A new campaign will help UK businesses to optimize their sites for use with mobile devices.The campaign known as “GetMo initiative” was launched by Google recently.The new “GetMo Intiative” will help webmasters and tools for optimizing sites that will be accessed through mobile browsers. Testing materials, developer guides and case studies are designed based on Google’s HowToGoMo U.S. effort which help businesses to optimise their sites for mobile handsets.

The initiative will also provide an opportunity for third party developers in building more mobile sites in the coming months. UK was mainly chosen because 84 percent of UK users have looked up local information on their mobile phones. Google have found that mobile searches have grown over 400 percent over the past two years.

According to Google, a lot of business are unable to keep up with the demand and offer sites suited for mobile browsers. Due to increase in the sales of smartphones more consumers engage with the brands by searching for them on their mobile phone.

GetMo campaign also provides an opportunity for Google to boost it’s mobile browser market in UK. In both handset and tablet fields, Google’s android platform has been increasing its market share.

New designs are being tested by Bing for their search engine results pages and local search listings. According to Liveside.net, a new Bing UI seems to have been rolled out for more users in the U.S. A lot of designs have been changed over the last few months,but this one represents the most substantial update.

The suggested searches appear below the search box and not in the side bar. User controls have become more prominent and navigational elements have become smaller.

Two new local search results layouts are tested by Bing and currently local search results are displayed in a box at the top of the page.Three to five results are listed as text links next to a Bing map and organic results are listed below it.

The new features currently are not available to all users and will disappear as Bing continues to test new layouts and designs.Bing has been trying to balance both local business and users trying to find information about them

A bunch of old tweets are sold by Twitter to a firm called DataSift,which will analyze the tweets for marketing purposes.It is first such company to get access to such tweets which date back to two years.Another 1000 plus companies are on DataSift’s waiting list.

Datasift has launched a product called “DataSift Historics” which enables the companies to get insights,trends,news and public opinion about their brands. Only public tweets will be analyzed by DataSift and not the private ones.Once a tweet is deleted,it’s also deleted from Datasift’s archives.

Twitter has been focused on advertising and selling it’s data has largely contributed to it’s revenues. Bulk of the revenue has has been through advertising and Twitter does not disclose it’s finances. As per eMarketer, Twitter will earn about $259.9 million this year and $399.5 million in 2013.

Do you care about your old tweets?Your comments are welcome

According to Media Post, Startup search engine Blekko has started to test ads on it’s site. Blekko does not have a direct relationship with large brands but it’s working with them through feeds from Google and Bing.

For startups like Blekko,both Google and Bing have an inventory which enables them to use their advertisers through search feed. It’s just in the test phase and majority of the searches on Blekko will not be showing any ads and it’s highly unlikely you will see PPC ads.

Rich Skrenta,Blekko founder and CEO told “Searches are linked to slashtags that help to curate content and they are still ironing out the links”

Search Traffic is worth between $50 and $100 and he belives that when someone types keywords into a box the intent increases.Blekko is backed by Russian search engine Yandex, as well as venture capitalists PivotNorth Capital, SV Angel and Marc Andreessen.

A new feature health search results have been added to Google. Google will now list possibly related health conditions when searched for a symptom or multiple symptoms of an illness.

In it’s official blog,Google had announced the feature and also shown with an example [abdominal pain on my right side] to show how it will work. The results which appear over Google’s organic results are algorithimically generated and not written by doctors or medical experts.

A lot of people have started using the search engines for getting answers on medical questions. Out of 10 Internet users,eight people look for health related information online making it the third most popular activity.

The question which will arise is whether Google’s new suggestion will help people in need or just misguide them in a wrong direction. Your comments are invited about Google’s new search feature

Screenwise, a new product from Google is paying the web users to make Google better.You need to search the web using Google web browser and share the data with Google.

The users need to install a black router on their home network to measure the internet usage.The black router acts as a screenwise data collector.People who will install this router will earn $100 for joining and $20 for each month of participation.

The project starts on March 1st and it is on the same day Google’s new privacy policy goes into effect. Google has created this program to learn how everyday people use the internet.You need to be atleast 13 years old,have a Google account and use Chrome web browser.

“As a panelist, you’ll add a browser extension that will share with Google the sites you visit and how you use them. What we learn from you, and others like you, will help us improve Google products and services and make a better online experience for everyone,” according to the website.

Google will be offering you a $5 amazon gift card to install the browser extension as an incentive for signing up. An additional $5 Amazon gift card will be offered every 3 months if particiapnts continue to participate in the Screenwise program.

Even though Amazon is not involved in the Screenwise program,Google has made it clear that they will be receiving Amazon gift cards.Knowledge Networks,an online research firm is the panel management partner for conducting analysis.

Google spokesperson said “Like many other web and media companies, we do panel research to help better serve our users by learning more about people’s media use, on the web and elsewhere,” according to a Google spokesperson.” People can stay long as they like and can leave at any time.

The reports of a Panda update by Google has been confirmed and it may rolled out anytime this week. Google has also told that there won’t be any algorithm changes and the update is just a data refresh of Google Panda algorithm.

A lot of webmasters have commented about the loss in rankings and many sites regained their traffic to Pre Panda level.

Google Panda 3.2

A lot of people may ask why 3.2 and not 2.x?One of the Googler told that “one of the 2.x updates was labeled as “minor” update and should have likely named as major update”. The updates are not numbered by Google so it is not easy to keep track of the updates.

The current “data fresh” update is just a minor update so this update is referred as 3.2 update. The last update was done during November and there was a long gap between two updates because Google said there would not be any updates during holidays.

There has been changes made on how Google calculates average position metric.In an attempt to provide more accuracy to the rankings,the way of calculating average position in Google Webmaster Tools Top Search Queries and Google Analytics has undergone some changes.

This is a sample Google has put forward to understand about the changes it has made to average ranking position of pages in a site.

“Let’s say Adam searched for [blue berries] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 3, 6, and 12. Richard also searched for [blue berries] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 5 and 9. Previously, we would have averaged all these positions together and shown an Average Position of 7. Going forward, we’ll only average the highest position your site appeared in for each search (3 for Adam’s search and 5 for Richard’s search), for an Average Position of 4.” There won’t be any changes made to historical data.

A new master privacy policy and terms of service was announced by Google in it’s official blog.The users will be notified about the new changes in the coming days.The new terms of service and privacy policy will take effect on March 1.

Instead of 70 privacy documents,Google has created one privacy document to govern all it’s products.Google can pull information from one service and deliver it to you through other Google product you use.

Individual search has become more customized and this has brought a wonderful opportunity for the advertisers to reach their targeted audience.

Check out this video on Google’s Privacy Policy Update

These new changes from Google aslo helps them to make more revenue. It will result in better search results and ads. Google made sure that it will never sell user information and it still promotes data liberation. Google received a fare share of criticism for the changes in in it’s privacy policy in previous years.

Another update from Google on it’s search results and now you can see results for punctuation marks and symbols.Searching for the symbol equivalent of a percent sign,comma,carat and more symbols will return search results but the results are not exactly relevant.

Wikipedia page ranks as the top link for for the following punctuation marks.

• ^ (caret)
• ( ) { } [ ] (bracket) – parentheses, brackets and curly brackets are all combined into the same search result
• ~ (tilde)
• | (vertical bar)
• “ (quotation marks)
• < (less-than sign) > (greater-than sign)
• $ (dollar sign)
• . (full stop/period)
• , (comma)
• : (colon) – however, the colon that is a piece of the large intestine currently outranks the punctuation mark of the same name
• ; (semicolon)
• # (number sign)
• % (percent sign)
• @ (at sign)

These punctuation marks in Yahoo and Bing diplays “No results found” to the user.