Google’s evolving user interface and its impact on Paid and Natural Search

Google began life, as did all its contemporaries, as a search engine that simply found and sorted the Internet’s textual content. As technology progressed and consumer activities online became more sophisticated, the need naturally arose for search engines to not only find, categorise, and retrieve simple textual content, but to also find, categorise and retrieve more complex data types, such as images and video content. Now in 2007, Google’s search results are augmented with search-query-dependant news, videos, images, maps, stock quotes, music album info, weather, scholarly articles, blog posts, UPS/Fed-Ex tracking numbers, and more. Providing search results that incorporate these new data types has impacted on Google’s User Interface (UI), representing the biggest aesthetic and functional changes to its UI in its history. Enter ‘Integrated Search’ Google calls the augmentation of its search results with these different data types ‘Integrated Search’. In the screenshot below you’ll find one of simplest... Read full article

Google News – getting in and getting optimised

By Andreas Pouros Managing Director, SEO What is Google News? Google News collates stories from over 10,000 news sources from around the world, automatically arranging them to present the most relevant news first. Google News is relatively unique in comparison to other news services in that Google’s news results are compiled exclusively by computer algorithms, with no human intervention. There is also no political bias, unless that bias is accidental and no deliberate censorship unless required by law. Yahoo, in contrast, is heavily policed and editorially controlled by human editors. Being instantly accessible from Google’s default web interface, Google News represents a significant potential traffic stream if a site manages to get included as a News partner, and if it can efficiently and effectively feed Google with newsworthy and optimised articles on subjects and themes that people are actively searching for. Furthermore, syndicating your content via the major PR newswires... Read full article