Future Searches

Global Search Market is Growing

According to comScore, 113 billion searches were conducted in July 2009 globally.

Google sites had 58 percent increase compared to last year and ranked as the leaders within search engines in global search market with 76.7 billion searches conducted and 67.5 percent market share. Google sites are followed by Yahoo sites with 8.9 billion searches and 7.8 percent market share. Yahoo had just 2 percent increase compared to last year and closely followed by Chinese search engine Baidu sites with 8 billion searches 7.0 percent share. Microsoft sites ranked forth worldwide with a 41 percent increase compared to last years data which seems promising for next year.

The overall July 2009 data represents a 41-percent increase versus July 2008 in global search market that is a positive indicator for future search marketing opportunities and e-business.

No More Page Rank Sculpting with “nofollow” Attribute

Since Matt Cutts from Google throw a bombshell in SMX advanced meeting in 3th of June about Page Rank Sculpting, every search marketing blog is discussing the same issue. Is it really like “nofollow” attribute no longer passes more juice to followed links or not and what changes shall SEO‘s do in that case? First of all lets have a look at what page rank sculpting is all about.

What is page rank sculpting?

Every page has a page rank value, that is a numerical weighting that it passes in to the links allocated in it. Page Rank sculpting occurs when we use “nofollow” attribute in unimportant links to prevent passing page rank values so that we pass that left over weight in to followed links to increase the page rank of those links.

According to Google’s change, regardless of  “nofollow” attribute, Google determines the Page Rank  it passes along  links according to the number of links on a web page. That is using “nofollow” no longer generates more page rank for the followed links. Here are some of Matt Cutts goodies:

Google Wave: How It Can Help Online Marketing and Communication

Google unveiled Google Wave, a communication and collaboration tool in Google I/O conference last week. Since I was not there I searched on the internet and found out what Google Wave is all about. First of all, it is something we all need to wait and experience to understand how much difference it can make in our business and daily communication needs. It seems to be a combination of email, instant messaging and micro-blogging all under the same interface. There are some terminologies which we all will become familiar with as we use Google Wave. Ok, lets have a look at it.

Above is a screenshot of how Google Wave looks like. On the left, there is your Google Wave folders and your Google contact list with images of your contacts. There is Google wave inbox in the middle of screen where you can click on any wave to open a pane for that wave on the right side of the screen. There users can see everything about that wave, respond to waves, add more people just by simply dragging pictures of people in their contact list in to the wave,  rewind back and see how that wave evolved over time, change the contents in a wave or see the changes made by other users in a wave.

Google Advanced Search Experience

Google launched new search options at it’s Searchology event held at its Mountain View headquarters to improve search experience of users.

New Google Search Options are giving an advanced search experience with easy to use of navigation. From now on, users will be able to refine their search results deeper according to time, relevance, reviews, timeline and many more.

I especially find it very useful to refine search results only for the last 24 hours which gives fresh content for your topic and I agree with Google’s product manager Kavi Goel that this is a  “step toward making the whole internet smarter.”

Google search option Wonder Wheel

Another fantastic feature is Wonder Wheel. When you make a search, it puts your keyword in to the center of the wheel and gives you related search terms. You go deeper and deeper as you click on related terms covering your main search term.

New search features gives an insight to SEO’s for the future strategies. Similar to blended search, new search options welcomes proactive and committing websites in the new search universe.

How do you think new search features will affect SEO practices?

Effects of Economy Breakdown in Search Engines

Recession showed impacts on search engine companies as well. Here is how Google and Yahoo performed in this tough times.

Google revenue declined from one quarter to the next

Internet giant Google reported a 9.2 percent rise in quarterly net profit of 1.42 billion dollars. The figure is up six percent from the same quarter a year ago which was 1.31 billion dollars in the same quarter but down three percent compared with the fourth quarter of last year. Google said the revenue declined for the first time ever in consecutive quarters.

“Google had a good quarter given the depth of the recession — while revenues were down quarter over quarter, they grew six percent year over year thanks to continued strong query growth,” chief executive Eric Schmidt said.
According to new chief financial officer Patrick Pichette, Google was laying off 200 sales and marketing employees.

Yahoo has dramatical net income plunge

At the same time, Yahoo reported a 78% decline in net income for the first quarter 2009 and plans to cut its workforce by 5%.

Drive Traffic to Websites by Current Search Trends

If you have a website or blog, I know that you want to drive big traffic and bring leads, generate some ad revenue or just increase your Page Rank and websites’ value.

One way to drive traffic to your website is following trends and generating posts related with search phrases. There are several ways you can monitor real-time (delays are always possible) search trends such as Google Trends, Twitter and Yahoo Buzz.

Google Trends

Google trends give you approximate popular search patterns. You can see a list of most searched 100 queries. It gives search volume index for each pattern, news articles, blog posts, related searches, peak times and locations. I believe it gives great insight for popular search trends as majority of people use Google for search.

Trend topics by Twitter

Twitter is a “a real-time short messaging service” and has recently added search and trend topics features to users homepages. It gives top-ten popular tweet topics and a great global insight as they say:

“As public tweets fly in from around the globe, we analyze them to detect when certain words or phrases occur with higher frequency. These trending phrases are surfaced in the Twitter home page just under the new search box and they’re updated throughout the day.”

Google Experiments Flu Trends for Mexico

Google has created experimental flu trends for Mexico after the Swine Flu outbreak.

The data in Mexico flu trends represents aggregated search data but has not been validated against confirmed cases of flu unlike Google Flu Trends for U.S.

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on Google

Google Algorithm Change Favoring Big Brand Ranking

Matt Cutts from Google revealed that Google has made a “simple change” in their algorithm and they are putting more weight on brands in rankings for specific keywords.
According to Matt, Google’s philosophy on search results has been pretty much the same and inside Google search engine teams, they don’t think about brands but keywords like “trust”, “authority”, “reputation”, “page rank”, “high quality” so giving their users the best results for search terms.
Here is the video where Matt Cutts speaks about all these and suggests SEO’s to build expert content in their niche to become a subject to high quality links and better rankings.

New Google Adwords Interface

Google today launched a new interface for Adwords that gives a faster, clearer, more user friendly and more efficient experience  to Google Adwords users without changes in their Quality Score, bidding, budgeting, and other aspects of ad serving.

 At first glance, new Adwords interface looks similar to Google Analytics. It enables easier analysis by giving custom graphs feature at every level of accounts, quicker editing with less clicks, broader insight by seeing all keywords, ads, placements from all ad groups at once. Users can filter their results, analyse their data easily to determine the success of their campaigns and ROI.

An overview of new Google Adwords interface is explained in the video below:

Google’s Twitter Acqusition v.s. Independant Twitter

Twitter’s speculations spread for it’s partnership possibilities with internet companies like Google, Microsoft, the News Corporation and NBC Universal as TechCrunch claimed Google is looking forward to acquire Twitter in the beginning of April. Since then Twitter, the most popular social microblogging site gained more attention.

According to the Newyork Times, Fred Wilson ( the Union Square Ventures partner who was an early investor in Twitter, the microblogging start-up, and is on its board ) says:

“There are lots of conversations going on and Twitter is struggling to figure out what to do with whom, when and how,” 

There are currently only 30 people on board in Twitter and Twitter is currently recruiting for the director of strategic partnerships position that is advertised as “the first business development role in our mostly product- and engineering-oriented company.”  Twitter’s database and search capabilities of real-time updates would make this an attractive offer for Google.

Twitter turned down an acquisition deal from Facebook last fall for $500 million of its stock and hopefully Twitter is not going to sell it’s soul this time too. I love Google but I believe there should be competition instead of monopolism. Twitter want to be independant and continue their story with their own initiative.