Search News

What’s Happening In Google Maps

You have to admit, Google does an amazing job with Google Maps.  How Mapquest is still is business is beyond me.  Did you know they also now have Streetview?  Google has been and continues to be the leader in online maps and directions.  This week, the search engine rolled out some interesting features across it’s maps.

About a month ago, Google gave Map-goes an option to enable a few beta features.  Amoung those that make the list, a click and zoom tool which allows you to zoom into a certain area by creating a simple box with your mouse.  The feature it great esspecially if you want to zoom into a certain area faster.  Another feature Google released is known as Aerial Imagery.  It gives you  “rotatable, high-resolution overhead” images.  The downpart to this, is that it’s only avaliable in certain areas, but the good news is that the search engine giant plans on explaning that in the near future.  (more…)

Next Time You Travel To…Google, Kansas

So I have to say as spring break approaches Kansas doesn’t come to mind as a place to visit…..ever.  I mean what do they have there?  As far as I know, the only thing from Kansas is a dog named Toto.  I mean, I hate to say it but Nebraska sounds more fun, since they have a whole museum dedicated to Kool-Aid. 

However, the city of Topeka is trying to bring in not just tourists, but also bring in the major search engine Google.  And to entise everyone, Topeka’s mayor, Bill Bunten has renamed Topeka, the states capital, to Google, Kansas for the month of March.  (more…)

Facebook Passes Yahoo As 2nd Most Visited Site

We already know that Internet users are spending most of their time on Facebook more than any other site.  Despite the time spent on the site, Google continues to dominate the web as the most visited site on the web. 

However a new report from Compete.com shows that Facebook has now taken out Yahoo as the second most visited site on the web.  At one time Yahoo dominated the web for sure, until about 2 years ago when Google stole the spot from the company.  And since then, most of Yahoo’s traffic has slowly been declining, as Facebook’s rapidly increasing.  (more…)

Google Optimistic About Future In China

It’s been nearly a month since the battle between Google & China went public, and for the first time since the insident Google co-founder Sergey Brin said at the TED conference on Friday that he’s optimistic that Google will not end up pulling out of China because of the recent hacking and censorship issues. 

“I’m an optimist. I want to find a way to work within the Chinese system and provide more and better information,” he said. “I think a lot of people think I’m naive, and that may be true.” (more…)

Google Turning Into A Social Media

At about 10:30AM PST, Bradley Horowitz, Google’s Vice President for product Management announced in a press conference that Google will open it’s own social media known as Google Buzz.

Horowitz brought on Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Buzz, to actually introduce the product.  Google Buzz with be integrated with G-mail accounts as Jackson called it “an entire new world.”

He first introduced 5 key’s that make up Google Buzz.  Those being, auto-following, a fast sharing experience, both public and private sharing, inbox integration and finally, “just the good stuff.” (more…)

Getting Tweets Ranked In Google

A few months ago, both Google & Bing launched deals with Twitter that would allow tweets to appear in real-time search results.  And while many of us try to compete to get our websites ranked higher for the search engines, now we must also fight to get our tweets ranked higher too. 

Luckily Google is no longer keeping that a secret.  In a recent article, journalist David Talbot scored an interview with Google’s Amit Singhal.  Singhal admitted that like Bing, ranks are based on the number of followers you have, however, it’s not necessarily how many actually followers you have, it’s how reputable those followers actually are. (more…)

China Bites Back At Google

The Chinese government is fighting back against Google’s comments yesterday, saying they would no longer filter out information on their website. 

“The Chinese government administers the Internet according to law and we have explicit stipulations over what content can be spread on the Internet,” said Jiang Yu, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman.  (more…)

Google Gains Lead, Bing & Yahoo Fall Behind

The most recent report from Nielsen, shows that Google continues to dominate the search engines, but the most surprising news, is that they are gaining more users. The report documents the top 10 search engines for the month of December.  Google took 67.3% of those searches.  That’s nearly 6.7 billion people searching Google, compare that to only 1.4 billion on Yahoo!, which followed Google with only 14.4%.   That’s a drop from November, when Yahoo took roughly 15.3% of searches.  That’s close to an entire percent, which is drastic in terms of search.  Bing dropped to 9.9% of all searches, which is down from 10.7% in November.  It looks like those users went over to Google, since in November Google only had 65% of searches in November but jumped 2.3%.  (more…)

Google May Leave China

It seems like the world’s most used search engine, maybe leaving the country with the most people.  Google announced late Tuesday afternoon, that after much thought the company is working closely with the Chinese government but may close down it’s website in the country very soon.

“The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard,” said Google’s David Drummond, “and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today.” (more…)

Rumor Billboard Ad’s To Go Digital On Google

Google will not confirm but if the rumors are true this could be a new way for online advertisers.  Reports from both RedWriteWeb & CNet say that ads could soon cover billboards on Google Maps. 

The concept is interesting, just think about it.  Right now, if we were go onto Google Maps, we would pass millions of billboards, without dated opening movie dates, telling us what channel to watch for our local news, and which car dealership is nearby.  Now those billboards can be replaced with real time advertisements.  This would allow advertisers to be able to select any location on Google Maps for Google Ad’s. (more…)