Tuesday 24 January 2012

Focus On The User: Facebook, Twitter & Myspace’s Version Of Google

web browsers to take the “Search Plus Your World” out of their Google search results. Granted, Google has its own toggle to turn the feature on and off from the search results page, but this goes further.
First, here’s a video about it:
On FocusOnTheUser.org, where you can get the bookmarklet, it says, “This proof of concept was built by some engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, in consultation with several other social networking companies. We are open-sourcing the code so that anyone may use it or make it even better.”
John Battelle has a bit more of the story, however, after visiting Facebook’s offices. He talked to Ross, who is one of the creators of Firefox. Battelle writes, “It was a simple hack, he said, some code he had thrown together in response to the whole Google+ tempest.”
“After Blake showed me his work, we had a lively discussion about the implications of Facebook actually releasing such a tool,” writes Battelle. “I mean, it’s one thing for a lone hacktivist to do this, it’s quite another for a member of the Internet Big Five to publicly call Google out. Facebook would need to vet this with legal, with management (this clearly had to pass muster with Mark Zuckerberg), and, I was told, Facebook wanted to reach out to others – such as Twitter – and get their input as well.”
Apparently that strategy went through, since Twitter and MySpace are also getting some credit.
The bookmarket actually says “Don’t Be Evil,” a reference to Google’s proclaimed philosophy.
Don't Be Evil
An interesting snippet from the FAQ page at FocusOnTheUser.org:
Q: I thought Google needed a deal and more info from social sites to integrate them into its new social features?
A: This is clearly not true. The bookmarklet never accesses any server or API outside of google.com. The information has already been indexed and ranked by Google.
Focus on the User
Do you think the bookmarklet makes Google’s results better? Better than Google’s own toggle? Let us know what you think in the comments.
About Chris Crum
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237 StumbleUpon: Crum Google: +Chris Crum 
resource:
http://www.webpronews.com/focus-on-the-user-facebook-twitter-myspaces-version-of-google-2012-01

YouTube Now Has Over 4 Billion Video Views A Day


Whatever you were just doing in the very second it took you to start reading this sentence, an entire hour of video was uploaded to YouTube. And yes, another hour of video was uploaded per each subsequent second after that original one. And so on.
That’s the big news from YouTube today, who announced on their blog earlier that they are now clocking 60 hours of uploaded video every minute. That is, in a word, unreal.
YouTube put together a fun interactive visualization over at onehourpersecond.com that shows you what the rest of the world does in the time it took to upload some videos. One of my favorites in spite of the lack of sense it makes to me: “In 38 minutes of uploads to YouTube, our ostrich is still running at full speed, traveling 98,040 miles.”
Additionally, they also calculate that they’ve exceeded four billion video views worldwide every single day. They put it in perspective: “That’s up 25 percent in the last eight months and the equivalent of more than half the world’s population watching a video every day, the same number as there are US $1 bills in circulation, the same as number of years since there was water on Mars…it’s a big number, and you’re making it bigger every day.” Lots and lots of videos happening in your face, humanity.
And because video is their thing, of course you knew they’d have a video to mark this milestone:
In order to mark my own observance of YouTube’s achievement, I’m going to share some of my favorite videos with you here. Hope you like them as much as I do.
About Drew Bowling
Drew Bowling is a staff writer for WebProNews. He never met an all-you-can-eat buffet he didn't like. Twitter: @bentfortherent Google: +Drew Bowling
resource:http://www.webpronews.com/youtube-now-has-4-billion-views-a-day-2012-01


Friday 6 January 2012

Facebook Co-Sponsors Next GOP Debate


With the Iowa Republican Caucus in the record books – and Michelle Bachmann’s campaign in the history books – the nation sets its sights on the New Hampshire Republican Primary on January 10.
Will Mitt Romney keep his 25% momentum rolling? Right now he actually polls at 47%, more than double his nearest rival.
Will flavor-of-the-week Rick Santorum still be relevant by then?
Will Jon Huntsman’s efforts in that state pay off with a surprise?
Will Ron Paul’s never-say-die base pull off a big upset?
Will Newt Gingrich show up? Or will there be a book signing schedule conflict?
Before the Primary on Tuesday, the remaining candidates square off in yet another debate on Saturday the 7th. This one is staged jointly by NBC’s “Meet the Press” and Facebook.
Taking advantage of the nature of social media, the debate will feature days of opportunity for viewers to submit questions, chat up each other about the candidates, and watch videos.
Facebook is highlighting how the candidates use social media, specifically Facebook of course, to interact with voters and get their message out.

Their “U.S. Politics on Facebook” page talks through how the candidates are doing.
The Facebook presence for Meet the Press is pushing the upcoming debate heavily.
As for the event itself. it will take place at 9:00 a.m. ET in Concord, NH. Of course, Facebook will carry a live stream, and video will be available on Facebook afterward.
About Mike Tuttle
Husband. Daddy. Musician. Theater junkie. Google+

resource:http://www.webpronews.com/facebook-co-sponsors-next-gop-debate-2012-01

Google Algorithm Changes Announced


As you may know, Google has been putting out a monthly list of algorithm changes it has been making, as part of the company’s initiative to be “more transparent”. Google will never put out the entire secret sauce of its algorithm (without a court order, at least), so webmasters can at least be thankful that they’re being thrown a handful of bones in the form of a monthly list.
In the latest edition of the series, on the company’s Inside Search Blog, they highlight 21 changes made in the month of December. The list goes as follows:
  • Image Search landing page quality signals. [launch codename “simple”] This is an improvement that analyzes various landing page signals for Image Search. We want to make sure that not only are we showing you the most relevant images, but we are also linking to the highest quality source pages.
  • More relevant sitelinks. [launch codename “concepts”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We improved our algorithm for picking sitelinks. The result is more relevant sitelinks; for example, we may show sitelinks specific to your metropolitan region, which you can control with your location setting.
  • Soft 404 Detection. Web servers generally return the 404 status code when someone requests a page that doesn’t exist. However, some sites are configured to return other status codes, even though the page content might explain that the page was not found. We call these soft 404s (or “crypto” 404s) and they can be problematic for search engines because we aren’t sure if we should ignore the pages. This change is an improvement to how we detect soft 404s, especially in Russian, German and Spanish. For all you webmasters out there, the best practice is still to always use the correct response code.
  • More accurate country-restricted searches. [launch codename “greencr”] On domains other than .com, users have the option to see only results from their particular country. This is a new algorithm that uses several signals to better determine where web documents are from, improving the accuracy of this feature.
  • More rich snippets. We improved our process for detecting sites that qualify for shopping, recipe and review rich snippets. As a result, you should start seeing more sites with rich snippets in search results.
  • Better infrastructure for autocomplete. This is an infrastructure change to improve how our autocomplete algorithm handles spelling corrections for query prefixes (the beginning part of a search).
  • Better spam detection in Image Search. [launch codename “leaf”] This change improves our spam detection in Image Search by extending algorithms we already use for our main search results.
  • Google Instant enhancements for Japanese. For languages that use non-Latin characters, many users use a special IME (Input Method Editor) to enter queries. This change works with browsers that are IME-aware to better handle Japanese queries in Google Instant.
  • More accurate byline dates. [launch codename “foby”] We made a few improvements to how we determine what date to associate with a document. As a result, you’ll see more accurate dates annotating search results.
  • Live results for NFL and college football. [project codename “Live Results”] We’ve added new live results for NFL.com and ESPN’s NCAA Football results. These results now provide the latest scores, schedules and standings for your favorite football teams.
  • Improved dataset for related queries. We are now using an improved dataset on term relationships to find related queries. We sometimes include results for queries that are related to your original search, and this improvement leads to results from more relevant related queries.
  • Related query improvements. [launch codename “lyndsy”] Sometimes we fetch results for queries that are related to the original query but have fewer words. We made several changes to our algorithms to make them more conservative and less likely to introduce results without query words.
  • Better lyrics results. [launch codename “baschi”, project codename “Contra”] This change improves our result quality for lyrics searches.
  • Tweak to +1 button on results page. As part of our continued effort to deliver a beautifully simple user experience across Google products, we’ve made a subtle tweak to how the +1 button appears on the results page. Now the +1 button will only appear when you hover over a result or when the result has already been +1’d.
  • Better spell correction in Vietnamese. [project codename “Pho Viet”] We launched a new Vietnamese spelling model. This will help give more accurate spelling predictions for Vietnamese queries.
  • Upcoming events at venues. We’ve improved the recently released places panel for event venues. For major venues, we now show up to three upcoming events on the right of the page. Try it for [staples center los angeles] or [paradise rock club boston].
  • Improvements to image size signal. [launch codename “matter”] This is an improvement to how we use the size of images as a ranking signal in Image Search. With this change, you’ll tend to see images with larger full-size versions.
  • Improved Hebrew synonyms. [launch codename “SweatNovember”, project codename “Synonyms”] This update refines how we handle Hebrew synonyms across multiple languages. Context matters a lot for translation, so this change prevents us from using translated synonyms that are not actually relevant to the query context.
  • Safer searching. [launch codename “Hoengg”, project codename "SafeSearch"] We updated our SafeSearch tool to provide better filtering for certain queries when strict SafeSearch is enabled.
  • Encrypted search available on new regional domains. Google now offers encrypted search by default on google.com for signed-in users, but it’s not the default on our other regional domains (eg: google.fr for France). Now users in the UK, Germany and France can opt in to encrypted search by navigating directly to an SSL version of Google Search on their respective regional domains: https://www.google.co.ukhttps://www.google.de andhttps://www.google.fr.
  • Faster mobile browsing. [launch codename “old possum”, project codename “Skip Redirect”] Many websites redirect smartphone users to another page that is optimized for smartphone browsers. This change uses the final smartphone destination url in our mobile search results, so you can bypass all the redirects and load the target page faster.
The image search landing page quality signal change is quite interesting. We ran a great article on optimizing for image search by Michael Gray last year, and that’s full of tips to consider for this less talked about element of SEO, but the adjustments, as unspecific as they may be, reflect Google’s Panda-style focus on quality in search results. This, to me, is saying they’re applying same kind of thinking they do with regular web search to other parts of Google, more than ever before.
Here’s the list of questions Google has presented in the past to consider asking yourself, when evaluating quality.
Note that “better spam detection for image search” is also on the list.
Also note the codenames used throughout the list. Most you probably won’t have to remember like Panda and Caffeine, but it’s still nice to have something to reference for the future.
With regards to the “more rich snippets” item on the list, you may want to check out the series of videos Google recently put out on how to do rich snippets.
Which changes do you think are the most significant? Is your site being helped or hurt by changes?
About Chris Crum
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237 StumbleUpon: Crum Google: +Chris Crum

resource:http://www.webpronews.com/google-algorithm-changes-2012-01