According to Nielsen’s December data Google share of US searches was 67.3 percent, an increase of 1.9 percent from the previous month. Yahoo’s share dropped .9 percent to 14.4 percent and Bing’s share dropped .8 percent to 9.9 percent. Nielsen also reported that there were 9.9 billion searches performed during the month.
Category: Google
Google Expands Personalized Search Results to All Users
For several years Google has provided users signed into a Google account the option of receiving search results that have customized based on their previous search queries. On Friday Google announced that it will expand Personalized Search to all users. With Personalized Search, Google customizes search results in attempt to show results that are the most relevant to a user’s query when there query has multiple meanings. It will also show websites that the user frequently clicks on in search result higher in the search results. For users not signed into a Google account the customized results will be based on the searches linked with a web browser cookie. This means that a multiple users using the same web browser will receive customized results based on a combination of all users’ searches and users using multiple devices will receive different customized results on each device. The customization is based on up to the last 180 days of searches.
Google to Add Notification of Outdated Applications to Webmaster Toolsations
Google will soon begin sending messages via the Webmaster Tools alerting webmaster that “content management systems (CMSs), forum/bulletin-board applications, stat-trackers”, and other web applications on their websites are out of date. This is an expansion of the alerts that Google began sending in October of 2008 to alert webmaster that they were running versions of applications that were known to contain security vulnerabilities. The notification will be limited to applications that Google is able to determine the version that is on the website by parsing the source code of the website’s pages. While some applications, most notably WordPress, include this information there are many other high profile applications including Joomla and Drupal do not. In their post announcing the feature, Google proposed that developers begin including a generator meta tag that includes the version number of the application in the web pages generated by the application.
Google Starts Incorporating Breadcrumb Links into Search Results
Google has announced that they have begun to incorporate website’s breadcrumb links into some search results. Breadcrumbs links are used to aid users in navigating the hierarchy of a website. For a small number of websites, Google will trim the URL shown under a search results snippet to just the domain name and then display breadcrumb links. Depending on how many how many and how long the breadcrumbs are they may exclude some of them. Google said that the intent of the feature was to provide “useful information about the page” and to allow users to “easily access information on broader topics”. They also said that they hope to expand the feature use in the future.
Google Adds Malware Warnings to Mobile Search Results
Earlier this week Google began labeling results that are suspected of containing malware in the mobile version of Google search. Since August of 2006 Google has been labeling suspected websites and blocking access to them in their standard search results. The only change made for the mobile version is that label placed under the result states “This site may harm your device.”. The message in the standard search uses the word computer instead of device.
Google Announces That It Will Add Twitter Posts to Search Results
Just a few hours after Microsoft announced that it would be adding Twitter tweets to its search results, Google has announced that they will be doing the same. Unlike Microsoft, which released a beta version of their Twitter search along with their announcement, Google will introduce a product that “showcases how tweets can make search better” in the coming months. The move by both search engines is part of their strategies to integrate more real-time information into their search results.
Mobile Searches on Google Grew 30 Percent in Q3
During Google’s third quarter earnings calls Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt reported that Google had a 30 percent quarter-over-quarter increase in mobile searches during the quarter. Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s Senior Vice President of Product Management, said that smart phone adoption was a driver of growth and that mobile search has grown twice as fast as desktop search during the last year in Japan and some other markets. Schmidt also reported that Google made over 120 “search quality improvements” during the quarter.
Google Adds Crawler View and Malware Details to Webmaster Tools
Google has added two tools to their Webmaster Tools service under the “Labs” label.
The Fetch as Googlebot tool shows the contents of the page and HTTP response headers that Google receives for a specified page. Being able to see exactly what Google sees, when it requests a page, can be helpful in diagnosing problems that can cause Google to have trouble crawling and indexing websites. It can also help in diagnosing hacks that modify the content of pages when Google requests them.
When Google has detected that a website is infected with malware, the new Malware details tool provides samples of the malicious code that Google has detected. The types of code that Google will provide samples of include “injected HTML tags, JavaScript, or embedded Flash files” and the tool will also identify if URLs from the website are being redirected to another website that contains malware.
Google uses the “Labs” label to identify features that are still in development and that “may break at times.”
Google Expands Search Results Filtering Tool
Google has announced that they have added a number of new features to Search Options, their search results filtering tool included in the search results page. The tool already provided a number of options for filtering results based on the when the pages were created and now can filter results from the past hour and from a specified date range. Results can now also be filtered to include more or fewer shopping sites. Users who are signed into a Google Account and Web History enabled can have results filtered to include or exclude pages they have already visited. The Search Options tool was released in May.
Google Adds Links to Sections of Web Pages In Search Results
Google has announced that they have begun to include links to section of web pages in their search results. The new links come in two forms, the first form provides a set links to section of the web page relevant to the search query and the second form provides a link to jump to specific section of the page relevant to the search query. When these links are shown is determined algorithmically, but Google has provided information on what will provides the best chance for these links being shown. Anchor are needed in the web page so that sections of the page can be linked to, the anchors should use descriptive names, and there should be a “table of contents” which links to the anchors.