a wide implication within the SEO community if successfully tested. Imagine if Google was able to spider a website and use this technology to read images and understand the exact context of a web site, this potentially would be the one step closer to Google being able to understand how to index a website based on a “human” interpretation of the site and its content. Although this will be a long time in the future the possibilities are extremely exciting.
Google News Timeline is another tool which has been designed to provide Google users with more relevant results. It’s the brainchild of the original Apple Macintosh development team. Timeline will display a historical timeline of news articles by date, week, month and year and will include Videos, Images and articles. The search can also be refined by publication type, including magazine, newspaper, blog, movies and music. The new features potentially provide a very valuable wealth of information which will be free to access.
Over the past few weeks the search marketing industry has been buzzing by the news that Google now prefers brands, giving big brand sites an extra boost in ranking. The changes took effect in the recent “Vince’s” Google Algorithm update.
Matt Cutts, head of Googles Webspam team, recorded the following Youtube video for Googles webmasters Central channel explaining exactly how the changes will effect search results.
Matt Cutts stated that the “simple change” is not so much about brands, but about elements that go into a brand, including “trust, authority, reputation, PageRank, high quality.”
“I don’t think of it as putting more weight on brands. We really don’t think about ‘brands’ in Search Quality that much,” says Matt “It’s not that we try to always return brands. We try to return whatever we think the best results are for users.”
“The net upshot of this change is pretty simple. We try to return high-quality results, we think a lot about trust, reputation, authority, PageRank. And so, what you should be doing doesn’t change: try to make a great site. Try to make it a site that is so fantastic that you become known as an authority in your niche,” Cutts said. “And it doesn’t have to be a big niche. It doesn’t have to be a huge, well known keyword. It can be a smaller niche, and if you’re still the expert, that’s the sort of thing that people are going to want to link to, that they’ll talk about, the sort of thing people really enjoy. Those are the sorts of sites, the experts, that we want to bring back.”
On February 11 2009, 29 MP’s signed an Early Day Motion explaining their concerns about Google’s dominance in the search advertising marketplace. The motion urged ministers to “consider measures to prevent the monopolisation of the online search advertising market.” It has come to light that this year Google has increased its share of the online marketplace to over 90%. The motion was supported by 25 Labour MPs, one Conservative, two Liberal Democrats and a member of the Scottish National Party.
Andrew Dismore, a Labour MP supporting the motion said, “A monopoly is unhealthy, Google cornering the market is not good for competitive pricing or quality of service. The Government should recognise that there is a potential problem.”
“The Competition Commission should draw up recommendations to protect consumers – in this case, the people buying the advertising.”
Is Google suffering from its own success? Google does not set the price of its advertising; the cost is driven and set but the advertiser, bidding for position in an auction style environment. Competition dictates the marketplace and this has long been seen as a fair method of determining ad placement.
“On the internet, competition is literally one click away,” said a Google spokesman. “We have to prove our value to our users and advertisers every day, because if they’re unhappy with Google, there’s nothing preventing them from switching to another search engine.”
