Google Search Engine Archives

So Gabs spotted last week that Google was testing removing the "pages from UK" radio search button at Google UK. He was the only one I saw mention that until now, but I blogged it at Search Engine Land, because I knew it would come up again.

Today, I spotted a thread at Google Web Search Help with complaints from some searchers that Google South Africa is no longer showing the radio button "pages from South Africa" only. They are pretty upset about Google dropping this. Keep in mind, it seems to be a limited test and Google might not go this route.

Here are some screen captures from Gabs:

Google UK With the Country Specific Filter:

Google UK without the Country Specific Filter:

To make up for the lack of the radio button, Google will add a link to the bottom of the search results page that shows: "Show only results for United Kingdom."

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has a searcher asking Google how they can remove a Facebook page from Google. The page has been deleted from Facebook, but it still shows up in the Google Cache.

Googler, Wysz, gave the searcher a detailed explanation of how he can remove this Facebook page. I'll quote him word for word:

In this case, you'll want to do a cache removal request, which does not require the page to return a 404; it just requires that the webmaster modifies the content. While going through the steps documented in the help link below, you'll want to choose "The site owner has modified the page..." option. Make sure you include the correct URL (the Facebook page you mentioned, not the URL of Google's cache) and only mention terms that were on the page but are no longer there. (Don't use "Facebook" as a term, as that is likely still on the page.)

So go to this document to learn more and if you have questions, hit Wyzs up in the thread.

Forum discusison at Google Webmaster Help.

The Google News Blog is asking Google News publications to sign up for the YouTube Partner Program in order to get your videos more exposure.

If you use Google News, you would have noticed that they are playing up YouTube videos. Many of the results contain little YouTube icons, at least for the past month or so, to encourage people to view those videos. Here is a screen shot of how those icons are displayed in Google News:

Since we do weekly videos, I think it might be a good match for this site. Maybe I'll start doing more videos, if they bring in more traffic. We will see.

Right now, Google News only told Google News publishers to apply to the YouTube partner program. What happens afterwards is a bit of a mystery. Google said, "will do a separate review and follow-up about including your videos in Google News." So we are waiting further instructions.

A WebmasterWorld thread is not too happy about this request. One said:

And that's why I prefer Yahoo! News. Too many low quality blogs in there passing as "news".

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Catalyst Group study showed that searchers mostly liked Bing's search interface and results over Google, but would not leave Google because they were familiar with it. TechCrunch covered this study first, where the key findings included:

• Most searchers liked Bing's design and organization layout over Google
• Users felt Bing and Google were equal in returning relevant results, despite the layouts
• Most searchers would continue to use Google, even though they liked Bing better

Here is the chart people are showing:

Here is the full PDF of the study:

Catalyst Group Bing V. Google Usability Study -

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is an interesting conversation taking place at WebmasterWorld on the topic of page one results versus page two results. Senior member, Whitey, asks the question, should webmasters begin preparing their sites to rank well on page two over page one?

Why would anyone want to do this? Well, some webmasters are suggesting that the first page results are cluttered and polluted with universal results, including videos, news, local and so on. They think that in many cases, people will begin hitting the page two button and get results from that page.

Personally, if people are clicking over to page two, I am sure Google would be aware of that and pull many of the universal results off page one. The last thing Google wants is to make their searchers click over to page two, even though that means more air time on Google's servers (which means more ads). The reason is, searchers will become frustrated and switch to a competitor, such as Bing. ;-)

I suspect Google has noticed that searchers are clicking over to page two less often now. But I can be wrong and if I am, should you start thinking about page two optimization? Or no point in that?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

An interesting thread at Google Web Search Help started by "anotherDad" tells the story of how a father was shocked to see a pornographic site come up in the Google search results for a search for his daughter's name. He said:

I recently did a Google search on my daughter's name, and was surprised when one of the URL's returned by the search forwards to a porn site when clicked.

What this father quickly learned was that this site that was showing up had a cached page that contained the honor roll of his daughter's class. That cache page contained his daughter's name on it. What was likely happening was that either the URL was taken over by a spammer and Google has not updated their index yet or the page is being cloaked, in a very bad way.

I love this post because it shows how a normal searcher was shocked by this. Let me share his thoughts, after learning a bit on how Google operates.

I originally thought that the Google crawlers might have made a false association. I now believe that the Google crawler had nothing to do with the bad links. I now believe that the offending links between my daughter's name and the porn site were generated by hackers/pranksters or a perhaps by a dodgy webmaster who is alligned with the porn site.

I have a couple of suggestions for Google. I think it is relatively hard to find the corrent Google help pages and the corrent Google help forum for problems like mine. People like me who are not IT professionals don't have all day to look around every pocket of Google (and there's a lot there) for help. I also think that the "contact us" link is misleading. I think it is unusual for a corporation as big and important as Google not to have some kind of customer service for cases like mine.

This searcher is exactly the type of person Google takes seriously and it is always interesting to read posts by them. Especially when it is so close to home and so important to them.

In the end, Google was wrong - his daughter is not a porn star and the father can somewhat rest a bit easier at night.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Update: JohnMu from Google commented below stating there is a special form for this at Google.

The Google News Blog announced a neat new feature where they hyperlink the author's name in the Google News results. If you click on the authors name it basically takes you to a search for articles by that author, i.e. author:name here.

You can find many of my articles at Search Engine Land by searching for author:"Barry Schwartz", which shows me I need to update the feed here to include the author's full name (which I thought I did) this way the Search Engine Roundtable supports this command.

Again, the author search in Google News, I don't believe is new. But the hyperlink is new and makes it more visible.

As a searcher, you can follow your favorite authors, even if they write across several sites and publications via a Google News RSS news alert.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday was not only the day Google posted a Father's Day logo, but it was also the day Google posted logos for the first day of Summer and Winter. Here are those logos:

Google showed the winter/summer logos in countries that do not celebrate Father's Day on June 21st. It showed the winter logo in the Southern Hemisphere and the summer logo in the Northern Hemisphere. The issue is, just like when they showed the first day of Spring logos and ended up showing "First Day of Fall" and not the "First Day of Autumn" in the Southern Hemisphere. This time Google seemed to upset folks from that side of the globe.

A Google Web Search Help thread has posts from people in that hemisphere who are a bit upset. The original poster said it is a bit more complex:

The history of seasons associated with calendars is a bit more complex than just the Winter Solstice. Yes, the Winter Solstice (traditional time of MID-Winter festivals) falls on that date according to our modern calendar. No, that does not make it the beginning of Winter. In civil calendars (at least in Australia), Winter begins with the first of June. Earlier calendars involved the cycles of the moon and counts of days more than they involved the sun (the SOLstice being related to the sun).

In any event, it seems like Google may have ticked off a few people in that hemisphere.

Other than that, I hope you had a nice Father's Day and we decided to launch our "Welcome Summer" theme a day late, in respect for Father's Day. Here it is:

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Sandip Dedhia from BlogsDNA for spotting this and also Vertical Leap noticed a bit later. It Google seems to be truncating the display URL in the search results to a single line. So I decided to test this and it is not always consistently true.

A search for iphone 3.0 os does truncate URLs longer than one line, here is a screen capture. Notice how Google adds ... to shorter the URL in the middle portion (not at the end).

It is very nice how they keep the keywords in the display URL and truncate the less keyword specific components of the URL, i.e. "article/166311."

But when I do a more complex search for site:cgi.ebay.com test, which I know has longer URLs, it seems like those display URLs act like the old way of how Google truncated URLs to two lines:

Notice the ... added to the end of the display URL.

Clearly, the site command search I conducted is more of an advanced search. But I don't think the URL truncating is based on search query but rather the URL structure. For example, if I search for Electrical Test Lead Set you will see two results that have long URLs. One is truncated to a single line and the eBay listing is only truncated to two lines:

Interesting to see how this works, don't you think?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: Google has updated us on Why Google May Shorten Your Long URL in the SERPs.

It appears that Google has quietly removed the file size figure from the search results. I am not sure when this happened, it could have been a year ago, but it did happen.

A year and a half ago I took a screen capture of a search result for my company rustybrick and it had the file size of the page listed in the search results.

Now, the same search, does not return the file size:

A WebmasterWorld thread recently noticed this go missing from the search results. Most people are in favor of removing the file size label, being that many people have broadband connections these days. They rather see other information listed in the search results, such as if the site is in flash or if there is video or PDFs on the page, as opposed to the file size of a given web page.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

About six months ago, we reported Google Drops iPhone Optimized iGoogle: Users Revolt. In short, Google dropped the iPhone flavored iGoogle and iGoogle mobile users were really upset and they were upset for a long time.

Now, Google announced a new iGoogle currently being tested for iPhone and Android users. Here are screen captures:

Much cleaner look for iPhone/Android users, don't you think? The previous look that people were complaining about looked more like this:

Paul from the Google team said in the long Google Web Search Help thread that has the complaints about this:

I know you all are very passionate about iGoogle on the iPhone. I'm happy to announce that we've got a new version for you to check out! See the article linked below for details.

If you'd like to share feedback about the new version, we're collecting it over in the Google Mobile forum.

Not everyone is currently happy with the changes, but I personally think this is a major improvements from six months ago.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

I don't think I wrote about Google's latest search results test. Over the past month or so, Google has been testing images, several of them, directly under a search snippet. BlogStorm first reported the finding back on May 26th, and I covered his finding as Search Engine Land on the same day. Then it seemed to be hitting the Google UK servers as some sort of test.

Well, it seems to have expanded to Google Sweden. Brent Csutoras (a nice guy btw) wrote how they are now seeing the same thing in Google Sweden for a search on [vigselringar] which means wedding rings. Here is a picture taken from his blog, since I cannot reproduce it here:

So keep an eye on this, because it might be coming to Google.com.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Some times I have to point out the most ridiculous threads in the forums. This morning I spotted a thread at Google Web Search Help where a person was complaining that searching in Google Images for the search phrase [nude women] returned some images of (now hold on to your chair now....) nude women!

The individual wrote:

Please take nude & half dressed women off your images if you type in a name for a women alot of half dressed women come up & young kids do not need to see this kind of stuff. if you are looking for a type of bra alot of bad stuff comes up. i did not think google would have this kind of stuff on there website.

What type of search engine would Google be if it did not return images that were related to your search query? If you don't want your children searching Google for nude women, then you should get a good internet filter. Also, Google does a pretty good job filtering out nude women, even for a search of nude women, when the safe filter is set to its highest level.

Sorry for the rant, I am low on sleep.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

This June 6th, Saturday, is known to many as D-Day. June 6, 1944 was the day the D-Day operation began and thousands of soldiers died. It was also the 25th anniversary of the popular computer game, Tetris.

Google decided to celebrate Tetris's 25th anniversary with a Google Doodle, while Bing honored D-Day with a special theme.

Google Tetris Doodle on June 6, 2009:

Bing's D-Day Theme on June 6, 2009:

There are many searchers very upset with Google over celebrating Tetris overing honoring the fallen soldiers. We know that Google often tries to stay away from posting logos for sad events. Google even commented why they don't do a Google Doodle for memorial day (although they did post a Google ribbon this year). Google said in 2008:

Thank you for your note. We understand your interest in seeing a Memorial Day Google logo. If we were to commemorate this holiday, we'd want to express reverence; however, as Google's special logos tend to be lighthearted in nature, this would be a particularly challenging design.

We wouldn't want to create a graphic that could be interpreted as disrespectful in any way.

Should Google have not posted anything? Should Google have posted a D-Day Doodle? Should Google just do whatever they want? Take our poll:

Forum discussion at several forums:

• How can Google recognize Tetris on 6 June instead of D-Day (6 June 1944)?, Google Webmaster Help
• New Google Logo : Celebrating 25 Years of The Tetris Effect, DigitalPoint Forums
• Google start page Tetris on June 6?, Google Web Search Help
• Tetris? New Google Logo, Google Webmaster Help
• WHAT ABOUT D-DAY !!!!!, Google Web Search Help

Starting around mid-May, using Google with the Opera browser was somewhat of a challenge. In short, if you went to Google.com, entered a keyword search and hit the return key, Google would not do anything. You had to manually click on the "Google Search" button with your mouse.

A Google Web Search Help thread has dozens of reports from unhappy Google and Opera users. Google confirmed the bug on June 1st, saying:

A fix is on the way!

Pretty soon, hitting the Enter key after typing a query will perform a Google search in the versions of the Opera browser that you've reported.

I wanted to check in with all the relevant people on my team before giving you the official word on this issue. That explains the delay in my response. I understand the frustration at not hearing sooner about such an important issue. Promise to do better next time (lets hope there won't be a next time!).

Currently, it appears the enter key now works on the search results pages, but searching in Google.com's home page, still requires the click of a mouse.

I believe the bug came with Google's new Google suggest features which launched on the same day the bugs began being reporting.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Google Squared made its debut yesterday as a Google Labs project at google.com/squared. Honestly, it is very cool to use and has a lot of potential. But it is also extremely risky and often shows very poor results.

Google Squared tries to take the unstructured nature of crawling the web and making it into structure data. In some cases it does a nice job, but in many cases, it fails completely or it shows false information.

Since I had a kid recently, I decided to search for jewish schools to send her to. The thing is, it only listed one Jewish school. It should have listed hundreds, but it did not. I understand, possibly the Jewish school web sites are built incredibly poor from a search friendly standpoint that Google could not extract the content from it to include it in a square.

So I moved on and I search for jewish newspapers to potentially advertise RustyBrick's Jewish iPhone Apps in. We got a neat ad by the way. That search worked pretty well.

As a searcher, you need to be aware that Google Squared is useful but you need to know that the data can be seriously flawed. We discussed the dangerous of snippets earlier, and it applies directly here. Over time, I suspect it will get better, but it might take a lot of time.

As an SEO, you should realize that building search friendly sites will only help Google understand your sites and structure it in Google Squared. Is that a good thing? That is up to debate. In any event, if Google remains dominate, which seems like it will for at least the near future, you need to make sure to play their game. Will rich snippets play a roll in this? Maybe. But search engine friendly design, seems key to me.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This week, we had two major stories about Google seriously causing trouble with their search snippets. The first is more obvious with The Register reporting a webmaster was sued for his listing in Google showing something that was not even written on the page. Profy reported that Google Squared, which just went live declared the living to be dead. Yet another case of unstructured search, structuring data into a false fact.

A new Google Webmaster Help thread is now discussing an individual's case of Google showing a search snippet about his company that, he feels, is derogatory about his company. If you do a search for classicexplorations.com in Google, the localsearch.com result shows this:

The owner of the site is very upset that the words "false false false" come before his company name, Classic Explorations. The person contacted LocalSearch.com and LocalSearch.com told him that this was a Google issue. He explained the meta description used for this page did not say the words false on it. LocalSearch.com said that this person needs to Google to fix the issue.

Googler, JohnMu, replied saying:

There is really not much that you could do in a situation like this. For this particular query, the keywords happen to be found on that part of the page, so this is the part that we use for the snippet. I'll pass this on to the team, but I can't guarantee that this will change quickly. In this case, the disadvantage is more on the side of the other website -- users are very unlikely to click on their result (and even more likely to click on your pages :-)), so I wouldn't spend more time worrying about it for the moment.

Clearly this doesn't seem as big of a mistake then declaring a living president as dead or declaring a company went bankrupt when it did not. But this just shows you the power of Google's search snippets and how it can impact a business or truth, as it is known.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Yesterday, I wrote at Search Engine Land about a report from The Register about how a Dutch company was sued over the snippet Google choose for a certain web page of theirs. Let me quickly explain what happened.

A web page on Miljoenhuizen.nl showed up in Google for the search phrase [Zwartepoorte] and [bankrupt]. When you read the snippet under the Miljoenhuizen.nl listing in Google, it basically read that Zwartepoorte was bankrupt. The issue is, Zwartepoorte was not bankrupt. So Zwartepoorte sued Miljoenhuizen.nl to make Google remove the snippet. The thing is, Miljoenhuizen.nl did not say Zwartepoorte was bankrupt, Google took several words on a page and mixed them together to completely make that up.

A Dutch court ordered Miljoenhuizen.nl to change the page, so Google's snippet would change. Miljoenhuizen.nl removed the page and the issue is now resolved.

Personally, I think it is crazy for a court to make such a request. But what do I know? I really want to see how you guys feel about this.

Should webmasters be responsible for what Google shows in their snippets about our web pages? Take our anonymous poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are several reports at Google Custom Search Help and Google Web Search Help with searchers who use Internet Explorer version 6 on their PC and are claiming that Bing has hijacked the search feature in the toolbar.

Several users are claiming that since Bing was launched, even though Google was their default search provider in IE, Bing has taken control. Even worse, when they try to change it back from Bing to Google, it does not work.

Here is one post:

Had Google set as my default browser. woke up this morning to discover that BING had hijacked this feature. cant change it via: search/customize on the IE tool bar. all I get is a windows live page saying Ooops.

There is no official explanation from either Microsoft or Google, as of yet. Matt Cutts of Google did tweet about the issue. A Microsoft individual did tweet back saying the "folks have escalated your concerns."

Forum discussion at Google Custom Search Help and Google Web Search Help.

Update: We have a statement from Microsoft on this issue:

We're aware of the issue with IE6 and Bing and are investigating a solution. This issue is not impacting IE7 or IE8 users. We respect user choice on search providers in IE and all browsers, and designed IE to enable that choice. We will provide an update soon on this issue, and we apologize for any inconvenience it has caused. In the meantime, we encourage customers to upgrade to IE8 here. Alternatively, Firefox users can install the add-in for Bing here.

Update: Microsoft emailed me again at 2:45am on June 3, 2009 to inform me the issue is now resolved with IE6. The issue was server side, so the fix was able to be pushed out remotely to all infected browsers.

When Google's new search options feature went live earlier last month, Google also changed how they handle time based queries.

Back in 2007 Google handled the time based query refinements by appending &as_qdr= to the URL, now Google is using &tbs=qdr: for the same refinement. Let me show you how it works:

To show the pages indexed by Google on this site for the past day, I use the site command and append the past 24 hours refinement.

• Old Way that still works: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:seroundtable.com&as_qdr=d
• New Way: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:seroundtable.com&tbs=qdr:d

So as you can see, both methods still work. Why duplicate the efforts? As Tedster said in a WebmasterWorld thread, it is possible that two different teams at Google worked on the various features and didn't consult each other.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A moderator at WebmasterWorld noticed Google stopped using standard URL redirects in the Google search results to track click events. If you hover over the link, it now appears that Google is just sending you directly to the destination URL, without using any click tracking.

But that is not the case. If you look at the source code, it looks like Google is using some type of JavaScript to track the click.

Here is a sample of the code used:

<a href="http://www.google.com/" class=l onmousedown="return rwt(this,'','','res','4', 'AFQjCNG5-9Jej-ukVeakTgwonqt2narbYg','&sig2=4Lwo00y104At7P9SCT7uXA')">

Moderator, jdMorgan, added that he noticed the JavaScript request going to Google but then it is resulting in a 204-No Content response. But then he noticed a request direct to his server with the same referrer (the same/original search results page).

This appears to be a new way of Google tracking click events in the search results.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

After some testing, Google has finally announced that they will be launching changes to their search suggestions. The key changes include:

(1) Search Ads in Search Suggestions:

(2) Improved "navigational query" support:

(3) Search Suggestions even on search results pages:

(4) No estimated count numbers, as you can see from the screen shots above. Here is a screen shot of the old way:

(5) Search suggestions are now personalized based on your search history and other factors:

(6) Google bolds the query words in the search suggestions drop down.

I don't see this feature live yet, but it should be soon.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Part of the Searchology 2009 Google event was that Google will be launching Google Squared this month. Danny has a good walk through of Google Squared features, if this is the first time you are hearing about it.

Brian Ussery Tweeted that there are some fun easter eggs in the preview. A Google Blogoscoped forum thread lists some, including:

• [times]
• [be there]
• [alpha]
• [42]

Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped.

The Google Wonder Wheel and search options we have seen being tested is now the real deal in Google.com. Google announced it yesterday at the Searchology event, which Danny live blogged. In fact, Matt posted a nice recap of all the announcements at Search Engine Land. So I won't discuss each feature, but instead, I'll show the video Google released to demo it.

There is a lot of discussion around how this might impact the SEO world. Clearly, this gives searchers a way to refine results at a much rapper pace. So the number one ranking, is not always the number one ranking. SEOs had been preparing for this for a long time ever since universal search came to use in 2007. So this isn't that huge, but it is major change in how search is presented, although not as major as universal search.

Forum discussion at Sphinn, DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

A few weeks ago, Google launched a way to verify your Google Profile with them and ultimately show up in the Google results. In fact, Google offered free business cards with your Google Profile information on it. You can get those business cards over here.

I received my business cards last Thursday. But to my surprise, they didn't work! By didn't work, I meant, that if you typed in barry schwartz into Google, my Google Profile did not show up. The whole purpose of the Google Profile business cards was to give people a way to look you up by Googling your name. But in this case, it didn't exactly work.

Why? Didn't my profile show up. Well, Joe Kraus of Google (founder of Excite, JotSpot, etc) commented at my personal blog to inform me that my profile may have hit the celebrity filter. Joe said:

Hey Barry. My name is Joe Kraus and I'm the PM Director for Google Profiles. We're looking into it. There's a possibility your name is getting caught in our celebrity filters but we'll know more soon. Sorry for the hassle.

Am I a celebrity? I doubt it. But I suspect that maybe the famous psychologist/professor is a quasi-celebrity.

In fact, Kaila noticed that if you search for barry swartz, a misspelling of my name, my Google Profile does show:

So maybe Google should of sent me the business cards with the misspelling? I assume Google might pull the celebrity filter from my name, at least I hope so. It does make sense for names like Michael Jordan, Barack Obama, Britney Spears and so on, but I am not sure my name (even for the professor) deserves the "celebrity status."

So this has less to do with the name being common and more about the name hitting a possible filter, I think.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Not all of us are like the founder of LifeLock by hanging up billboards of our social security numbers giving people access to our most private number. The bottom line is that most people don't want their social security number posted in public. It leaves you more susceptible to identity theft and can leave you with a bad credit rating, at no fault to your spending habits.

A Google Webmasters Help thread has one person very eager to have Google remove his social security number from a third-party web page. This person supposedly ticked someone off, who then got back at him by posting his information, including social security number on a web page. Google indexed the web page and he wants it removed.

Clearly, in this case, you cannot plead with the webmaster to remove the page. You may be able to contact the hosting company and ask them to remove the page. But you can use the Google Removal Tool to ask Google to remove it from their index. Googler, Jonathan Simon said:

I agree with LuSEOfer's suggestion of contacting the site owners to get your information removed at the source. It may not help if the site owner is the same person as the person who posted your information but it's worth a try. Most reputable site owners don't want this sort of information on their site.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

So we know Google is seriously testing AJAX search results and Google has confirmed that. We know Google was not passing referrer strings to the receiving sites, but Google promised to fix that. But these changes are going to be coming to a Google search result near you, so you need to be aware of it.

Matt Cutts of Google posted a video explaining a bit more about these changes. It is well worth watching the 3-minute video:

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

In the past couple of weeks, we showed how Google Maps can cause real pain for some business owners. I first showed you how you can close down competitors on Google Maps and then I showed how your business listing can be merged into a competitors listing leaving them with your business and you with non.

Those are two serious ways on how Google Maps can seriously impact your business and sales. Google posted documents on how to reopen one's business after being closed, but we are still seeing complaints from business owners, to this day. Google is working on fixing the merging issue, but no update yet on when or how soon it might be fixed.

The next bug I spotted was via a Google Maps Help thread where one business owner explained that when conducting a search for signs Buckhead, Google changes the town of Buckhead to Bankhead. That then leads his potential customers to a totally different town, far away from his business.

He said:

When I use Google and try to search this (in Atlanta) "signs Buckhead" Google Maps listings result is "signs Bankhead" which is incorrect. Bankhead is in another section of town. This will cause me to drive way over to Bankhead to get my signs. The organic listings are OK but I need directions from the Maps. As a test I also tried "furniture Buckhead" and the same Bankhead listings came up again in Maps. Is this a search issue or a maps issue? When I look at Maps in the Buckhead area it says Bankhead as well.

Here is a screen capture:

Google confirmed the issue and hopes to have this one resolved as well. But there is no estimated time for when the fix will be in place.

I certainly wonder, how many businesses are losing money due to these three recent bugs with Google Maps?

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

Just a couple weeks ago, we reported about a Google Video redesign that upset users. In short, they changed how the Google Video search results displayed. Well, it looks like Google is testing search refinements on the video results pages.

Sam from Oh Nuts sent me a screen shot, which he saw when using the Chrome browser (however, I could not replicate in Chrome):

Compare that to the image I have on April 22nd and you will notice the large difference.

Forum discussion continued at Google Web Search Help.

When Google launched SearchWiki in November 2008, it came with a little comments bubble, where users can leave comments about a specific site in the search results. Google seems to be changing that comments bubble or icon into simple text that reads "Review This Site."

Here is a picture of the old version, notice the little comments icon on the right of the "Similar Pages" link:

The new version has a plain and simple "Review this Site" link:

Clicking the link or icon (depending on what you see) will open a text box:

Then after submitting the comment, you will be able to see it under the result:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Qwerty, a long time High Ranking Forum personality, wrote a blog post named Google Related Searches - Cheaters Rejoice. In short, he explains that Google is smart enough to know the answers to the New York Times crossword puzzle, without even seeing the puzzle. How is this done?

Well, according to Qwerty:

So apparently, Google hasn’t indexed the content of the puzzle and related every clue to it. Rather, it looks like it has detected a trend: someone searches on some of the clues, someone else searches on the same clues, someone else searches on some of those and a few others, and this all happens within a few hours, so Google determines that the searches are related to each other based on that, so when I come in and search on one of the clues, Google offers up some of the other searches that were run today by other people who ran that same search.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was indeed true. So any of you looking to cheat on the NY Times crossword puzzle, give this a try next week.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

It appears Google has launched a redesign of the search results pages on Google Video. For example, a search on barry schwartz returns search results on the left side and the video on the right. If you click on a search result, it shows the video directly on that page and gives you the option to click through and watch it on the site it came from.

Here is a picture:

A Google Web Search Help thread (note, the Google Video help forum is no longer, they moved it to the web search section) has a couple users who are unhappy with the new layout. The new layout is due to the fact that Google doesn't allow video uploads on Google anymore. It is now just a search engine for videos, while YouTube is their upload and user generated content (video) section.

One user said:

I am seeing a redesign of TV view when I search for a video in Google Video. The video description is takes up a lot of space, the video is smaller (and not expandable) and there is no way to rate videos (or even see video ratings!).

Alex Chitu said, "the new interface has a lot of flaws: the video player moves as you scroll down, the list of related videos is not always visible, Google Video no longer displays ratings and there's a lot of unused space."

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Google announced you can now create verified Google Profiles that potentially can show up in the Google web search results. Danny Sullivan has the ultimate guide on how these Google Profiles work. For example here is my profile as displayed in the Google web results:

It can also show up in this format:

To have your profile displayed in the Google web results, you likely need to have a verified listing. How do you verify your profile in Google? It isn't that easy.

Here is a picture of my profile, there are two verifications. (1) The profile itself (aka "verified name") and the (2) email address.

Let's start with verifying the profile (aka the name):

(1) You must go to Google's Knol site and sign in.
(2) Then go to your profile settings.
(3) Click on the "Name Verification" tab
(4) Then choose to verify by phone or via credit card

If you verify by phone, you enter in your phone number and Google will call it. When you get the call, Google will display a pin code followed by a pound sign on the Knol web site. When prompted, enter in the pin code and pound sign and you should be verified. If you verify by credit card, just enter in your credit card information. Note, Google currently can't verify American Express or Debit cards.

Verifying your email address:

(1) Go to your Google Profile and click "edit profile"
(2) Midway through the page it says "Verified domains" and explains:

You can verify email addresses and choose which domains (the part after the @) you'd like to appear on your profile. Your email addresses will not be displayed. This will help visitors to your profile know that you are the real you. Learn more

If your email is already verified, it should read:

You have verified email addresses at the following domains. Check which domains you'd like to appear on your profile. Your email addresses will not be displayed. This will help visitors to your profile know that you are the real you.Learn more

Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft and other free email accounts cannot be verified as domains. You need your own domain. You can add a non Gmail alternative to your Google account to verify your email.

That is basically how to get the verification labels on your Google Profile.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, Google launched a new labs feature named Google News Timeline which gives you a cool new way to scan news. You can scan the news using an AJAX interface based on chronological order. You can then drag the timeline from left to right or right to left. In addition, you can group news by days, weeks, months, years, or decades or restrict to a certain time period. Finally, you can add queries to filter by and remove news from Wikipedia, Time and so on.

Here is a video that shows it in action:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google announced they have a new labs feature that allows you to find similar images using Google Image Search. To do so, go to similar-images.googlelabs.com and give it a try.

I thought I try searching for danny sullivan to find similar images. The first image is this one:

Attractive, eh? ;-)

In any event, lets see what Google Images considers similar to this picture of Danny. Clicking on the similar images link shows me these images:

There are some guys as well.

Here is a video on how this all works:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Early April, many mobile users, who use Google Mobile for News, noticed that Google News on their mobile device was not updating. In fact, the news was outdated for days on their devices. The issue seemed to have resolved itself for many a few days later, so I decided not to report it.

Now the issue seems to be springing up again. We have a report in the Google News Help discussion area from one mobile user who said the news is now "over 10 hours" delayed. I personally checked myself and the news seems as recent as 30 minutes. But this may have to do with browser caching or something similar that caused the issue a week or so ago.

Googler, Inbal, said:

Thanks for the heads up, our mobile engineers are on top of this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to resolve this in the near future.

It might be a user specific issue or might be a bigger issue. I am not sure.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

An hour or so before I went offline for Passover, the Google Analytics blog announced a very significant change to how Google search will be passing along referral data. In the past, a search for flowers and a click on that search result to your site, would show the URL:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

Now, you will see the referral string (in some cases, right now in beta):

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The new format is broken down as such:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t

&source=web

&ct=res

&cd=7

&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm

&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j

&q=flowers

&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w

&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

Google's Matt Cutts confirmed on a BlogStorm blog post that Google may be passing along Google ranking data, along with this information.

Brett Crosby, the man behind Google Analytics, summed it up:

The key difference between these two urls is that instead of "/search?" the URL contains a "/url?". If you run your own analyses, be sure that you do not depend on the "/search?" portion of the URL to determine if a visit started with an organic search click. Google Analytics does not depend on the "/search?" string in the referrer, so users of Google Analytics will not notice a difference in their reports, but other analytics packages may need to adapt to this change in our referrer string to maintain accurate reports.

The folks at WebmasterWorld suspect this change is more about Google eventually migrating to AJAX search results, amongst other things.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

99.999% of people would never notice this nor care about it, but a Google Webmaster Help thread has discussion around a very small bug in Google's cache. If you view the cache of a W3 document for a match on xml well formed root, you will notice that Google says they will highlight the words "root" in a red color. But if you scan through the document, you will notice Google is not highlighting that word in red.

Here are pictures:

Googler, JohnMu, thanked the person for reporting it and has submitted the bug to the right team.

I am shocked that it was reported and noticed.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

The Google blog announced that Google is now showing more local results in web search for more generic queries. This is something that was noticed before the announcement but now it is officially confirmed by Google.

This means that searches for local-like keywords no longer need to have a location in the query. For example, a search on web design automatically shows me a local box in the middle of the Google web search results, without me specifically specifying web design, suffern, ny, which then shows the local box at the top of the results. Here is a picture of Google detecting that I am near the city of Monsey, in New York and it even ranks my company in the number two spot.

Google explains how they get your location:

In most cases, we match your IP address to a broad geographical location. You can also specify your likely location using the "Change location" link on the top right corner, above the map.

These searches work for a wide range of keywords, such as restaurants], [dentist], [groceries], [sporting goods], [flowers], [bank], [gym], [post office], or even [111 8th ave].

My big question is why are there so little people discussing this new change in Google in the forums? I know there are plenty of blog posts on this topic, but very few forum threads.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The much awaited update to the Google Blog Search blogroll detector algorithm has finally been pushed through.

An updated Google Groups thread has Googler, Jeremy Hylton saying:

We have launched a ranking change that reduces the number of results that are returned because of blogroll matches. There are still problems to work out, but this change appears to be a big improvement over our earlier fix. We had originally planned to launch an experiment for link: queries, but decide more recently to release this change first. We are still working on the link: change and expect to have that ready in a few more weeks.

We did expect to see an update for how Google Blog Search responds to the link query, but as Jeremy said, that won't be released yet for the next few weeks. But the blogroll matching detector, which matches for keywords in the blogroll sections of sites, should no longer return results for those keywords.

Why does this matter? Well, lets say you are like me and you track who links or mentions you via Google Blog Search. If someone has the Search Engine Roundtable in the blogroll, and the do a daily blog post, even if that blog post doesn't mention the Search Engine Roundtable, blog search would show that new blog post as a match. Why? Because it is in the blogroll and Google thinks it is part of the content of the blog post. Google said they fixed this issue but they do want feedback at the Google Groups thread.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

February 3rd, we reported Google Won't Let Some Searchers Turn Off "Safe Search" Filter, well, almost two months later, the issue is still not resolved. In fact, Google cannot find any issue.

The other day, Googler Skylar said he was unable to find any issue. He said in the Google Web Search Help thread:

Thanks everyone for providing information about your computers and browsers. I’ve been passing these details along to the rest of the team to check on SafeSearch filtering. We're currently unable to find errors with SafeSearch filtering. It is likely that a corrupt cookie, a third-party add-on, or an anti-virus program could be interfering with your preferences. I recommend giving the "Preferences aren't sticking" help article a try to make your preferences stick. In the meantime, I understand that it is frustrating when your preferences don't stick, and I'm sorry for any inconvenience you're experiencing.

But this does not explain why hundreds of searchers are still having this issue.

Forum discussion continued at Google Web Search Help.

Almost two months ago, we asked, Should Google Search Suggestions Show Adult Suggestions? In short, Google, on occasion, showed search suggestion for porn/adult related phrases, as you typed your query. The example I gave then, was when you typed "you," Google would offer a suggestion to youpron which is an adult site. Here is the before picture:

A new Google Web Search Help thread shows that Google listens and does remove porn/adult keyword suggestions from that list. The case in that thread was for when you search for [hvernig] Google offered a suggestion [hvernig á að totta] which in Icelandic means "how to give a blowjob."

Googler, Skylar, said last night that it has been removed. He said:

The inappropriate suggestion will no longer appear when someone types "hvernig" in the search box. Thanks again for sharing your feedback about this query suggestion so that we can improve Google Suggest.

So I decided to check the [you] query and it was gone also:

So how do you remove porn suggestions from Google? Post your complaint in the web search forums.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

There is a long thread of upset iPhone, G1 and mobile users at Google Mobile Help discussions. It seems like many users who try to access Google.com on their iPhone or G1 are being presented with errors.

The first report came in on the 23rd, saying "I get the following error message: "error to use eval to parse history info json string!" But many other users are complaining as well. This is not only impacting iPhone users, but also G1 users and likely users of Google Mobile on any mobile device.

iPhone users can manually fix the issue by going to Settings, then Safari, and then click on Clear History, Clear Cache, Clear Cookies.

Googler, Bret, said:

Thanks for the feedback guys. We're looking into this issue. I'll post any updates I have to this thread.

Hopefully this gets resolved soon.

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

The Google Blog announced Google has added additional search refinements and detailed snippets. Here is part of the announcement:

More and better search refinements
Starting today, we're deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

Longer snippets

When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page. Below are a couple of examples.

We noticed Google testing long snippets at least twice and also an option to control snippet size.

Do you like it?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Marty from the aimClear blog emailed me a screen shot yesterday morning, which looked like Google experimental search results. I then spotted a WebmasterWorld thread that discusses the same thing Marty emailed me.

There is a new link in the Google results that says "Show Options." When clicked, it opens up other grouping options. Robert, a WebmasterWorld admin also sees it and he describes the options as:

The main groupings select among...

- types of results (All results, Recent, Videos, Forums, Reviews)...
- time of results (with options between Anytime and the past year)...
- different types of what I'd call snippet displays (with options including standard or longer snippets, and snippets including image thumbnails)...
- and different views (including Standard, Wonder wheel, Timeline, and Search Suggestions)

Here is a screen capture:

When I try to search for the query that they spotted this with, I get a message from Google that reads:

The option you have selected is currently unavailable.

Is this a form of experimental search being forced on searchers?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google started showing search refinements in mid 2006. Later on that year, they cleaned up those refinements and they began showing up a lot for medical searches and for those that participated in the Google Coop solution.

But now, a WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google is showing less and less refinements these days, then they have in the past. In fact, searches that worked in the past to trigger then, don't all work. One example is clinical trials, and also site:www.seroundtable.com florida does not work. You can see that it does work if you force the more condition to be added to the search parameter.

Google frequently changes how the search results interact with searchers. Maybe the refinements were not used all that much or maybe they confused searchers. Or maybe them not showing up as often, recently, might be a bug? We don't know.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I posted a search brief on this topic at Search Engine Land, when I saw Search Engine War noticing Google UK testing single line Sitelinks. But it seems like more folks in the UK are noticing the "classic" Sitelinks showing up. I call them "classic," because the first time we saw Sitelinks, they were in the form of a single line.

A WebmasterWorld thread has one UK searcher noticing them. They call it "mini" but there is nothing "mini" about having any extra line in the Google search results. Typically, Sitelinks look like this:

Eight links, in four rows and two columns. Earlier, Google was testing four links in a single column:

But originally, before we even knew what they were called, they were on a single line:

Search Engine War has a picture of the new "classic" Sitelinks in place.

Personally, I prefer the single line Sitelinks - at least from a searcher's perspective. Just seems cleaner and lets me see more results on a page.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If there was a three strike rule for Google SMS Search, Google would have been out a long time ago. For the fourth time in about two months, Google SMS Search went offline again.

The most recent, was the other day. We have two threads at Google Mobile Help. The first thread has confirmation from a Googler.

Googler, Zeke said:

Thanks for posting. Yes, we were experiencing some issues yesterday with the mobile aggregator used by many carriers. This caused a delay in responses, but them problem has been fixed.

You should be able to use Google SMS normally now. Please let me know if you run into any other trouble.

The later thread specifically complains about Google not returning hockey scores. I tried some of those searches and they did not return results for me, but searching for [scores lakers] did work just fine for me.

Here are the past articles we wrote on Google SMS search failing:

• Google SMS Search Not Returning Search Results, January 8, 2009
• Did Google SMS Search Die Again?, January 15, 2009
• Google Finally Confirms Fixing SMS Search, January 27, 2009
• Google Mistakenly Sends Dozens of Unwanted SMS Messages To Users, February 3, 2009

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

There is an interesting thread at WebmasterWorld that Google may be biased towards showing more and more "big brands" in the top Google web search results.

Yea, yea - big brands have more links, more trust, more pages and bigger budgets to rank better. We all know that. But some are speculating that this month, more than any other month, there was a spike in how Google ranks these big brands.

Tedster, WebmasterWorld's administration, goes as far to possibly imply, and I quote, "Eric Schmidt made some comments that brands were more important."

The question is how would Google do this?

• Manually?
• Using social media metrics
• Linkage data
• Something else

There is a lot of speculation and concern in that thread right now.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Aaron Wall from SEO Book wrote more details, with examples, of this claim. Pretty enlightening, if I must say, so take a look at Aaron's post.

A business owner is showing his frustration with Google over Google Maps listing his business as closed. In a Google Webmaster Help thread, this business owner said:

The search result from Google shows our office as closed (the exact phrase shown is "place closed")

Can someone please point me how I can get this corrected? Our office is not closed.

Want to see it yourself? Here is a link to the live map, but for archival purposes, here is a screen capture:

Notice how it says, "place closed" directly under the business name.

This business owner can fix this by going to the Google Local Business Center and updating his listing there. And if you have not verified your business, go do so, so this doesn't happen to you!

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

If you visit Google's reliability report at the Better Business Bureau (BBB) web site, you will notice they have a rating of a "D." The D rating is when the BBB says:

We have enough concerns about this company (for example, their offer, customer complaints, advertising, etc.) that we recommend caution in doing business with it.

How can the BBB caution people conducting business with the largest and most loved search ad company?

In the past 36 months there have been a total of 424 complaints. To me, that is a pretty low number based on the number of advertisers and Google users they have.

In July, I reported at Search Engine Land that the BBB listed Google as unsatisfactory. In any event, does Google deserve a D or unsatisfactory rating?

A Google AdWords Help thread has responses from advertisers. I personally like BizWriter's response:

I agree with you about the scammers, affiliates etc. but -BBB D rating or not- the real issue is that AdWords support is mostly an euphemism even for honest advertisers. Misleading messages in AdWords interface, no phone support, loops and dead-ends when someone tries to contact support. Is that the customer support one would expect from a multi-billion -"do no evil"- company? Google is getting sclerotic and you need to be nimble in business. Just my 2 cents.

JezC, a top Google help member said:

I'm astonished, after all the stuff you've replied to, that you give this any credibility. There's *two* issues (CC denials, and account review speed) that are showing up as a pattern here, and *one* significant cause of increased activity - more newbie affiliates than I can recall seeing in around five years of activity on this forum.

So what do you think? Does Google deserve this rating?

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

Ever conduct a search at Google and be presented with a "We're sorry" error from Google? The image on the right is what you would see and Google thinks you are a machine conducting automated queries and they want to validate you as a human.

Well, over the past few days, I have been noticing a much larger number of threads with complaints from searchers that they have been getting this message. I typically see threads on the issue but not the number and volume I have been seeing over the past few days.

I then spotted a Google Web Search Help thread that has confirmation from Google that this is an issue on their side. Skylar from Google said:

Hey! Thanks y'all for sharing this strange behavior in your Google's search results. This is an issue (we're working on it) caused by computer worms that search for vulnerable sites to infect. These nasty annoying computer worms will use certain search queries or patterns to find those sites. When we detect these abusive queries, we display the 'We're Sorry' page to stop the worms. Once in a blue moon, your search queries can coincidentally match the search patterns that worms use, and you get blocked as a result.

A quick fix you could try is simply adding another key word to make your search queries more unique (and different from the queries worms use). By making this change, you're less likely to be blocked. Check out http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2007/07/reason-behind-were-sorry-message.html to read an interesting blog post on reasons behind the 'We're Sorry' page.

So it seems like Google is aware of showing this message to real humans, a bit too often and they are working on a fix.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports one member noticing receiving images in his Google Alerts from Google Blog search. It seems to be an extension of how Google News shows images near some articles. But in this case, this searcher is saying the images are near blog post results from Google Blog search.

I am not too sure if the user is confused in how he or she is using Google Alerts. I think that this person subscribed to Google Alerts and signed up for both News alerts and blog alerts. Google News often shows images near articles, but Blog Search does not - as far as I know.

Is it possible that Google Blog search is now showing images near the blog results? Yes, why not? But is it happening?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Web Search Help thread has an annoyed searcher who is upset Google's search box offers search suggestions for "youpron" when you type in the word "you."

The easy solution is to turn off search suggestions in your search preferences:

But you cannot turn off search suggestions on every computer your child has access to. So the big question is, should Google's search suggestions have a strong adult filter that disallows adult oriented suggestions by default?

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Sometime yesterday, Firefox 2.x users were unable to use Google's search box, as they typically do. They would go to Google.com, enter in a search query and hit enter. Then nothing would happen. Really, nothing would happen.

There is a long thread at Google Web Search Help discussions on this issue.

Google even confirmed the issue saying:

Thanks to all of your comments, we pushed out a fix to resolve the problem. You should soon be able to search after clicking 'Enter' but if you continue to get no search results, please let me know.

I personally tested Firefox 2.x on Google just a minute ago and it is now working. But for at least a couple hours, Google on Firefox did not work at expected.

In addition to not being able to query Google, many complained that Google Suggest, the search suggestions as you type, did not work either. It seems Google fixed that as well.

Google has been pretty buggy this week. Here are just the bugs we covered this week:

• Google Mistakenly Sends Dozens of Unwanted SMS Messages To Users
• Google Won't Let Some Searchers Turn Off "Safe Search" Filter
• Google News Crawl Issues a Bug with Google
• Google News Font Size Bug Confirmed
• Google Accidently Knocks New Zealand Off The Globe

Good week for Google, don't you think?

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Two days ago, we reported that Google is testing switching to AJAX to display their search results. But the tension over this discussion was not all that bad, that was until GetClicky.com wrote:

Just know this: a major update that Google is testing has completely broken the ability for any external analytics service like Clicky to determine the search query used by a visitor arriving at your web site. Why would they do such a thing? Who knows. They aren't talking.

Now, Techmeme is buzzing with the story and Google scrambled to release a statement that reads:

We're continually testing new interfaces and features to enhance the user experience. We are currently experimenting with a javascript enhanced result page because we believe that it may ultimately provide a faster experience for our users. At this time only a small percentage of users will see this experiment. It is not our intention to disrupt referrer tracking, and we are continuing to iterate on this project. For more information on the experiments that we run on Google search, please see http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-is-test-this-is-only-test.html.

There is a lot of commotion on this story and this Google test at WebmasterWorld and Google Web Search Help forums.

Brett Tabke, founder of WebmasterWorld said:

I honestly don't think G is shortsighted enough to do something like that system wide. Websites would have little incentive to look to Google for traffic or optimize for Google. The focus would no longer be on Google for optimization. We wouldn't know what or how to optimize for keywords - optimization would be shots in the dark. Our only options would be to look for other big sources of traffic.

On the other hand, we have to respect a websites - even Google's - opportunity to innovate. I think we have to see what G is doing with the Ajax before passing final judgment on it and it's intentions. I doubt that it is Googles will to break log analyzers and keyword trackers with this test. I think that is a by-product of whatever Ajax implementation google is currently testing.

The discussion around this topic is pretty intense and high strung now. It will be interesting to see how Google moves forward with this test over time.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Web Search Help.

Google has a search preference that allows a searcher to define how strict the adult filter should be. It is called Safe Search and I think it was originally designed by Matt Cutts.

In any event, I am seeing dozens of reports of the Safe Search filter getting "stuck." The largest standalone thread is at Google Web Search forums which describes the issue as users not being able to remove the safe search preference to something more lax.

Google Employee Skylar confirmed the issue in the thread and said they are looking into a fix. Skylar said:

Thanks for mentioning SafeSearch's odd behavior today. Several other people also commented on the same issue. I've passed this post, along with a few others, to our team so they can take a closer look at this.

If anyone has more to add about SafeSearch not sticking, please include information about what kind of computer you have, what browsers are you seeing this problem in, what troubleshooters you've tried, and whether you have any filtering software. It will help me to best figure out what's happening here.

At about 2:30am (EST), this morning, Google seemed to have fixed the issue. I am not sure what caused it, because Google has not yet confirmed the fix, but we have at least two reports saying that issue is now resolved.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search.

The SEO Smackdown blog reports that they noticed Google switching "completely" to AJAX based search results. This can put a huge damper in rank checking tools, that scrap the Google search results. Most people are not seeing the Google search results pages render in AJAX, not yet at least.

But if this does happen, we can start hearing scandals of rank checking software being blocked by Google again. It turns out, what was blocking them was a change to how Google was testing new html for their search results page, which put these rank checkers out of business for about a month, until they came back in second week of September.

Google frequently tests different user interfaces and layouts with subsets of users. It is possible that this is just a test or it is possible that this is the being to a new AJAX based search result from Google. To the searcher, it makes very little difference, but to the SEO, it may matter.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

From Google:

We're continually testing new interfaces and features to enhance the user experience. We are currently experimenting with a javascript enhanced result page because we believe that it may ultimately provide a faster experience for our users. At this time only a small percentage of users will see this experiment. It is not our intention to disrupt referrer tracking, and we are continuing to iterate on this project. For more information on the experiments that we run on Google search, please see http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-is-test-this-is-only-test.html.

If you conducted a Google search between 9:30am and 10:25 am (EST) on Saturday, January 31st, you would have seen Google label all the search results as "This site may harm your computer." Google admitted it was a human mistake. How did it happen? Here is how Google explained it:

We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

In the meantime, the whole internet went berserk. There were thousands of posts in forums across the web, asking what this was all about. Thousands of webmasters posted with concern that their site had malware or Google mistakenly marked their sites as having malware. For 40 minutes or so, the Internet world was feeling very vulnerable due to this mistake. We even have tons of coverage at Techmeme.

What is a bit comical, is receiving 85 comments within 30 minutes on a post I wrote a week ago named Your Site May Harm Your Computer? Get That Google Label Removed In Hours.

Here are just some of the many discussion forums discussing this, now resolved, issue:

• PLEASE READ: Your site might not have malware, Google Webmaster Help
• My site was remove using webmaster tools, Google Webmaster Help
• "This site may harm your computer" bug in search result!!!, DigitalPoint Forums
• Early April Fool's?, HighRankings Forums
• Google Glitch Marks all Sites "This site may harm your computer", WebmasterWorld
• Google Webmaster Error Now!!!!, DigitalPoint Forums
• Errors all over Google SERPS - This site may harm your computer, Sphinn
• You have Incentive Based ads.. Oh yes you do! - Search Engine Watch Forums, Search Engine Watch Forums

You know when you misspell something in Google, they show a "Did you mean" with the correct spelling. Historically, Google has told us that even though they put that Did you mean in red, people still ignore it. So a a month or so ago, they decided to test enhancing the Did you mean feature. The enhanced version showed the correct spelling for the two top results and the remainder of the results were for the wrong spelling.

Here is an example of a search for matt cuttz versus the correct spelling of matt cutts.

A WebmasterWorld thread took notice that this seems to always be the case now. Google seems to always be showing the new way of showing Did you mean results. Tedster added that he has been noticing an influx of "no results" found. Here is an example for a search on mesothmioma, which is correctly spelled mesothelioma.

The above example might be a bug in Google's spell checking software. Outside of the bug, it does seem like the enhanced version of Did you mean, is sticking around for a while.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Discovery, a moderator at Search Engine Watch Forums asks if Google is using their political bias to show pro Obama search results versus negative Bush search results. Let me go on record here and say, I do not think Google is doing this, but many people do, this is why I am covering it.

His argument starts by saying that we know Google and their CEO are major supporters of Obama. This is no secret and we know we were concerned that this support would show a bias in Google. That being said, Discover shows two search results, but for misspellings of each President's name.

First, a search result for Barack Aboma, clearly misspelling the last name. Here are the positive or neutral results for this search term in Google. Plus they have a spelling correction at the top:

Second, a search result for George Busch, misspelling the last name as well. Here are negative results for this search term in Google. Plus it is missing a spelling suggestion:

Discovery wonders why Bush has such negative results while Obama has such positive results? Well, I think the clear answer is that many people in the US love Obama, while many people really dislike Bush. The search results show it, and so do the polls. But is there more going on?

Discovery puts it this way:

In history most powerful entities in a country have always been the media outlets. If you control the media or the main point of communications with the public you have a great deal of power. You can control mass opinion and behavior. If Google is the media source of the new age, can tinkering like this be their downfall?

I'll leave it at that and let the discussion continue at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This is not really SEO related but I found this thread at Google Webmaster Help funny. A parent comes on, asks if there are any other ways porn sites can come up in their Google Web History without having access to their computer.

In short, it appears the parents were away and their son went on their computer. The son then conducted a few adult related searches and clicked on to adult sites. The parent is asking if there is any way that this search history could be easily manipulated. In short, the parent wants to know if their son actually used their computer to look at porn.

The only way, that I know of, to add search history to Google is to conduct searches on Google while signed into that Google account. So if someone hacked into your account and conducted searches, then that might be possible. But typically, hackers won't want to get your son busted for looking for porn. The parent signed off:

This answers my question & I thank you for Google help.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

One of the most popular topics from searchers (not SEOs) in Google help groups are about removing content in Google's search results. As you can imagine, Google is not eager to remove content in any case, so they have set up specific rules in which they will remove content.

JohnMu of Google detailed which scenarios Google will remove search results from Google in a Google Webmaster Help thread. You can request removal of content in these following cases:

* The site owner has modified a page so that it no longer contains the information or image that concerns me.
* The site owner has removed a page/image or blocked it from being indexed by using robots.txt or meta tags.
* You've been unable to work with the site owner, but the information appearing in the search results is one of the following:
- Your social security or government ID number
- Your bank account or credit card number
- Your image of my handwritten signature
- Your full name or the name of your business appearing on an adult content site that's spamming Google's search results.

Google has a step by step walk through on removing content from Google. You can start that process over here.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

On January 8th, we reported major issues with Google SMS Search not working. Then again on January 15th, we asked if Google SMS is dead or not.

Well, not we finally have confirmed reports that Google SMS search has been fixed and is working.

A Google representative, Bret, said Google has "recently made some changes on our end to address this issue." Now, if you want to get sports scores via Google SMS search, it should now work. It only took about 20 days to get working again, but it is working according to many users in the thread.

I am personally unable to test it now, being that I am in Israel right now on vacation.

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

Brian Ussery posted screen captures of Google possibly adding favorite icons on the left hand side of the display URL in the search results. He posted a screen capture at Google Blogoscoped Forums and emailed me a few.

Here is a screen shot of a site command, which is the only way he was able to see the fav icons, for Matt Cutts' site.

Now, we are not sure if he has some Firefox extension that is making this happen or if it is something Google is testing. Brian is confident he doesn't have an extension on Firefox that would cause this. It also only shows when he does a site:www.domain.com command.

I heard some rumors about this a week or so ago, but passed on it, because I thought it was an extension. So, two reports, within a week - might imply it is a Google test. I cannot personally confirm this.

The images are hosted on Google. For example, if you look at google.com/s2/favicons?domain=seroundtable.com, you will see the favorite icon for this site. But this is used primarily for Google Profile icons. So maybe Google is now using this for search results? I am not sure.

Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped Forums.

Update: This seems real, John from Google said in a Google Webmaster Help Thread:

We do a ton of tests every year, so I wouldn't be surprised to accidentally stumble across something like this :-).

That said, I'd be curious to hear of other changes in the search results pages that you guys would like to see. I don't really have anything to do with that, but it's always neat to see what kind of ideas you all would have. Do you think favicons make sense in search results? Do they help you to recognize a site that you like to go to?

A Google Groups thread has confirmed reports from Jeremy Hylton of Google, that Google blog search, in some cases, has issues finding and returning new blog posts in Google Blog Search.

Jeremy explained that earlier on, there was an issue with Google crawling certain blogs. But then at the end of December they fixed that issue. Now, it appears there is an issue with the same type of blogs, where Google is missing random new blog posts from those blogs.

Here is how Jeremy put it:

We are having some problems with your blog that we're still debugging. We have most of your recent posts in the index. At the moment, it looks like the two most recent ones are not getting returned. There was an earlier problem that caused us to stop crawling your blog entirely. We fixed that just before Christmas. I was just checking on your blog to confirm that the fix is working when I noticed that we're again missing a few posts. We'll definitely look into it.

I believe this all started in early November, when Google changed how they index blogs. In early December they vowed to fix it and then in late December, Christmas time, they thought they fixed the bulk of it. However, there are still issues that Google is aware of, including the issue mentioned above.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Google Operating System wrote about a new personalization feature Google is testing, named Preferred Sites. How does it works? You go to your search preferences and enter in a list of domains or sub domains that you prefer. If Google finds a result from any of the sites listed in your preferred list, Google will bump up that listing to the top of the search results and label them as such.

Here is a screen capture from Google's preferred site help document.

This is not available to most people, but it is a limited test for some users. If you see the preferred site option in your Google search preferences page, that means you are in the test. Clearly, this is an extension of SearchWiki, which is now the default.

We have two threads discussing the impact this might have on SEOs. One thread is at Sphinn and the other is at WebmasterWorld. And this will impact SEOs just like any other personalization feature and similar to how SearchWiki will impact SEOs. In short, most searchers will be clueless to this preferred site preference, even if Google flashes it in front of their faces, like they do with Search Wiki. So we will see how much of an impact this makes being that (1) it is a test right now and (2) being that users might not know how to use it.

Forum discussion at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

A year ago, Google released an optimized version of iGoogle for the iPhone. But recently, Google began redirecting iPhone users away from that optimized version, and to the standard mobile version of iGoogle.

The optimized version was located at http://google.com/ig/i and here is a screen capture from Google Operating System.

Now, users are redirected to http://google.com/m/ig/, which is the standard mobile version, it looks like this:

This seemed to start happening on Thursday, and since then, iPhone users have jumped into the Google Web Search forum revolting over the change. Paul from Google tried to calm users down by saying:

Hey everyone, I have an update for you. We've decided to direct iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page. We've found that people hit iGoogle from lots of different phones -- we want to ensure you'll all see the same version.

Most or all of your existing content should translate over to the standard mobile version. The only exception would be any gadgets that aren't compatible with most mobile browsers.

We've got several articles in our Help Center about the mobile experience on iGoogle, which you can find in our Help Center.

But that just caused more discussion and anger towards Google. Just browsing through the really long thread, it seems like Google is getting a lot of backlash about this change. I have a feeling, they might consider putting things back to the optimized iPhone version, which means they have to maintain an iPhone version, along with the mobile version, web version and any other version they might have.

Who is to blame? I am not sure, Google made a big stink about optimized iPhone versions of their sites. Here is a video they released in June 2008 on this iGoogle for iPhone:

So, who is to blame for iPhone users not wanting to lose this page?

Forum discussion at Google Web Search.

There have been more recent reports of Google showing longer descriptions (aka snippets) in the search results. We have reports from ThatsSEO.com, Holistic Search and SEMVironment.com with examples and screen captures. I was able to reproduce it for a search on fill empty cells with specific value openoffice.

A typical search shows a two line description or snippet:

But with the query above, you can get a three line description or snippet:

Or four line description or snippet:

Now, it seems like the longer your search query, the longer the snippet might get. But I have not fully tested this theory.

We have seen incredibly long Google descriptions in the past, plus we have seen Google test snippet size controls.

Forum discussion at Sphinn 1 and Sphinn 2.

Just last week, we reported major issues with Google SMS not returning search results. It was fixed about two days later. But now I am seeing more reports of Google SMS issues, so I decided to try it out myself.

I sent three SMS messages to Google and now it is 10 minutes later, and still not a single response. Here is a picture:

Google has confirmed issues with specifically requesting sport scores from Google SMS. In a few Google Mobile Help discussion forums, we have confirmation from Google that there are issues with this request. You can find those threads here, here and here.

But there is a bigger problem, it seems like some people, including myself are simply not getting any response from Google's SMS search, at all. Like I showed in my screen capture above, not a "no results found" or any type of error message. Is it being blocked by the cell provider or is Google's SMS server down?

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

Update: Over an hour later, I got a response from Google, the response didn't have any results, but at least it told me so. Note, that it should have results:

Google's SMS search is simply not returning results anymore. I am not sure how many people this is impacting, i.e. I have no idea how many people use Google SMS to search on their phones, but some have noticed it.

For example, here is me sending a text to 466453 and Google returning no results for either "Lakers" or "RustyBrick."

A Google Mobile Help thread has confirmation from a Google representative, Bret, that there is an issue. Bret from the Google Mobile team said:

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I'm looking into the issue and I'll reply to this thread with any updates.

The issue was first reported last night.

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

Update: It was still not working at 6:30am (EST) on 1/9, but at about 10:30am (EST), it started working again.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks why does the site command in Google not match up in the number of "indexed" URLs reported in Google Webmaster Tools. A very valid question, let me show you.

A simple site command in Google for site:www.seroundtable.com returns 17,500 results. So that means, Google has indexed approximately 17,500 pages from the www of this domain.

Now, if I login and check my Sitemap data for this site (yea, I finally created a Sitemap file), it shows about half of the indexed URLs. It says Google has indexed 8,813 URLs of the 9,086 I submitted.

For me, the answer is simple. I seem to only sending URLs of the individual blog posts here. So although I have about 9,000+ blog posts at this domain, I still have about twice as many pages on this site, due to the categories, date archives, tag landing pages and so on. Those pages are not included in my Sitemap file. So Google seems to only showing the indexed URLs of what I submitted. Of course, it is hard for me to validate that by just looking at the numbers.

What I found interesting is when I went to Yahoo's Site Explorer, Yahoo told me they h have indexed 16,498 of my pages, but crawled only 15,022 pages and thus know about 16,498 of my pages. I guess via linkage data, they can index more of my pages then they actually crawl?

In fact, Yahoo's numbers for a inurl:seroundtable.com command is almost on target to the numbers they report in Site Explorer, which is nice.

In regards to what is going on with Google... I am not sure if the results are accurate or not. Tedster at WebmasterWorld said:

I'm never surpised when Webmaster Tools information seems peculiar in some way - it happens a lot. Also note that site:example.com results are getting weirder and weirder, often omitting urls that definitely are in the index - sometimes with a simple site:example.com/directory/ query.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, I was tipped off by a reader that the number two listing on Google Trends was this form of "ASCII art" ✈ ▌▌. At first, I thought it was an airplane landing on a runway strip. By I was wrong, it seemed to be an attack by a group of users, targeting Google Trends. They wanted to show an airplane flying into the former World Trade Center "Twin Towers." Yes, horrible!

Since posting, we have several comments at Search Engine Land. Danny notes that this potentially stemmed from a post at eBaum's World Forum.

In any event, this is not the first time Google Trends was targeted by hate. We saw a Swastika on Google Trends about six months ago. Then Google told us it was purely algorithmic, based on a spike of searches. This time, likely the same thing. I have a feeling that this is an issue that Google's Search Quality team can fix going forward, but the question is, are the resources there for it.

You can find more coverage of this story at Techmeme.

Forum discussion at Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.

Ever since Universal Search hit Google, we have been noticing flavors of video thumbnails and static images left aligned on the Google search results. A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around this latest format and some are happy with it, while others are not.

Here is a picture of a subset of a Google search results:

You tell me, which one will catch your eye first? Likely the one with the image next to it on the right. So, this can be a great way to get your search results more exposure, and a higher click through rate, which might result in a higher conversion rate for your site. At the same time, if you are the listing above the one with the image, you are likely to see a drop in CTR, due to the result directly below. So this can help some webmasters, while hurt others.

Here is a poll on this topic, would love to see the responses:

Clearly, adding videos and images to your site, will help you gain the exposure over your competitors. The WebmasterWorld thread discusses various methods on how to get these images near your search result.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Conduct a search for the child day care site KindyList and you might be presented with a "Did You Mean?" suggestion from Google. The issue is that Google is suggesting you search for Candylist instead, which is far from a child friendly site, it is a pornography site.

Here is a screen shot of me searching for KindList:

Notice the Did You Mean? at the top. When you click on Candylist, you get this search result:

If you click through, you get nudity, pornography and so on.

Yes, Google's "did you mean" results are purely algorithmic, but I agree with the webmaster here. The webmaster complained in a Google Webmaster Help thread saying that this is just not appropriate. I agree. The did you mean algorithm is nice and very useful, but it needs checks for these types of cases. Should the did you mean ever return a X-rate set of results for a non-X-rated originating set of results? I don't think so.

Forum discussion continued at Google Webmaster Help.

In response to an upset webmaster's post in the Google Webmaster Help forums, Googler JohnMu wrote down four things that some people suspect Google of doing, which he says he has never seen since working at Google. These include:

1. Googlers changing crawling, indexing or ranking of content they don't agree with. As a data point, check the search results for http://www.google.com/search?q=jew as well as the explanation at http://www.google.com/explanation.html.
2. Large companies being able to encourage Google to change crawling, indexing or ranking of a site they don't like. Yes, they contact us, but no, they don't get any results.
3. A site being damaged with regards to crawling, indexing or ranking, by someone else on the outside. I've seen sites run into troubles for getting hacked, but I've never seen them run into trouble because of something someone other than the owner did outside of the site.
4. A spam report being taken seriously if the site itself was abiding our Webmaster Guidelines. 42,000 spam reports wouldn't change a thing, regardless of who filed them, if the site is compliant.

Do I believe John here? Yes, 100%. Do I think Google has ever done any of these without John knowing about it? I think it is possible. To be fair, John does add:

Obviously, any of these things could theoretically happen, but I haven't seen it happen, and I don't believe it's something a webmaster has to worry about. If it ever became obvious to Googlers that one of these things happened, it would be resolved immediately -- so if you feel that it has happened, please take the time to submit a spamreport with the details. We take these reports very seriously.

Do you think Google is 100% honest about these topics?

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google recently optimized for the hundredth time, the Google Search experience on the iPhone and also Android. But it seems like ever since the upgrade, many iPhone and iPod Touch users are having issues searching at Google on mobile Safari.

A Google Mobile Help discussion thread has bug reports from several iPhone/iPod Touch users complaining they can no longer conduct searches in Safari on Google.

Rebooting the devices did not help.. Supposedly, some users have noticed a JavaScript bug on line 21. The error is "TypeError: undefined value".

I tried this on my iPhone and it worked fine for me. So hopefully it is now fixed.

Forum discussion at Google Mobile Help.

John Honeck asked in a Google Webmaster Help thread how much more valuable is a number one ranking in Google, when compared to the likes of Yahoo.

He asked it in the form of, "Is being #1 in yahoo as good as being #50 in Google? #100, or?" But let me place a poll below and ask you it in a different format.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

It appears that Google is looking for new ways to enhance (erm, monetize?) Search Suggest. Danny Sullivan notes at Search Engine Land that some users are spotting Google AdWords ads within Search Suggest, as seen below:

Search Suggest is also apparently expanding news results and more.

In terms of ads, though, Danny notes that the placement (top?) is questionable. What happens if someone accidentally clicks on that ad? It's easy for someone to slip up when using a drop-down box. I'm sure you've done it before.

That concern is echoed in Sphinn by advertisers. Here's one good comment:

As an advertiser, I kinda don't like those ads in the suggest box, especially the one at the top. It's just asking for errants clicks or someone thinking it will return a search result. I want my ad clicks to be as qualified and deliberate as possible.

Someone else adds that those ads probably "convert like [censored]." And he's probably right.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Danny Sullivan notes at Search Engine Land that there are a number of Google search engine enhancements that we may start to see very soon. They include reviews seen within the SERPs, pagelinks (a term he coined), and better spell correction and are illustrated below.

The Search Engine Land post explains these in detail, but I'll give you the background.

The image below indicates that you can now see more information about business listings, including reviews:

The next feature you may see is something that Danny calls pagelinks. Like sitelinks, popular portions of a web page are appropriately linked.

You need to actually have internal anchor text within the page though to get this "Jump to" pagelink feature.

The final that Danny writes about is how Google is now to handle auto spellcheck. Instead of just showing "did you mean XXXX?", you get results for the correct spelling *and* the misspelled query as seen below:

Looks pretty impressive. It'll be most important for SEMs to start looking at how to work with reviews, but I think that pagelinks would also be important here too.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

No one likes malware; web surfers, searchers, webmasters, and so on. But malware can hurt a lot when your search result in Google is labeled as not being safe due to malware. No one will click on your result, for good reason.

Often, malware gets onto a site though some type of security breech. Hackers take advantage of those loop holes and then place malware on your site, that may infect your visitors. So Google (and other search engines) try their best to keep people away from your sites, if they believe your site has been infected with malware.

That being said, if you are able to remove the issue from your site and your site is malware free - you can remove that message in the Google search results within 24 hours.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has JohnMu of Google saying, "automatic reviews generally take about a day until everything is cleared up (warnings everywhere); there are situations where they take much less time and there are times when they take a bit more."

For more on this, check out Google's blog post on this matter.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google cranks up the Consensus Engine by Andrew Orlowski at The Register completely took Marissa Mayer's comments out of context when he wrote in his introductory line:

Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance.

Marissa did not admit that. She said at a LeWeb conference in Paris that Google may look at SearchWiki data and use that data to influence the search results. Specifically, if "thousands of people" remove a result using SearchWiki, then Google might take notice. She did not say if Google would have Google staff "pick and choose" search results. I, as others, assumed that any SearchWiki changes to the core index would be done algorithmically, not by hand.

To say Google "staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results" is a "historic statement" is false. Because, (1) Google did not say this and (2) many speculate there is human involvement in the Google index, to some extent. Google has been open about their human evaluators in the past and there has always been rumors of Google picking the top results for the most important categories. This might just add to those rumors, but it is not an admission.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

We featured the popular searches for 2008 from Ask, Google Product Search, and Yahoo. But now, we get the official word on Google's front-facing search engine of the most popular terms. The 2008 Google Zeitgeist reveals the most popular terms:

1. sarah palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa
8. wer kennt wen
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers

The first thing that looked out of place was #3. I'm apparently not alone with that mindset. Why would so many people be searching for Facebook login?

In any event, here you go. These are Google's most popular searches.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Barry reports at Search Engine Land that Marissa Mayer spoke at LeWeb in Paris about SearchWiki and said that it's possible that the tool may be used in the future for ranking purposes. Barry refers to the TechCrunch coverage that says that Marissa also acknowledges that SearchWiki will soon be able to be turned off (think early 2009), but more importantly in our space, that if "thousands" of people remove a page using SearchWiki, Google may respond in kind by removing the offending result.

Less than an hour ago, Barry submitted this story to Sphinn and there already is commentary about how this obvious gaming can be dangerous. To be honest, I'm still of the opinion that users should have had the opportunity to turn on SearchWiki and not the other way around. I feel that there will be loopholes we've yet to explore.

Meanwhile, in a post Barry made today on click data being used for rankings, a related subject matter, JohnMu says that Google won't rerank based on user activity because of the potential to abuse behaviors that may impact Google's ranking algorithms. Or maybe there's more to the statement that meets the eye.

This all leads me to believe that if Google actually does acknowledge that people can rerank results, people can outsmart Google. There are a number of tools available that already harness the power of the collective with incentives. Most recently, Amazon launched its Mechanical Turk to enable people to get paid to do things using their computers. And of course, we can't forget about sites that pay you to vote on social media news stories -- they could just expand their services to help with reranking in Google. A market owner who really wants his competition to be ranked lower could totally employ these services if he's desperate, could he not?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Google has a cache, basically, the cache allows you to look at pages as Google crawled them. The question is, at least in a Google Webmaster Help thread, is the Google cache storing everything locally at Google?

John, a top contributor, said that Google stores web pages locally, but all other documents are not stored locally. So that means, if you pull down a web page, but Google cached it, the web page will likely still come up in the cache. However, if Google indexed a PDF or Word doc, and you pulled it down, the cache result will likely not load.

John said:

Only if the .doc page was still their server. Google only has a snapshot of the HTML on the particular page, everything else resides on the on the web as is (images, external css, targets of links).

Do note that John is not an official Google representative and I was not able to quickly find supporting documents in Google's help section on this. Of course, you can use the noarchive meta tag to ask Google not to cache your pages, more on that over here.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A few weeks ago, Google launched SearchWiki to the public, making all Google searchers who are logged in, advanced searchers. I was surprised by this, so I asked you guys, do you think the average searcher is ready for this.

After 150 responses, the results are in. 124 (or 82.67%) of you said, no, the average searcher is not ready for the Google SearchWiki. While only 26 (or 17.33%) of you said, yes, the average searcher is ready for the Google SearchWiki.

Maybe my post skewed the results, but honestly, are we ready for this?

Forum discussion continued at Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld, Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.

Remember Google's SearchMash? The search engine they used to test wild and fun stuff for advanced search features? Well, as TechCrunch noted a week or so ago, Google stopped the testing at SearchMash.com.

Now if you go to http://searchmash.com/ you will see this message:

Why did Google kill it? Well, maybe it had to do with Google launching SearchWiki a few days prior? Maybe it has to do with Google cutting costs or maybe something else.

There didn't seem to be an official response from Google on why it is missing. But we can make our own assumptions.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: WebmasterWorld had a thread the day it went down and I missed it somehow! Not sure how. :)

Want to know the hottest search terms across the various search engines? Yahoo, Ask, and Google [Product Search] have listed the most popular items. Here's what Yahoo has as its top 10 searches:

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus
5. RuneScape
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto
8. Lindsay Lohan
9. Angelina Jolie
10. American Idol

And Ask.com's most popular list, on the contrary, doesn't seem that interesting (as some say):

1. Dictionary
2. MySpace
3. Google
4. YouTube
5. Facebook
6. Coupons
7. Cars
8. Craigslist
9. Online degrees
10. Credit score

Google's most popular searches are not available (yet?), but Google's most popular product searches are public:

1. nintendo wii
2. wii fit
3. ipod touch
4. xbox 360
5. nintendo ds
6. ipod nano
7. uggs
8. nikon d90
9. zune
10. digital picture frame

Surprised much? Some are.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

It seems like we have confirmed reports from a Googler in Google Groups that Google's video crawler, part of the GoogleBot family, is not playing nice. In short, even though you may be telling Google not to crawl your videos, they will anyway.

One person said it has been going on for 1.5 months already and he has no idea what else to do.

JohnMu from Google apologized saying:

I've passed this on to the video search team to look at (and fix :-)). I don't know how soon you will see changes, but now that they're informed things should generally change soon. If you don't see a change in a few weeks, please post back here again.

Hopefully this will be fixed shortly.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Update: John commented with a clarification and I wanted to make sure you all saw it:

Hi Barry, I just wanted to clarify something quickly on this - it's not that we're not following the directives (to disallow crawling). Instead, we've already crawled these URLs earlier and even with a disallow statement they'll generally remain in the index for a while (which is how it generally works with robots.txt files). I was hoping that they would drop out quicker, which seems to be what the webmaster would prefer.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google is still offering search tips to help searchers become more efficient searchers. In short, Google offered what they call a "tip" at the top of the search results, directly above the organic results. The tip read:

Tip: hit return instead of clicking on the search button to save time.

I tried to duplicate this tip by searching over and over again and clicking on the search button, but I was unsuccessful.

This is not the first time Google has offered such search tips. Gary Price reported this almost three years ago in January 2006. He even posted a screen capture if you are interested in seeing it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The blogosphere is buzzing about Google's announcement that they have made Google SearchWiki the default for users who are signed into Google while searching.

What this means is that users will see features to promote, delete and comment on search results. This is advanced searcher stuff. I am really a bit surprised Google pushed this to every Google account user as the default. Why? (1) As Arrington said, it wasn't broken originally - well, some would disagree with that. (2) It is confusing for the average searcher, no?

Do you think the average searcher is ready for it? Take the poll directly below this line:

Okay, so some basics that might not be clear to every reader of this site:

• This only changes your search results, no one elses
• You must be signed in to use it
• You can change the results back

For SEOs, will this impact the future of search? Well, yes and no. Clearly, people can now promote and remove sites, so you may benefit or not from that. But will Google use this data to improve their overall algorithms? I would suspect so, on some level. But with any Wiki-like system, it can be spammed, so I doubt Google will rely on this data too much.

That being said, let's get our SEO and promote me higher. There is this other Barry Schwartz who uses Barry Schwartz in his title tag. He wrote some books to play with people's heads. He is much older. He spoke at Google. He is much cooler. But I am in the SEO crowd, so I should rank #1. No?

Here is the current default results for barry schwartz in Google:

Now, go down to my personal blog, CartoonBarry.com and promote it.

It will then pop up this window, say "yes."

It then should put my blog at the top for you:

Click on the comment bubble on the right of the result and leave me a witty comment:

Thank you!

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld, Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.

Today, gabs spotted a new feature in Google.co.uk that lets you skip through the splash screen of sites. Using this query, you can see a similar result to this:

Search Engine Land spotted this in June, and it looks like Google isn't done testing this out yet. Further, the "Skip Intro" link isn't very visible, so it'd be interesting to note how many people actually have seen this but never actually clicked on it (probably because they overlooked it).

It's a nice addition, but indeed, I think the "Skip Intro" link would need to be more prominent to be useful.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Argentina Forcing Google & Yahoo To Censor Search Results from Search Engine Land covers this very well. In short, Argentina is forcing, by court order, Yahoo and Google to censor their search results. The results being censored are for select public officials, models, actors, and sports stars.

For example, a search on popular soccer player, Diego Maradona returns no results at all and a message that means:

On the occasion of a court order sought by private parties, we have been forced to temporarily remove some or all of the search results relating to it.

Here is a screen capture:

Why do results come up at Google? Well, Google is censoring the results, but not completely removing the results like Yahoo.

We have discussion on this topic at Sphinn where one member seems to really know a thing or two on the topic. He said:

This is an incredible story - congrats to OpenNet Initiative for reporting this (and SEL + Ramkarthik for spreading the word :)

My first thought was that the Argentinean government had these results removed - it´s no secret that the Los Kirchner censore with a ´soft hand´ (critical journalists are not invited to press conferences, economical figures are´adjusted´ etc.). I was quite surprised to read that it´s actually private parties who have their online presence removed. I´m no expert in law, but find it hard to understand how an Argentinean private party can oblige international SE´s to have their ´names´removed from the SERP´s (and as a result other people with the same name loose their online presence as well).

Under which law do these SE´s operate? Any ideas?

Under the laws of which they run in that specific country. That is how it works.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

You know the results bar at Google? The one that says, Results 1 - 10 of about X for keyword? It looks like this:

Well, it is never much all that accurate. Some novice searchers look at that to compare how popular topic A is to topic B, but that really doesn't make much sense. In addition, it is often fairly buggy.

For example, a WebmasterWorld thread has some webmasters noticing the bar read, "Results 1-18 of about 13 results" or something like that.

You got that? 1 - 18, first of all, Google shows max 10 by default. And of 13, but showing 1-18? Doesn't make much sense.

This is not surprising to many of us. I typically ignore that bar anyway, and you should likely ignore it too, or at least, take it for what it is worth.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Every week day, I put together, what I call the Daily Link Find on my personal blog. It basically is a summary of links to my blog posts I find for the day. I find most, if not all, the links via Google Blog Search, using the link command.

For me, I use link:www.seroundtable.com while in Google Blog Search. I limit it to the past 24 hours and then scan the real articles that wrote stories linking to my sites.

The thing is, Google changed the behavior of how this link command works about a week ago. In the past, it would only show me links that were found within the body of the content. I assume it just looked at the RSS feed data and not the blog itself. Now, Google is showing me new content they found with links to my site, but from anywhere on the site, including the blogroll. This is an issue for me, because a large number of sites write stories daily but also have me on their blog roll. This means that although they are not linking to me, or referencing me, in their blog post, it still comes up in Google Blog Search. This causes a headache and a lot of wasted time on my behalf weeding out the true references from the plain and simple links from blogrolls.

Did anyone else notice this significant change?

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Google announced that they are now using OCR technology to index and show an HTML version of a scanned PDF document. In the past, Google only showed an HTML version of PDF's created with text enabled formatting. But now, if a document is scanned as an image, Google can create an HTML version using OCR.

For example, this PDF is a scan of a cooperative agreement between Google and Regents of the University of California. You cannot copy and paste the text from the PDF document. But now, with Google's OCR capabilities, you can view the HTML version and use this text in your own agreements, saving you the expense of starting from scratch on your own agreements.

Ever find that perfect document that you wanted to reuse for contracts, marketing material, how-tos, and so on? But you were unable to reuse it because it wasn't copy and paste friendly? Well, now you can use Google to get to it. From now on, when searching for documents like this, try filetype:pdf in the search box along with your search query.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Mike Blumenthal has been covering Google Maps spam since Google Maps came out. I guess he got sick of covering the issues and not much being done about stopping it. He decided to do something a bit extreme. He hijacked Microsoft's listing in Google Maps and made them a Microsoft Escort Service. He also messed around with profiles, here is one example:

Danny Sullivan has a really enjoyable read on how Mike did this.

While some SEOs and webmasters are shocked this can happen, those of us who have been around and watching the space has known this has been going on for a while now. Who is to blame? Businesses should validate and acquire their Google Maps listings? Do they even know they are able to do so? Are they aware? Is ignorance an excuse?

Meanwhile, Maps Guide Brian, an official Google Maps representative posted a Google Groups thread stating that they will be upgrading the Local Business Center:

Please note that that the Local Business Center will be undergoing scheduled maintenance today, October 30th, and again on November 6th. We appreciate your patience as we work to continue to improve this product!

Hopefully this upgrade or maintenance will help prevent some of these issues. I know Google is a big target and the more features and tools they release, the more susceptible they become to becoming targeted. It is a tough business and sometimes it can be hurtful. You build tools to help people (of course also make money) and people come in and abuse it.

Forum discussion at Sphinn #1, Sphinn #2 and Google Groups.

Numerous webmasters are reporting that Google News (and Google Book Search results, as we reported) are showing up in the SERPs for particular Google searches. However, these news stories aren't recent; they are relatively old and dated.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to reproduce the search (perhaps I'm searching for terms that always have associated news), but there's a question about Google's relevancy if it's providing old news stories.

Further, to that end, there are also observations of MSN and Yahoo shopping results. Interesting.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

About a year ago today, we wrote about a Google experimental test for voting up web results. Well, it seems like Google is now pushing that test out to users. Several folks are now seeing it.

We have a WebmasterWorld thread with some people noticing it. We have blog posts from Justin Hileman, Garett Rogers, Alex Chitu and a German blog noticing this. Here is a video that demonstrates it all:

Alex notes that all users are not yet able to see this, but you can see "traces" of the Google SearchWiki by appending &swm=2 to the end of your search result string.

Going back in time, Google had a remove result feature, which they dropped a while back. This is a bit more sophisticated than simply removing results from the search results.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Google Base Blog announces new updates to Google Product Search. The post explains that the product_type attribute has been added and should apply the category and values from the taxonomy listed here. Further, the blog post states more about the taxonomy:

The Google product taxonomy is a tree of categories that describe product families, with verticals (Electronics, Home & Garden, etc.) at the highest level, followed by more specific product families or products within these broad categories (such as Electronics > Audio > Audio Players & Recorders > MP3 Players).

While Google finds this value optional, I'd consider it pretty helpful and I'm sure others would agree.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

First go read Greg Sterling's write up at Search Engine Land named Location in the Browser: What Does It Mean?

Now that you read that, you will realize that the implication of Google adding geolocation capabilities to your desktop browser can be huge. The Geolocation API can run on any browser that has Google Gears and automatically will run on Android and Google's browser, Chrome.

Google currently knows your approximate location for when you do searches only via IP data, personalized search data or other, less exact methods. But now, if the browser can detect wifi locations and/or cell towers, Google will know where you are, almost to your exact location. GPS is supported, but most laptops or desktops do not have GPS devices built in yet (yes, yet).

The reaction to this from advertisers and searchers are split. A WebmasterWorld thread has advertisers excited that Google's geolocation capabilities will be able to target their ads better. But searchers are not yet 100% comfortable with Google knowing their exact whereabouts, at all times while using Google properties. Personally, I am not about privacy - I actually am considering wearing a GPS enabled device with me at all time to track me where ever I go and then publish that data on my personal web site. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The other day, we reported again that Google Testing Dates on Search Snippets. But it is much more than just dates. Google is now showing additional attributes from the content on the page. For example:

Notice how the above result shows post numbers, author numbers, and the last post date. Clearly, in this case, Google thinks this blog post is a forum post or maybe not, maybe Google classifies the "comments" in the blog post as a threaded type of discussion.

They also pull out author names, for example in a case of searching for minotti, the last result looks like this (hat tip):

Will this stick? I am not sure - my gut tells me no, Google won't keep these in most cases. Maybe specific queries will return these details, but I just don't feel that Google will keep these additional attributes on the search results pages. At least not in this fashion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

A couple days ago, Matt McGee at Search Engine Land confirmed the reports the Wall Street Journal that Google will be offering web search result notifications not only via Google Alerts, but also via RSS format.

Yahoo and Live Search both have RSS results enabled in auto-discovery mode on the search results pages. Google does not and has not enabled this ever. Why now? Honestly, I am not sure why Google has waited this long? I know they don't want their search results to be used for many purposes outside of searching. Does this mean that rank checking tools can go the RSS route, as opposed to the scraping route? I doubt many will change and it is hard to know exactly how Google will release the RSS flavored results. Will it be only via Google Alerts or will Google enabled auto-discovery like Yahoo and Live does? Many of the other Google search properties, like Google News and Blog Search have auto-discovery enabled.

Time will tell - but I am happy about this. It makes Google's web results more accessible.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld member is spotting some interesting Google interface tests with regards to placement of dates on snippets of SERPs. pageoneresults writes:

In performing certain search queries, Google appears to be inserting the date of the page in front of the Snippet. I just performed one search and 5 of the 10 results had dates preceding their Snippets. One of them had the date towards the end of the Snippet.

Of the 6 dates shown, all were within the past 10 days with the exception of a Press Release from 2007.

Michael Gray has spotted this as well. (Note: this differs from the visits that are recorded by Google if you're logged in.)

He believes that Google is finding that the dated results is actually faring well for Google. From my experience, the inclusion of the date has helped especially since dated results feel fresher.

In fact, if you do site: searches, you can find some good results as well, and another person agrees that the dated results are obviously incredibly helpful, especially in a technological field where things are always changing.

I'm guessing we'll be seeing more of that in the future.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

This article was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 9th.

Google Maps Guide Tom has given us a summary of the most recent updates the Google Maps team enabled on the Google Maps for Mobile product. Tom created a Google Groups thread detailing each point and they include:

• The Sony Ericsson device memory issues should be addressed really soon.
• Touch screen support coming to LG Vu users soon
• Internal/External GPS issues are being worked on
• Google Maps desktop version data takes several weeks to come down to the mobile version

If you want more details, make sure to check out the Google Groups thread.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Want to see the old Google -- probably before half of you were born searching? Check out Google's search engine from 2001, and what Google calls its oldest available index. You'll probably notice that Gmail back in 2001 was a Gnome-based Linux mail client and that YouTube didn't exist. Searching for Barry Schwartz back in 2001 brings back some psychology dude who must've written a book (joking aside, I own the book). Searching for Tamar Weinberg yields no results of the present Tamar Weinberg, but that's probably because I didn't get married (and didn't change my last name) until 2005. However, you can dig up relevant information by searching with my old name, so I consider this pretty accurate for 2001.

Besides that, though, those searching reflect back on a day when Google wasn't dominated by ads and when their rankings (#1) were easier to achieve. Further, it seems that some are trying to leverage this old search engine for competitive research.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Ever just want to search Google Images for just photos? Well, now you can. A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google has added a new filter option to the advanced image search section of Google Image Search, for "photo content."

So, now, if I am looking for photos of people with my name, I can easy find tons of them. If you do not like using radio buttons, just append the &imgtype=photo to the end of the Google Image Search string and you will restrict the results by photos.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Everyone is talking about the announcement that Google Blog Search looks more like Google News, the home page and works a bit more like Techmeme. Danny has a quick post on it, ReadWriteWeb calls it a Techmeme Killer, but Matt Cutts explains the core differences between what Google is doing and what Techmeme does.

Honestly, it feels like just yesterday when Google launched blog search. Well, technically, it was a little over three years ago. But over time, blog search became more and more part of Google.

So now, Google Blog Search has a new front page with subcategories:

The interesting bit is that although tons of blogs and news sites are covering the news, we only have a bit of discussion. In fact, the only discussion I found was a single post at WebmasterWorld.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports Google is testing giving the users the ability to set the size of the search results snippets. Google is showing at the upper left of the search results page "Web: Result details: S M L" The "S," "M," and "L" letters are button like and they control the snippets.

S = No snippets
M = 161 character description in the snippet area
L = 638 character description in the snippet area

TechCrunch secured a picture:

Member iridiax at WebmasterWorld said:

I've been using it all day today on the L detail setting, and I really like it. It shows a meta description and on-page content, so it's much easier to distinguish between good pages with real info as opposed to keyword list spam or stub pages with just a deceptively nice meta description.

He is the only one that sees this, that I am aware of.

Personally, this control would make more sense to have in the search preferences, but I guess Google needs to test it out on a few people, before deciding to add it anywhere.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting seeing an spike in the number of instances Google is showing Google Book Search results within the web results. A few other members have agreed in seeing a larger number of book results in the Google web results.

Robert Charlton speculates Google may be testing if searchers like these results. And based on click data, they may decide to keep the results more prominent or not.

I think it is a seasonal thing. As one member points out, "these have been there for weeks and are increasing their density by the week." What is about this time of the year? Back to school maybe? In fact, almost exactly last year, we reported the same exact issue. Last year on September 24th I wrote, Google Book Search Results in Google.com Organic Results? It was discussing how members noticed an increase in book results coming up.

Google started experimenting with Google Book Search results in web search back in December 2004.

So do you think this is a seasonal thing for back to school season or just a test?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread uncovers a very interesting occurrence that is taking place when using a site command feature, known as the "hidden" or "invisible" site command search.

If you want to search with a site command but don't want the referral data to show that you are using a site command while searching, you use to be able to use a flavor of a Google Custom Search Engine to get at it. The example given is:

http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft&sourceid=webmasterworld&num=100&sitesearch=webmasterworld.com

Notice that when you search using that command, up come videos from YouTube.com or video.google.com, included in the webmasterworld.com results. A site command is suppose to restrict the results, only to results from that site, i.e. webmasterworld.com.

The same issue happens when you change it to sitesearch=seroundtable.com. But it is not an issue when using the Google Custom Search Engine that I placed on this site, see here.

At first, I thought it may be an issue with Google Custom Search Engines. Because last night, TechCrunch reported that there was a major outage with the Google CSE. But Google said they fixed that, so that is not the issue.

Maybe the thread creator is right:

I suspect google have deliberately broken this method of site searching precisely because it is invisible to the user, and they would rather people use the Custom Search Engine system instead. But that's just the cynic in me.

Who knows, maybe this is the wrong query string in the first place?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As we know, algorithms are very powerful in influencing the search results. However, we also know that Google has human evaluators -- thousands, in fact. In a recent blog post on the Official Google Blog, one of Google's engineering directors shed some light into the role of human evaluators. The relevant piece of information is here:

Google makes use of evaluators in many countries and languages. These evaluators are carefully trained and are asked to evaluate the quality of search results in several different ways. We sometimes show evaluators whole result sets by themselves or "side by side" with alternatives; in other cases, we show evaluators a single result at a time for a query and ask them to rate its quality along various dimensions.

Tedster at WebmasterWorld is pretty interested in these results; the fact that human evaluators actually look at results side by side to help improve the quality of its search results is pretty reassuring.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

About three weeks ago, I covered a story at Search Engine Land on Google Blogoscoped finding Google testing two video results, in the web search results, on the same line. Here is a picture:

It appears Google is continuing the test. AccuCast started a Search Engine Watch Forums thread showing two video results on the same line, for a search at Google UK for MTV awards. I personally do not see it, but I kind of like the two video results on one line.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

It appears Google Germany has removed many, if not all, adult video sites from their index. A Google Groups thread reported this, where an adult video site owner said his Adult Tube site was removed from Google.de and so were all his competitors.

Googler, JohnMu, explained that a site command for at least one of the sites, such as site:www.redtube.com, returns a message from Google that it was removed due to local laws.

If you click over to ChillingEffects.org it explains:

A URL that otherwise would have appeared in response to your search, was not displayed because that URL was reported as illegal by a German regulatory body.

The same with other sites, such this message, "German Court Order against display of privatamateure.com and youporn.com."

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

If you haven't seen my coverage of the Google News Error Aids In United Airlines Stock Drop at Search Engine Land, let me bring you up to speed in a couple lines. Earlier this week, Google's news crawler crawled Florida Sun-Sentinel website to find a link to an article that discussed United Airlines filing for bankruptcy. The article was actually an old story, but had no date, so Google picked it up as a new story. Then others saw the story on Google News (not on their home page), assumed it was new, and wrote about it. United Airlines stock price feel about 12% on that old news.

A day later, Google blamed the Tribune (the owner of the web site) for not dating their article. Google explained the link was found on the home page, Googlebot crawled the link, indexed the article, and found September 7, 2008 as a date listed on the page. Tribune then came back blaming Google for the mistake, saying that the URL is old, never changed, the content is the same, and it is all the same from 2002. The only thing that happened was that the article became a "most popular" link on the Florida Sun-Sentinel website, but the link and URL was old.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the "Securities and Exchange Commission opened a preliminary inquiry into the circumstances around UAL Corp.'s stock drop, according to people familiar with the matter." John Reed Stark, head of the SEC's office of Internet enforcement said, "Anytime anyone spreads false information over radio, TV, Internet message boards or chat rooms, about a public company that will raise questions as to whether someone is committing securities fraud."

So who is to blame? That is the discussion at a WebmasterWorld. Should legal or financial action be taken against either company? Should we learn from this and improve the process and algorithm to make sure it doesn't happen, but not take any action? This is a tough call, very tough call.

Here is a poll, who do you think is to blame?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Poll results now live at Survey Says: United Airlines (UAL) Stock Price Drop Blamed On.

It has been confirmed via a WebmasterWorld thread that many search ranking checking tools have been working over the past day or so.

Just about a month ago we reported about the issues people were having with WebPosition Gold and other rank checking tools. We first thought Google was going after these rank checking tools but then we learned that the issues were due to Google testing out new HTML structures and layouts in the search results pages.

The WebmasterWorld thread reports that not only is WebPosition Gold now working, but other rank checking tools also. So maybe the Google experiment is over or maybe it is on a vacation? Or perhaps, the tools built in a fix for the scraping issues.

I still know Google hates these tools but will they go as far to block them?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google just can't win. I beat up Google on showing pornography or inappropriate images in their image search engine or on web search way too often. We complained in December that Google Image Search was too sensitive and then Google seemed to have relaxed the filter in June. But then we saw more porn or images that would upset some people.

Now, I am seeing reports at WebmasterWorld that Google may have tightened the filter to be more sensitive again. The filter does not appear to be as strong as the December filter, but it is discussed that it is more strict that after the June changes.

This is a hard balance to find but it is something Google and other image search engines struggle with daily.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Go to Yahoo Search and use their search suggestions. All I want you to do is enter in "G" into the search box and obtain the search suggestions.

Yea, Google comes up as a suggestion. This is really a common thing. People go to search engines to find other search engines. In fact, I have seen several clients go to Google.com and type in "google" to get back to Google.com. I am not joking.

The search suggestions typically try to show you the most common searches for your partial search phrase. It is not surprising to me that Google is a popular search at Yahoo. In fact, try typing in "Y" into Google, you will see Google puts YouTube first, but in fact, Yahoo is search more often, according to the numbers:

Again, not surprising.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Earlier this week, we reported that Google Suggest was going to become more mainstream -- that is, that it would be the search default. Essentially, Google would "choose" the search phrases you were aiming to search for. This decision has been already challenged as search engine marketers wonder the consequences of this decision.

On Sphinn, lots of debate is cropping up about how this will change the face of SEM -- for good. In one post, we see 9 ways how the decision will impact search marketing. Some of these include the negative impact to long tail searches, more traffic to regional sites, and less opportunity to capitalize on misspellings, among others.

In another post, Google Suggest is thought to "completely change the query landscape" because the drop-down box may offer you suggestions that will change your mind on the search phrase you may have aimed to look for initially. The same concerns (capitalization on misspellings and long tail optimization) are brought up in this post as well.

However, that's not all. Martin Bowling explains that Google Suggest is a reputation management nightmare. Using an illustration for Obama, one sees that a lot of 'common' searches include 'obama antichrist' and 'obama muslim,' search phrases you wouldn't think of (or would you?). Because of effective reputation management, though, the actual SERPs for "Obama" hardly show any of those negative pages, but the bitter taste doesn't really leave your mouth. This can eventually grow over time and the reputation management dangers could increase. Indeed, that is a bit worrisome.

There are a lot of related discussions on Sphinn:

• 9 Ideas How Google Suggest Could Change Search Marketing
• Google Suggest Will Greatly Change Keyword Referrers
• Google Suggest(s), A New Reputation Management Nightmare

We have been covering the issues with search ranking checkers since beginning of this month. At first, we thought it might be related to WebPosition Gold only, but it was not, it impacted most, if not all, scraper based rank checking tools, checking Google's search results. A week ago, WebPosition Gold hinted that a fix is coming to their software, despite that Google hates rank checkers. But no fix has come yet, as far as I know.

To make things worse for rank checking products that scrape Google, it seems like Google is dynamically messing around their HTML structure to confuse the scrapers.

The continued discussion on this topic at WebmasterWorld shows signs of this. One member, pageoneresults, said:

Ah-ha, they've got some sort of dynamically generated thing going on with the output. Every 24 hours it is scheduled to generate a variation in the html output. Google just put it on auto-pilot after testing these past few weeks. < Me "Tin Hat" is always on during these types of discussions. :)

After that post, member sc0ttkclark said the format changed once again.

It seems like Google may have implemented a feature that is transparent to searchers but can totally mess up rank checking tools. This is not just impacted WebPosition Gold, but all scraper based tools, including the SEO Firefox plugin, which is being discussed at Cre8asite Forums.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Cre8asite Forums.

Update: Google's JohnMu directed me to a Google Blog post named Search experiments, large and small, where he said, "I imagine it might be more due to" that blog post. I was away when Google posted that, but as John said, it does look to be very related.

The Official Google Blog has acknowledged that it will begin rolling out Google Suggest, which will let you formulate queries with more ease, reduce spelling errors, and save keystrokes. An example screenshot is below:

It's about time, but one wonders if this is happening because of Yahoo's success with Search Assist. While Google has had this technology for years, are they playing "catch up"?

In terms of SEO, there are concerns that this will affect long tail searches and those looking to capitalize on misspelled keywords. Only time will tell if this is indeed to be the case.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if Google would penalize a site in the free/organic listings if that site does not pay up their AdWords bill. For example, ACME Inc. has been running an AdWords campaign and racked up a bill for $10,000. ACME decided to not pay the bill, because ACME ranks very well for their keywords in the Google organic results. If ACME doesn't pay the bill, would Google lower the ranking of ACME for their keywords in the free/organic listings?

This is not a new topic. We covered this exact question over two years ago, Would Google Downgrade a Site's Ranking for Not Paying an AdWords Bill? The discussion around that topic, two years ago, was mixed. Some felt Google would and have dropped the organic rankings of those who don't pay their bills and some have said, no Google has not and will never do such a thing.

In addition, we have heard time and time again, from Google that paid ads have no influence on free search listings. If that is the case, then not paying a bill on the AdWords side, should have no direct impact on a search listing.

Of course, one came make the argument that by not being in the paid listings, your branding and traffic might drop, which may have an indirect impact. But that is for a different discussion.

Reviewing the new WebmasterWorld thread, most people think that Google will hurt your rankings over time. Here is one quote:

OF COURSE THEY WOULD! Would they do it immediately? Probably not. Would you die a slow death? Probably so. Don't even think about reneging on the bill. And, if I had my finger on the trigger, it would be an immediate pull. ;)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google has been bolding the search phrase within the search results for as long as I can remember. For example, a search on [search engine roundtable] will bold the words "search," "engine," and "roundtable," on the Google search results page. Here is a picture of one search result for that search phrase:

But according to a WebmasterWorld thread, Google is not always bolding words. I have confirmed this to be true, in some cases Google will not bold an exact matched phrase, in the Google search results. Why? I am not sure. Especially after seeing the latest Google blog post on search quality describe how Google will not only bold exact matches in the search results, but also implied matches, such as with a search on arod, which matches on and bolds "Alex Rodriguez," picture:

So which examples can I show you that do not bold? How about my fun big blue pineapple chair example. Notice that in the third result, the title is not bolded:

That is just one quick example. I have seen more and I bet I can trigger more.

We have seen Google not bold URLs in some cases, and Google AdWords started bolding matches about a year or so ago. Even Google China bolds, but they bold in red.

Is this a bug, is there something more to this?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld member points out that Google has been a little more open with regards to personalized search results. For example, when you do a search, you might see something like this, where Google says that these are searches based on your web history:

When you click on "More details," Google gives you more information about personalization:

Google announced this transparency at the end of July, and it's been relatively welcome addition. They fear that the results could still be personalized if you're not logged into your account, however.

On a similar note, Pierre Far has written that you can now opt out of this behavioral tracking, and he directs you to the forms you need to fill out on Google and Yahoo (in addition to NAI).

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Cre8asite Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google is now placing product results, for some searches, in the middle of the search results. For example, a search on ipod nano returns the Google Shopping results in the fourth listing, as opposed to above the web search results.

Yes, this is Google Universal Search at it's best, but it is confusing some users. A WebmasterWorld member asked why Google was placing AdWords listings within the search results. Yes, you and I know they are not AdWords listings, but does the average searcher? In that case, does the average searcher care if there are product results in the 4th listing, mixed into the search results? Maybe not, maybe that is what Google is testing.

For you, the advertiser, if you have product and you are not in Google Shopping/Product Search, then maybe it is time you submit your products to Google.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Searchlight Digital Blog has an interesting post that illustrates the percentage of click-throughs you'd get based on a specific Google ranking. The analysis performed by Searchlight covers over 36 million queries and more than 19 million clicks.

The interesting data comes from the explanation from Pete, the blog post's author:

Where this gets really interesting though is when you look at what can happen if you own most of the real estate on a good SERP. The top four results put together account for over two thirds of all clicks that will happen (68.69% in total). The top ten taken as a whole will give nearly nine tenths! (Actual total figure - 89.69%).

Drop onto page two, and you’re basically stuffed. Unless the term gets huge traffic, you’re not going to.

In a way, this information is troubling, however. The discussion on Sphinn concerns individuals. NickWilsdon, for example, is quoted as saying: "That shows the effect of Google pushing up these authority sites into top positions. Eventually they will just leave scraps for everyone else."

I guess we're all hoping that day never comes.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A select group of webmasters have observed "Related" links under search results. I can't see it myself but Aaron Wall blogged about it, and Barry covered his angle on Search Engine Land.

Here's a screenshot:

Barry notes the following:

It is also interesting to speculate how Google determines to show which related phrases for each result. If you notice, Aaron's seobook.com result shows a related phrase for get more links and if you search in Google for that, seobook.com does rank in the number one position for that search phrase.

Forum chatter is revolving around this observation as well. Robert Charlton says that "the Related queries are in fact queries for which the pages displayed would rank." That's because Google is already in possession of that data.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Did you know that Google has a search engine related to governmental queries? Google's Uncle Sam search engine includes White House news, top governmental stories, American Forces Information Services, the Washington Post, and more. The search engine also searches .gov sites only.

It's pretty useful for "official" information, and one forum member who is a political science student is particularly thankful for a search engine that is targeted to such queries that are related to official government pages.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Google Groups thread lead me to believe that Google Maps will soon be offering walking directions to everyone, in the near future. So, I decided to check the example I was watching, i.e. 200 Madison Ave to 200 Lexington Ave in New York and I see walking directions!

I lead off this post that this was coming soon, but it is now here, at least for me.

Yes, I covered signs of this at Search Engine Land, where Google Operating System had screen captures of Google testing out walking directions within Google Maps. Again, now I personally see it, do you?

Here is a screen shot of the NY example I mentioned above:

For a full size screen shot, check the image on Flickr.

So, when Maps Guide Brian from Google said in the Google Groups thread "stay tuned here for updates," in regards to the release of walking directions, then I guess he means now?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Update: Everyone I asked to try my example above was able to see walking directions. I have several responses already at my Plurk request, so it seems like this is indeed live.

Update 2 (at 1:45pm): The Google LatLong Blog has now officially made it official with one of their own blog posts announcing the new feature.

A WebmasterWorld forum member is a bit disturbed by a #1 Google ranking on one of his own websites -- that is BROKEN. It's an old site with many pages indexed and strong inbound links, but every single time he's checked the site for the last 4 months, he gets a "cannot connect to database" error. Still, the site has stayed in the #1 position. Why is it that Google prefers this irrelevant site over better content?

He puts the concerns simply:

Anyone landing on my site in the last 4 months would be greatly dissappointed. In google as much as me.

The site has no meta tags, but it lost its sitelinks. Still, the fact that it has a #1 ranking (with Wikipedia being #2) is substantial to him and others. He's not complaining about his #1 ranking but he can imagine the frustration others feel for not being able to rank when they're probably optimizing very well to get that #1.

The question really comes out to be -- if Google once considers your site and authority, is it always an authority?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Two months ago, we noticed Google testing a green look, but since then - it seems Google stopped that test.

I spotted a new DigitalPoint Forums thread with new reports of Google testing out the green look. Here is a picture of what this member sees, compared to the standard blue bar, which is what I see:

Green top Google bar (larger):

Blue top Google bar (larger):

Maybe Google is getting serious about implementing green as their user interface? Or maybe not. For more pictures, see our older post on this Google test.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.