Today Google announced Google Product Search for Mobile. Android and iPhone users will now be able to type a product query into Google.com and get Google Product Search Results formatted for their phones.
Paid Search Down, Social Media Up in the UK
Research from Hitwise indicates that online retailers in the UK are seeing less traffic from paid search efforts and more from social networks. Paid search traffic has fallen over the last year – the percentage of all UK Internet visits to online retailers dropped from 10.1% in March ’08 to 8.9% in March ’09 according to Hitwise’s Robin Goad.
Google Improves Search-Based Keyword Tool
Back in November Google introduced a new keyword tool called simply Search-based Keyword Tool that enables paid search advertisers to see what keywords they may be missing out on based on searches that are leading to your site. Today Google has announced wider availability and some improvements to the tool.
Google’s Need For Freshness Sours Search Results
Every so often SEO professionals produce a list of what they believe to be the top factors influencing search engine rankings. The latest update to this list of proposed factors looks much like past lists, focusing on traditional factors like links, content, HTML tags, and domain registration age, and some new ones like geographical factors and personalized search history. But one term might be new to many people: link velocity.
Google Adds Sitelinks for More Search Results
Using Google for searching the web, you’ve probably seen some results pages from time to time that have the top result displaying a number of secondary links underneath it. These links go to different pages within the site.
Simply referred to as "sitelinks," such pages might take you to an about page or a help page, or really anything deemed beneficial to the user by Google’s algorithm. The example below for a NASA search displays links for Gallery, Missions, Aeronautics, etc.
Google Referral Change Linked to Faster Search Results Experiment
This week, it was announced that Google was making changes to search referral URLs. Basically, where URLs looked like this before:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search
They will start looking more like this:
Google Making Changes to Search Referrals
Update: Google now says: We initially reported that Urchin Software might require a patch to handle the new URL structure, but after some additional testing, it turns out no patch is needed. Urchin can handle both the current and new URLs.
Original article: Google is changing referral URLs on results pages. What up until now has looked something like this:
CPC Declines on Big 3 Search Engines, ROI Strong
Average cost-per-click in the US declined last year on the big three search engines according to research from Efficient Frontier. Google’s fell 14%, Yahoo’s fell 16%, and Microsoft’s fell 28% over a year’s time (via CNET). Essentially the study indicates that less money was spent per search ad.
Google Image Search Adds New Features
Google has been working on a couple of new features for Google Image Search. The first one is the addition of suggestions for Google Image Search, which is basically just Google Suggest for the image search engine.
Hulu Improves Search Feature
Hulu announced some improvements to its search functionality today. For one, they have added some shortcuts to the autocomplete feature.
Previously, the autocomplete suggestions would just take a user to the regular search results, but now, the shortcuts offer other options like going straight to the latest episode (for current shows), or the show page (for all shows).