Search Engine Marketing | Cheryl Waller

Google Updates Local Search Results On Desktop With Carousel Design

June 18, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

At the end of last year, Google introduced a new design for some local search results on tablets that put a carousel with the top results at the top of the page. Today, it’s bringing this design to the desktop, too. This new feature can be triggered by searches for restaurants, bars and other local places, Google says, and it’s currently rolling out in English in the U.S. and should roll out for other languages in the future.

A typical search to see this feature would be something like “Mexican restaurants in nyc.” Google will then put the carousel at the top of the page, including a photo, the standard Zagat ratings, price class and cuisine. A click on these places will bring up their Google+ Local sites with more information.

Users can click on an arrow in the right to see more places and they can use the map in the sidebar to zoom in and the carousel will automatically restrict your searches to this specific area.

Google, of course, also uses a similar design for some of its Knowledge Graph results. As a number of bloggers noticed recently, these Knowledge Graph carousel results seem to be popping up more frequently now than ever before. Given today’s addition of the local search carousel, chances are that Google’s stats show that this is a very effective way of presenting search results. I wouldn’t be surprised if the company continued to expand its use of this design element for other kinds of queries in the near future.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Carousel, Facebook, Google, Search, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Developers Can Now Ship Hard Drives To Google To Import Large Amounts Of Data To Cloud Storage

June 18, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Google just added a new service to Google Cloud Storage that will allow developers to send their hard drives to Google to import very large data sets that would otherwise be too expensive and time-consuming to import. For a flat fee of $80 per hard drive, Google will take the drive and upload the data into a Cloud Storage bucket. This, Google says, can be “faster or less expensive than transferring data over the Internet.” The service is now in limited preview for users with a U.S.-based return address.

Platforms like AWS and Google’s Cloud Platform are obviously great for analyzing large data sets. As Google software engineer Lamia Youseff notes in today’s announcement, however, “transferring large data sets (in the hundreds of terabytes and beyond) can be expensive and time-consuming over the public network.” Uploading 5 terabytes of data over a 100Mbps line could easily take a day or two and most developers may not even have these kinds of connections.

Amazon, it’s worth noting, already offers a very similar service. It, too, charges $80 per hard drive, but in typical Amazon fashion, the company also charges a per-hour fee for importing the data. Importing a 5 terabyte hard drive to S3, Amazon calculates, will cost an additional $45 for an eSATA drive, which makes Google’s flat-fee service significantly cheaper. While Amazon also allows you to export your data using a hard disk, though, Google doesn’t currently offer this service.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, cloud platform, Facebook, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Google Will Soon Start Selling Chromebooks At Walmart And Staples, Other Retailers Coming Soon

June 17, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Google sure isn’t giving up on its Chromebook initiative, even though it’s not clear that the company’s Chrome OS-based laptops are selling all that well. Today, Google announced that it’s expanding its brick-and-mortar retail efforts for Chromebooks through partnerships with Walmart and Staples.

Over 1,500 Staples will feature them starting this weekend and about 2,800 Walmart stores will carry Chromebooks later this summer. In total, Google says, this will triple the number of stores that carry its Chromebooks and bring the total number to 6,600 stores around the world.

Walmart, it seems, will only make the cheapest Chromebook — the $199 Acer Chromebook — available on its shelves, though. Staples will feature “a mix of Chromebooks from Acer, HP and Samsung” and will also make them available online. The more expensive Pixel, Google’s high-end Chromebook, won’t be available at any of these retailers, it seems.

The company also announced that select Office Depot, Office Max, Fry’s and Tiger Direct locations will begin selling Chromebooks in the “coming months.” Previously, only Amazon and Best Buy carried Google’s laptops.

Expansion Outside Of The U.S.

Google is also expanding the availability of Chromebooks internationally. In the U.K., for example, 116 Tesco stores are now selling Chromebooks; in the Netherlands, Mediamarkt and Saturn will carry them and France’s FNAC stores will also get Chromebook displays. Google is also adding partners in Australia (JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman) and Sweden (Elgiganten).

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, chromebooks, Facebook, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Microsoft Improves Windows Phone Voice Recognition: 2X Faster, 15% More Accurate

June 17, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Google may have acquired Geoffrey Hinton’s DNNresearch and is now using his technologies to power its Google+ photo search features, but the academic work Hinton did on deep neural networks (DNN) is now also helping Microsoft to improve its speech-recognition systems. Microsoft today announced that it is using DNNs to double the speed of its speech recognition engine for Windows Phone while bringing down its word-error rate by 15 percent. Bing Voice Search, the company says, now also works far better in noisy conditions.

For now, these improvements are only available for users in the U.S.

Microsoft says it quietly started rolling this new system out to Windows Phone users over the last few weeks. The new system is the result of the Bing Voice team working closely with Microsoft Research, the company’s network of 13 research labs that work on anything from improving cell phone battery life and machine learning to research in game theory and economics.

DNNs, Microsoft says, help researchers build a smarter acoustic model to represent the acoustic representations of a language. Essentially, the idea is to build a model of how the brain listens to and interprets speech. You can find more info about how Microsoft uses DNN here.

There can be little doubt that voice recognition is a pretty hot area right now. Google, with its conversational search feature, is currently leading the way, but Apple (with Siri), Microsoft and a number of startups like Maluuba are also all working on products that use voice recognition, natural language processing and other techniques to get users just a little bit closer to the “Star Trek computer” ideal.

Filed Under: Bing, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Microsoft, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, speech recognition, TC

Google Pledges $5M To Fight Online Child Exploitation

June 16, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

The Internet has plenty of dark corners, but one of the darkest is surely the growing number of sites that traffic in child pornography. Google, which has no interest in surfacing any of these sites and images, has long worked with numerous nonprofit organizations and law enforcement agencies to help protect children online and keep these sites out of its index. The company has, however, recently been criticized by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and others for not doing enough to fight child pornography online.

Today, Google pledged $5 million to the fight. It will distribute this money to a number of organizations in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia and Latin America. Among the organizations that will receive these funds are groups like the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the U.K.’s Internet Watch Foundation. Google has also set up a $2 million Child Protection Technology Fund to “encourage the development of ever more effective tools.”

Since 2008, Google has been tagging the child abuse images it detected in its index and those that were reported to organisations like the NCMEC to ensure that it could also identify any copy of these files.

In today’s announcement, Google revealed that it has recently started to add this information to a cross-industry database that it shares with law enforcement agencies and charities. This, Google believes, will allow these organizations to “better collaborate on detecting and removing these images.”

Later this week, representatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and a number of telecom firms will also meet with the U.K. Culture Secretary to discuss this issue.

It’s worth noting that Google is obviously not the only search company that is working to combat child pornography online. Microsoft has a similar initiative, and the company also tags images of child abuse it finds using its PhotoDNA technology. Facebook started licensing PhotoDNA from Microsoft in 2011. The company has also been working with a number of law enforcement agencies to develop the Child Exploitation Tracking System.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Google X Announces Project Loon: Balloon-Powered Internet For Rural, Remote And Underserved Areas

June 15, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Google X, the secretive lab behind projects like Google Glass and Google’s self-driving cars, announced its latest project today: balloon-powered Internet access for those areas of the earth where regular terrestrial Internet isn’t a good option. Earlier this week, Google started testing these balloons, which are meant to provide Internet access comparable to 3G networks while sailing the stratospheric winds, in New Zealand.

We had previously heard rumors about this, but just like most of Google X’s projects, this idea sounded like a long shot. Using free-flying balloons, after all, sounds like a recipe for disaster – or at least for run-away balloons.

Because the whole idea sounds a bit crazy, Google says, it’s calling this initiative “Project Loon.” Google, however, believes that it has found a way to let these balloons “sail freely on the winds” and steer them by moving them up or down to catch the right winds. This still means the team has to manage a fleet of these balloons – and the idea here is to one day have these fly these around the world. Google says it’s solving this problem “with some complex algorithms and lots of computing power.” Google uses wind data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to predict the balloons’ flight paths.

Currently, Google says it is using 30 balloons in this pilot project and about 50 testers in New Zealand are using the service on the ground. These testers have special antennas that can connect to the balloons when they are within a 20km radius.

Google, and its chairman Eric Schmidt in particular, have long been talking about the importance of getting those two-thirds of the earth’s population who don’t currently have Internet access online. Project Loon is meant to help solve this problem, Google notes. Not only could it bring Internet access to areas where today’s technologies don’t work well (jungles, archipelagos, mountains), but it seems Google also hopes that this balloon-powered network can help bring down the price of Internet access in many countries where it’s currently unaffordable for many people.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Google, project loon, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Google Quietly Kills Quick View For Wikipedia Results In Mobile Search

June 14, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

In April, Google announced a couple of new features that were meant to speed up mobile browsing. Among them was “Quick view,” an experimental feature that added a badge to Wikipedia results on Google’s mobile search results pages that, when you clicked it, loaded the Wikipedia result in around 100 milliseconds. Now, however, it looks like these Quick view badges were indeed just experimental and have quietly disappeared from Google’s mobile search results pages.

We asked Google about this change, but the company did not provide us with an on-the-record statement. It’s common for Google to quietly run various experiments on its search results pages and then remove them later. Once the company officially announces a feature, however, it tends to keep it around for a while.

When Google launched Quick view, it said that it was working on bringing more sites on board and even offered a sign-up page for webmasters who were interested in making their sites available through this feature. The sign-up page is still available.

It’s surprising to see Google, which loves anything that can help speed up the web, remove this feature from mobile search. Maybe users didn’t actually use Quick view or didn’t fully understand it, but its odd to see it go. It was actually a very useful feature and worked exactly as advertised.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that this version of Quick view was different from the one Google also once featured for quickly opening up PDF files, Word documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Maybe anything called “quick view” doesn’t have a long life expectancy at Google.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Google, google search, quick view, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

With Waze, Google Gets Access To Social Mapping Data – And Possible Patent Legal Heat From Nokia

June 14, 2013 by Ingrid Lunden Leave a Comment

The Google deal to buy Waze — reportedly for $1.1 billion — is a strong move for both companies to enhance their respective mapping services, and to help monetize them better. But it could also serve as the tipping point for Nokia to turn the screws on getting Google to take licenses for certain mapping patents that it owns, or else face legal consequences.

According to a source familiar with the situation, Nokia has been eyeing up taking legal action against the search, mobile (and mapping) giant for a while now, and the Waze deal could be the tipping point for that to finally happen.

“Nokia has held off on a suit against Nokia for Google Maps for several years just waiting for the right time to approach with an overall suit covering Android and Maps,” our source says. The right time, it seems, could be based on two patents owned by Nokia, 7,628,704 and its extension, 8,070,608, along with a possible third, 7,092,964, which is more related to location-based mobile advertising. Nokia has more than 9,000 patents both filed and granted in the area of spatial relationships (some covering software, some hardware).

On the first of these, the ’704, our source notes that this specific patent covers Waze directly, in relation to the fundamental technology behind encouraging users to collect spatial data without paying them via money, with a specific call-out for games. “This is at the core of Waze,” the source says.

“It is very likely that they would file on the spatial data side against Google,” our source added. “The Google Maps and Maps API only impacted them somewhat because of what Microsoft, Garmin, Samsung and so many others pay but Waze likely pushed it too far from a risk standpoint.”

The ’704 patent was first filed in 2006 and granted in 2009. From the abstract, it looks like it was conceived for gaming first, and location tracking second:

A method is disclosed for collecting geographic data during game play. A game scenario includes an activity for the game player to perform. The game player may be given an incentive within the context of the game for performing the activity. The incentive may be of non-monetary, monetary or in-game value. Performing the activity within the context of the game directly or indirectly results in the generation of data that is collected and used for the purpose of updating, adding to or supplementing a geographic database.

The patent and the related patents all come from a trove that Nokia picked up as part of its $8 billion acquisition of Navteq, which forms the basis now of its here mapping division.

That division is still loss-making, but has also been highlighted as a core part of Nokia’s mobile strategy. That is both for their own devices now running on Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS, and as a way of moving in as a third-party player for IP for other mobile companies. After losing its position as the world’s biggest phone maker after the rise of Apple’s iPhone, Android and a number of strong handset makers (like current world leader Samsung) that have built devices on Google’s OS, maps are arguably one of Nokia’s strongest products.

On another track for revenue generation, CEO Stephen Elop has noted that Nokia will make $653 million in patent licensing revenues this year, and it is “watching closely” for more targets.

One of the lead inventors named on the patent, Kurt Uhlir, ran Navteq’s skunkworks for years, along with board-level projects. His patents are used for a number of video games including Flight Simulator X from Microsoft (going back to the gaming element of these patents).

Nokia does not details of all its patent licensing deals, but Facebook, Foursquare, Garmin and Motorola are among those who are believed to have already licensed the ’704 and related patents, some possibly in connection with licensing mapping data or in exchange for providing other data to Nokia.

As you can see from this SEC request to Apple for details of its patent licensing settlement with Nokia, the exact terms of what licenses get granted to whom are not required to be made public (and that, by default, could raise questions of whether Apple also has access to this patent). Another company that could fall into that category is TeleAtlas, now owned by TomTom (which provides some data to Apple for its mapping product), which also settled with Navteq over patents (but also sued it for antitrust violations).

Asked for a response, Nokia would not confirm anything to TechCrunch. “We don’t comment on our legal strategy,” a spokesperson said. “We also don’t discuss whether we may or may not have been in talks with other companies. But, as a long term innovator in this industry, and with a portfolio of around 10,000 patent families, it should be no surprise that we have a number of patents for leading edge technologies.”

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Europe, Facebook, Google, mapping, Maps, mobile, Nokia, patents, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC, waze

Google To Shut Down Mobile Ad Aggregator AdWhirl Sept 30, Points Developers To AdMob Mediation

June 13, 2013 by Ingrid Lunden Leave a Comment

Google, the worldwide leader in mobile advertising, today made another move that could help consolidate its position a little bit further. The company today announced to developers that it would be shutting down AdWhirl, a platform that let app developers switch between different ad networks on the fly. AdWhirl was a part of AdMob, acquired by the mobile ad network after a flurry of competition, just months before AdMob was acquired itself by Google for $750 million.

In a letter to developers sent out today (embedded below), Google said that they will until September 30 to decide where they would like to move their ads. It’s encouraging them to migrate to AdMob Mediation, a competing tool that it launched after the acquisition while continuing to support AdWhirl. They can also continue to use AdWhirl, if they care to use the open source code “to run their own AdWhirl service.” But Google won’t be involved with hosting or supporting it.

Predictably, some developers are not happy with the decision because they believe the timeline is too short.

“We developers understand that it might be discontinued in the future, but terminating this in three months is just too fast for us to migrate,” writes Vinh Nguyen, a developer at Mad Rabbit, who forwarded us the letter. “A lot of developers depended on most of their revenue through this product.”

Others are commenting on Google’s forums. “Some of us have used AdWhirl for 4 years and have tons of apps to update for this change,” one wrote. “When you killed off Google Ads and forced us to use AdMob at least you gave us till the end of the year. What about the users that don’t upgrade, will you continue serving them ads?”

Eric Leichtenschlag, an engineer with AdMob, notes that AdWhirl.com will also be shut down, so users will not be able to log into their accounts after September 30. For those apps that don’t migrate from the service, mediation will stop working. “This means we will return a 404 to the SDK and there will be a blank space where the ad used to be.”

Those 404s will be a thorny issue for some developers. Nguyen says AdWhirl is not just used to aggregate ad networks for apps, but distribution of those apps across different app stores. “We now have a lot of users who have downloaded our apps through these third party sites, and they are right now generating a lot of ad request (revenue) for us,” he says. “On third party sites it’s a lot harder to reach the users again for an update of our apps. This is because most these sites do not have update notification build in like with the Play Store. We are mostly depended on users to go back to the site and check for an update themselves.”

It’s a whimper of an ending for a service that was once a thorn in the side of AdMob, since it was initially used as a way for competing networks like Quattro (now part of Apple) and Jumptap (still independent) to have more leverage against the most dominant player. Until that player took AdWhirl, and its revenues, for itself, users of the mediation platform could swap in ads on their apps on the fly from a number of networks (an unlimited number, AdWhirl says on its site), a model that forces more competition in pricing.

But in the greater scheme of things, this shouldn’t really come as a surprise.

As Google continues to earn more than half of all worldwide revenues in mobile ads (in 2013, eMarketer predicts Google will make nearly $9 billion out of global sales of nearly $16 billion), it has been making a number of efforts to streamline its mobile ad operations.

That includes a rebuild of AdMob’s developer tools in May, and integrating AdMob and AdWords. And it points out that the newer system is actually better, because it covers more ad formats, better reporting (for AdMob, at least), and has better Google support built in (of course), among other things. A Google service is still a Google service, by any other name.

The letter:

Dear AdWhirl by AdMob Developer,

AdWhirl has been supported by Google since 2010, when it became part of the Google family through the acquisition of AdMob. Since then, we’ve invested in helping AdMob developers serve ads in their apps from any number of ad networks through AdMob Mediation, which many developers use today. As we continue to improve AdMob Mediation, we’ve decided to retire AdWhirl, and will be discontinuing the service on 30 September 2013. The open source code for AdWhirl will still be available if anyone wants to run their own AdWhirl service.

AdMob Mediation is at no cost and more robust, with features like network-level reporting, country-level allocation and support for more ad formats. You can learn more about the specific features of AdMob Mediation here.

We encourage you to start using AdMob Mediation prior to 30 September. You’ll need an AdMob account to begin using AdMob Mediation. If you have one already you can find instructions for switching from AdWhirl here. If not, you can sign up for an AdMob account here.

Sincerely,

The Google AdMob Team

[story updated with additional quote from developer]

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: admob, Advertising, adwhirl, apps, Blogging, Facebook, Google, mobile, mobile advertising, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Google To Retire Chrome Frame For Internet Explorer And End Support Next January

June 13, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Google just announced that it is retiring Chrome Frame, its open source plug-in for bringing Google Chrome’s JavaScript and rendering engine to legacy versions of Internet Explorer. The company cites the fact that legacy browsers like Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are now finally on the decline and that most people are now using modern browsers as the reason for this decision.

Google launched Chrome Frame in 2009 as a way for businesses to move some of their web-based apps to a modern framework without having to switch away from Internet Explorer. Back then, Google argued that this would allow developers to target modern technologies for their users while still retaining compatibility with their legacy apps.

Chrome Frame allows developers to set a tag on their pages to automatically prompt Internet Explorer to switch to Chrome Frame or — if the user doesn’t have Chrome Frame installed — direct them to the installation page.

Chrome Frame will be retired in January 2014, when Google will cease support and updates for it.

The company, of course, recommends that businesses that rely on Chrome Frame switch to a modern browser or to check out Chrome for Business, which now includes legacy browser support through an add-on, too. Given that this is an open source project, there is always a chance that somebody else will pick it up and continue to support it.