Google has offered personalised search results for some time, serving up customised, tailored results for each searcher to provide them with the most relevant results possible. By ‘learning’ about a user’s search history and preferences, Google can then adjust the search results in the future. This was initially only available for people who were logged into a Google account, but since December last year, Google made Personalised Search the default option for everyone.

This recent change appears to have been introduced at a low key level, despite the significant implications for users – in the way that search results are now being presented to them – as well as for companies that are marketing their websites using search engine optimisation. By using a ‘cookie’ file that is saved on each user’s computer when they search Google, the search engine is able to record past activity to help adjust similar search results in the future.

This tracking feature was originally provided in the form of Google’s Search History, which was switched on as a default option for many Google searchers in February 2007. It was renamed as Web History in April 2007, to reflect how it began to track more information about how Google users surfed the web after having conducted a search. It then became known as Personalised Search and was available only for signed-in Google account users, but this recent change has meant that every searcher is now having their search activity recorded in order to help Google serve up more relevant results in the future.

If a user now searches Google, a text link appears at the top right of the screen saying ‘Web History’. This link explains that “search results may be customized using search activity from this computer” and users have the option to disable this function. If you sign into a Google Account, you have the option to register for the more detailed Web History option which then displays more detailed information about previous search activity and the search results may also be adapted in different ways based on this data.

All the main search engines have always retained search history for a set period of either 90 or 180 days, although this data wasn’t linked to individual searchers. With Personalised Search, the data is recorded on the PC, unless the user is signed into a Google Account. Either way, there are privacy issues arising from this data collection and although Google does provide users with an opt-out option, most people are unlikely to be aware of this and will do nothing about it.

Of course, Google’s argument is that by recording this data on search activity they can improve the quality and relevancy of results in the future. The use of cookies and user history has influenced the ranking of Google AdWords adverts in the past, and continue to do so. The extension of this feature for all searchers means that users may be presented with quite different results when using different PCs, and popular sites that have been visited in the past are likely to rank better in the future.

From a search engine optimisation perspective, this means that ranking results for a site will potentially vary between different users and will be hard to track changes on an accurate basis. Having said that, ranking positions have always been used as a benchmark in the past and the real measure of a successful SEO campaign will be an increase in search engine referral traffic. In the long term, the data that Google collects about search rankings and user activity is likely to influence ranking results overall.

You can find more information about Google’s Personalised Search results here and it’s worth bearing this feature in mind when you use this search engine. If you’d like to know more about this and the impact on your search engine marketing strategy, then please contact us.

The Google blog has just announced the launch of another notable new product, Google Sidewiki. This new feature allows searchers to contribute helpful information next to any webpage and can display a browser sidebar next to the web page, where users can read and write shared entries along the side of the page.

The new Sidewiki tool is an extension of Google’s personalised search functionality and ’search wiki’ option launched at the end of 2007, which allows users to adjust their own search results and add comments against ranked websites. The Sidewiki tool now takes this a step further by giving users the chance to share knowledge, experience or advice against web content.

In developing Sidewiki, Google says that a priority was for users to see the most relevant entries first, so they have developed a system to rank the comments that are added in the ‘best’ order. So, instead of displaying the most recent entries first, the Sidewiki ranks entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from users, previous entries made by the same author, and many other signals they have developed and tracked.

This should help to address the obvious concerns of website owners that competitors will post negative comments and reviews against their web content, in much the same way that review based websites have been trying to deal with competitive ’spam’. There is also the eventual question of how the tone of comments will be used by Google in the long term to add another layer of data to the relevancy of search ranking results.

Another feature of the Sidewiki is that the technology will match comments about a web page with other websites where the same content is displayed. This will help to broaden the value of the system and to reduce the need for duplicated comments or posts. Google is also going to use relevant posts from blogs and other sources that talk about the specific page of content so that users can discover their insights more easily, right next to the page they refer to.

Google Sidewiki is being made available as a new feature of the Google Toolbar so you need to download the latest version to access this sidebar and add or view comments. It’s still going through a beta stage of development and Google will be improving and enhancing this feature in the coming months. You can read a more detailed review of this new tool by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land.

To find out more about using Google’s Sidewiki and the potential implications for your website, please contact us.

Google’s Webmaster Blog recently posted an article that confirmed the irrelevance of the keywords meta tag in the search engine’s ranking results. This created quite a ‘buzz’ on Twitter, blogs and discussion forums, although it’s been known for some years in the search engine optimisation business that Google ignores any content placed in this tag. However, there are still website owners or marketers who believe that the keywords tag is something to be concerned about.

When websites and search engines were being developed in the 1990’s, the keywords meta tag was a section of code that was used to determine the content and relevancy of a website within search results. However, as Google has stated in their recent blog post, the early trend of search engines to judge pages only on the web page content - including the meta tags - led to keyword ’stuffing’ or spamming which couldn’t be seen by the regular user of a website and were techniques designed to manipulate the search engine results.

However, one of the main reasons for Google’s success was that they placed more emphasis on so-called ‘off-page’ factors, such as the links pointing to a web page, and they ignored content that was hidden to the website visitor, as this was seen to be irrelevant and open to manipulation. As a result, the keywords meta tag was ignored as a factor within the search engine’s ranking algorithm and so content placed here didn’t have any influence on how a website would be ranked for a search query.

Therefore, obsessing about this meta tag and which words to include in it is mostly a waste of time. It is recommended that the keywords tag is still used on each web page, but mostly as a default tag with some of the main terms that are relevant to the site content as a whole. Recent tests have shown that some search engines, such as Yahoo! and Ask, do still use the tag as an element of indexed website content, but it’s not likely to have a strong ranking factor. Google has also said that it’s possible they could use this information in the future, but this is also considered unlikely.

A more interesting aspect of the Google blog post is a brief comment about the description meta tag, which is often used to display the short snippet of information about a web page that appears below the link to the site in the search ranking results. This content is also usually hidden within the HTML code of a web page, but will be displayed in the search results if there isn’t relevant content that can be used from the visible page content. Google’s comment is that this tag is important and should be written in a way to accurately describe the content on the specific page, so as to encourage the clickthrough rate from the search results, but they say this content also has no impact of the search ranking results. This is more debatable however, and this tag does carry more importance as part of an SEO campaign, for both Google (with their guidelines on best usage here) and on other search engines.

If you’d like to know more about meta tags and the implications for your website’s optimisation strategy, please contact us now for a discussion.

The Bid Simulator is a new tool that has recently been introduced by Google as part of their new AdWords management interface. The tool can be used by advertisers to view the potential impact of a different bid level within the advertising results for each search term being used, but what value does it really offer?

Using data from the past 7 days, the Bid Simulator tool re-calculates the number of impressions for which an advert could have shown had the advertiser chosen a different maximum CPC, as well as how many clicks the ad could have received for those impressions and how much those clicks could have cost.

According to Google, the new feature provides “increased transparency into the AdWords auction and provides the insight to make more informed bidding decisions about advertising objectives”. The figures are, of course, estimates based on expected behaviour and recent trends, and the initial feedback from professional PPC marketers has been mostly negative about this new tool’s real intentions.

The way in which the tool regularly indicates the benefits of an increase of bid levels has been treated with wide-spread scepticism. It often shows that raising bid levels by large amounts can increase the number of impressions (which doesn’t necessarily correspond to a rise in clickthrough rates). So it would seem to be more beneficial to focus upon improving quality scores to lower cost-per-clicks and improving advert copy, rather than just manipulating bids levels to increase impressions.

A Google spokesman stated, when questioned about the high frequency of raising bid levels within the tool, that “shown bids are not recommendations but are simulations for various bids to give insight to the advertiser. The feature aims to show missed opportunity”. Also that “past performances cannot guarantee future results so the simulations should not be taken as exact, they are simply predictions”.

It’s an important point that an advertiser should keep in mind when using the Bid Simulator so that the predictions need to be viewed with a pinch of salt, like most of Google’s PPC projections. In other words, rather than being recommendations, they are just projection models with a large frequency of incredibly high simulated bids.

Professional PPC marketers have the impression that Google created this tool to take advantage of ‘rookies’ and other irregular users of AdWords by encouraging advertisers to bid highly in order to simply make more money from their clicks - so not encouraging the creation of highly optimised campaigns, or the reduction of cost-per-clicks through improved quality scores.

Thus, it is suspected that many full-time search marketers will find the Bid Simulator will only demonstrate the projection that they really don’t want to pay any more than they already are, and so the focus on bid management needs to be placed in different areas.

If you’d like to know more about this new bid management tool and the implications for your AdWords management, please contact us for further information.

At the start of June Microsoft launched its new search engine, named Bing. Supported by an extensive advertising campaign in the US, Microsoft are hoping this updated version of their search technology starts to win market share back from Google. Bing is being positioned as a ‘decision engine’, which Microsoft hopes will “empower people to gain insight and knowledge from the Web, moving more quickly to important decisions”. But how does it compare to Google?

Bing incorporates some useful new functions, such as the new Explorer Pane. This includes Quick Tabs that break searches down into Web Groups relevant to the user’s search query. Although the Explorer Pane can be useful, the Quick Tabs often steers users to Microsoft services such as Bing Shopping, so it’s worth being suspicious of any search engine that habitually gives its own links precedence over others.

Bing’s results are also separately categorised, but this leads to a lot of scrolling down the page and seems redundant when there’s already the Explorer Pane to focus search results by categories. Both Bing and Yahoo! now display instant results in alternative formats to that favoured by Google’s “ten blue links” approach. Its Quick Preview feature gives you a text-based synopsis of the pages displayed in the search results and Instant Answers gives responses to questions such as currency conversion, weather forecasts and more. However, an issue with the Quick Preview feature is that it can take too long for boxes to pop up with text.

The layout and look of Bing’s new image and video search is good and the search-refining tools are easy to access. Microsoft has also added advanced technology to search queries involving travel and buying, through the purchase of Farecast in 2008. It is a useful function that compares the best deals for airfares and hotel rooms, although its level of accuracy is, as yet, unknown.

Overall, Bing doesn’t offer a great leap forward in search technology and results but it does make some progress by focusing on improving the consumer areas of travel, shopping, products and health. The new search engine is a great start with some useful functions, but Microsoft still has work to do, as the results don’t seem to be as intuitive as with Google. For example, it doesn’t personalise your results according to your IP address, like Google does.

So, as usual with Microsoft releases, Bing has potential but isn’t fully completed yet and it will only manage to convert Google users once it performs its ongoing tweaks and improvements to demonstrate more relevant results, presented in a better way. The US version of Bing is currently slightly different to all the other regional versions, from the Home Page image through to some of the functionality, although this is expected to be rolled out to all versions at some point.

More details about Bing can be found here. If you’d like to know more about Bing and how your website can rank on this search engine, please contact us.

Last month also saw the much anticipated launch of Wolfram Alpha, the new “computational knowledge engine”. There were the inevitable comparisons to Google, but the creator of this new search tool - physicist and software entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram – has discouraged these types of comparison as the new website serves a different purpose. Regardless of this, it’s an impressive new resource.

Despite all the press hype, Wolfram Alpha⁸ isn’t a traditional search engine. You can’t use it to find any type of web content online, but instead it can be used whenever you might be looking for a direct answer to a question. Stephen Wolfram has said that the site’s brain is built on content sites like the CIA World Factbook, US Census reports, Wikipedia, and “about nine-tenths of what you’d see on the main shelves of a reference library.”

The Home Page of the site provides example searches that can be done on Wolfram Alpha, plus there is further page of examples⁹ to give users the idea of its strengths. The team behind this search service have done well to collate all the data that it draws upon, but it’s only a small fraction of what’s available on the whole of the web and it may prove to be initially confusing or disappointing to people who are now so used to Google to find information online.

Wolfram Alpha’s main target audience will be mathematicians, engineers, and scientists – as well as students or journalists - because it’s based on Wolfram Mathematica, a software package that can do complex calculations. And being a “computational knowledge engine”, rather than a pure search engine, there are 5 main things that it can do better than traditional search engines, namely performing complex queries; localisation; precision; calculation and comparisons.

This is its main advantage, in that is can make calculations on the fly and present results based on the requested search. It can solve difficult equations and makes decent graphs for lots of specialised enquiries. This can also be its ‘Achilles heel’ however, as it encourages specialised search queries and it takes a bit of practice learning how to phrase queries so the engine understands the input.

Although it’s still early days and will surely improve, it’s currently too picky about syntax and not intuitive to work with. For example, if you enter a query it doesn’t understand, it just returns the text “Wolfram Alpha doesn’t know what to do with your input.”

Therefore despite exhibiting some interesting new technology, Wolfram Alpha isn’t intended to revolutionise search engines. Instead, it aims to add a useful new layer to them, not by trying to beat Google at its own game, but by complementing the traditional search engines and providing an alternative, specialised service to try bridging the gap between search engines and reference libraries.

If you’d like to know more about this new search engine, please contact us for further information.

During May, Google’s search team announced the launch of the new Search Options Panel within Google’s main search results. This gives the searcher the ability to filter, refine and further explore the standard search results to help them find exactly what they need. These options are very useful to ’slice and dice’ the search results for greater focus.

The new search options panel has been launched with limited fanfare and has probably been missed by most Google searchers. It can be accessed by clicking on the “show options” link on the top left hand side of the standard search results and reflects the type of filter options seen in Google News.

The main search tool options now allow users to break the results down into smaller categories of videos, forums or reviews. Other options include looking at results by recency, using a number of different date ranges, or by looking at the images from pages of results. There are also several more in-depth features such as related search, the “timeline” and intriguingly named “wonder wheel”.

The related search option displays other possible search phrases that the user might want to consider and extends the range beyond those now usually displayed at the bottom of a search results page. This function can also be used to check possible search terms for SEO or PPC campaigns, at a very basic level.

The timeline search option enables the selection of a time frame for results so that the chronological order and numbers of documents relating to the search can be viewed. This would be useful to examine the timeline and size of a news article, or how events have proceeded on a particular story. The wonder wheel is an excellent visual map for exploring related topics. It’s also possible to view topics related to the original search not by a visual representation, but by related searches by clicking on the link on the left hand side.

These changes appear well timed by Google to provide more search options in the face of new search engines from Wolfram Alpha (below) and the imminent launch of the new Microsoft search engine - Bing - which we will review next month. It also gives searches new functions to improve the range of results being displayed, although Google should probably do more to raise awareness of this new function. They have apparently put considerable resources into researching eye-tracking and usability studies about how people understand the options in the panel and interact with it, so it is a well-researched, user-friendly method of searching which aims to benefit the user by allowing a much greater level of depth into search results than was previously attainable.

To find out more about the Search Options Panel and how it can help to increase the marketing opportunities for your website on Google’s search results, please contact us now for more information.

Google’s Local Business Listings are now regularly shown within the main search results if a user searches for a local business, alongside a small map. In addition, viewing results on Google Maps provides more information and additional advertising options through Google AdWords, all of which should be used by a localised business to target their potential customer base. Google is now adding new features to this service to help advertisers gain more local business.

We first covered the value of Google’s local business listings and their increasing prominence in Google’s ‘universal search results’ back in our June 2007 newsletter. The local business listings service has developed further since then and remains an important area for companies who are targeting a localised market to gain a prominent listing. Achieving a high ranking in the 10 businesses listed in Google’s main results can be difficult, particularly in a competitive market, but if searchers click through to the more detailed business listings, or search directly within Google Maps, there are additional ways to achieve visibility and to attract searchers to your website.

One of the main ways to achieve good visibility is through the use of a local business advert, which is created as part of a Google AdWords campaign. This allows advertisers to create a specific advert to appear on Google Maps searches, with a small icon, address and contact details. In addition, Google has now announced some additional new features for these adverts to help companies attract prospective customers faster and to gauge how well their adverts are performing.

The first addition is that Google’s local business ads will now feature new interactive links within the panel that is displayed for the business. These panels are designed to provide more information for users and to connect them to the business quicker with a link to their website. Now users will be able to see more information from this panel and to take additional actions, such as a “Get Directions” option, a link to “Street View”, and “Save to My Maps” which allows users to personalise their search results.

In addition, Google AdWords will also be adding a new interaction report for local business ads in the near future. This report will help advertisers to assess the activity through the local business ads and their return on investment, with such information as how many users opened the info window and clicked on each of the new interactive links. Google says that Maps users are often looking for different information than Search users so that these new interactive links and the reports should help customers connect with a business faster as well as help the advertiser understand how to better target Maps users versus Search users.

If your business could be benefitting more from a Local Business Listing on Google, contact us now for more information on this feature and we’ll be pleased to help. We can create optimised listings and Local Business Adverts to help raise your profile and improve your visibility to your target market.

Many of the trends likely to have an impact in 2009 have already started, but what are our predictions for some of the key developments this coming year?

1) The economic slowdown focuses attention online: there is little doubt that the economic impact of the ‘credit crunch’ in 2008 will have a significant impact on business in 2009, particularly in the US and Europe. Progressive companies will still need to maintain and grow their business in the face of any downturn and therefore even if marketing spend is cut back, the focus on online marketing will be greater, due to the measurability and proven cost-effectiveness of this form of advertising for many businesses. Search advertising will still see an overall growth in spend and market share of online advertising and despite some companies withdrawing from this sector, many others will put more spend into this targeted advertising to support their business.

2) Analytics becomes more mainstream: partly because of the widespread uptake of Google’s free Analytics tool and partly because of the greater need for advertising spend to be effective in 2009, the use of website statistics or analytics is expected to become more common, even for small companies. However, the interpretation of the data and the way that understanding can be used will still be the most important aspect of this trend, but companies can now access much better data on their online activities which in turn can help to improve their website and marketing strategy to get the most from their online spend.

3) Yahoo won’t survive in its current form: it seems inevitable that Yahoo’s ongoing saga that was the source of much news coverage in 2008 will come to some sort of conclusion in 2009. Whether this is with Microsoft eventually coming back on the scene and buying Yahoo’s search business, or some other form of takeover by another leading online brand, it’s likely that Yahoo won’t be able to survive the next 12 months in their current form, despite – or maybe because of – the change in their CEO. It would be a shame for Yahoo to lose more search market share, as Google needs a stronger competitor, but with the economic problems in the US, it’s hard to see Yahoo surviving much longer as a key player and we can expect more developments here sooner rather than later.

4) Video becomes the new marketing tool: as mentioned above, with the growth and impact of ‘universal’ search, video is now playing a more visible role within search and in 2009 this is likely to see a bigger impact in the business sector. Companies need to think about ways they can effectively use video to drive traffic and new business to their website, as it is becoming a more widespread medium and one that can play a bigger role within search and advertising channels. The ‘optimisation’ of video will be as important as the production if the effort of creating videos is to reap the rewards expected, particularly against the massive growth of user generated video content on sites like YouTube, but the creative use and marketing of videos will become more mainstream this year.

5) Reputation management becomes a core service: we’ve covered this issue before, but with the increasing growth and focus on user-generated content sites - such as review sites, blogs and comments on social networks - the need for companies to monitor what is being said about their business and brands, and to respond effectively to that content, will become a bigger requirement in 2009 as more businesses realise the potential dangers as well as the advantages of this trend. Online reputation management will therefore become a service in much demand from PR companies and search engine marketing firms, as web content is monitored and responded to in a more effective manner.

These were our 5 predictions for 2008 that were made in January last year, together with a review of what actually happened:

1) ‘Universal search’ becomes a significant optimisation issue: the inclusion of all forms of search results – such as images, videos, news or maps – within the main search engine listings has become more prevalent over the year, particularly on Google. This has created many opportunities for companies to achieve visibility within the search results in new and more creative ways. Local business listings have been the most effective method for many companies who target a localised area, so much so that Google has had to control some of the more extreme methods by companies trying to get listings within these results. Video sites like YouTube continue to attract huge traffic volumes and videos do appear within Google’s search results, when applicable. Google has also introduced new formats for PPC adverts although these remain limited to the content network and have yet to be offered within the main search listings.

2) Personalisation gains ground: the impact of personalisation has yet to be understood as no figures have been released by Google, or other websites that offer this option, to show what the levels of uptake have been. However, at the end of 2008 Google introduced the Search Wikia option for logged in users, so that search results could be adapted to suit user preferences and notes could also be added to listings. There were also hints from Google that this data may also be eventually used to determine search engine rankings which is likely to attract abuse of the system. We believe that personalization is still in the early stages of development with the vast majority of web searchers being aware of, or using, this option, although it is likely to gradually increase usage within the market and to become a more significant issue for search engine optimisation.

3) Behavioural advertising becomes the next ‘big thing’: this is still expected to become a key service for advertisers but has still to become a mainstream function, partly due to the technology still being developed and data being collected, as well as the privacy issues that are raised once individuals realise how their data is being used to target advertising. The huge mass of data that’s being collected by search engines and other major web properties should provide highly targeted advertising opportunities but the balance between this and privacy concerns is still to be determined.

4) Content targeted advertising becomes the new PPC battleground: Google has made further improvements to the content advertising network for PPC advertisers in 2008, most notably with the introduction of Placement advertising, and with the use of display and video advertising options. This sector has not become a battleground as other PPC services offer weak alternatives, but with better data and reporting on Google’s own service, the content network has become a more accountable resource to extend the reach of this targeted form of advertising.

5) Mobile search finally becomes serious: the launch of the Apple iPhone at the start of the year and the new Google-apps phone some months later has marked the start of the mobile Internet in earnest. The range of applications seems to be limited only by ideas at the moment and so as these type of phones gain market share and become ‘the norm’, then companies need to seriously think about focusing part of their online presence to the mobile market. This has yet to happen in any significant volume but the signs are there and examples can be demonstrated.