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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

Google Adds Nutrition Info For Over 1,000 Fruits, Vegetables, Meats And Meals To Its Search Results

May 30, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Google keeps adding new information to its Knowledge Graph, and today it is bringing nutrition info to its search results pages. Want to know how many calories there are in an avocado or how much protein there is in your chow mein? Google will now happily provide you with an answer. All of this information is, of course, also available through voice search and this new feature works on the web and mobile.

As Google notes, “this new nutritional information builds on our work on the Knowledge Graph, which brings together all kinds of information from across the web that wasn’t easily accessible.” Thanks to this, Google’s nutrition search, for example, knows that if you want to know about “summer squash,” zucchini should be an option in its drop-down menu because it’s apparently a type of summer squash.

Here are some other examples Google suggests you try (I should add that in my own searches, this wasn’t working yet, so your mileage may vary):

Tempted by some popcorn at the movies? Ask “how many calories are in popcorn” and you’ll get your answer. [Hint: it's 31 calories per cup]
Perplexed by a food label or recipe? Ask “what nutrients are in breadfruit?” or “is there sugar in grenadilla?”
Big on a high-protein diet? Ask “how many carbs in corn?” or simply search for [corn] and you’ll see detailed nutrition info.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s Bing – thanks to data from Wolfram Alpha – has also been featuring some nutrition facts in its search results since at least 2010. As far as I can see, though, this data isn’t currently available through Bing’s natural language queries.

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

Google Starts Using Computer Vision To Let You Search Your Google+ Photos

May 23, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Google almost completely revamped the Google+ photo experience last week, but somehow the company didn’t get around to announcing one of the coolest photo-related features in its repertoire yet: Google now uses computer vision and machine learning to let you search your own photos for things like sunsets, food and flowers. I also tried terms like “cars,” “beach” and “bikes” and Google consistently returned the right results. This search is built into Google+, but you can also use the regular Google search and use the query term [my photos of xyz] to find the right images.

That’s a huge step forward for photo search in Google. As Google rightly notes, “searching for your photos can be challenging because the information you’re looking for is visual.” I know I’m anything but diligent about tagging my photos, so this new search feature actually allowed me to find random images I had uploaded to Picasa Web a long time ago.

As Google’s Vic Gundotra noted when he announced the new features for Google+ Photos at I/O last week, Google wants to help its users manage their photos. “Organizing photos is often a hassle,” he said, but oddly enough, the company didn’t announce this search feature at I/O and instead waited a week before launching it.

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

Google Adds Monthly Top Charts To Google Trends, And A Beautiful New Search Trend Visualizer

May 22, 2013 by Darrell Etherington Leave a Comment

Every year Google creates a summary Zeitgeist feature to sum up the year in search data, showing what has been the most popular among its users. Now, it’s rolling out Top Charts, a new monthly series of lists similar to that year-end feature, available on Google Trends as of today. It’s built on Google’s Knowledge Graph, and provides a representation of the actual things people are interested in, rather than just keywords alone.

The charts are broken down in broad categories, and include lists of things like actors, animals, whiskeys, TV shows, space objects and medications just to name a few. The charts display a top five in the main page view, with a relative rating indicated by a colored bar, as well as arrows to indicate whether the items on that list have gone up or down since the last monthly period. You can drill down to see a full list of 10 items, as well as a brief description of each, its peak ranking and the total time it has appeared on the charts. They’re also embeddable, as you can see below.

There are more than 40 Top Charts in total, and that’s not all Google has shown off today. There’s also a very cool animated visualized of the top trending search terms, which indicates what’s being actively searched for at this very moment, with a colorful background and smooth animated transitions. This tool is customizable as well, so you can view up to 25 searches at a time and set it for different regions.

Finally the Trends home page displays elements of each of these, with a hot search term list, and ranking indicators that show popularity over time and by geography for different terms. The changes are not huge, but they do provide some useful data on a more frequent basis than we’ve seen before, which can help people identify what people are interested in, useful for media organizations targeting their content, for instance, or for anyone curious about the pulse of the world’s Googling population.

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

Google Quietly Kills SMS Search, Closing One Way Of Connecting With Mobile Users Who Don’t Have Data Plans

May 12, 2013 by Ingrid Lunden Leave a Comment

Google is well known for its regular bouts of spring cleaning when it kills off a number of products in one fell swoop, but it also sometimes makes quick changes in between the bigger announcements. One of those has now hit its portfolio of SMS-based products aimed at users of lower end devices: Google has quietly closed down SMS Search.

People began to notice the service stop working on Friday, and asked about it in one of Google’s Product Forums (good thing those haven’t been closed down yet) and on Reddit. Jessica S., a Google employee, set the record straight:

“Hi everyone,

Closing products always involves tough choices, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. Streamlining our services enables us to focus on creating beautiful technology that will improve people’s lives.

Thanks,
Jess”

For those of you who didn’t use it, SMS Search was a service Google had created that let users send search queries by text message to a short number, in this case 466453. The search results would also come back as text messages. These would not be links to further web pages, but actual information, playing on the many services that Google offers on its desktop search portal for things like currency conversions, weather and local listings. This was mainly intended for feature phones without data connections:

But the search could also be used on smartphones:

Google’s SMS services page hasn’t removed a link to SMS Search yet, it goes to a 404 page.
Trying to find a picture of how SMS Search looked, I came across (on Google) a link to its Canadian SMS Search page, which appears to still have an active link, but as Ghacks points out that won’t work because it uses the same short code number as the U.S. service did.

In some regards, you can see why Google would choose to axe SMS Search. The number of feature phone sales is on the decline worldwide as more and more people make the shift to smartphones.

In the last quarter of 2012, Gartner says the number of mobile phone sales worldwide was a 472 million units, compared to 478 million a year ago, but at the same time smartphone sales increased by 58 million to 208 million (it has yet to release its quarterly figures for Q1 2013).

It could be that Google is simply doing this to stay one step ahead of the times. Or it could be that, as with other products like Google Reader, it was not getting enough use of the service.

For now, Google’s other SMS products that let you check your calendar, update your Blogger blog, check your Gmail, and send and receive SMS text messages through Google Voice, appear to still be working; but users will inevitably start wondering if these will be next on the chopping block.

We’re reaching out to Google to ask and will update as we learn more.

Photocredit: SEORoundtable

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

Google’s Seth Sternberg And Ardan Arac On Getting Developers To Adopt Google+ Sign-In

April 30, 2013 by Drew Olanoff Leave a Comment

After Google’s announcement and demo of app activities being introduced into its Search product, I spoke with Seth Sternberg and Ardan Arac about how Google+ sign-in is coming along and what the company is doing to get developers to adopt the platform.

The integration is yet another signal that Google is trying to unify all of its products, with Google+ being the glue that holds everything together. Arac explained how the Search team wanted to surface app activities once they were introduced to Google+ profiles.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: ardan arac, Blogging, Facebook, Google, google+ sign-in, Search, search engine optimization, SEO, seth sternberg, Social Networking, TC, video

Google Announces App Activities Coming To Search, Showing You Information Based On Usage By Other Google+ Users

April 30, 2013 by Drew Olanoff Leave a Comment

Google’s No. 1 strength is its search product, so it makes sense that all of their products feed back into it somehow. Today, the company announced the introduction of “App Activities” into Search. What this means is that when you search for something like “Fandango,” which uses Google+ sign-in, you’ll see top movies based on what users are rating.

Today at Disrupt NY, Seth Sternberg, Director of Product Management for Google+, and Ardan Arac, Product Manager at Google, are demoing the new feature.

The plan is to surface interesting in-app content, using search to dig deeper into what people are doing on those apps. The launch apps are music and movie ones, which lend themselves to lists of top content based on listens and ratings. Google is rolling this out in the next few weeks for Fandango, SoundCloud, Deezer, Flixster, Slacker Radio, Songza and TuneIn. Up until now, app activity was only showing on profile pages:

Of course, this all relies on users authenticating with Google+, something the company has been trying to get developers interested in leveraging since it was announced in February. This will work for iOS, Android and web apps.

Here’s a look at what Fandango search results will look like with app activities being surfaced:

A closer look shows the aggregated data based on listens within the app by its users:

This particular feature is an incentive for app developers to make sure they’re building for Android and to include the Google+ sign-in component, since all of the data that’s being pulled out makes an app more attractive to users who are looking for new ones to download. When you visit Apple’s App Store, you’re greeted with simple ratings, reviews and screenshots, but no interesting data that shows how active they are.

You could imagine that information like top scores could be displayed for games in the future, making the whole experience of using the app more social and interactive.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: app activities, apps, Blogging, Disrupt, Facebook, Google, Search, search engine optimization, SEO, social, Social Networking, TC

Google Tests Search Without Instant Previews, Moves Sharing Tool, Cached And Similar Pages To New Drop-Down Menu (Updated)

April 24, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Back in 2010, Google launched Instant Preview to provide users with a quick way to get a graphic preview of a webpage before you click on the actual link. Now, as first spotted by Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System blog, it looks like Google is thinking about removing this feature and replacing it with a new drop-down menu.

Update: a Google spokesperson just responded to our inquiry: ”We’re constantly making changes to the layout and features of the search results page.” The wording of this response sure makes it sound as if this will be a permanent change and isn’t just an experiment. Google’s typical answer to these questions starts with “we’re always experimenting with [xyz],” after all.

Instant Preview is probably not a huge hit, given that Google wouldn’t consider removing it if it were a popular feature. It did hide a bit of useful functionality besides the previews, however. Opening these Instant Previews allowed you to also find similar pages and access the Google+ Share feature. In addition, it was also the only way to find Google’s cached version of a given page, too.

All of these features are still there in this new version, but they are now accessible through a drop-down menu right next to the main link.

It’s not clear if this is just a test, or if Google is indeed fully removing this feature and replacing it with the new drop-down menu. We have contacted Google about this change and will update this post once we learn more.

Here is what this looks like for TechCrunch (“Similar,” for some reason, only appears for a subset of results):

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

Google Now Could Arrive On The Web, Making The Timely Assistant Truly Cross-Platform

April 22, 2013 by Darrell Etherington Leave a Comment

Google Now is one of the best things to happen to Android in a while, and now new code discovered in a sample page taken from Google itself suggests it could arrive on the desktop, not just via Chrome but through the Google homepage itself. Code snippets include provisions for letting a user set their home and work location, “Discover Google now” and change their current location, all in support of the Now service.

Those options come up on your Android device now if you’re running version 4.2 or higher, and are used to tweak things like directions, estimated travel times, weather info and more provided to you by your phone. Google Now uses your search history, content found in emails and more to provide you with information it predicts you’ll need, before you even request it. It’s sort of an anticipatory Siri.

Previous discoveries have indicated that Google Now is probably being worked on for Chrome desktop browser integration, and for inclusion in Google’s iOS search app. But bringing it to the Google homepage means it’ll be broadly accessible. It also means Google will have an opportunity to deliver more via its homepage, sort of like an iGoogle, but hopefully better at its job of providing you with relevant, personalized content.

And of course, the benefits of having Now available on the web will add another source from which Google can gather data to improve and iterate upon the services Now offers. Having direct access to desktop search information will make for better recommendations in theory, and provide a more complete picture of who a person is and how they typically spend their days. Google Now is also getting better at tracking online purchases and ecommerce, and since the majority of that activity still takes place in the desktop, this will help with those efforts, too.

Google Now is definitely not Google’s lone answer for the question of what comes after search, but it’s definitely one of them. And since the service has been well-received by the tech press and early adopters so far (general usage stats are harder to track down), it’s more than likely we’ll see it percolate to other platforms, and a general web presence has to be on that list.

[Via Engadget, Google Operating System]

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

Bing Questions Study That Claimed It Delivers 5x More Malware Than Google, Says It Blocks 94% Of Clicks To Malicious Sites

April 19, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Last week, a study by German antivirus testing company AV-Test claimed that Microsoft’s Bing delivered “five times as many websites containing malware as Google.” Unsurprisingly, Microsoft does not agree with these findings and today, the company released a full rebuttal of AV-Test’s study. The researchers, Bing argues, used its API to execute queries instead of performing its searches directly on Bing.com. This methodology, however, Microsoft claims, bypassed Bing’s malware warning system.

Bing, Microsoft’s senior program manager for Bing David Felstead notes in his response, “actually does prevent customers from clicking on malware infected sites by disabling the link on the results page and showing the below message to stop people from going to the site.” Microsoft doe not explicitly remove potentially malicious sites from its index, he writes, “because most are legitimate sites that normally don’t host malware but have been hacked.” Instead, it pops up a warning when users click on these links.

The reason for this, Felstead says, is that when users search for a site – even if it’s a known malware vector – they do expect the site to appear in Bing’s index and would think Bing’s directory is incomplete if it didn’t show up on the search result page.

Overall, Bing says it shows results with malware warnings for about 0.04% of searches. Felstead also claims that Bing’s warning system blocks “94% of clicks to malicious sites.”

Despite the fact that the competition between Google and Bing has been somewhat heated lately, Felstead does note that detecting malware on websites is a very complex problem and that “no engine will be perfect 100% of the time.” On the other hand, though, he also argues that Microsoft does show these malware warnings on its site instead of removing the links from its index in order to protect users who may otherwise go to Google and “then click on it (because Google may not have detected it as malware) their machine could be put at risk.”

Here are the original results from AV-Test: