Google updates “Google Social Search” which they had introduced in 2009 with some advanced features to offer its users with the most relevant information which is also personalized according to the users’ interest and relationship. ‘Google social search”, finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the (bottom in the past but now at the top ) of your search results.  With this new updating,  Google facilitate you to get even more information from the people related to you, from their YouTube , Flickr, Blogs or website and shows at the top of search results.

But keep in mind that you will only get social search results, when you log in to your Google account

There are mainly three important features which Google highlights:-

First, Social search results will now be combined all through your results based on their relevance. You will start getting results on top from co-workers, friends which they have created or shared. Google has quoted an example for this, it says that; If you are thinking about climbing Mt Kilimanjaro and your colleague Matt has written a blog post about his own experience, then that post will come up with a note and a picture. In the past, results were shown at the bottom

Second, unlike in the past where Google shows results for content that was created  by people in your social circle, now they shows results what they have shared also (for eg retweets, exception Facebook Likes) ,. If someone connected to you has shared a link publicly, Google will show those results. Google cites an example on their blog. It says, if you’re looking for a video of President Obama on “The Daily Show” and your friend Nundu tweeted the video, that result might show up higher in your results and you’ll see a note with a picture of Nundu:

And finally, Google provides enough control over how you connect accounts and also makes the same more easy and convenient.Users are provided with two options to connect accounts publicly on your Google profile or privately in your Google Account and your social connections won’t be shown to the public on your Google Profile, but those connections could influence your search results.Also, if Google’s algorithm finds a public account that seems to be yours due to similarity in usernames they invite you to connect your accounts right on search results page in your Google accounts.

These updates have been rolled out in Google.com in English only and by next week only searchers could see it.

Google have been exploring various algorithms to detect ‘Content farms’ (low quality content sites).  For the same they consider users’ feedback as one of the signals and introduces experimental Chrome extension as a privilege for the users to block sites from their web search results. If installed, the extension will send the blocked site information to Google and Google will conduct a study to consider that as a potential ranking signal for their search results. You could download the extension (‘Personal Blocklist extension’) and start blocking sites that carry low quality content.

When you block a site with the extension, you won’t see results from that domain again in your Google search results.

You can always revoke a blocked site at the bottom of the search results, so it’s easy to undo blocks:

You can also edit your list of blocked sites by clicking on the extension’s icon in the top right of the Chrome window.

Most of us were in the assumption about Google’s new content farm algorithm would be an up-gradation of the algorithm for quality search but it was actually to block low quality content scraper sites and not content farms. We will have to wait and see… how well Google performs in the coming days with the ‘New Content Farm” .

Matt Cutts from Google, Harry Shum from Bing and Rich Skrenta of Blekko on a search panel open out their views. The debate frenzied between Harry and Matt, despite Matt being a calm natured person. Matt was very certain at Bing Copying Google’s result and clearly pointed to that whereas Harry’s response and answers were quite ambiguous. It is clear that both Google and Bing are using users data to influence rankings. The conversation then diverted to on ‘how’ both are getting their data, of course from the respective toolbar. Here again Matts puts a valid statement blaming that Bing creeped the toolbar onto users PC’s via IE where Harry had a fragile answer as that no one is bothered T&C’s so it does not value. And the discussion concluded with a note of pacifying messages.

Here is the gist of the debate/talk show/conversation

Bing uses user data on Google as a ranking signal – but that these keywords were outliers and that Bing does not just copy results.

Bing uses data from Google in their algorithm, Google denies using Bing data.

-Both Google and Bing are using user data in their algorithm

-Google have developed a chrome add on that will allow user to veto sites from their search results

The debate on the ‘copying’ issue must be known to everyone. Google blames Microsoft for copying the search results of the former, and Microsoft firmly denied giving some justifications. The growth of Bing over the past 8-9 months was beyond expectation and Google has reached to a point where it realized that BING is a good competitor and is afraid of losing the first rank. After this realization they are constantly observing the growth of Bing and the reasons that led to the same. Some terms they have used in this fiery debate is notable. Google started off saying that Bing has done ‘a cheap imitation’ and as a response Bing accused Google of trying a “spy-novelesque stunt”.

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Mehdi, Microsoft’s Senior VP of Online Services, published a strongly-worded denial of Google’s claims on the Bing Search blog which again would keep heating up the debate; It says – Google engaged in a “honeypot” attack to trick Bing. In simple terms, Google’s “experiment” was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as “click fraud.”

We could definitely wait for an apt response from Google for this 🙂

Google Toolbar Page Rank underwent minor updates in the past few months.However many webmasters were waiting for a major update for the past couple of months,as the last major update was on April 3,2010.There was only 1 main update in 2010,while the previous year 2009 witnessed 5 major updates.

At the beginning of this new year 2011, the first major update was seen on Jan 20,2011.

A list of all the recent updations can be viewed here

Some views on the importance of the Page Rank : http://www.seroundtable.com/pagerank-update-jan11-12832.html

The world of search engine technologies has been altering at an extraordinarily fast rate. Even from one year to the next, one can view major trends in how the search engines are faring.

Based on the report release by Hitwise, 2009 witnessed Google in the top spot, Yahoo Mail in second spot, the core Yahoo search in the fourth spot, Microsoft’s Live Mail in the sixth spot, the Yahoo search page in eighth spot, and MSN in ninth spot. This signifies that 6 of the top 10 sites belonged to one of the search engine giants.

Presently, in 2010, Facebook has reached the number one slot. The Yahoo properties remain chiefly unaffected; Yahoo Mail is now in third , the core Yahoo page is in fourth, and the Yahoo search page is in ninth. For the time being, Microsoft seems to be creeping up. MSN grabbed the number 6 slot, and while Live Mail dropped to position eight, Bing crept into the tenth slot.

Though it may look like Yahoo and MSN are closing the gap on Google, it should be noted that there’s a major gap between the second and third slots for 2010. While Google’s third place ranking is from having around seven percent of all online traffic, Yahoo Mail’s third place position depicts only about three percent.

The above study is based on pages that obtain visits most recurrently, and is based far more on repeat visits than it is on exclusive visitors.

Google Webmaster Tools team has added an extra function to its offering, enabling users of the SEO service to view the precise details of queries that drive traffic to their page.

Titled “Top Pages”, users can also view the number of clicks and impressions made alongside each search term, and even display this information in the form of pie or bar charts to read the data more clearly. A trends analyst at Google Webmaster Tools, Jonathan Simon that throughout the past year they had made some significant changes to the search queries feature in Webmaster Tools. He also added that they had received lots of feedback about this enormously popular feature.

Additionally, he added that a usual request they heard was that people wanted to be able to view search queries data for their site’s individual pages. Understanding the importance of this feature, the same has been implemented by Google.

With the new function added, in the search queries feature, there exists a new tab titled ‘Top Pages’. Just as in the ‘Top Queries’ view, one can click on a definite query to view more detailed data, and assess how the query is performing across the whole site.

Using this functionality, users of Adwords should be able to recognize the most effective way to allocate their resources, in terms of achieving the best possible rankings. Results can be filtered by location, enabling users to see which areas need more keywords than others.

Google’s yearly Zeitgeist, which delivers the top searches of the year, once more offers a remarkable look into what the world was thinking about,as well as interested in.

The results conclude that “Chatroulette” was the “fastest rising” search term around the world in 2010, overtaking Apple’s iPad and Justin Bieber, which took the second and third place spots, correspondingly.Twitter and Facebook also made a showing in the top 10 list, taking the No. 8 and 10 spots, respectively.

But just as rapidly as those search terms developed during the year, there were some queries that were cut down from the top spot.

Google revealed that “swine flu” was the “fastest falling” sort out term around the world this year, followed by “wamu” and “new moon.” Michael Jackson, who was last year’s top search query, obtained the ninth spot in Google’s list of declining queries.

Google also examined what topics were most well-liked in the consumer electronics space this year. And needless to say, Apple’s iPad and iPhone 4 took the top two spots. They were followed by the Nokia 5530, HTC Evo 4G, as well as the Nokia N900.

Google’s Zeitgeist findings are significantly different from those released recently by the company’s competitors.

Yahoo findings conclude that the BP oil spill was the most popular search term on its service in 2010, trailed by the World Cup and Miley Cyrus.