Google improves its Arabic Search engine, but does it work?

Google improves its Arabic Search engine, but does it work?
A recent post by Moustafa Hammad and Mohamed Elhawary, two engineers at Google search quality group, captured my attention. The post discusses recent improvements to Google Arabic search engine. The improvements involve searches where users repeat the same letter or forget to add spaces between words. “Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar along with [...]

5 Simple Tips to Index Your Website in Google Search For Free

5 Simple Tips to Index Your Website in Google Search For Free
When it comes to SEO, increasing your inbound links is one of the most effective ways to improve your ranking. If you’ve recently launched a new website, or are looking for some advice to get started …

Testing Keyword Use in Title Tag as a Google Ranking Factor

Testing Keyword Use in Title Tag as a Google Ranking Factor
This is the second part of a three-part tutorial that examines and verifies ranking factors for the Google search engine. If you want to make sure that your SEO efforts for your web site will be meaningful and give it greater visibility in the most popular search engine keep reading….
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Apple, Microsoft in talks to make Bing default search on iPhone

Apple, Microsoft in talks to make Bing default search on iPhone
In an effort to neutralize Google’s dominance in the search market, two bitter rivals are in talks to replace Google search on the iPhone. According to BusinessWeek, Apple and Microsoft are in talks to replace Google search engine on the iPhone and replace it with Microsoft’s Bing search. The talks have been …

Google/AOL Search Deal Ending, Big Interest In New Partnership

Google/AOL Search Deal Ending, Big Interest In New Partnership

The AOL/Google search partnership agreement is ending this year and according to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong the company will be looking for the best possible deal, though Google will get “firsts dibs”, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Initial reports had Armstrong stating the new partnership was open to the highest bidder, but the Wall Street Journal updated their online story to state that Google had “first dibs” - suggesting there was an option in the previous deal with Google.

Microsoft is interested in the partnership to increase its market share and AOL could “get the same economics from a new deal”, Armstrong said according to WJS.com.

AOL has about 2.9% of the search market, according to comScore, and would help push Microsoft over 30% when combined with their Yahoo deal. Google holds over 65%.

The added interest in AOL comes from its high click thru rate. AOL searchers have the highest CTR of all engines according to Chikita, Their CTR for ppc ads is over two and half times that of Google. Given the engines monetize through paid search the numbers become interesting.

Bing (1.74) and Yahoo (1.37) also have significantly higher CTRs compared to Google (0.98).

These higher CTRs would give Microsoft a chance to compete with Google in the one area where it counts - revenue. Interestingly, just like searchers, many advertisers just use Google - though in my experience there are better CPAs using the other engines. Since there are fewer advertisers the bids are lower - this may not be the case in the future if advertisers become aware of these figures.

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• Bing Captures Almost 10 Percent Search Share In U.S. (techcrunch.com)
• Citi Media: Armstrong: Focus Is On Improving Search, Web Services (paidcontent.org)

New Format for Universal Image Results in Google Search

New Format for Universal Image Results in Google Search

Google is rolling out a new format for displaying images in universal results when they appear in the main search. The new format shows one image larger than the rest. This will only happen when Google is feeling confident that they have the right image.

Here’s a sample, per the Official Google Blog:

Boost eLearning Provides Course on New Google Search Features

Boost eLearning Provides Course on New Google Search Features

Boost eLearning provides search training for organizations, so that employees can conduct efficient searches for their business research. Now, Boost eLearning has unveiled a new course featuring Google’s new search features.

The new course explores the new “show options” feature which allows searchers to filter their searches by time and type.

“A large percentage of enterprise employees use Google for business research,” said Victor D. Alhadeff, CEO of Boost eLearning. “Enterprises therefore gain significant benefits when they help employees learn a greater portion of Google’s powerful search features. With a few minutes of easy online training dramatically improving both search speed and accuracy, employees and employers both come out winners.”

With knowledge workers spending an average of 30 minutes searching, courses like this can help employees streamline their search activity and increase productivity. 40% of searches do not return a desired result, and learning these new features could help reduce that number.

Google Flu Trends Intense in Canada, High in United States

Google Flu Trends Intense in Canada, High in United States

Okay, so Google Flu Trends has been around since November of 2008. But Google has found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity.

Check out the world map below to see how Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity. It is intense in Canada and Norway. It is high in Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Sweden, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States.

Each week, millions of users around the world search for health information online. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer.

You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Insights for Search. But can search query trends provide the basis for an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?

Google has found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together.

Google compared its query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often Google sees these search queries, it can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world. Their results have been published in the journal Nature.

So, according to the world map, now would be a great time to visit Australia, where flu activity is minimal. Throw another shrimp on the barbie.

Search-based keyword tool

Search-based keyword tool
The Search-based Keyword Tool provides keyword ideas: Based on actual Google search queries; Matched to specific pages of your website with your ad and search share

7 Google Updates: Custom Search, AdWords API, Maps, Search Appliance and More

7 Google Updates: Custom Search, AdWords API, Maps, Search Appliance and More

Google had another busy week pushing out updates. That’s really no surprise considering Apple released product refreshes and Microsoft released Windows 7. Google hasn’t let any major update from any competitor go by without their own news and this week was no different.

We’ve already covered Google getting a deal with Twitter (similar to Bing’s deal with Twitter) as well as a new social search experiment set up in Google Labs.

Here are 7 updates that are slightly minor but you’ll still want to know about:

Custom Search is now available for mobile search experiences on smartphone and higher-end devices. Google will even host your mobile-optimized custom search pages for you, or you can host it on your mobile site.

AdWords API has a new version that includes asynchronous calls, keyword and placement ideas, and a location extensions preview.

Google Maps for Mobile has introduced layers for Blackberry users.

Google Search Appliance, an enterprise search server, released an update that includes a Self-Learning Scorer.

Google Friend Connect has a new Wordpress plugin.

Webmaster Central has new instructions for verifying a Blogger blog in Webmaster Tools.

Google Reader added Popular Items and Personalized Ranking features.

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